Early one morning while it was still dark as night I saw a raccoon in our neighborhood while walking my dog. When the raccoon spied us, it scrambled to get under a fence getting only halfway through, stuck there, clawed feet scratching at the pavement, and not knowing whether to back out and fight or forge all the way through. I empathized with the raccoon.
Long ago, in Don Po's backyard our semi-circle of kids gathered around to watch Don our colorful neighbor, scout master, cheerful guy around town, slaughter chickens with an ax. They didn't have the chance that the raccoon had. These were candy-colored family pets-- they were sold with artificially colored feathers back then-- bought for his two daughters one Easter. Now the once colorful birds were grown up into mature chickens, and it was time for them to be turned into a family dinner. After a beheading, he'd throw a bucket over the headless bird, otherwise it would have probably run right at us. Gotta protect the children. This was one of my first experiences with real violence. I became increasingly shy of it as the years went on.
I came up short in the lottery to pick draftees for the military. The numbers were one to 365, the days of the year. Each birth date got a number, lower numbers got picked first. Mine was fifty-one.
We were playing a rough game of tackle football in the Struss backyard one day, and I'd been getting beaten up pretty badly, when an ugly side of me turned up. When Ernie took the snap and began to move forward with the ball, only to be tackled by both Strusses, I felt it was my chance to get revenge. I jumped down hard on top of them all, even though the play had already ended, and I think I knocked the wind out Ernie, who was on the bottom of the heap.
Maybe I didn't realize it at the time, but even in the rough-and-tumble world of the Strusses there was a code of ethics when it came to things like this. They could shoplift with abandon, and Tony Struss pushed me off of Woody's steps once, leaving me with a sprained wrist, but piling on in a football game, that was unacceptable. They scolded me for that.
I visited a draft evasion counselor. He hooked me up with a sympathetic doctor who testified that my feet were flat and my knees were none too good either. I mailed it in to the local draft board. No response. I began preliminary research into what life was like in Canada. How cold could it be, really?
I remember Lumpy getting tackled once up at the church field with everyone inadvisedly piling on. We had to carry Lumpy home like pallbearers, to find out later that he'd dislocated his shoulder. Or rather, we dislocated it for him. So maybe the Struss boys had a point.
But at the time, that didn't matter. Ernie and the Strusses were furious. I wrapped their harsh words around me like a Superman's cape. Their words didn't affect me as they were designed to do. For the moment, I was tough, I was invincible. But when we resumed play, I was back to my old self, not so tough, only the worse for it now, because now they were gunning for me to get even for my indiscretion. I was afraid to take my next turn at running the ball, and for the rest of the game I conveniently moved away from it. It was like dropping your pencil then reaching for it on the floor when the teacher looks around the room to call on someone.
Revenge was sweet, I'd decided, but it was fleeting and the kind of sweet that left a bad aftertaste. And, like the bible says, it begat more vengeance.
No letter arrived concerning my doctor's excuse. Instead one arrived telling me I had to report in two weeks to get on a bus with other unfortunates for a 70-mile trip to Wilkes-Barre. It was for a physical exam and other formalities as a prelude to service. There was no avoiding it, no dropping my pencil and looking for it on the floor. I had to take action... of a sort. Action by being passive, you might say..
After a trying day at school, my sister and her friend Jane rubbed me the wrong way, so I whacked Jane on the back of the head which forced her face into the tabletop. When Jane picked her head up from the table her face was smeared with blood. And there were the usual skirmishes with my brother. I have a vague recollection of knife play with me swinging a kitchen knife at my brother and notching the door jamb. Call it the fog of war.
These incidents, microcosms of war, were frightful. If I could swing a knife at my brother or mash my sister's friend into a tabletop, then what would lie ahead for me in a real armed sanctioned battle against an "enemy" I did not know. It was as good a time as any to end the cycle of violence.
I wrote a long essay detailing my aversion to war and violence in particular (leaving out those occasional flare-ups), and I sent it to the draft board, applying for Conscientious Objector status. The essay included some of the things I mention here.
I'd never been wounded really. I did get a busted front tooth that needed a crown which bugs me to this day. That happened when Tips and I were throwing rocks into the creek, and he reared back with a rock in his hand, trying to feed it to me I suppose. I nearly sliced the tip of my finger off with a pocket knife once, and all I can remember about that was the way my sister poured peroxide on it like pouring a glass of wine, the peroxide splashing everywhere. Soupon threw a baseball that opened me up right at the eyebrow. On that occasion, the doctor, who was new in town and still had a lot of his stuff in unpacked boxes, couldn't find the anesthetic, so he stitched me up without it. He thought I did very well with the tricky procedure. Once, when my parents were away on the only vacation I can recall that they ever took, I was a pirate jumping from the couch to the upright piano, gashing the back of my head, necessitating a row of stitches.
I had watched other people get injured in fights and football games, but I was immuned to the real bad stuff. With little experience in this area, I was left to fear the unknown. When I got a bit older, I'd lie in bed some nights trying to imagine myself in bootcamp, in Nam, in a VA hospital.
The crowded bus ride was a lonely one. We were all strangers packed into this vehicle as though we were a chain gang going off to a work camp. I took care to swallow some pills before we pulled out because someone told me that they might not take you if there was some controlled substance in your blood. In my childhood, my brother and I would brandish Fanner Fifty six guns in our cowboy outfits or saunter around in fake army uniforms. It seemed poignant to me now as I rode the bus to where I might be fitted up with the real thing.
It was not unusual to see guys from around town suddenly bulk up inside a year or two. Even diminutive fellows who started out kind of scrawny. Bill did it and in later years became mayor of the town. Ernie did it and he killed someone, however accidental it might have been. Like the US military, all that bulking up made them feel unbeatable. For the military industrial complex that extraordinary power led to Vietnam. In Ernie's case, the same mindset led to a fight and a killing, when Ernie hit a Marine in the head with a 2x4.
I got a letter. The draft board wanted to see me in regards to the doctor excuse. But that didn't matter now-- it was a moot point-- because I passed the physical up in Wilkes-Barre. I had done everything short of clicking my heels together and declaring "There's no place like home", so now I would finally get to see the people behind the curtain.
I'm reminded of Bernie, who lifted weights in a desperate attempt to lift his spirits too. Trouble was, the spirits were devilish in nature. Plainly put, he'd acquired a mean streak. What made him tick was a timebomb. Once I observed that he looked a little tired, and he pushed me up against a fence, demanding I rescind the remark. It was a reasonable request which I readily fulfilled for the distraught bodybuilder.
But he really did not look well rested. He had a nervous energy, thrashing about, looking for a place where he could utilize his practiced bravado. He found it in Vietnam.
I, for one, wasn't going to be a pawn in that game. I had a real problem with guys in offices calling the shots. And I had an innate fear of guns going off. I wouldn't send my dog into battle, though many people did in World War II. Sent their dogs to war. Some came back with a canine version of PTSD. And the whole fighting thing seemed useless, a feeling I have to this day. Add to that a crazy war about which even right-wingers were having their doubts, and you might understand my reluctance. Being a chicken didn't mean you had to end up in the stewpot.
When I got to the draft board office, I was blind-sided with a request to go before the board to defend my claim for CO status. Each of them had a copy of my essay, asking questions about my beliefs, referring back to the essay occasionally. They said I would hear from them in a matter of days.
We were a counter-culture crowd. I don't know if the phrase "semper fi" would fit our cohesive group exactly, but there was a club-like allegience and comaraderie that guided us. We didn't believe in the war and not much else that elder society hath wrought. While women and blacks were demanding equality, their eyes on the prize, the elders were oblivious. Their eyes were on the prize of a kewpie doll.
I got my picture in the paper demonstrating in front of the draft board office, learning much later that my dad had saved that grainy newsprint clipping for years in a drawer by the telephone.
Bernie seemed to suddenly understand the counter-culture thing. He'd travelled far and wide to get to a mellow place (when all the while I was already there.) He went to Vietnam and came back docile as a box turtle, though his body still carried some of the dangerous muscle attained from workouts. He had curiously returned earlier than the usual tour of duty, rumored to have gotten a dishonorable discharge. Espousing peace and love now, smoking grass, and listening to unpatriotic rock music, he attached to us as though to say, "Here's the new me". In effect he was extending an olive branch, a broken arrow.
We had this handshake involving our thumbs wrapping around, our fingers coming up over the wrist, our elbows touching. It was the hippie handshake. Bernie, just back in the neighborhood, extended his hand to me for the clasp. While I didn't feel an instant kinship, it was a reasonable request which I readily fulfilled for the freed veteran.
The letter arrived, granting me CO status. I left Catasauqua to work in a hospital fifty miles away as prescribed by the draft board, first mopping up blood from the operating room floor, then getting promoted to transport orderly for the Occupational Therapy department. I had beat the awful system. The dispensation from the war, which was nearly ended by that point, was my own kind of subtle revenge.
