The Last Draft

it was announced that no further draft orders would be issued.

The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War

by Paul Hendrickson

Hardcover: 427 pages
Publisher: Knopf (September 9, 1996)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0679427619
ISBN-13: 978-0679427612


No kidding, the closer I get to losing my own health and life the more I am drawn far far away to the natural recreational areas surrounding my boyhood home. It seems there is little draw for me for the actual town I was born in seeing as though the residents have pretty much destroyed it, or to visit again the house my family spent its better years in together, but the outlying Huron Forest, the historic Ausable River, Sand Lake, and the tongue of land jutting out into Lake Huron and Tawas Bay called The Point consistently conjures pleasant and luscious, if not lustful, memories for me. It was during my high school years in the early seventies that I escaped to these places, to get away from being the dutiful son and contained student in a rather goofy school, to get away from being public when I wanted to be private, and to believe I would eventually be going places better and far more important than the town I felt I had been torturously trapped in for the previous sixteen or seventeen years.

Recreational drugs helped me to escape. Also being attached to the freak flag the old Byrd, David Crosby, alluded to somehow felt possible for me. And then standing on our school chums' bonded difference together in the face of harsh and critical parental authority whether coming at us from home, the school system, or even our local police. From the time my teenage years began in the mid sixties there was obviously something changing for me besides my anatomy. The normal state of teenage confusion was complicating my life in the most extreme, but it was nothing anybody else would have easily noticed at least until I turned eighteen. The Vietnam War was in full gear, there was little known about it other than the pics of thousands of body bags and wounded, college riots, tear gas, and knowing the suffering was everywhere and in 1972 there wasn't much chance of escaping it.

A diversion even to this day is the rivalry of high school sports. Our greatest rivals were up the Lake Huron coastline at the mouth of the Ausable River in a little town by the name of Oscoda. Wurtsmith Air Force Base was situated just west of the town back then before all the shutdowns occurred and that active military base undoubtedly provided a steady influx of athletes to the Oscoda Schools sports programs. An unfair advantage was afforded Oscoda as their teams seemed to always have at least one or two gifted black athletes on their teams at all times. My school, Tawas Area, was an all-white all-the-time endeavor and we worked hard to maintain our dominance over all the neighboring schools, but Oscoda presented, if not a losing dilemma for us, a promise for nail-biting pain. By the time I advanced to high school I had pretty much given up the sporting chance of fighting my way to fame on the football field or basketball court and had instead resorted to a Silvertone electric guitar and hopes of making it big somewhere on a local stage.

Vietnam continued to lurk in the background and in 1972 I was involved in the last lottery draft for a war that would not end and could never be won, except nobody officially was telling us that, we just felt it through and through. On February 2, 1972, a drawing was held to determine draft priority numbers for men born in 1953. But the "last draft" was a scary thing for me, being still in high school and wondering whether or not on my graduation date if I would be called up to serve my country instead of getting to follow my own personal plan of escaping my town as fast as I could in order to claim my own forty acres and a mule I knew existed for me somewhere west of the Mississippi. In the meantime, I was bent on performing a miracle in Oscoda of bedding the most desirable girl belonging to our rivals from the north, having the poor girl named Jane fall madly in love with me and accomplishing what the better jocks and men before me had not been able to do thus far. I stupidly and most awkwardly arranged our first date together to occur on the same day as the draft, and fifty numbers drawn into it I realized I had forgotten to listen to my fate, and steadfastly from that moment on centered my attention in her home on the radio and the numbers still remaining to be announced. The problem with missing the first fifty is the feeling your number was already up and any digits to follow would only heighten the pain of knowing what was already feared as fact. I was listening well into the two hundreds when I realized Jane had no absolutely interest in my ass being on the line, and dumb though I was, I witnessed myself picking up and leaving her house because she was obviously and ethically not the girl for me, conquest or no conquest to come. Back in those days women weren't drafted into the military and also not asked to serve. Only young boys were, and it still, to this day, does not feel right to me unless you were a girl who happened to care. And there were plenty of those girls somewhere, just not in my vicinity that day when it mattered most.

My draft number was high. Driving home south along the coastal highway of US-23 it finally came to me, 346, the most blessed number in my memory even to this day. I knew then I would not have to choose whether to serve or run to Canada. Note I had been torn every which way prior to learning my lottery number as my father was a WWII veteran and proud of his country and his chance to serve in the Navy. His own brother had freakishly died in an auto accident while hitchhiking home after getting discharged from the same war my dad was in, hurrying home on the cheap to Alabaster, a little gypsum mining town five miles south of the Tawases where the family had a twenty-two acre sandy-soiled farm my parents still live on today and call The Acres. I obviously never knew my uncle Everett, but his memory was alive and ever-present throughout that time in my life. It is easy and also chicken to say I would have served if called. It is also impossible to say I would have run away to Canada as I was told others were doing in droves. I was a rule-follower then (except for the occasional recreational drug) and always have been. It is possible I would have shown up for my inductee physical, but I am not able to say so with any certainty. This brings to mind an analogy I use often when discussing this situation that had such a huge impact on my life and the life-changing decisions that followed the calling of my high number. When 9/11 occurred and it became legend concerning the brave men and women on the flight over Pennsylvania perhaps heading for the White House and its destruction I immediately felt as if the man who led the charge with his cry of "Let's roll" could have been me. I want to think it could have. But I am always careful to say I could just as well have been the fellow wetting my pants and crying under the airline seat. You just don't know what you will do when faced with a dangerous and grave situation. I am always amazed at the almost unanimous claim every man makes regarding what he himself would have done in these situations. I am suspect always of the testosterone-charged he-man or the scary bully who is, in my personal experience, easily put down and pummeled to the ground because he should have known better than to piss the wrong guy off. But that doesn't make me a tough guy, it is just my way of confessing to you that I hate bullies and all they stand for.

Two leading examples of bullies I have hated most recently are Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. I believe in my heart of hearts that little George was basically a decent man who got caught up in the right-wing hawkish politics of the day and followed the advice and agenda of two people he shouldn't have. Of course, W was in charge and should be held accountable, but I don't think he had the brainpower to hold a better and more humane conviction than he did. It was all he could do to remain the stubborn son he was credited, and unjustly admired, for being. Another group of USA bullies were the framers of the war in Vietnam. I have always remained slightly ignorant to all the history behind the war as I really had no interest in it. But almost every day I am reminded of the war that took 58,272 American lives and ruined or killed millions of others. I have always been careful to be sympathetic to the Vietnam War veterans and to realize that their shoes were ones I did not have to fill. I never protested the Vietnam war, but I was afraid of it. I never supported the war in any shape or form. I thought it was awful and something I did not want to know more about. But something changed in me when I discovered the biographer Paul Hendrickson. After reading both Hemingway's Boat and the biography on Marion Post Wolcott I was hooked on Hendrickson. I had to read about McNamara though I really didn't want to.

A few years ago my wife and I went to a screening of Errol Morris's The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. The film was quite good, but the topic wasn't anything I wanted to know more about after viewing the movie. Really, nobody in my circle ever really talks much about the lost war of Vietnam. I do have a brother-in-law who was a helicopter pilot there in 1968 and was involved in a deadly crash when another helicopter crashed on to his when he was on the ground. His entire crew was killed but he survived as an entirely crushed and physically broken man and the crash ended his dreams of being a commercial pilot though he would fly for another year in the military after his release from the hospital before being grounded permanently when it was discovered during his annual review that he had too few fingers left to fly with according to the rules of the military flight manual. He recovered from his serious injuries enough to overcome his disabilities out of of sheer will in order to conduct another long and remarkable career as first a carpenter and then a builder. Bill is a hero of mine and we are talking more about the war these days and our personal relationships to it, which in my case isn't much except for what I have recently read. Which brings me to why I am writing this piece in the first place. Paul Hendrickson has written a dandy of a book on not only Robert Strange McNamara and the Vietnam War but five other people connected to McNamara's folly. Hendrickson brings his text alive by adding more personal stories that the typical biographer leaves out. He is relentless in researching his subjects. This book was ten years in the making.

Besides the detailed history lesson of events leading up to the war in Vietnam and the lies that followed, what I took most from this non-judgmental book was the Gandhi-like acceptance of all who were involved in the Vietnam War. There is not the bitterness and anger one would expect resulting from some of the awful things that occurred there. Story after story demonstrates something that is difficult to describe with words, but easier to show with them. My brother-in-law, for example, has a determination that is colossal. He accepted his injuries and went on with his life making the best of what he had, and to this day does not think about what he lost back there in Vietnam unless somebody like me brings it up. Even McNamara went on with his life. On a somewhat different if not, some might say, perverted side note, I have noticed with great interest that in every book written by Paul Hendrickson there is at least one titillating, but gracious and even intellectual, reference to sex, and for that I am always grateful. I found it interesting in one striking example regarding McNamara that can be found toward the end of the book when Hendrickson remarked that after the death of his beloved wife of forty-one years, Margaret, he, Robert Strange McNamara conducted an adulterous romantic affair with a married woman who was raising eight children. She was often his traveling companion when Strange conducted business for the World Bank, a post Lyndon Johnson gave him in 1968 in order to get rid of him on his cabinet. Neither the woman, Joan Braden, nor McNamara denied their affair, and their indifference came across to me as something not extraordinary at all at the time, though in my world today it would be nothing short of earth shattering and shameful. After Hendrickson's book was published Joan Braden wrote her own book, ''Just Enough Rope: An Intimate Memoir'' (1989). The columnist Maureen Dowd wrote in her New York Times Review that, ''Joan Braden has taken a lot of heat for this book, which has been criticized as a vapid kiss-and-sell by a Washington society hostess with the capital's most notorious 'open' marriage.'' Seems Mrs. Braden was married to a CIA agent who approved of her extra-curricular activities. But the fact that all three involved were basically indifferent to the affair and what it signified is interesting to me and I wouldn't have known that bit of fluff if Hendrickson hadn't brought it to my attention in a rather footnote or something like oh-by-the-way. It must certainly be obvious to all by now that I really like this writer's style.

Paul Hendrickson cannot produce books fast enough for me. I am eagerly awaiting his next which I understand is a work on Frank Lloyd Wright, but for now I will delve more into Hendrickson himself and read next his book, a memoir titled, Seminary: A Search, written in 1987 and published by Summit Books.