dropping out and going to Vietnam

I was talking to a buddy of mine yesterday about DST, and he was against it too.  I didn't realize that there was such a grassroots groundswell.  But now I see that I misread Beagles and he is for making it permanent.  By the way I differ on Rubio not being a Trump yes man.  He may peep something now and then that is a little off the Trump track, but if it draws attention he will quickly backtrack, and I don't expect he will be crossing Trump on these upcoming Emergency and Yemen votes.  But keeping DST permanent doesn't sound that different from abolishing it.  I expect both the abolishers and the always-DSTers are closer together than those who want to keep it the way it is.  I expect what they don't like is changing their clocks twice a year, but I see that as the main strength of the system, two sort of holidays every year, what's not to like?


I went to U of I with two of my high school buddies, Woodrow Ellis and Ted Jennings (Beagles will remember these guys).  Before it even got cold both of them were back in Chicago.  Those suburban schools were so much ahead of Gage Park that we were swamped.  I hung on by the skin of my teeth for a couple years, and eventually caught up a little bit, but it was lonely and dull.

And then in the spring of 1965 I got introduced to The Tavern.  It wasn't really a tavern but it was a section of the student union with kind of old timey furnishings and it was where the kiddy (because they were so young) beats (because it was too early for hippies) hung out.  Bam, suddenly I had a big group of friends to hang out and skip classes with.  And one day I met Terry and Steve, actual dropouts, as opposed to students goofing off, who lived in like their own apartment and could hold parties where copious amounts of beer were drunk.  Way cool.

But on the other side they had no jobs and being drafted was the only sure thing in their future.  Terry had some money squirreled away, but Steve sponged mainly off me which, me being cheap, was not that easy to come by.  They both got drafted Terry was maybe a little smarter or more likely luckier because he ended up in Oklahoma repairing helicopters while sad sack Steve went to Vietnam.

There were letters from some fort in Louisiana called Tiger Country, standing in the rain in formation wondering how he got there and where he was going.  I know both dawgs went through basic, but I wonder if maybe their time was easier in that they weren't drafted and didn't face Vietnam.  Eventually Steve was on that twenty-four hour plane ride and when he got there he said he had never seen anything as green as those rice paddies.

Meanwhile stateside I was living the life of Riley, hanging out with my beer drinking buddies, going to parties and bars and jokingly writing Steve to thank him for defending my way of life.  I flunked out of school just before graduation and was living in this sort of crash pad which had just crashed when Steve got back from Vietnam, flush with cash and looking to have a good time.