I went to my parents, told them I didn’t believe in the war, and they agreed with my stance. My childhood braces were long off by that point, but I hadn’t worn my retainer as instructed, and my teeth had begun another slow journey forward in my mouth. There was probably no such thing as an army orthodontist, and since braces were so damn expensive, I figured the military wouldn’t want to be on the hook for replacing them after your service ended. “Hernias? Metal in the mouth?” He went on and on, but my attention never left the phrase “metal in the mouth.” What the hell could it mean? The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. I remember standing in a long line of young men at a pre-induction physical in downtown Los Angeles one sunny afternoon, listening as the sergeant recited a long list of questions designed to weed out the undraftable 4-F losers. When the National Guard started shooting kids at Kent State, it became a very real issue-of good vs. When we asked big questions about why we were fighting, we got no answers beyond “this is your country right or wrong-love it or leave it.” If you didn’t offer blind obedience, you were treated like an enemy by the establishment. I never saw it as anything close to the moral equivalent of World War II, which had so affected our parents. I didn’t support an invasion of a country that was not a threat to the United States. The more I learned about the war, the less sense it made to me. It also took care of the army.Ī number of friends from high school had been drafted, and several were killed in action, including our class president. Growing my hair out allowed me to cover up my big ears, leaving my teeth as my primary point of personal embarrassment. The late 1960s were the right time for a kid like me to be on the scene. Without course credits to my name, I became eligible for the draft, and was saved from Vietnam only by… my buck teeth. Dropping out of school to tour with the Electric Prunes, a psychedelic rock band from the San Fernando Valley, had deeper implications than my ongoing education (or lack thereof).
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