Now I’m not sure that it will take 18 minutes and 20 seconds to read this diary or if it would take 18 minutes and 20 seconds for me to sing it, but I do know you’d rather I NOT sing it, so just read along….
Yesterday was Thanksgiving, so as I often do, I ended up listening to Alice’s Restaurant, the famous anti-war song that Arlo Guthrie wrote sometime in 1966 or thereabouts and ended up putting on a same-named album in September of 1969. It also brought back memories of seeing Arlo perform the full song in his 50th anniversary tour, and my wife and I flew from Hawaii to Denver to gather with many of our old college friends to hear him perform. And while, in original singing of the song, Arlo reflected back on a Thanksgiving two years earlier, I am going to have to go back a bit further than that, although, coincidentally it would be about the same year that he wrote the song - 1966.
1966 - September, to be a bit more precise, I left my sheltered suburban white bread suburb west of Chicago and headed off to college in Denver, Colorado. Now, where I grew up there were no such things as Democrats, and certainly no such thing as anti-war persons of any political persuasion, but I had been raised in an otherwise socially progressive home where my father, having been raised on a farm in the deep south, and seeing the problems with the Jim Crow south, had moved his family north; and my mother, raised by very progressive parents, was making sandwiches for the local college students to take on their Freedom Rides in the south. So, when I went to college and in that freshman year I got exposed to the idea that the Vietnam was maybe not a good thing. That led to reading up on the history of southeast Asia which of course led to an awakening regarding The War. With that, I became involved in our local SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) chapter, and over time became president of said chapter and did the usual protesting activities of the time, including student strikes, marches, etc.
But (kinda like in the song) that is really just prologue to my story of the draft and the infamous but real Group W bench.
By 1969 I had graduated from college and was in graduate school in Boulder, CO. And it was on December 1st of that year that the first draft lottery was held and my birth year was in the cohort for that lottery. I remember all of us tracking the pulling of the numbers, with some of us in immediate peril and others very safely at the end of the line. I was somewhat above the mid-point, but not so high that I was feeling totally comfortable. So then it was a time of waiting.
And eventually, the wait came to an end and I got my notice to report for my pre-induction physical. Like Arlo, and many others (I had one friend who, the night before his physical, slept in a bathtub full of hay, because he had allergies and he was hoping to really set them off for his big day) I prepared appropriately, which entailed significant amounts of various substances, some known and some only guessed at (for the record, probably best NOT to listen to In the Court of the Crimson King, by Crimson King, when in such a state). But in the end, I did wake up the next morning with enough cognitive functioning remaining to know that I had a Very Important Appointment that day. So off I went.
Now, for those who have never had a pre-induction physical or never taken a pre-enlistment physical, understand that in addition to the “physical” part of the exam, there is also the mental/cognitive part of the exam, otherwise known as the intelligence test (I’m sure the Army had a more interesting name for it, but that’s what it was). And this was where I had to make my first decision about just how serious I was in my anti-war beliefs. To that point, I hadn’t fled to Canada, nor had I burned my draft card. And in fact, there I was - getting ready to follow a bunch of orders about where to go and what to do. The proverbial slippery slope. Put up or shut up time.
And so with that, I began taking the intelligence test, which was an interesting exercise, because my plan was to begin my active resistance at that point. Which meant I needed to know the correct answer, so as to make sure I didn’t choose that. And thus splendidly and with great success, as a Ph.D. candidate grad student, I successfully failed the Army intelligence test.
Which led to me meeting my friend “the Sargent”, who became my shadow for the rest of the day, almost. He came into the room of guys who had been sitting around waiting for results, and called my name out. He escorted me out of the room and began questioning me about my academic background. Seems he was mystified (hah!) as to how a graduate student could fail this test. I explained that sometimes you have good days, and sometimes you have bad days. He did not buy that. And told me so. And took me to another room, with another group of guys. And just before he escorted me in, he said “you will take tests and keep taking tests until you pass one.”
Now it turns out that the room full of guys were actually folks who had done rather well on the basic test, and they were now going to be tested to see if they would be clerk-typists or machinists, or something else other than front line cannon fodder. I was a late arriver (not unlike Arlo and his arrival at the Group W bench) so they all turned to me and asked me “So, what are you going for?”, to which I responded, “I’m not going for anything except to not get drafted,” and began to explain to them that if they managed to fail all the tests, then they might be deemed unfit for the Army and wouldn’t be sent off to fight and die in an evil war. Of course many of them got really excited, or at least interested, by this idea (remember, none of these guys were there by choice - they got the same letter I did). At which point my friend the sarge, who had never left the room, got the distinct impression that I was being a bad influence on the group and pulled me out, and went on to his plan B - which was to just escort me through all of the rest of the physical and to make sure that I didn’t talk to any of the other pre-inductees.
So off it was - to all the poking and prodding and “turn your head left and cough” indignities of a military physical. As an interesting side-light to this process, when my blood pressure was taken by a black physician, he noticed my escort and my long hair, and for the first time in my life I was deemed to have “high blood pressure,” and would need to come back twice more in subsequent days to have it rechecked. My unproven suspicion is that I wasn’t the only one participating in an act of resistance that day. But as fate would have it, there would be no reason for me to come back those subsequent two visits. Because …..
The next and final stop on my tour through the pre-induction process was … yes, you guessed it - the Group W Bench. Now, truthfully, up until that moment in time, I had figured that the Group W Bench was an artifice of Arlo’s song. After all, I never did have to see a shrink in the process, so no opportunity to jump up and down with him yelling “kill!, kill!, kill!.” But there it was. An actual bench, outside an actual office. And somewhere - maybe on the door or maybe on the wall above the bench were the words “Group W.” Now, unlike Arlo, I did not have any companions on the bench. Maybe a slow day for mother-rapers, father-killers and father-rapers. So I sat there by myself. Until Capt. Smith (yes, that was his name) opened the door and invited me in.
Now I am a bit foggy on some of the details here - specifically whether he had a file of anything beyond my behaviors of the day in front of him or not, but regardless, we got to talking about my activities in the anti-war movement and my history of being in SDS and having been president of my local chapter. He wasn’t really that impressed with my rise to high political office, noting that he’d had a number of people come in claiming to have been SDS presidents, to which I could only respond that we were a VERY democratic organization and liked to have lots of elections, so it didn’t surprise me that there were other presidents of our local chapter. We also talked about my conversations with the other guys that were taking tests to be clerk-typists or whatever. And after that we got down to the nub of it. As best I can recall, the monologue (he did the talking and I did the listening) went like this:
“Denver11 (well, he didn’t say ‘Denver11’, he used my real last name, as in ‘Mr. ------‘), the army runs well because people follow orders and do what they are told, and we have lots of people that will be happy to follow orders and allow us to continue to operate efficiently. What we specifically do NOT need are people like you, who do not follow orders and who encourage others to not follow orders because you will just cause trouble. So, if the draft ever gets to your number, you call me (at which point he gave me his card, with his direct telephone number on it), and I will make sure that you are not accepted into this army.”
Now I suppose it would be a really wonderful end to this story to say that my number was called and that I called Capt. Smith, and that I never got drafted, but the only true part of that is that I never got drafted. As I recall, they got up into the mid to high 100s (maybe around 175 or so?), and thus I never got to see if Capt. Smith would have been good for his word, or if he wasn’t, what I would have done at that point. I only know that when the time came, I did MY version of singing a verse of Alice’s Restaurant.
I also know that every time I go to DC, I walk the wall. And every time I break down in tears, because too many got sent over and too many died, and too many came back with physical and mental scars that exist to this day.