Evan Hunter - Sons

I had told my father during our unsuccessful Judge Hardy chat in the living room of our house last November that I was going to appeal my classification and ask to enter the Army as a noncombatant, but that was before I knew what was actually involved. I had thought it was merely a matter of running over to my local draft board the next day, showing them my classification notice, and saying, “I know I’m classified 1-A, but I’d like to change that now if it’s ail right with you. I’d like to be put in 1-A-O, which as you know means I object to taking up arms against an enemy, but I don’t object to military service in a noncombatant status. So will you please make the necessary changes?”

“You mean you want to appeal your classification?”

“Yes, I’d like it changed to 1-A-O.”

“You’re asking for an exemption.”

“I’m asking for reclassification.”

“You’re appealing your present classification and asking for an exemption.”

“Okay, yes.”

“Fill out this form. Mail it back to us within ten days.”

“All I’m asking...”

“There are no automatic deferments or exemptions. Fill out this form. The Selective Service will decide whether to accept or reject your appeal.”

It occurred to me, as I looked over the form for the first time, that it would have made an excellent mid-term examination for a graduate student in theology. I visualized a bare-assed southern Baptist, dunked into a river at infancy and subsequently raised as a God-fearing citizen, trying to cope with the complexity of language in the form, and finally throwing up his hands in despair — fuck it, I’d druther go fight. My own situation was not too dissimilar. To begin with, I knew beforehand that a Supreme Court decision in March 1965 had broadened the legal interpretation of the first question in Series II. RELIGIOUS TRAINING AND BELIEF, so that belief in a supreme being did not necessarily have to mean belief in God, but could instead mean “belief in and devotion to goodness and virtue for their own sakes, and a religious faith in a purely ethical creed.” I knew all about the Seeger case, and I knew about the decision, and I was therefore surprised to discover, as late as November 30 of that year, that the question “Do you believe in a Supreme Being?” was still on the form. I recognized, of course, that I could answer “No” to the question if I so chose, supposedly without prejudicing my appeal, but I was honestly unprepared for the emphasis on religion throughout the remainder of the form. I was not a religious person. Oh yes, I had been in and out of the First Congregational Church every Christmas Eve as part of the ritual of singing carols around the enormous firehouse tree, and then going over for midnight mass, and I had also been there for services on the day after President Kennedy got shot, but I could not be considered a “churchgoer” in any sense of the word, nor had there been any really strong religious influences in our home (though my mother did try to get me interested in Ethical Culture and took me to a meeting in Stamford one Sunday morning). My objections to the war in Vietnam were purely moral, and it seemed to me unfair that I was now being asked to justify those beliefs by pretending they were religious — in other words, by lying.

For if I wanted to qualify for an exemption, I would have to answer questions like 7. Have you ever given public expression, written or oral, to the views herein expressed as the basis for your claim made in Series I above? If so, specify when and where, keeping in mind that the basis for any claim in Series I above had to be “religious training and belief.” I suppose I could have stretched a point, turned a corner in my mind that would have allowed me to explain as “religion” my sincere aversion to murder. But it seemed to me that this would have necessitated a duplicity that severely compromised my convictions.

I could not bring myself to complete the form.

I could not admit that I was a witch.

Besides, it was too late, the wheels were already grinding. That Wednesday, I received a notice from my local draft board, advising me to report for induction into the Army of the United States a week later. On December 8, 1965, I was sent to Fort Gordon, Georgia, for eight weeks of basic military training, after which I went to Fort Jackson, South Carolina for an additional eight weeks of Advanced Infantry Training. At the end of March 1966, I was flown to Saigon where I met an old football opponent from Stamford who told me all about the weather, the rodents, the serpents, the parasites, and the insects of Vietnam, and later showed me the whores, the pimps, the pushers, the profiteers, the protesters, and the policemen preserving law and order. The next morning, I climbed into the back of a deuce-and-a-half, and was escorted in convoy with fifteen other men to the base camp at Cu Chi.

Lloyd Parsons, the Negro who’d been showing off his jungle boots in the Saigon bar, was in one of the trucks with me.

Once you passed the target area, even if the mission was later scrubbed, it counted as part of your tour of duty, and the squadron clerk recorded it as such. In the Fifteenth Air Force, a tour consisted of fifty missions, after which you were entitled to be sent back to the States in one noncombatant capacity or another, usually as an instructor. (A fighter tour in the Twelfth Air Force consisted of a hundred missions, but that was because they were making shorter-range strikes, going out to dive-bomb and strafe, coming back to load up, going out again, three or four times in a single day.) You didn’t have to go home after your fiftieth mission. You could elect to stay and fly another tour, the way Archie Colombo did in February. He went to Rome for three weeks, and came back in March to join the squadron again. He was shot down flying the third mission of his second tour, which coincidentally was my fiftieth and final mission for the United States Army Air Force.

Colonel Spiller gave me the usual rah-rah pitch about signing over for a second tour, telling me that the war in Germany was almost over, hell, General Marshall had expected it to be over by last November, it was just taking a trifle longer, that was all. Patton’s Third Army had already crossed the Rhine and only last night Allied bombers had dropped 12,400 explosives and 650,000 fire bombs on Berlin, it was worth seeing through to the end, wasn’t it? Besides, there was the possibility that if I signed over for a second tour, I might be immediately discharged after we knocked off Germany, instead of being redeployed to the Pacific where I would have to fly my ass off against the Japs. I thanked Colonel Spiller for his consideration, knowing he had only my welfare in mind, but I told him that I was very tired just then and that I thought it might be nice to go home. The colonel looked me in the eye, the tic in his own eye beating erratically, and said, Sure, Tyler, I’ll okay the necessary papers. On April 3, 1945, two days after Easter, I left Foggia in an ATC airplane and after interminable stops at Iceland and Gander, finally landed at Michel Field, two miles northeast of Hempstead, Long Island.

There was the scent of imminent victory in the New York streets that April, much stronger, more easily sniffed than it had been in Italy. It was as though, paradoxically, the civilians knew more about the progress of the war than the men who were overseas fighting it, and thus informed could safely predict its early end. Even my father, when I spoke to him on the telephone from a bar in midtown Manhattan (the phones at the field had men standing in line ten deep) seemed to possess secret intelligence that the war, in Europe at least, would be over before the end of the month. I told him that I certainly hoped so, and then I asked about Linda and told him how anxious I was to see them both, but that I didn’t know exactly when I’d be getting to Chicago because the Air Force seemed to be fairly confused (situation normal) about what to do with all these returnees. My father asked if I wanted him to conic down to New York, and I said I didn’t think that was necessary, and he told me again how happy he was that I was home and safe, and asked me if I needed any money, and then said he hoped to see me soon, and to please keep in touch with him. The call ran seventeen minutes overtime. I went back to the bar where the ice was melting in my scotch, and asked the bartender to freshen my drink, and then walked over to the jukebox and put in a quarter and punched out five records, and went to sit down again. An Air Force captain was sitting at the far end of the bar, a jigger of whiskey and a glass of beer on the polished top in front of him.