David's Military (Lack of) Experience

You could mail me or go to my home page, or my main military page.

I've been interested in military and naval affairs all my life, although I've never been in military service. (If you want to know why....)

I was born in 1954, at the tail end of the Korean war. My father served in the Army Air Force in World War II. He was a waist gunner in a B-17, and was shot down near the end of 1943. When I was growing up, I was assuming that I would enter the Army, Navy, or Air Force at some time, and that the questions would be which and when.

When I was about ten years old, Lyndon Johnson was President of the United States, and he embroiled us in a bloody, expensive, pointless war in Southeast Asia. It served very little national interest, and Johnson insisted on micromanaging the war for political purposes. It became intensely unpopular with the younger generation, particularly those of us who might be called to fight in it.

Different people did different things. Some just went to Vietnam, cursed it, and served through it. Some declared that they were conscientious objectors. Some emigrated rather than serve. I respect all of these folks. Some decided that there were more comfortable ways to discharge one's military obligation than slogging in the mud.

Therefore, many, many people looked for ways to get military service. Some managed to get into the National Guard. This was difficult, so young men looked for anything that would keep them out of the Army, or at least avoid being an Army private. This meant that volunteers flooded the Navy and Air Force and Army ROTC and West Point, and these responded in one of the standard business techniques: they required things that would be nice, but were at least easily measurable. After all, they were faced with many more applications than they needed, and this was one way to thin them out. Draft requirements were something of the reverse: there was a big demand for riflemen, and it was necessary to be generous in accepting them.

The result was that officers were required to be strong physical specimens, without obvious flaw, whereas the draftees were held to a much less stringent standard. In my case, the fact that I could barely see without my glasses made me eligible only to carry a rifle and be shot at in combat, which seems to me a bad job for a man with bad eyesight. Therefore, the only way that I was going to be in the military was if Uncle Sam told me, personally, that he wanted me. In fact, the draft expired before I turned eighteen, and the only draft classification I ever held was 1-H (meaning that the draft board had no idea if I was fit in any way whatsoever, and didn't care either).

I don't know how much the eyesight standards got relaxed after the war was over, because by then I didn't really care. I was moving on with my life, and was not going to interrupt it later. I'm not sure any one of the postwar programs would have accepted me with my eyesight, even if at the time it was enough for an infantryman. Since then, I'm older and my eyes have deteriorated further, to the point that I'd be ineligible to be drafted even by Vietnam criteria (although I still see fine, with proper correction). Anyway, I was young, naive, and foolish then. I'm older now.