Typical draft notice sent to millions
College after high school was never on my radar screen. I struggled in school and placed well near the bottom of my 1965 graduating class at San Benito High School in Texas. I racked up a massive number of F’s during my school days in Texas and even repeated the fifth grade at my elementary school in San Benito. Reading was a struggle for me, yet I loved reading. Everything I read was blurred, but I innocently believed back then that blurred vision was the norm for everyone. I was amazed how my friends could possibly get better grades than me – and with less effort. I would have to read assignments two or three times before I could fully grasp whatever it was I read.
Even if I had qualified for college academically at that point, I did not have the financial means to afford a college education; yet, military service after high school was not something I considered a viable option. Vietnam was looming, and I had no desire to go to some far-off land to fight in a war I believed was politically motivated. I was never interested in college or the military but had a massive desire to leave the family farm. My brothers and I worked damn hard on that farm, and a farmer was not something I aspired to be.
It was the mid-sixties. It was the Vietnam period. Every male eighteen to twenty-six not in school was considered for military draft. I received my draft notice and had two weeks to choose: enlist or be drafted. Reluctantly and naively, I enlisted in the military. At that age, I struggled with authority figures, a core aspect of military life. I left home quietly, without even saying goodbye to my friends. I fought the urge to call Molly, the one true friend I cherished. In the end, I just left, bidding farewell to no one.
I entered military service at the age of nineteen experiencing my first-ever vision test. It was determined then that I suffered from hyperopia, a defect of the eye better known as "farsightedness". I was prescribed glasses, and my whole world changed at that point. I breezed through several challenging military schools and courses to which the army sent me even graduating at the top of my stenography class at the US Army Adjutant General’s School in Indianapolis.
What follows here is a story of how I got there, what happened in the ensuing months and the struggle my experiences caused me in both my personal and family life.
My professional life seems to have been less impacted for a reason I was not to understand until I was diagnosed with repressed PTSD and admitted to a PTSD recovery group more than forty years after my last combat assignment. While still actively working, I would purposely work many more workhours than necessary. I would be the first one in the office and the last one to leave. Then retirement came, and I struggled to find tasks with which to occupy my mind. This provided the mind extended opportunities to unravel and begin reliving those sad memories I had worked so hard and for so many years to conceal.
While in the PTSD program, I was pumped up with what seems to me an unnecessarily endless bounty of heavy drugs to include Prozac, Prazosin, Fluoxetine, Zolpidem, Citalopram and Duloxetine which were prescribed to me individually in a "let's-try-this-and-see-if-it-works" method. While designed primarily for the treatment of PTSD and insomnia, they appear to have sufficiently caused my memory bank to recall a massive number of wonderfully pleasant with some hauntingly undesirable memories which I had fought for many years to suppress. While this helped me document my book, it began another struggle to again put these undesirable memories back under wraps. It is an on-going effort.
Typical draft notice sent to millions
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