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In the fall of 1966

By: One Small Voice

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In the fall of 1966, I was just a summer past being graduated out of high school when I turned 18 years old. Yes, if you do the math, I am over 60 years old now. At that time when I turned 18, it was as it is now, mandatory that young males (but not young females) register for the United States of America’s Armed Forces Selective Service System (a.k.a. the “Draft”). It was also near the beginning of the U.S. of A’s escalation of armed forces in Vietnam.

There were the messages from the Right saying things like “Love It or Leave It”, “Our Country Right or Wrong”, “Support Our Troops”, and also more personal directives from my father who was a WWII war hero and recently retired from the United States Air Force. This was just before the time when the Left started chanting, “Hell No We Won’t Go”.

Within the 30 days past my 18th birthday, the time required by the Selective Service System to register for the draft, I decided that 1) The Selective Service System’s method of involuntarily forcing (via random lottery or not) young men into war is a blatant form of slavery; 2) The “patriotic” obligation put upon young men to “Serve Their Country” with perhaps the “Ultimate Sacrifice” is mostly propaganda; 3) Wars are started and promoted by rich men who want to get richer by providing weapons of war to the government; 4) War (i.e. Vietnam) was not the thing I wanted to do at that time.

I had thought a lot about War and my future that summer of ’66. I had recently finished high school and was just a few weeks before become an adult. I thought a lot about my options besides going to war: 1) Not registering for the draft then waiting until they came to arrest me and send to Jail or 2) leaving the country and going to Canada; 3) Going Underground: not leaving the country but leaving home and changing my name and location. However what I really wanted to do was 4) go to College, eventually get married and raise a family. Before I tell you what I did with the Draft in 1966 and at the end of my last summer as a child, I need to tell you about a couple other major events that happened to me just in the few years prior when I was growing up as a child.

In the early part of the 60s, I was going to a very old, brick building elementary school in the deep south: Mississippi City Elementary School in Mississippi City, Mississippi to be exact. I was in my last year of grade school and this was a “Whites Only” public school. And for the following two years I attended a brand new “Whites Only” public middle school. Yes this was before the civil rights movement and when there were new public schools for White’s and only very old schools for “Colored” (the polite southern word for non-white people) only.

Note that 1960 was just a little less than 100 years after the civil war… a war that freed the slaves (except for young men to be enslaved, i.e. drafted. in future wars). It was also in 1960 that my family returned from a 4 year tour in Japan where white people were the minority. I mention these things because it touches on the use the color of a person’s skin are a determination of social status. And that touches on the common use of religious belief in the determination of the social status of other people’s religions.

The other major event that happened in my childhood that I need to mention stated on October 8th 1962 and lasted for two weeks (least the major part). This was when I was just a freshman in high school and my father was still in the Air Force at that time. We were living on an Air Force Base. Not just a regular Air Force Base but one that had a bunch of B-52s airplanes which I knew carried nuclear bombs. And this event did not just happen to me but it happened to the whole world! It was called the Cuban Missile Crisis! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis).

While the whole world was on the brink of a nuclear war, I was living in the basement in Air Force housing provided to my family on this air base that had that planes that the USA would use in what seemed to becoming very soon: an all out nuclear war. Talk about being at ground zero! I thought for sure that at any second, I would see a bright white light before seeing nothing forever again… same as I had watched on TV about those films showing the dummies living just outside a nuclear blast testing zone. I also knew what happened to the hundreds of thousands of people living in Nagasaki and Hiroshima as we were stationed in Japan for 4 years (just 10 years after those nuclear bombs were dropped and insistently vaporizing most of all living things around those two cities). This feeling of pending doom was even more pronounced after a lady came around and advised us to fill the space outside the basement windows with dirt and stock up on food and water supplies. I could see the dirt thru the window of my basement bedroom and realized that these actions would do little good living at ground zero. This 1962 experience and then again with the draft in 1966 were fortunately my only experiences with war until 9/11/2001.

But the fear of total nuclear war remains. Not just my fear but a fear that should be everyone’s! Not a fear that should control our daily lives, but we do know that a total nuclear war could end most if not all live on earth! Yes, we will probably disrupt the environment so bad with an all out nuclear war that the earth becomes as hostile to live as it is on the moon. No air. No water. No planets. No living without taking a whole life support system with us.

Ok, I (and the human race) survived the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then 4 years later I was required to register for the Draft. Of course registering for the draft meant going to war and in 1966 that meant I was probably going on a one-way trip to Vietnam. What I decided was that war is morally wrong. Why? Because the concept of war should deal with morals and should state that any use violence except in self defense is morally wrong. Isn’t this what religion teaches us: “Love thy Neighbor”, “Turn the Other Cheek”, “Do unto others”, etc. etc. etc.

So what I did was file for a conscientious objector’s deferment when I first filed for the draft. And a couple months later I got a letter from the draft board stating that my deferment was granted! So I was able to go to college and eventually get married and later a divorce. And now after a long career working with computers and in my later years of life, I want to write about war. I would like to do more than write, but writing is all the time I have left to do. So I recently wrote articles about “FW: Christmas Stamps "urgent" and “Beauty Queen Terrorists”.

“FW: Christmas Stamps "urgent"” Is about religious profiling (stereotyping). And “Beauty Queen Terrorists” is about an recent incident of care home sexual abuse and leads to a discussion comparing abuse (in various forms) to terrorism. And since terrorism is world-wide, that lead to a proposal for a “United Free Nations Organization”, which is the title of my next upcoming article!

By One Small Voice, December 2008

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

OneSmallVoice@StuffedWidgets.com

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