>got through
Turns out, there's a story....
A truly scary (for RC) AIM bedtime story as told to a friend:FRIEND: Q. What's the difference between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War?
RC: sand instead of jungles
FRIEND: A. George W. Bush had a plan to get out of the Vietnam War.
FRIEND: hehehe
RC: hhh
RC: i didn't. damn i was lucky. probably screwed up my chances of being President, though.
FRIEND: didn't go or?
FRIEND: you too young surely?
RC: didn't go.
RC: no, i graduated from college in 72 --height of the war
FRIEND: I can tell you one thing with 169% certainty, neither would I have gone
RC: body bags coming home by the plane load
RC: but i didn't have a plan.
RC: had always thought the war would end
RC: we had a lottery system for the draft.
FRIEND: wow!
RC: it was selected by the month/day of the year.
RC: my lottery number came up only #26 --they went through number 120 or so that year.
RC: in short, i was fucked.
FRIEND: then.....
RC: I haven't told you this story? It's a GREAT story ...but unbelievable.
FRIEND: I am on the edge of my seat, I love this stuff
RC: we graduate in early May over here
RC: as a footnote, I was married at the time to my first wife
RC: anyway, I got my "Notice to Report" in Feb or March
RC: that meant I was definitely in the "cattle call"
RC: the first step was to get a physical exam.
RC: by the Selective Service Bureau (the draft)
RC: every word i'm telling you is the truth, always is, but I want to assure you before I go on.
RC: anyway, my college was some distance from home
RC: the draft board is "local" --based on your home address. So they set your physical to be made in their jurisdiction.
RC: My physical was slated to be in Norfolk VA --HOME OF THE MID-ATLANTIC FLEET. One of the largest military cities (actually a ring of military cities) in the country.
RC: Not good.
RC: Very, very bad in fact. Their doctors were agressive ...known to take men with impairments that would easily get one off in other jurisdictions.
FRIEND: ouch
RC: Yeah.
RC: But, I couldn't leave classes yet, not until May.
RC: I should inject here that some jurisdictions and some members of the local draft boards were -I hate to use the word- liberal on their views of Viet Nam by now.
RC: Anyway, I went to the draft board in Lexington Virginia where my college was.
RC: Lexington was VERY small at the time, probably only 5000 residents.
RC: the whole county probably had only 15,000 residents.
FRIEND: big civil war town?
RC: uhhh, General Lee is buried there.
FRIEND: ah
RC: Search on "Shrine of The South"
RC: Lee Chapel is on my college campus
RC: anyway, there are two colleges in Lexington. One, Washington & Lee, where I went.
RC: and the other is the huge, formidable.....
RC: VMI --Virginia Military Instute
RC: ouch again, from the looks of it, i'm expecting to be in a VERY conservative draft board.
RC: i mean, this is the mountains of the south (redneck beyond belief) and the home of military legends like Stonewall Jackson and R.E. Lee, to name a few.
RC: Follow so far?
FRIEND: yeah!
RC: OK. I go to the draft board office in the basement of the small-ish US Post Office
RC: usually, the post office is crowded --but it was mid-afternoon and I now feel like it was eerily empty upstairs --but that may be a
RC: misrecollection.
RC: anyway, when i did go downstairs I *KNOW* that the draft board was empty ---perhaps not unusual, but it did feel odd at the time, given the
RC: number of students in town and draft-age men around the county.
RC: The office only had one person in it ...a VERY elderly lady.
RC: Very small, petite.
RC: I had never seen the woman before, nor did she indicate that she had ever seen me.
RC: I asked for some help.
RC: "Is there any way I can get my physical postponed or get a more convenient date?"
RC: Now the next bit is fuzzy, I'm sure we must have chatted at least a minute or two --but no more than that.
RC: Her name was Mrs. Brown
RC: Then she pops the question that changed and may have saved my life.....
RC: "You look like a nice boy. Do you really want to go to Viet Nam?"
FRIEND: for one second I thought you were going to say she said "fancy a fuck?"
FRIEND:
RC: hhh. reading this, I was thinking that too, evil twin.
RC: but not at the time.
RC: I am stunned, is this some sort of trick? But I blurted out a shocked, emphatic "NO MA'AM!"
RC: Remember, there is not a soul around. To this day, I think if someone else had been there she would have just given me some paperwork.
RC: And I'd have gone to Viet Nam.
RC: So, she looks at me and says....
RC: Well, do you mind if I help you to try and get out of going?
RC: THIS IS THE WOMAN AT THE DAMN DRAFT BOARD ASKING ME THIS!
RC: Being ever-so-sharp, I once again blurt out "NO MA'AM!"
FRIEND: and then she said "fancy a fuck?"
RC: no, evil twin
RC: though I would have
FRIEND: lol
RC: trust me, you would have too
RC: those were raw times.
FRIEND: hehehehehehehe
RC: the country had been on the brink of student revolution.
RC: search on "Kent State"
RC: students were shot by the National Guard
RC: raw, raw, times
RC: So, back to Mrs. Brown.
RC: She then says...
RC: Well, the first thing I have to do is to get you moved to my jurisdiction.
RC: I do not want you going to Norfolk for a physical.
RC: YES MA'AM! Whatever you say, MA'AM!
RC: Then I'll have your physical done in Roanoke VA, I'll pick a date when some of the more liberal doctors are going to be there.
RC: In the meantime, you need to go home and talk to your doctors. Anything and everything in your medical records will be of help.
RC: Yes MA'AM!
RC: So I drove home that day or the next --then about a 5 hour drive.
RC: And went to our family doctor, the only doctor I had ever used.
RC: BAD NEWS!
RC: Some years prior, Elizabeth CIty had a major downtown fire.
RC: It took out a city block.
RC: Took a week to quit smoldering.
RC: Guess what had happened to my medical records?
RC: Ashes.
RC: Oh shit.
RC: The doctor was my next door neighbor. Knew the family very well.
RC: His nurse, Mrs. Ames, knew my mom & dad very well.
RC: The doc couldn't do much except write some sort of lame note --an obvious draft dodge at the time
RC: But Mrs. Ames said, "you know, while the building was burning the firemen threw whatever records they could get their hands on out the windows into the streets.
RC: Some of those were ours.
RC: I'll see what I can find.
RC: I do not recall how many hours or days went by.
RC: But, she FOUND something.
RC: you still awake? there are more wild convergences of luck and blessings coming up.
FRIEND: I'm not going to bed until the end!
RC: ok.
RC: Seems that when I was 14 they had a mandatory tubercolosis test in the middle school.
RC: they had given us a shot, then lined us up a few days later to see if the shot area was red & puffy.
RC: So, as we were standing in line, just a few minutes before I went in to see the nurse
RC: a mischief-making friend of mine asked if i had had a reaction.
RC: i looked at my arm, it was pale.
RC: then that SOB pinched my arm where I had looked.
RC: Damn, by the time I got in before the nurse it was flaming red.
RC: Obviously, I had tubercolosis! hhh!
RC: I told the nurse, but these mandatory public health things don't allow for much explaining. OFF I WENT TO THE HEALTH DEPT FOR XRAYS.
RC: Now, these were torso xrays, going for the lungs. quite a few of them
RC: Guess what, NO tuberculosis.
RC: *BUT*
FRIEND: ......
RC: They did think they saw an odd overlap in my vertebrae and sent a memo of that to my family doctor.
RC: So
RC: He ended sending me out to the hospital for more xrays and an evaluation.
RC: This had generated quite a bit of xrays and papers that said, basically, "this might become a problem in the future."
RC: What Mrs. Ames found ~courtesy of our local firemen~ was a SINGLE, legal-sized xray evaluation.
RC: I wish I could say it was burned on the edges ...but I don't think it was.
RC: Would make for a better story.
FRIEND: I am imagining it burnt at the edges if that helps
RC: Still the street had been piled high with these files, mixed in with the debris and literally millions of gallons of water, so it was a miracle to just have that piece of paper in our hands.
RC: This prompted the good doctor's memory, and he was able to write a decent-sounding excuse based upon it. Not great, but decent.
RC: I made the rounds to the optometrist, too, claiming double-vision (truthfully, I had been really plagued by this in the first 2 years of college).
RC: But it had been mostly resolved. Still, I had the eye doctor to whip up an excuse note.
RC: The above was all I had. I had been too healthy for my own good, it seemed.
RC: So, I took it back to Mrs. Brown (I think a week or two had gone by)
RC: She says, basically, "This isn't much, but it'll have to do."
RC: I can't recall if it was then or later, but she eventually said "I've postponed your physical twice, I didn't like the doctors. You'll have to go this time, hopefully you'll get a good doctor."
RC: Jump forward a few weeks. On a Saturday morning we, the damned, have to meet at the Post Office to take an Army bus to Roanoke.
RC: When I get on the bus, Mrs. Brown gives me a big manilla clasp envelope and says "Give these to the first doctor you see." I assume that it's all my records and her related paperwork for me.
RC: Wrong assumption.
RC: It was for everybody on the bus ...but I didn't know that. Truthfully, I'm not thinking too clearly at the time --nervous.
RC: It was about a 90-minute bus ride, and the bus finally pulls up to the place. It had been built originally as......
RC: A MEAT PROCESSING PLANT!!! BWWWWAHAHAHAHA! God has a mean sense of humor.
RC: So, they tell us to strip to our shorts and queue us up in a long, serpentine line to be -well- processed.
RC: But, the guys doing the different little chechpoints are obviously not doctors, just corpmen.
RC: I have this envelope. I'm at least a third, maybe half way, through the checkpoints. I'd probably been in line 30 minutes at this point, maybe more.
RC: I'm getting really, really nervous now. Damn, I'm going to get through this whole thing and some doctor's going to say "Well, I wish I seen that. Sorry, too late now."
RC: So, I come around a screen (much of it was a large, open room --this was a meat plant, remember) and what do I see? A guy with a starched shirt and a stethescope.
RC: "Are you a Doctor??!"
RC: Yes.
RC: Well, Mrs. Brown said give you this. (hands envelope)
RC: He sits down at the desk and pulls out the stack.
RC: I'm standing beside the desk, still in the queue for the most part.
RC: He reads for a minute, then turns to me....
FRIEND: .........
RC: "So, Mr. Gribble, how long ago did you hurt your knee?"
FRIEND: ?
RC: MR GRIBBLE??? WTF is he talking about
RC: oh, yeah, i knew another student name Gribble, he was on the bus
RC: it dawns on me, that was everybody's paperwork
RC: "No. No! I'm Jordan."
RC: More shuffling of paper.
RC: He reads for a minute, then without saying JACK SHIT to me ...reaches for a stamp and stamps something on the paperwork
RC: At that time in the US, there was a 2-character code that people would bribe to get it on their records. "4F" --medical exemption
RC: He hands me the paper.
RC: I'm still in line.
RC: Down on the paper is 4F.
RC: -end-
FRIEND: Did you let out a yelp whilst inline?
RC: I think my heart being in my throat prevented that.
RC: Seriously, it took a while to sink in.
FRIEND: If you just flat out refused to go which prison they send you to?
FRIEND: military prison or?
RC: Usually Levinworth. Federal Prison.
RC: Few refused.
RC: Most that would not serve joined the Coast Guard or National Guard.
FRIEND: was that because of peer pressure?
RC: But the 'Guards' were jammed full, as you might imagine.
RC: No, it wasn't exactly peer pressure.
RC: How can I put this? ....More like "STAND" among rugby players. Does that make sense?
FRIEND: sort of
RC: A few fled to Canada.
FRIEND: If you said you were really busy and just couldn't fit it in I guess that wouldn't have washed right?
RC: yeah, you'd be on the front lines in a week. no training. no gun
FRIEND: hehehehehehehe
RC: But the choice to object was life-ruining, really. Akin to desertion.
RC: So, most took their chances.
FRIEND: now I'm going to bed, thanks for the story
