The Draft

After we graduated high school all males without influence received a letter. This letter was dreaded by young teen males throughout the land and became a symbol of oppression at the time. It came to us from the Government (defined as "those people who send OTHER people's sons to war"). The letter began cordially enough; "Greetings..." and told us in very nice but firm phrases that we should grab a bus on a certain day and go to Oklahoma City so that we could stand around naked and have men in white coats draw on our bodies with marking pencils.

If you were unlucky enough to get the bad marks, you were told to get on yet another bus which would take you (with a few stops along the way) to Viet Nam, where they kept Asian people who would spend their days trying to shoot you.

They drew lucky marks on me. I didn't know that I had a heart murmur and I didn't ask why when they said that I couldn't get on their bus. They said that I was no longer classified as 1-A (which was an invitation to Viet Nam), but I was now classified as 1-Y (which means don't call us we'll call you next year to do this again).

I was instructed to get out of the way and go home, which made me very happy. And I was instructed to "Destroy" my old draft card, which said I was 1-A and to keep my new draft card, which said that I was 1-Y.

So I went back home to Tulsa and went back to the park to hang out once again with my hippie-war-protestor-Nixon-hater-Dylan-loving friends. Since I didn't have to worry about the draft anymore for at least a year, I hooked up with a draft-dodging friend and headed off on a hitchhiking adventure to California. We drifted to San Francisco and checked out the Haight/Ashbury district and we visited panhandle park for a little rock and roll. Then we went across the bay to Berkeley where we met a whole slew of new friends. The popular thing there was for everyone to get together downtown and march around and turn over cars and set them on fire and throw rocks through bank windows.

Since I had little else to do, I went along just for the fun of it. There in the park, just before the pepper gas attack, some of my brave new hippie friends actually stood right up in the crowd, took out their draft cards and burned them for all to see. Being totally consumed with the emotion of the moment, I too stood up and took out my draft card and burned it. I wasn't totally stupid though, I burned the one the government ordered me to burn. I wasn't about to go to prison over a little bit of runaway emotion.

A few years later I joined the Navy.
Go figger.