Thank You for Your Service
When I was starting school in 1960 I was in a little tropical valley due east of San Jose. It was literally a one-room schoolhouse where the kids of the expats living and working at the Center for Tropical Agricultural Research and Education in Turrialba, Costa Rica went to school. To be fair, it was only for grades one through eight. After that, kids had to go to high school elsewhere (at least as far away as San Jose if not back in the United States). Also, if you wanted Kindergarten (as I had the prior year) you went into Turrialba to a local Spanish-speaking school. I think that has probably changed now all these sixty years later, but from the look of it on Google Earth, it hasn’t changed so very much. Both of the houses we lived in during our two-year stay there are still intact and the school is on the same spot only a bit bigger (maybe they have a few rooms now).
One of the only things I recall from my days in that crowded and busy one room during first grade was that besides picking up on the second through eight grade lessons (causing me the next year in Madison, Wisconsin to be asked to skip second grade entirely), I had lots of time to amuse myself while the overworked teacher attended to other students. That left me with lots of time to read and draw. I read as much about WWII as I could (for some reason I was especially interested in the Pacific Theater), and I drew naval and air battles from the Pacific, usually with all the sound effects I could get away with in the commotion of the open schoolroom. My mother was decidedly anti-gun to the point of not wanting me to have a cowboy holster and pistol, but I was, nonetheless, totally intrigued by warfare, not unlike many boys my age at the time.
Then things really settled down in terms of open warfare in the first half of the sixties. We had our share of bomb shelter training and Cold War drills and we all knew that war loomed over the world as a distinct possibility, but less so in terms of tanks, planes and battleships and more so in terms of nuclear bombs and ICBM’s. Those years of relative peace were a time when I don’t really remember thinking too much about warfare. And then as we drifted into the second half of the sixties and the war in Southeast Asia became more and more real, so did the draft and the possibility of being forced to go to war, or at least into the military, at a certain age. I was a big kid all of those years, big for my age and just plain big. I was taller than average and certainly heavier than average. I won’t call myself fat because as I see pictures of myself from those days, I don’t think I looked so very fat as much as just….big. Until I got to high school I really didn’t worry too much about the draft or going into the military at all. And then we moved to Rome, Italy in 1968 and everything changed.
I know that historically LBJ was in Vietnam up to his neck and that Nixon didn’t invent the war or the anti-war movement in the U.S., but that is about when I became aware of it all. In the summer of 1968 we took the Italian Line’s S.S. Michelangelo from NYC to Naples and I have a picture of myself at the Captain’s launch party wearing a sharkskin blue suit, a white turtleneck and a silver peace symbol on a chain around my neck. That seems like an anti-military statement to me. During high school at a Catholic boys prep school I was acutely aware of the draft, but it got crowded out by thoughts of motorcycles, girls and college, more or less in that order. I vaguely assumed that I would find some way out of the draft and I had no sense that I was headed for basic training any time soon.
The way the draft was working in the early 70’s was that there was a lottery of the 365 or 366 birthdays for that year’s crop of 18-year-olds and your birthday got assigned a rank order number. Low numbers risked getting conscripted and high numbers could expect to sneak past. No one knew from year to year, how many would get called to serve and thus exactly what numbers were in the danger zone and what numbers were safe. Being a year younger than most of my classmates (remember that whole skipping second grade thing?), I got to watch during the number lottery as all my Freshman classmates agonized to hear their numbers and then rationalize their fates. It was quite dramatic and some took it all lightly while others wore their fear on their sleeves. My friend Paul got a low number and was actually called to go for a physical. Some allergy or other got him a pass, but he was closer to getting drafted than anyone I knew personally. As for me, by the time my lottery year rolled around, we were given numbers (I got #320), but no one was called even for a physical. The following year didn’t even get numbers. So, the draft passed over my house like the plagues of Egypt crossed over the Israelites homes.
I never participated in an anti-war demonstration in college though I did get inadvertently caught up in the Giap-Cabral Engineering Library takeover and riots in 1972 at Cornell, but Vietnam was winding down and my thought of war were mostly on the evening news watching the fall of Saigon. Then it was off to Wall Street in the mid-70’s and my military connection was the strangeness of having some colleagues go to reserve duty every few weekends. I had two college friends go into the military, one from Naval ROTC to the nuclear power training program and one to Air Force OCS to pay for medical school via a stint as a flight surgeon. I also had a friend who went to nursing school and met a guy a few years ahead of us at Cornell who had joined the Marine Corps. They married and so I had three active duty military friends for a while plus some friends at work who were reservists. One of my bosses at work was a guy named Andy who was generally nicknamed Lieutenant Commander since he had been a naval aviator and was considered a bit of a disciplinarian.
By that time I knew I was past the point of any military service and I very much felt that respect for my friends that had served. There was something about not serving that made me feel grateful to those who had. I’m not sure if I was just guilty about being so lucky or that secretly I was still the first grader who wanted to be in the Pacific Theater with all the sound effects. As time has passed I am still highly respectful of those who served. Being an expat for so many years in my youth made me very patriotic and I like to think that is what causes those feelings more than anything else.
Recently I was asked by my old boss Andy to ghost write a book about his ribald years in the military (1962-1966) when there was no war on to go fight. I agreed and am now the proud co-author of 226 pages of something called Wardroom Warriors. It’s intended as a funny title to make people realize the non-fighting nature of young officers in those years, but it is especially poignant to me since I am even more distant from the fray than any of them were. At least they could have conceivably been called to battle. I was not even in the wardroom, but rather down the street and around the corner. We are in the stage of seeking a publisher and today I called my old Cornell Marine Corps buddy to ask him to give it a read. He is a recently retired four-star general. That makes him one of 55 who have attained that rank…ever. After speaking to him today I found myself realizing that of all the important people I have ever known, including billionaires and captains of industry, he may be the person who I am most honored to know. Whether it is the first-grader in me, the guy who drew #320 or the friend who wrote Wardroom Warriors, I feel the strong need to say just one thing…thank you for your service.