draft ten

 There is something I want to try out on you.  We are having an open mic at the towers next Wednesday, and I am going to give a reading from it.  But in the meantime there is that draft thing, which actually I think you have read before so I am just going to finish it off today.

Well I wasn't going into the army so what did that leave?  Jail or Canada.  You know, it would be bold, it would make a strong statement if I went to jail.  Yes it would, but then I'd be in jail wouldn't I?  Canada it was then.

 But there were rumors going around that Canada would give you a hard time letting you in unless you had a certain amount of cash, I think it was $500, and, as we used to get sick of hearing about when we were youngsters, but never get sick of saying now that we are oldsters, that was a lot of money in those days.  I had come back from California broke and hadn't been working for the Wigwam long enough to stack up much money.  If only I had more time.

 Especially since I had just gotten my draft notice.  Remember The Cream, they had this song:

 Take it back, take it back, take that thing right out of here.

Right away, far away, take that thing right out of here.

Don't let them take me to where streams are red.
I want to stay here and sleep in my own bed.

 I stuffed it back into its envelope, sealed it back up as best as I could, wrote on the outside "No longer at this address," dropped it back into my mail box, and wrote them that I had moved to a friend's address.

 There was another rumor that if you applied for Conscientious Objector status the army would not draft you until that issue was resolved.  And the thing was even if you got turned down you could appeal it, and all that would take a lot of time. 

 So a day or two after that I mailed them another letter officially asking for Conscientious Objector status.  When they mailed that form back to me a few days later I thought, aha, I had outsmarted them again.  But a day or two after that bam, back in the mail was that draft notice, and the date to appear had not changed.

 It was less than a month away.  I had some plans.  I had a friend who was willing to drive me, I had an address or two of people who had gone before me.  I didn't have the $500, but maybe the rumor wasn't true.  Just like graduation I hadn't told my parents a thing.  I had this letter started, still have it today somewhere.  "Dear Folks, by the time you read this I will be in Canada..." something about my moral standards blah, blah, something righteous about an unjust war.  Kind of trails off, I never did finish it. 

 About a week before I was going to leave, I ran into the people whose house I told the draft board I had moved to.  Did I get the letter from the draft board?

 What letter?

 They'd left it on the table in my room a couple days ago.

 When I got home there it was.  It had been buried underneath some other papers and I hadn't noticed it.  And it was, friends and neighbors, a Cancellation of Induction.  It wasn't exactly what it seemed, it was more of a postponement.  They were canceling my date to appear, and they would be awaiting the outcome of my Conscientious Objector application.

 Well this was plenty good, plenty good enough, now I would have plenty of time to build up some money.

 This Conscientious Objector thing.  I had never taken it seriously, never thought of it as anything more than a delaying tactic.  Generally you had to be religious, and you had to be against all wars, not just this particular one.

 Well not necessarily so, as I found out when I went to visit my draft counselor, Mr Silverman, because I would have to fill out this form, and I might as well do a good job on it, since I was going to appeal it and all.  Religious was good, but it wasn't necessary.  Technically you had to be against all wars, but you know, you could just keep quiet wars like WW II, because who wouldn't be for that one?

 Draft Counselors were a dime a dozen.  They were all over campus.  I don't know how I selected Silverman, I think his name was on a list on one of those card tables that were set up all over the student union.

 Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon from 1 to 3 he joined this group that assembled at the Alma Mater statue behind anti-war placards.  I used to see him as I was passing by.  Why didn't they stay till 5, and end this war even sooner?  One day it was raining and they all had umbrellas out.  Why didn't they set the umbrellas aside and bring the boys home earlier.

 I was always a little embarrassed talking to him.  I felt like you had to be a good guy, a person with high moral standards to apply for this, and I wasn't bad, but I really wasn't all that good.  If there was a line of us waiting to give alms to the poor, the truly good guy would figure out how much he could scrape by on and put the rest in the pot.  Myself I'd be checking out how much the others were giving, and maybe if I was in a good mood I'd put in five bucks more, but that was as good as I'd ever get.

 And you know there were two kinds of COs.  One kind did two years work at a crappy job, very loosely connected to national security.  The other kind went into the army but carried a medic bag instead of a rifle.  I didn't plan on being the second kind.    

 And then there was jail, that would be the truly good move.  Who wouldn't rather do two years in some crumby job than be shot at and have to take orders from assholes?  Going to jail was truly making a sacrifice for what you believed in.  That's what the guy who only kept a few bucks for himself and dropped the rest into the pot would do.  "The most serene people I know," Mr Silverman would say looking at me sincerely, "are those who have decided to go to prison for what they believed in."  I imagined that if he could have gotten me to go to jail that would have been a gold star for him.  The other guys standing around the alma mater would look at him approvingly and nod.  I would never be that serene.

 I filled out the forms.  Slivon who had just come back from Vietnam before we had signed that lease on that house on Hessel wrote a letter for me.  Something like how even though he had fought in the war and thought it was the right thing to do he knew I was a sincere guy blah blah blah.  Actually he believed the war sucked, but we knew if he wrote that nobody would listen to anything else he had to say.

 I had to go to a hearing at my draft board at 63rd and Kedzie, a heavily Catholic, conservative, and patriotic part of the city.  I didn't have much hope of getting my CO.  I was preparing to answer questions like What would you do if someone was raping your grandmother, you coward,  My Dad drove me over.  He'd always been a Republican, and I knew he liked Nixon, but we never exchanged a word about how he felt about me going into the army.  

 They called me into a room and Dad came with me.  They said my Dad really shouldn't be in the room with me for the hearing, but they didn't seem to want to make a big deal out of it, and I was glad he was sitting with me.  And the whole thing was short, they asked me one question I think.  Did I realize that even though I was against the war, I had to pay my taxes and they went to pay for the war?  Well nothing I could do it about that was there? I answered weakly.

Well I thought, there went a whole lot of nothing and I caught the train back to Champaign and a couple nights later I was pouring beers at the Wigwam and my mother called me there and they had given me the CO.

And that was it.  With that phone call I had passed from those who had the draft ahead to those who had the draft behind them.