The Draft: Part 1

When I was a kid, I worried about being drafted. This was a completely normal worry for any American male who wasn’t planning on volunteering for military service, but most didn’t give it much thought until sometime close to their eighteenth birthday, when signing up for the Selective Service would be mandatory. I was worried well before I was ten, and I can still recall the grown-ups in my lives that helped fuel my anxiety, though only one of them knew me personally and none of them would have wanted me to worry as much as I did.

It was on a weekend sleepover at my Grandma Hubbard’s place that I first learned my dad had been drafted and that he served in Korea. I was between 5 and 10 years old. Grandma Hubbard ran a nursing home and staying at her place for a Friday and Saturday night was a treat all my siblings and I enjoyed. Staying in a nursing home might seem a dreary affair for a kid, but Grandma had a color TV before we did and a nice hi-fi system. More than that, she was a good cook. I especially remember her fried chicken and occasionally fried rabbit, a meal I enjoyed but never had before or since. More than that, some of the patients and nurses adored me. I say with no false modesty I was an adorable kid.

Among the patients, I particularly remember Mrs. Benjamin, who was 99 years old when I met her and devoted to the San Francisco Giants. We would sit together in the front room in rocking chairs, listening to Russ Hodges and Lon Simmons calling the games on the radio. Mrs. Benjamin did not make it to 100, dying just after the Giants lost the 1962 World Series, likely of a broken heart. Among the nurses, there was a large African American woman named Gussie who loved me to bits. She and I would play cards and I would cheat by announcing new rules when the game was nearly over.

“Now you let Gussie win sometimes!” Grandma Hubbard would scold. Gussie would just laugh.

It was one weekend I noticed a medal in my Grandma’s bedroom on her night stand. When I asked, she told me my father won it in Korea. He had safely landed a plane that had a wing shot off and soon after that, he was honorably discharged and came home. He didn’t want the medal and so he gave it to his mom for safekeeping.

All of this was news to me. My dad never spoke of his wartime experience before I saw the medal, but he was willing to speak of it now that I had questions. In all the time he was alive, I don’t ever remember him volunteering stories, but that one afternoon, I asked questions and he answered them.

It was 1950 when he was drafted at the age of 21. He married my mom before he left. She had a son by a previous marriage, my brother Michael, oldest of what would become a brood of five, two boys and three girls. My father adopted Michael and I considered him my brother, not my half-brother. I admit with shame that once during an argument, I referred to him as my half-brother and it clearly hurt his feelings. I never said it again. In reality, the distinction was meaningless to me. When I was born, my older brother Michael and my older sister Kim were already part of the household. He lived with us until he moved out as a young man. Michael was always there and he was always my brother.

My father had studied at University of California, but he had neither a student deferment or permission to avoid service as the breadwinner of a young family. As he put it, he was dragged from under a bed kicking and screaming and shipped off to Korea.

My father was sent to an accelerated boot camp, but even with his few college classes, he was not put on track to be an officer. More than the college credits, his most useful military skill was he already had a private pilot’s license. Regardless of that, he started his military career as a buck private and rose to the rank of corporal before he was cashiered and back to that truly desired rank, civilian.

Anyone familiar with military protocol will know that a corporal should not be flying a plane, but he was solo in a small cargo plane that lost a wing to enemy fire.

So how did a corporal find himself flying a military cargo plane? He was flying from the front line down to Seoul and back to pick up booze. The thinking was that he had shown he could fly and he was a skinny kid in early 20s. Giving him a co-pilot would mean the plane wouldn't carry as much whiskey. My dad joked that he had to land the plane safely because if he crashed, they might not be able to put out the fire for weeks. He also added that the parachute was not an option. He was terrified of parachutes.

The booze runs were a regularly scheduled part of my dad’s job. Every few weeks, his unit would need more refreshment and some officer, usually a lieutenant or captain, would knowingly lend my dad his uniform so he could fly the plane without arousing suspicion. My dad tells the story of some particularly thirsty full colonel offering his uniform, but this was vetoed. No one would believe someone could rise to rank of full colonel being as obviously young as my father at the time.

This had been going on for several months, clearly against military code but just as clearly sanctioned by his immediate chain of command. When he landed the crippled plane, the military magazine Stars and Stripes published the story and people other than his immediate superiors got wind of the situation. A decision had to be made whether to give him a medal for bravery or a court-martial for impersonating an officer. He got the medal, meaningless to him, and a discharge and ticket home, which were more valuable than gold.

This is not where the story ends. Months later, the Army is in touch and tells my dad they overpaid him $473.27 and would he please remit a check as soon as possible? (My father liked to make up numbers. In his defense, the story goes better if some exact numbers are chosen here.) Offended, he wrote back that they never overpaid him and in fact, because they had never given him flight pay, they actually owed him $790.84. They had given him a medal for flying, so they had to admit they knew, and flight is hazardous duty, so it earns extra pay. Letters went back and forth for months and the Army finally decided to give him the flight pay minus the amount they claimed he owed them.

As I said previously, all my dad’s stories highlighted the absurdity of army life, which prepared me very well for popular entertainment that would have the same theme. But I was kid and I asked questions, and those stories weren’t as funny.

Was he ever shot? No.

Did he ever kill anyone? Probably, was his answer.

He told the story of a battle where he and his comrades are entrenched on high ground and a North Korean troop tried to dislodge them. (I have no idea how many men are on either side of this battle. I was too young to ask.) The order is given to commence fire. The advancing North Koreans soon stopped advancing and fell to the ground, some of them returning fire. This goes on for some time, my father never stipulated how long. Eventually, most of the North Koreans retreat. The order is given to cease fire. It is finally quiet. Many North Koreans were not retreating. They were dead or wounded.

This is the only battle story my father told. There was no bravery or glory in it, just bullets at long range killing and wounding the enemy. I never asked about the casualties among his comrades.  One North Korean military commander tried to win a battle against the odds. He failed. Some number of men died due to his mistake, the majority of them his own troops. If there was any moral to this it was simply, war is boring.

I heard these stories in the early 1960s. I’m not sure if it was before or after Kennedy died. The United States had troops in Vietnam, but I likely learned this story from my dad before the big escalation ordered by LBJ. I was less than ten years old, but I realized the draft still existed and it was just waiting for me to come of age.

And then there was popular culture. I’m not sure where I was when I first heard Tom Lehrer, but I immediately fell in love. The first album I heard was An Evening (Wasted) with Tom Lehrer. I had never heard any music like this or even read liner notes like this, which generously quoted many of the worst reviews Lehrer ever got. The album opens with the morbidly cheerful Poisoning Pigeons in the Park and ends with one of his many songs about nuclear annihilation, We Will All Go Together When We Go. Along the way, he plays the song he wrote about his time as a draftee, It Makes a Fellow Proud to be a Soldier. It was like the stories of my dad’s experience had been turned into a peppy song with funny lyrics. I cannot overstate how much of an influence to this day Tom Lehrer has been in my life.

My next big influence was the Jules Feiffer cartoon Munro, made in 1959. I’m not sure when I saw it on TV, but it was a few years later on KQED, the local public station. It’s the story of a headstrong four-year-old being drafted. Coincidentally, I was four when the film was made, but older when I saw it. It captured my anxiety almost perfectly. Again, like my father’s stories and Tom Lehrer’s songs, the army was presented as an unrelenting and stupid bureaucracy, and I understood clearly in my pre-pubescent mind that it was just waiting for me to grow up. Lehrer and Feiffer have something in common. They were draftees, but were lucky enough not to see combat.

I was in high school when first read Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Slaughterhouse Five, two of the great anti-war novels written by veterans of the allegedly Good War. Both enlisted after Pearl Harbor, so they were not draftees. I was pleased to find out, many years after reading their books, that Heller and Vonnegut were pals.  

The story goes that in the 1980s, Vonnegut and Heller are at a party being thrown by a hedge fund manager. Vonnegut tells Heller that last year, the host had made more money than Heller had made from decades of royalties on his bestselling Catch-22. “That may be true,” said Heller, “but I have something he will never have. I have enough.”

Years later, when politicians were coming out against the war, two of the earliest converts were Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota and George McGovern of South Dakota, both of them veterans of World War II and, not surprisingly, good friends.

It felt good to know there were adults who felt the way I did about war, but there was no significant faction of elected officials who were proposing getting rid of the draft. To oppose the draft was considered cowardly, an excuse for “lazy hippies”. Ironically enough, decades after Vietnam, many pro-war politicians were outed as draft dodgers as well, most notably Dick Cheney, the man largely responsible for the American misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, wars that turned into quagmires every bit as damaging to American power as Vietnam was, but with considerably lower American death tolls.

It appeared inevitable. The draft had caught my dad and Jules Feiffer and Tom Lehrer and it wasn’t going anywhere. It would be there to catch my older brother Michael and eventually, me.