In the spring of 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson extended what amounted to a draft notice disguised as an invitation. It was not welcome. It was not optional. It marked the moment my life changed direction. I was nineteen years old and already sworn in with the Cook County Sheriff’s Police, having lied about my age to get there. I thought I had outrun uncertainty. I was wrong.
I came from poverty. I was partially raised by a single mother whose life was chaotic and unreliable. By the age of fourteen, circumstances forced me to live on my own. It was not a choice. It was survival. To avoid foster care and the grip of social services, I took responsibility for myself early. I held a full-time job, paid my own rent, and attended high school at the same time. I survived by working at a hot dog stand at Montrose and Broadway while going to Senn High School during the day. Junior ROTC gave me discipline and structure, but it never prepared me for a draft notice.
Basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, was harsh and unforgiving. From there I was sent to Fort Ord near Monterey and Carmel, a beautiful place designed to prepare young men for jungle warfare and uncertain survival. I trained in light infantry weapons. The purpose was clear. Vietnam awaited. Death was a real possibility. Fear never took hold. Pride did. I believed in duty. I believed in this country. I understood that freedom is never free and always paid for by someone.
My orders assigned me to the helicopter cavalry bound for Vietnam. As training ended, a sedan pulled up and my name was called. Out of two hundred soldiers, I was the only one not going to Vietnam. Instead, I was sent to Germany for on-the-job training as a medical corpsman.
That twist of fate spared me from the deaths of nearly seventy thousand young Americans. It also spared me the lifelong wounds suffered by countless others who returned broken in body and spirit. That luck has followed me for decades. I truly enjoyed being a medical corpsman. I often say, with dark humor, that the only combat I saw involved pillow fights with pretty frauleins. Humor helps. Guilt never fully leaves.
I think often of the families who paid the ultimate price. Children who never met their fathers. Parents who buried sons. Families permanently fractured by a war that never truly ended.
I remember men from my training who did not come home. One was Timmy Fitzmorris. We worked together as teenagers in Chicago before I joined the Sheriff’s Police. He joined the Marines and was killed by an enemy mortar round. His death stunned everyone who knew him. There was nothing separating his fate from mine except chance.
Today, Vietnam-era veterans are old men. At the Veterans Medical Center, I see them regularly. Men who once carried rifles now rely on crutches and motorized carts. They were warriors. They were brave. Many of us carry survivor’s guilt. We came home. Others did not. I gave some. Others gave everything.
To those Americans who have turned their backs on the Constitution and the principles on which this nation was founded, I say this plainly. If you despise this country, find another one and leave.
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