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for larger version       From the
Editor's Desk Everybody who is of a certain age knows a friend or relative who skipped the Vietnam War by "beating the draft," moving to Canada or by hiding in plain sight because their draft number never came up. There were many others, however, who accepted their fate and were drafted or whom did not wait for the draft to move them into the Army and joined another service. I was one of the latter. About a year after transferring from NYU to C.W. Post, I found out the hard way that my student deferment was not automatic at Post as it had been at NYU. I found out about that salient fact when I got a letter that began with "Greetings from the President of the United States." With a year to go to complete college and no desire to become a grunt, I had to look at other options. In 1961, the war in Vietnam had not yet become a headline issue, but I still had no desire to be a "grunt," whether it be in Vietnam or in West Germany. Like some of my friends caught in the same dilemma, I went to Floyd Bennett Field and joined the Naval Reserve. The Navy gave me a year to finish college (as long as I attended drills once a month and did a two-week boot camp during the summer). That put me on active duty in time for JFK's assassination and the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Most of my friends, however, "beat" the draft by becoming teachers, lawyers, police officers and the like. What brings this all to mind now, more than 40 years later, is a startling article in The American Legion Mag azine written by novelist Pat Conroy ("The Prince of Tides," "Beach Music," "The Great Santini," "Lords of Dis cipline," etc.). Although Conroy's father was a fighter pilot serving in Vietnam and he had graduated from The Citadel, Conroy decided early out that it was not his war. "In 1972, at the age of 27, I thought that I was serving America's interests by pointing out what massive flaws and miscalculations and corruptions has led her to conduct a ground war in Southeast Asia," Conroy wrote. For a new book that Conroy was writing at the time, "My Losing Sea son," about the Citadel basketball team in his senior season, he visited a number of his ex-teammates. One of those teammates was Al Kroboth, the team's center, who, for most of his senior year, led the nation in field-goal percentage (slightly ahead of a pretty good player named Lou Alcindor - a player who later became Kareem Abdul Jabbar). After talking about the team, Conroy brought up a touchy subject, one that he was not sure his friend would ap preciate. "Al, you know that I was a draft dodger and an anti-war demonstrator," Conroy asked. "That's what I heard, Conroy, but I have nothing against what you did. I did what I thought was right." Conroy asked Korboth to tell him about Vietnam. On his seventh mission as a navigator in an A-6 Intruder (a fighter-bomber), his plane was hit by enemy fire. He punched out of his plane and become unconscious. When he awoke, a Vietnamese soldier was standing over him, poking him with an AK-47. His back and his neck were broken and he had shattered his left leg. With no medical attention, he was led on a three-month barefoot walk to Hanoi. At night, old women came into the area where he was bound and urinated on him. He was constantly beaten to make him move faster. "At the very time of Al's Walk, I had a small role in organizing the only anti-war demonstration every held in Beaufort (South Carolina), the home of Parris Island and the Marine Corps Air Station," Conroy says. At that demonstration, one of the speakers suggested that the young marines, when sent to Vietnam, "frag" their officers by throwing a live hand grenade under their beds while they were asleep. "When I was demonstrating in Amer ica against Nixon and the Christ mas bombings in Hanoi, Al and his fellow prisoners were holding hands under the full fury of those bombings, singing 'God Bless America'," Conroy said in his article. Conroy wrote that he could not sleep after speaking with his old teammate. "I began to make judgments about how I had conducted myself during the Vietnam War," he wrote. "I began to assess my role as a citizen in the 60's, when my country called my name and I shot her the bird." "Do I see America's flaws? Of course I do," he wrote. "But I now revere words like democracy, freedom, the right to vote, and the grandeur of the extraordinary vision of our founding fathers." "Now, at this moment," he added, "I came to the conclusion about my actions as a young man, when Viet nam was a dirty word to me. I wish I'd led a platoon of Marines in Vietnam. I would like to think I would have trained my troops well and that the Viet Cong would have had their hands full if they entered into a firefight with us." "I understand now that I should have protested the war after my return from Vietnam, after I had done my duty to my country. I have come to a conclusion about my country that I knew then in my bones but lacked the courage to act on: America is good enough to die for even when she is wrong." Conroy concludes by saying, "I found myself passing remorseless judgment on myself. I had not turned out to be the man I once had envisioned myself to be." There are many men who, like Con roy, have begun to question their actions in that terrible decade of the 1960's. Some are still certain that they did the right thing by protesting the war, by burning their draft cards, by running away to Canada. Then there are others who, like Conroy, look back at their lives and believe that they did not measure up when their nation called. Does this have some relationship to today? There is no longer a draft and the nation no longer calls with the urgency that it once did. Would I have joined the Navy in 1961 had the draft not called? Probably not! Jewish Kids in Rock away were not advised to join the armed forces. In fact, I remember my mother reacting with horror when I came home with my enlistment papers. "I wasn't allowed to go out with sailors when I was young," she told me. "Now, my son has become on of them." That service in the Navy, which included Military Justice School and a couple of years on an aircraft carrier, however, became a seminal experience in my life. I have never looked back with regret over those years, although many of my friends got a three-year head start of their careers. Who knows what direction any of us would have taken had things been different in the 60's and 70's. Conroy, a very successful novelist, surely thinks that he missed his chance so long ago. | |||||
