A Letter From President Nixon

By Jon Stickel
Published: Jan. 10, 2014 

 

 

I got a letter from President Nixon many years ago.  Often in December, I relive that day standing in the lobby of my Washington DC apartment building by the brass mailbox bolted to the wall.  He was directing me to a job in Southeast Asia.  The letter went like this:

Greetings: From the President of the United States.  You are hereby ordered to report for induction into the armed services of the United States.  I could feel my stomach clenching as I read.  

I knew it was coming but it didn’t matter, it still came as a shock.  There would be a physical.  I would be meeting a bus to take me to an army base, WW1 era Fort Holabird in Baltimore; if I passed, I would be drafted.  If I did not they would re-examine me later to see if my status changed.  Until proven otherwise, I was subject to induction.  The draft board didn’t give up easily.

Volunteering for Vietnam wasn’t something the army was having a lot of success with.  You could obtain a delay or a deferment if you were attending college.  Wealthy whites rarely went to Vietnam.  Draft boards were made up almost entirely of whites.  Working class black neighborhoods received lots of draft notices.

By 1969 there were nearly a half million troops fighting in Southeast Asia.  African Americans made up a huge part of the men fighting in Vietnam.  Rumours went around that black soldiers were beginning to rebel, disobeying orders.  

The Vietcong were fighting in familiar terrain.  US troops inching into the jungle risked being devoured by darkness where the enemy appeared out of nowhere.

 I had been very active against the war, and inhaled enough tear gas in demonstrations that would convince anyone I wasn’t in the market for a government job.  Especially one that came with a uniform.  

As a backup, I had obtained a letter from a psychologist that said I was crazy.  She described me as unpredictable, an unstable homosexual prone to violent outbursts, and a potential deserter.  I would not be an ideal candidate.  I was going for my physical, but I was coming armed.

I had the letter with me when I met the bus.  It was before dawn in early December at 13th and F Street.  A small crowd had gathered at the bus stop.  There were women and small children milling around and guys carrying duffel bags on their shoulders.  They were saying goodbye to their girlfriends, wives and children.  They had already been drafted.  I stood waiting for the bus in the rain with them and the only other white guy.

When the bus pulled up the kids began to cry and the women began to sob.  The guys had a look I had seen in African American faces before, of resignation and anger, anger they were being sent to fight a war they had no part in and for freedom they did not enjoy in their own country.  Before he was assassinated Martin Luther King had called Vietnam “A white man’s war and a black man’s fight.”

Mohammed Ali had said after refusing induction,” No Vietnamese ever called me nigger.” Draft resisters were usually white and middle class.

An officer, high ranking, stood near the door as we stepped up into the bus telling us to get our lazy asses moving.  Kids were screaming daddy daddy, clinging to their fathers and climbing the stair steps banging on the windows trying to stop the bus.  The bus began to move.  The kids screamed louder.  The soon- to- be soldiers looked stricken.  The image burned into my memory.  They were taken away with no idea if or when they would be back.  The children’s screaming grew fainter as the bus lumbered away from the curb and we were engulfed in traffic noise.

The journey should have taken about an hour.  We were stuck in traffic.  A guy seated in front of me shook his head silently all the way to Baltimore.  I sat with the other white kid and he pulled out a letter from under his jacket, I smiled and pulled out mine. “ I’m crazy,” I whispered “Yeah, me too” he grinned and we both settled back silently into the green Naugahyde upholstery   clutching our secrets.

At the old white wooden barracks a skinny civilian guy posted at the door with a big Adams apple handed me a crisp one dollar bill saying “This is a gift from a great American who wishes to remain anonymous so you can never say you did not go into the army without a dollar bill in your pocket.”  I walked into the US army’s Fort Holabird with a dollar bill in one hand, and a letter saying I was crazy in the other.  We were motioned over to little desks where a belligerent officer informed us if we fucked around he would keep us all fucking weekend.  The army loved the F word.

“After you’re done you wait around until your x rays come back, you get a box lunch, and then you get back on the bus.”  We were marched into a locker room and ordered to strip down.

We were lined up naked in rows, a hundred of us, and herded into another room.  An army doctor walked by quickly; looking in our ears telling us we were okay.  We followed footprints painted on the concrete floor and filed into a room where a black guy in a white uniform sat on a stool handing out paper cups. ” Piss in the cup” he repeated as we shuffled past.   I asked him about seeing the psychiatrist, he told me to get back in line.

 An hour later and after some sort of eye examination we were given an x-ray and I asked again about the psychiatrist.  I was pointed to a desk in the corner where an officer was seated.  I sat down on the other side of the desk.  My relief lasted for the 8 seconds he spent looking at my letter, and he slid it back across the desk. ” What are you going to do with these problems when you’re in the army Stickel?”” Simple, I said, I’m not going in the army”.  ” Oh really?”  He jotted something down on my file and closed it.

 He pointed me to the hearing test station across the room.  That was the end of my military psychological evaluation.  The hearing test was essentially an air raid siren being activated in a small room while a person was seated beside it.  Any reaction from the patient would indicate a passing score.

I went back to my little desk and waited for my x-rays.  Three guys had syphilis and two had TB.  I was okay.  We got the box lunch, a baloney sandwich on Wonder bread and a green orange.  I took a bite and threw the rest in the garbage.  I got back on the bus with the driver and the few guys who had flunked the physical.  I sat alone and looked out the window in darkness as the bus rolled south towards the skyline of Washington.  I thought of the guys who I had just left behind, the wounded soldiers stuck at Walter Reed, the fresh graves at Arlington and the broken families who couldn’t say what their sons had died for.

In the coming weeks I would hear from the draft board.  They had classified me 1Y meaning they would re-examine me in six months, if my condition was unchanged, I would be drafted.  I continued on in the anti war movement, attended more demonstrations and helped organize high school students to resist the war.  

The following summer, four students at Kent State in Ohio were gunned down by Guardsmen during a campus demonstration.  Allison Krause, a former high school student with me in Maryland was one of the victims.  A few weeks later 3 more students died, shot down at Jackson State.  Schools closed across the US and millions of outraged students poured into the streets.  There were armed troops on street corners.  I was interrogated for hours after the police ran my name during a routine traffic stop.  I denied knowing who they thought I knew.  Nixon worked with his attorney general John Mitchell to charge anti war organizers with crossing state lines to incite riots, a federal offence.  Nixon thought opposing the war was treason.  

The war spread deep into North Vietnam.  I was running out of time.  I moved out leaving no forwarding address.  I sold my motorcycle and got a car big enough to take me, Wayne, an air force deserter, and his little brother out west and as far from Washington DC as I could get.  We joined a disillusioned generation that was living on the road.  Eventually my road would take me to Alaska, unloading fishing boats on the docks of Kodiak Island.  Later, I would return to Alberta where I had gone before.  The war ended, more or less, in 1975.  I never returned to Washington DC.