A veteran in preparation only

Veterans Day brings far more to me than I can give to it.

In the 1960s, with the Vietnam conflict raging, I prepared for almost three years to become a vet, but then spent all that preparation guarding freedom’s frontier in the kaserns and maneuvers areas of West Germany.

I only did that because I had to. My draft notice arrived on a hot Texas afternoon in August, 1966. The Vietnam thing was far enough along by then to keep college kids in their 20s vigorously trying to cover their butts with what was called the II-S Deferment for students. Graduation in June had taken my cover away, and I was doing my best to get accepted to graduate school when my Local Board decided I would make an excellent soldier, and dropped the letter in the mail.

Instead of the draft, I enlisted for OCS. It seemed like a better use of the time. I took Basic at Ft. Bliss in El Paso, Advanced Individual Training at Ft. Sill in Lawton, Oklahoma, and I was graduated from the Artillery Officer Candidate School in June, 1967. At that time, the School was graduating 170 second lieutenants a week, and all but 30 were receiving orders to report to Vietnam. I was one of the 30. Report to Kitzingen, West Germany, my orders read, and I didn’t argue.

I spent almost two years terrifying the Russians with a dinosaur of a device called the Honest John, a huge, barely mobile, truck-launched rocket whose launch blast could be seen from the Moon. Setting them off was great fun, but fire just one of them in anger, and your position would be slivered into atoms by return fire before you could get the truck started.

We fired nine practice rounds a year and spent the rest of the time scrounging sparkplugs (ALL the supplies went to Vietnam), drinking $5-a-liter Chivas Regal, smoking 13-cents-a-pack cigarettes, and licking clean platters of schnitzel and bratwurst. The exchange rate was 4 marks to the dollar. During that time I met a young Southern California woman touring Europe on the cheap. We were married in November, 1968, dress blues, crossed sabers, and all.

My tour was up in June, 1969, we came home, I was discharged at Ft. Dix, N.J., and that was that. I never fired on anyone, and no one ever fired on me. So I am not the stripe of veteran that we honor today. I still embrace the day. There is within me a certain content that I still use, all the time, which would not be there without my experiences of 1966-69. And Veterans Day symbolizes all the physical circumstances of my life today. No way would I live where I do, and do what I do, if that letter hadn’t been there on that hot afternoon. Veterans Day for me commemorates the absolute first day of the rest of my life.

I was lucky, and I used to feel guilty about that. Young men I knew – and older men too, the officers and drill instructors – at Ft. Bliss and Sill, went to Vietnam and became the honored veterans of today, living and dead. Then one afternoon in the 1980s in Washington, D.C., I visited the Vietnam Memorial. It is an astonishing monument, black, and so reflective that it pulls the living day into it. In there was where I could have stood. Out here was where I in fact stood, and guilt could do nothing about how lucky I felt. So I let it go, and nothing changed. I have felt lucky ever since.

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