(UPDATED with reply) About Avoiding Vietnam

   

     As most readers know, I served in Vietnam for a year, doing for the U.S. Army what I did for the rest of my career: Journalism. 

     I avoided the two-year draft by joining the Army for three years in 1969, and was in Vietnam months later.

     With that said, I have mixed feelings about other young Americans who avoided the draft by other means. Being in college. Being a minister. Or traveling to Canada.

     I really do not begrudge them their escape mechanism, but a comment in a New York Times column today by an author ticked me off enough to write about it now. Dennis Overbye writes about his job involving nuclear bomb testing:

"My job, to study the effects of nuclear explosions on the atmosphere, was sufficient to keep me out of the Vietnam War draft."

     Overbye's comment is really a footnote to his column...an aside, you might say. Yet there it is, in the first paragraph of his column, like a point he wants to make sure gets into the Times before he forgets.

   It was such an irritant that I sent him a note, asking if he had every wondered who took his place when he dodged the draft...and whether than person survived his Vietnam service. If I get a reply I'll update this posting. 

HIS REPLY:

Thanks for writing and thanks for your service. You make a good and telling point about what we now refer to as "privilege." I do think about the guys who went. I had an MIT education. Both at MIT and in high school by teachers yammered at me to avoid the army, my talents would be much more useful to the national defense as a civilian. I was against the war and got beaten up in a demonstration once. This happens. My father-in-law graduated the University of Chicago with PhD in chemistry and he was on his way to enlist in WWII, as his brother had, when he got yanked out of line and sent back to Chicago to join the Manhattan Project. The name of a stepbrother of mine is inscribed in the memorial in Washington.

I thought it was shameful the way the vets were treated when they came back home. I think if we are going to have wars and a draft I think there should be no deferments for anything.

Thanks again for writing,

Dennis