Part VII: War story
December 20, 2013
By Temple Ligon
December 20, 2013
I probably never suffered too much from the notorious Vietnam veterans’ ills and depressions because I asked for all that. I should have expected it. I volunteered, so no matter how bad it got, I really couldn’t complain because I was there by choice. Now, honestly, I would have been drafted anyway. By volunteering I was just maintaining a little control over my fate. Somehow the awareness that everything I experienced happened because I decided to put myself there made all I got there a bit more bearable.
As I said in Part I, I couldn’t remember anybody in my inner circle, wife included, who asked me what I did in the war. As a war story, however, I think the business about how I got into all that can be an interesting history of what life for young American men was like in the late ’60s.
I am a baby boomer born in 1948. The late ’60s the United States was at a turning point for the baby boomers, those people born between 1946 and 1964. The most recent statistic I’ve seen counts the boomers today at 78 million. As they turned 18, almost half actually enrolled in some form of higher education. Plenty flunked out, dropped out and got kicked out, and those who toughed it out to finish a four-year degree program counted among their peers the five-year plan, the six-year plan, and so on to where even a decade was not that unusual.
I began as a freshman at Clemson in the fall of ’66, and I was awarded an undergraduate degree at USC’s Columbia campus in the second session of summer school, 1975. By then, I could brag I managed to take a four-year degree program and stretch it out to a full nine years. In my nine-year plan was a three-year stint in the army, and before the army my life experience included two years of undocumented grossly irresponsible behavior. So I was five years older than most of my fellow freshmen when I finally took higher education seriously.
Blame the draft for some of the extended time tables in higher education. American men in the ’60s registered for the draft at age 18, exposing themselves to be called up between 18 and 26. But there was the student deferment, and as long as the draft-age students stayed enrolled full-time, at least for the first four years, Uncle Sam would not come calling. Still, with the draft breathing down their necks, young American men suffered the constant pressure from the draft as just one more thing to worry about.
Tired of worrying about it, I dropped out of school in March 1967, my freshman year, assuming the draft would catch up with me in about 30 days, the national average as I understood it. I went to work in a real estate lawyer’s office, where I had worked the summer before, and waited for the draft. But the draft left me alone for reasons I didn’t figure out until I had gone through my three years of military service.
The draft boards in America were run by local town leaders, city fathers who called up the inductees every month. As city fathers, these good men looked after the draft as they also looked after young men they knew. I was an uninformed beneficiary of being neighbors with my draft board.
In early November 1967, a good seven months later than I expected to hear from the draft, I read my greetings from Uncle Sam in a letter that told me to report to the federal courthouse on Laurel Street in another month. Well, fine, I finally got what I expected all along the time I was out of school, but all of a sudden I wasn’t ready. Maybe it had something to do with going through basic training up in Ft. Dix, N. J., or over at Ft. Leonard Wood, Mo., both training grounds in the frozen tundra as far as this South Carolinian was concerned. I was certain the army would not keep me anywhere near home. They would not take me from Springwood Road on the east side of the Forest Lake golf course and move me to Ft. Jackson’s Gate 2, just west of Lakeshore Drive, my old paper route. No, I was going to start basic training near December 21, the first day of winter, and come close to freezing to death in the next two or three months.
The local draft office was in the federal courthouse, and it was run by Betty Clegg, one of South Carolina’s nicest people. I called her for an appointment when I first saw my draft notice, and she agreed to meet with me immediately. I told her my tale of second thoughts and I asked her if there was any way to delay my arrival on the courthouse steps by a month. I explained that I was scheduled to resume classes at Clemson in the first week of January 1968, which would restore my student deferment. She did have a perfectly valid avoidance mechanism, good for the 30-day delay.
Clegg told me to drive up to Greenville and their federal courthouse there, where I could fill out an application form asking to report for the draft in Greenville instead of Columbia. Everybody in the country did this because everybody in the country was told it was allowed for one change in draft venue only. And for me it gave me that precious 30-day extension which put me back in class and back in a student deferment.
Whenever I needed to be seen as someone who wanted to be taken seriously, I dressed the part. On the day I drove to Greenville in my father’s car I wore my favorite Andrew Dial suit with a silk square and a silk tie. My wingtips were shined and my hair was cut close for the late ’60s. A cold day for November, I wore my Lourie’s navy blue wool topcoat. The form I filled out in Greenville asked me to say why I would have an easier time reporting for the draft in Greenville instead of reporting in Columbia. I said I planned to stay Clemson my last few days before reporting and travel to Columbia was too much of a financial burden.
Clegg told me to simply fill out the form in Greenville and not expect much of an inquiry. It was her job to be sure the request was legitimate. The Greenville crowd would mail the form to her for approval.
It worked. By the first week of January I was back in class.
In another three weeks all hell had broken loose in South Vietnam. It was Tet ’68, and everybody in the field and in the rear was running low on ammunition, both sides.
Walter Cronkite turned against the war during Tet, as did Time and other journals. The race for the presidency coming up in the fall began to look competitive for the incumbent President Lyndon Johnson.
The Orangeburg Massacre was February 8.
Johnson gave a speech announcing a pause in the bombing to spur peace negotiations, and at the end of the speech he declared himself out of the race for another term.
In April Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis.
I had a complete turn of position and decided to sign up and volunteer for whatever was available.
Around the end of April my Clemson roommate, Columbia’s Moffatt Burriss, and I drove the slow route to Columbia. The fast route was to take I-85 to Greenville and hang a right for I-26 to Columbia, sipping a Coke or a cup of coffee and that was about it. The slow route was to get off I-85 at the Mauldin turn-off where the road was populated with diners, juke joints and country stores, all selling canned beer.
By the time Burriss pulled onto Huger I was ready to tell him to take a left onto Laurel and pull over across the street from the Jefferson Hotel. He stayed in the car while I asked Clegg to put me on the list for the next draft. She tried to suggest the Coast Guard or the Air Force, but I said I knew what I wanted to do and I wanted to get drafted.
Burriss took me to my house where I announced my military future to my parents. I said I was due to report for the draft on May 14, and there was no further discussion.
As it turned out I had basic training at Ft. Jackson, where I could almost point to my rooftop as we marched down Tank Hill.
In June Robert Kennedy was assassinated as he gave his victory speech in the California primary.
After two months of basic training, another two months of advanced individual training (AIT), six months of officer candidate school (OCS), three weeks of jump school, nine weeks of ranger school, and wide intermediate gaps following one school’s schedule and preceding the next, I had about 18 months in training. The army was pretty good about letting me do what I wanted to do. After 30 days on leave in July and August 1969, when the Eagle landed on the moon and a half-million cheered at Woodstock, I left for South Vietnam. My mother asked me if I had a chance to see San Francisco, and at her urging I timed my trip to include one night in San Francisco. She was there in the late ’30s in graduate school at Berkeley. Her recommendation was the breakfast at the St. Francis on Union Square.
My night on the town in San Francisco was eventful thanks to a really nice guy I met at Fink’s on Montgomery Street. Charles Stickney was a hotshot at Wells Fargo, and he and his drinking buddy were having cocktails at the bar. The two of them gave me a short list of highly recommended watering holes where the women might tolerate a man in uniform. San Francisco was a tough town for a man in uniform in late summer 1969, but it was far worse when I came through on my return home in April 1971.
The smartest thing I ever did in my military life was at the very end, those two weeks in Hawaii I wrote about in Part V. That experience and those women got my head readjusted to the point I came home relaxed and mellow, as they said in the ’70s. It was a fine transition.
One problem en route to Columbia was the San Francisco airport. Since I had no class-A uniform – mine was burned and the PX was out – I wore jungle fatigues on the plane from South Vietnam to Hawaii, which was all right among all that military. After my two weeks at the Hilton Hawaiian Village, I still had no class-A uniform, and this leg of the journey was more of a civilian flight. It was a charter that landed in the San Francisco airport, putting me on display inside the commercial passenger terminal. I looked like I had just walked in off ambush patrol.
The people there were just awful. I have never seen so many versions of looks of contempt and gestures in disgust.
What the hell. By the end of the day I was out of the army and I was heading home.
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