A Cavalcade of Lesser Horrors

Screwed

102 Screwed It was a warm summer afternoon in 1966. I was standing at the counter in the Selective Service office in Waukegan with six or seven other young men. The local draft board was having its monthly meeting that afternoon, and we were all there to appeal our draft status. It was a scene that played out over and over again in the tired old office building on Water Street. It was all a misunderstanding . The draft board had done us wrong. They didn’t know who we were or what we were trying to achieve with our young and promising lives. This was our chance to stand there and show them that we were worth more to society as young civilians than we would be as conscripts. And this was their chance to turn a deaf ear to this month’s batch of cretins, to bring down that well-worn “Approved for Induction” stamp and yell “Next!” My own misunderstanding with the draft board had begun on August 18 when they changed my classification from 2-S (draft-deferred college student) to 1-A (eligible for the draft). A paragon of bureaucratic efficiency, they’d immediately fired off a first-class form letter to let me know the good news. Standing in my parents’ kitchen after work on August 20, reading the letter, I knew exactly where the problem had begun. I had failed to take a test the prior spring—a national Selective Service test that would have proven I was making progress SCREW ED 103 toward a college degree. There may have been alcohol involved in my absenting myself from the test room that fateful Saturday morning. There may have been quite a bit of alcohol involved. Like many other young men back then, I subscribed to a theory of personal exceptionalism. I thought myself too smart to be drafted or too good-looking or too something, I’m not sure what. The draft was for an inferior class of young men, not for a quickwitted young man en route to a meteoric career of some sort. I wasn’t sure what the career would be in—English majors never are. But I was a young man in a hurry, and I had no time for the inconvenience induction into the armed services might cause. Standing there in the kitchen, turning the problem over in my mind, I knew an appeal would be necessary. I considered an “I was drunk” defense. Nah. The ranks of the U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine Corps teemed with young men who’d signed enlistment papers while drunk. The Air Force had a few, too. If all those guys sobered up and couldn’t get out of their contracts, there was no way the draft board would accept drunkenness as an excuse in my case. Slowly, plan B took shape. I would present them with letters from the president of my college and others attesting to my character and good standing as a student. That would show them. I would flank these with letters from solid citizens attesting to my status as a fine young man. I fired off a handful of requests. The college president and others responded, and now here I was, standing with all the other poor dumb shmoes in sport coats, waiting to be heard by the draft board. The draft board office was on the second floor. You walked up a long, dark stairway, across a hall, through a Sam Spade–era frosted-glass door, and up to the counter. On the other side of the counter, the room was full of government file cabinets. Three prim, bored, menopausal women clerks sat at desks, pounding away on typewriters, completing forms and form letters, stuffing fate into no. 10 business envelopes, performing mindless ho-hum 104 SCREW ED in-basket/out-basket stuff, pausing now and then to take drags off cigarettes and return them to government-issued aluminum ashtrays . What must the office Christmas party have been like? Did they pull the dust covers over their IBM Selectrics a half hour early that day? Did they lock the door and break out a bottle of sherry and let the deferment and status change notices and orders to report for induction go unsent? “Merry Christmas, Jan.” “Merry Christmas, Bunny, and Happy New Year. I just know ’67...