re RE: VLVL(4) Vietnam

[pynchonoid]

me:
>I had spent many months

Actually only a few weeks, my induction notice came in
late in April, if I remember correctly -- 31 years ago
-- and I had to report to an induction center early in
June.

>, after I received my draft
>induction notice (I was in the last group of
draftees,
>one of the lucky 25,000 or so who were drafted in
'72,
>as a result of the first draft lottery drawing),
>exploring the possibility of claiming conscientious
>objector status.  The best advice I got, from the
>ladies at Grailville in southern Ohio where I spent a
>couple of those months, 

...only 6 weeks at Grailville (near Cincinatti)...

>was not to claim CO status if
>I didn't truly fit the criteria. I finally decded
that
>I wasn't a CO, that I would go ahead and let them
take
>me because I wasn't ready to run away to Canada with
>the prospect of having to stay there forever,
although
>I did tell my father (who was a WWII hero -- he won
>the Navy's Distinguished Flying Cross and Air Medal
>multiple times each flying divebombing missions
>against Japanese) that if I got orders to go to
>Vietnam in a combat capacity, I would desert.

It took a couple of more decades for me to integrate
what I had learned about killing in boot camp -- a key
lesson took place every day at the riflerange, where
the Vietnam Vet instructors drew crude caricatures of
Asian faces on the human silhouette targets, and
encouraged us to "murder those fucking zipperheads" --
and adopt Ghandi-style nonviolence.  Looking back, I'm
happy that I didn't falsely claim CO status at the
time I got drafted, as the ladies of The Grail (a
Catholic women's organization) recommended, thus
perhaps making it a bit easier for the real CO's to
make their case. 

To his credit, my late father, who in the early years
of the Vietnam War, good Reagan Republican that he was
(Dad actually shook the Raygun's hand when he came
through Louisiana stumping for a Republican candidate
for governor) sounded a lot like T and RJ and fq have
since 9-11 -- calling for the blood of poor people on
the other side of the globe in order to assuage the US
imperialist hunger for oil, war profits, and world
domination -- came to oppose the Vietnam episode in
the War That Never Ends, realizing what a scam it was.
 He even came to realize that he and the millions of
his WWII veteran colleauges, had been manipulated to
help make some fatcats fatter (as Pynchon details in
_Gravity's Rainbow_), although he remained proud, and
rightly so, of having done what he did to defeat the
Japanese.

Now, where's that hammer?  Got me some coconuts to
crack for our famous Labor Day Weekend BBQ dessert
confection...



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