Veteran’s Day and Self-Consciousness: A Lifelong Bond

Recalling draft lotteries and a friend named Rick(y)

By Ed Goldman

We’re meant to think of others on Veterans Day—the thousands upon thousands of soldiers who gave their lives defending our country and the people they left behind or never got to meet because they weren’t yet born. And so we do.

But the day also brings about in many of us, especially those of us who didn’t serve, a self-consciousness. Shrinks will tell you it’s survivor guilt, the same feeling we have when we lose a spouse or child and honestly wish we’d been the ones who died instead.

Wishing veterans a banner year

As I’ve mentioned here before, I was part of the first Draft Lottery in the late 1960s in which a young man’s birthday, if he was at least 18 years old, was one of 365 printed on separate little pieces of paper and tossed into what I’m inclined to call a wheel of misfortune. The idea was that if your Selective Service eligibility rating was already 1-A and your birthday was one of the ones randomly picked, you could be hearing from the military shortly thereafter—or, if your number was high enough, to be out of the running forever.

This was during the bloodiest years of the Vietnam War. I’d dropped my 2-S student deferment deliberately, not out of any desire to go into the Army—my two brothers had: one willingly, one drafted—but because I hated the feeling I was hiding in the halls of academia, which I’d grown to hate after only a couple of semesters. (I apparently outgrew that and in later years became a part-time lecturer at five different colleges.)

I’m not saying I wanted to get drafted. On the contrary, I was pretty sure that if I did get called up my fellow soldiers would shoot me before I saw a single rice paddy. “Unfriendly fire,” you might say. I feared this because at the time I had yet to learn tact. I was more capable of shooting my mouth off than a rifle.

When the Draft Lottery was held, my birthday came up Number 131. This was a low enough number to inspire almost everyone I knew to express shock and to pre-eulogize me in the same breath. “Sorry/Sayonara!” In Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer” the title character talks about attending his own funeral. I was doing Tom one better by unwittingly participating in the planning of my own. (I think today they’d call me an early adapter.)

Looking for legal dodges, I spoke with a draft counselor who said my allergy to the wool used in full-dress army uniforms would “absolutely” render me unfit to serve. He said this with a straight face but pot-reddened eyes, unless he was just moved by my impending death. I wouldn’t be surprised if he now walks down city streets screaming obscenities at utility poles.

To kill any suspense I didn’t intend to generate, they stopped the draft that year at Number 125. By six numbers, I was spared going into combat and the country was spared having me do so. Understandably, six has remained my lucky number ever since. At least I say that, anyway. In fact, I’ve never summoned it up in any games of chance. Maybe because I felt as though it had already let me win the lottery.

I lost a few friends in Vietnam, the closest one being a guy named Ricky Zimmerman. We’d been in school together since the third grade (when I came to California) and liked to goof off before, after and during class. He was one of my first friends to give up thick glasses for contact lenses in the fifth grade or so, and it really made a difference for him. The girls in our classes now considered him a heartthrob—his pale eyes gave off a rock-star kind of vibe, especially when he squinted because he wasn’t used to the contacts. He was a good enough athlete but what the girls really liked was he could talk “soulfully,” even as a kid (like noticing how the light dappled through the leaves. That sort of blarney).

Every year on November 11th I think of Rick (the more serious name he assumed as he grew into young adulthood). We lost touch after high school—and even during it, moved in different social circles. I hung out with student journalists and actors, he with some of the “bad boys” who butch-waxed their hair into pompadours, as he did, and the “bad girls” who ratted (teased) their hair into beehives. They all flagrantly smoked cigarettes in their cars after school. Those who were especially daring/defiant even got tattoos, which were far less ubiquitous then than now.

I wonder how Rick’s life might have turned out had he been lucky enough to live it past his early 20s. He’s been gone now for about a half century and I still think of him—as a kid with thick glasses, then contact lenses, then a pompadour, then as a fallen soldier. He had too short a life. I wish he’d had as lucky a number as I did.

Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).