Once upon a time I met a Vietnam-era draft dodger, a director of an overseas American school who was interviewing me for a teaching job. During the interview, I revealed that I was a Vietnam Veteran, which prompted the director, an affable and evenhanded man, to reveal his role during that war in as unpretentious way as possible. It was a hell of a face-saving effort. Damn courageous, I thought. Try as he might, however, his tale came out as an apologia, evinced by a profusion of inherent rhetorical features, the scrutinizing of which is the province and habit of old English teachers, like me. I felt sorry for the guy. He apparently assumed that I couldn’t cut through the pretense and, what was worse, that I cared an iota, or that I had ever given draft dodgers a second thought. I don’t. I haven’t (until now). They have their war. We have ours. And in momento courage (as opposed to the post facto courage we all have) if it came into play at all—played more in their court.
The guys who burned their draft cards and ran off to Canada to escape the draft and Vietnam were not cowards. Although I wouldn’t know, those acts must have been terrifying at that moment—like the hypersonic sting of a bullet flying very close by your head—the primal fear that resides in the nanoseconds of now, like when someone comes up behind you and goes “boo!” and you, saint or sinner, clutch your chest and holler “shit.” The difference is that “boo” demands an immediate unconscious reaction that quickly fades without qualification of bravery or cowardice until its re-telling, of course. On the other hand, dodging the draft was an extremely risky decision that had no basis in individual past experiences, experiences that wag their finger when you are on the precipice of repeat risky behavior, tales from memory that nudge you back from the cliff. Without those experiences, one consciously reacts with an informed decision against the hormonal chorus that says “stop!” To voluntarily step off the cliff is anything but cowardice. The draft dodgers were not afraid of going to Vietnam. How could they have been? They had never been there—neither had I—and the networks’ sanitized two-dimensional black and white images of the war that flickered in our living rooms at six o’clock weekday evenings and narrated by the measured and mesmerizing voices of Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, and David Brinkley were seductive rather than repulsive to impressionable young boys—like the discount store toy aisle loaded with its farrago of plastic olive drab martial play things, cheesy icons of death and destruction—as were the braggadocio stories, an understandable defense mechanism, told by returning vets who were anything but terrified on the trip over in chartered DC-8s crammed with 250—one would have thought—partygoers. Paradoxically, the freedom bird home was as a tomb. In the meantime, we were no more like Billy Jack than, well, Billy Jack, nor did we evolve from an ability to jump up and kick your head off in a wink into a Rambo-type who could single-handedly take out, gorilla-style, a company of soldiers with a knife. We were hometown boys duped and dumped into a damn bad deal where fight or flight was our only chance. There was no time for parsing out morality—or honor. That job falls to Hollywood and The Hill.
Conclusively, the draft dodgers must have been brave boys, boys with solid conviction, who were no doubt dead afraid, who got the boo and sting when the edges of their draft card turned black, curled, and burst into flames, or at the very moment they crossed the border into Canada where, although they knew they could get a hot dog or slice of apple pie or watch a baseball game, they could never return to America and frolic with their families and friends. I can’t imagine it. Choice or not, that’s death!—not the mythical one way boat ride with Charon across Acheron. As one draft dodger put it who stayed put in Canada even after amnesty: “I speculate often on my Americanness. Even though I bitterly reject its politics, when I travel down south of the 49, I'm like a salmon. I know I'm in home water; I can taste it, feel it and smell it [. . .].”
And it was precisely the fear of familiar and familial death that kept us hopeful in Vietnam—perhaps alive— rather than that darky death from which no one has returned, although too many people confuse that death with the heaven and hell scam and live lives in pathological fear mitigated by proselytizing but mostly by the joy of shaking the dust off their self-anointed feet when others don’t buy. The draft dodgers weren’t buying the Uncle Sam scam (substitute heaven and hell with give me liberty or give me death) heavily backed by those of us who also chose, drafted or not, and faithfully fell into ranks behind that avuncular jingoist and marched off, leaving the draft dodgers under the shade of maple leaves in an exacted shame. Of course we weren’t afraid either. Until our boo and sting moments came under the dripping dark of triple canopy jungle—with an exacted shame all its own.
And it was precisely the fear of familiar and familial death that kept us hopeful in Vietnam—perhaps alive— rather than that darky death from which no one has returned, although too many people confuse that death with the heaven and hell scam and live lives in pathological fear mitigated by proselytizing but mostly by the joy of shaking the dust off their self-anointed feet when others don’t buy. The draft dodgers weren’t buying the Uncle Sam scam (substitute heaven and hell with give me liberty or give me death) heavily backed by those of us who also chose, drafted or not, and faithfully fell into ranks behind that avuncular jingoist and marched off, leaving the draft dodgers under the shade of maple leaves in an exacted shame. Of course we weren’t afraid either. Until our boo and sting moments came under the dripping dark of triple canopy jungle—with an exacted shame all its own.
