1 of 12 Induction Army Draft

I Was Drafted During Vietnam Conflict. The year was 1967 and the Vietnam War dominated the news and my life. You bet your ass I was afraid and the obituary listings were not all strangers to me. I had an older brother in the military and it was his age group over there now and his friends that were coming home in a box. The war was about money and I wasn’t going to be getting any of it. My draft card had me classified as eligible for the draft and there was no escaping military service in the near future.

I tried for a college deferment but so was every one else. The SAT scores for admittance into a college were beyond my reach. Getting employed with this eligible for the draft classification was impossible. Who wants to hire someone that will be drafted in the near future? By the time they train you for the job you are likely to be inducted into the military. There was no where to go and nothing I could do about it. I was trapped like a hen in a fox den. Running to Canada was not popular yet and I was not aware of that escape route. The Canadian alternative started in late 1969.
Now my draft was for 2 years and I was ordered to the induction center. Reluctantly I went with only a toothbrush and a towel in hand. The toothbrush, well they asked you to bring only your toiletries as they would supply every thing else you needed.

I brought the towel to clean myself up because I new I was going to be shit on. Well right there at the induction center they give you a physical exam and inject you with some vaccines. Everyone lines up, gets naked, bends over and they give it to you right there up the as s with a finger. Until then I always thought that giving someone the finger was just a gesture and at the same time I was feeling sorry for the Italian army soldiers because their gesture had to be a bit more painful. If that wasn’t enough some guy comes up, grabs you buy the balls, and tells you to cough. “Sir no need to threaten me, after all I been through today I’ll be glad to cough”. You know they could have just said, “They have me by the balls and my ass was theirs”. I wasn’t deaf and there was no need for the radical sign language.

The recruiters are part of the induction center routine and every branch of the service has a few of them working there. This is where you get to sign up for a few extra years and promised all kinds of things for doing so. I bit the 2 extra years of service in exchange for the “No Vietnam tour lure”. I signed on the dotted line and now I was a 4 year enlisted man in the Army Security Agency.

The induction center was packed at 8 am and by 3 pm everyone was loaded on the trucks for transport to their new homes. My bus was headed for fort Dix and it was a long quiet ride. No one had anything to say. Jim Raab

http://jimraab.blogspot.com/