DC Flashback

Part 7: Aftermath

Shaken, shell-shocked, desperately seeking R&R, still-teenaged me found himself back in the burbs.

The Draft Lottery

The draft number for my birthday, October 25th, comes up … #2. Yikes! That called for evasive measures.

One fallout from dropping out of school I neglected to account for was the fact that my “student exemption” would no longer keep me out of the armed forces. So much for being classified 2S. The US Draft Board now listed me as 1A: perfectly ready for military service.

To make things a little more exciting, the Draft Board would be holding a “draft lottery” where they’d pick draft numbers out of a hat … meaning not everyone’s birth date would be called and not everyone would have to serve. Potential unknown soldiers who drew higher numbers like 346 (out of 365 days) might never have to serve. No one really knew where the cutoff point would be.

Some clever Selective Service staffer had the bright idea of holding the lottery on national TV. It would be great publicity for the fine organization.

If I wasn’t invincible, I would have been worried. Like most teenagers, I had complete confidence in my invincibility. I assumed that watching crew-cutted beaurocrats pluck numbers from a fishbowl would be good for grins. And I had one, giggling as draft position #1 was announced as some other sucker’s birthday.

#2 was next up.

“October 25th.”

So much for invincibility. There was only one available alternative left for a lover not a fighter to avoid tangling with the Vietcong.

Connie Kohn, the nicest person ever born, never known for deviousness, watched the televised lottery with me. I have no idea how she knew how or where to find a shrink to write a note stating that I was psychologically unfit for military service that would get me out of the army. But she did.

We drove down the Palisades Parkway over the George Washington Bridge, taking the West Side Parkway to midtown to meet a with a psychologist who had an office over an Orange Julius stand on 79th St. After the briefest of chats, this fellow typed out a one-sentence note and handed it to my mom who looked at it approvingly and passed it to me.

The get-out-military-service-free card was Tweet-like in its simplicity:

Lory has a fragile ego which could decompensate under the stress of military service.

Truer words were never spoken.

If by some chance you don’t know what “decompensate” means, a “normal” human compensates for events like burning down a village and shooting the surviving women and children like (say) the Mai Lai Massacre by acting as if it doing that was really no big deal.

Decompensation means you actually recall the screams after you kill and maim innocent civilians as well as the horrified facial expressions of the survivors watching as their huts burn to the ground with their babies inside.

As promising as the note was, I still had to go through with the actual draft physical before handing the succinct and perfectly truthful note to the army shrink at the end of the ordeal. That was the theory, anyway — I can’t say I was entirely convinced it was going to play out that way and I feared the pre-draft physical like you wouldn’t believe.

I was sure I’d be the only guy there who wasn’t gung-ho about the war, the only peacenik there who didn’t buy into “the domino theory” we’d heard over and over which stated that if Vietnam fell to the commies the next thing you know they’d take canoes to Canada and Mexico and then they’d cut a mighty swath across the amber plains of grain and turn us “red,” too.

Fortunately, that’s not how the pre-draft physical went down. Everyone there was as anti-war as I was! Busloads of us wisecracked our way through the battery of tests which took all day.

At the physical’s exciting conclusion, when an officer asked everyone to step forward except for anyone who had a reason why they couldn’t serve, I obeyed his orders.

“Why haven’t you stepped forward?”

I produced the note, which worked like a charm. Guys with “fragile egos” can’t be expected to storm hills.

For me, the Vietnam War was over.

Gainfully employed in the old world

After sleeping off the DC hangover for a few weeks in the room that I grew up in, with its odd wallpaper depicting daily life in colonial times, now that I was a non-student who wasn’t going into military service, the only thing left to do was venture out into the workplace.

In 2013, it may be hard for job-seekers to imagine having to compete with only one or two people instead of 500 to land the job of your choice. Job searches were infinitely less intimidating as the seventies began. It seemed like you could actually be whatever you wanted to be. You just told someone what you wanted to be and sometimes the answer would be “yes” there and then.

There wasn’t much in the way of work in River Vale, cause the town consisted of three golf courses and very little other commercial activity to speak of. So I waltzed into the Montvale Post Office, where a perfectly nice but definitely scary-looking Postmaster hired me on the spot. He was scary because he spoke with a Transylvanian accent and he looked exactly like Bela Lugosi — Count Dracula in a succession of black and white B movies that were standbys on Channel 9’s Chiller Theater.

The Assistant Postmaster was another story.

This drill-sergeant type was cast from the same mold as the principals and gym coaches who ran Pascack Hills like prison wardens with PMS. This fellow kept finding things to rag on me about my job performance — flaws like sorting mail too slowly while I was reminiscing about the lost semester in DC and the summer film school that came before it.

I responded by re-routing all letters and parcels to Alaska and Hawaii.

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