Overindulgence on this scale proved unpleasant. "Actually, greasy food gives me indigestion. But which is worse, a little gas or two years in the army?" Dave said to me. In one month of gluttony--during which Dave commonly ate four and five meals a day--he added 25 pounds of fat. He took on the appearance of an overfed courtier, a modern-day George III, with his long curly black hair hanging on each side of a puffy, red-cheeked face. The real change, however, was going on inside him.
Normal blood pressure, he figured, ranges from 120 to 140. Young people most frequently fall in the bottom half of this range. But Dave had a history of high blood pressure, and his diet had made it worse. "The day before the physical, my blood pressure was 160. Then, just before I went, I took a No-Doz tablet to make them think I was dying." The draft board held Dave for 24 hours, a drug-detection measure he hadn't anticipated; but fortunately for him, his blood pressure remained high.
Like Larry, Dave was scheduled for another check-up in six months. Assuming he flunked that second physical, he would be free. His 4-F status would stand regardless of later improvements in his health.
THE EXPLOITS of Larry and Dave have a comical tone, as if the draft were a game for college kids to play, a challenge, like climbing up Mem Hall to hang jack o'lanterns on Halloween. In fact, the draft was not such a serious business in 1972, an election year, when the number of inducted dropped from 96,000 to 50,000, and most of those who were drafted never saw Viet Nam. But in the years before, the Army's famous "greetings" announcement changed a lot of lives, even in the sheltered middle class.
I can remember my own trip to Draft Board Number 10 in Mount Vernon, New York, to register in 1972. I checked the conscientious objector slot with a mixture of pride and trepidation. Though the preliminary form committed me to nothing, I felt as if I had sealed my fate. Because I was born a Quaker, my religion provided an unusual advantage for getting approval for C.O. status. On the other hand, my draft board had a great deal of trouble filling its quota, and did not look kindly on conscientious objectors as a result.
If the board had denied my request, my family would have aimed me for Canada, I'm sure. But I had been thinking that Canada was too ambiguous an option to be a real protest. If I went to jail for my convictions there would be less ambiguity. And my reading that year was full of precedents: Thoreau, Eugene Debs, Daniel Berrigan, even George Fox, the first Quaker. I can't say now what I would have done, but I know my sympathies were with the resisters in American prisons. If it didn't stop the war, it would sure be one way to get some reading done.
Fortunately for the world and me, American troops were being pulled out of Viet Nam. I never had to test my own alternative, the way Larry and Dave did, and see if I could stick it out in my way as well as they did in theirs.
What I've learned of the world since then has not been kind to my early pacifist beliefs. If asked again to fight in a war like Vietnam, I could not so readily request C.O. status. Perhaps the only answer is to hope one never has to face such a choice. And that seems almost no answer at all.