GREETINGS

Everything we do is a choice. From getting up in the morning to going to bed at night and everything in between – what we eat, when we eat, breathing.....technically, all choices. The choices vary in scope and impact, painting some with a more important hue than others. As I attempt to sort through some of the choices I've made over the last 7 decades and put them into some semblance of order of importance in my life (other than breathing. I'll have no problem with breathing in the #1 spot on my choices hit parade), my biggest realization was that I was around in the '60's and '70's and am incapable of judging choices that I don't remember making. Then I remembered a choice I made in late 1965/early 1966 that turned out to be one of the wisest moves I had ever made. I had just spent my first semester of college in what was then a college but is now a university. It was 50 miles south of Pittsburgh......Waynesburg College in Waynesburg, Pa.......in the southwest corner of the state, bordering Ohio and West Virginia. It was a small, primarily Presbyterian Liberal Arts college and it was the one I got into. I was a far cry from class valedictorian. I think I was 57th in my class.......a class of 56. Waynesburg was the college I got into. I realized I wouldn't be there for long when I was first “rushed” by one of the fraternities on campus. I was curious so, I checked it out. I didn't get very far. You see, this was 1965. There were 31 Blacks and 9 Jews at the school and the 40 of us were barred from the “greeks.” I was gone after the first semester. It was while I was on my way back home to enroll at Uconn that I got the dreaded letter. I'm sure you've gotten it/seen it/read about it in the history books – It began, “Greetings… you are ordered to report for induction.” I was 18 years old and it scared the shit out of me. Probably, literally but, like I said....it was the 60's. Many of my friends and colleagues were getting the same letter. Some took off for Canada, some went off to war.......some never came home. The first step was the physical to determine if the Army even wanted you. I decided to go so I could get an idea of what I might have in store. Not to mention, I didn't want to go to jail. There were people who would show up to the physical doing things that made a 4-f rating a certainty. Ted Nugent, for instance, shat his pants to make sure he wouldn't be sent to war, making him, today, perhaps, the world's biggest hypocrite and coward but, that's a vent for another day. I passed my physical with flying colors and walked out with a big “1-A” stamped on my paperwork. NOW, it was time to make a choice. I could show up for my Army basic training and do 3 years with a year in Vietnam being a sure thing - I was 18 and had no training in anything but flunking math exams....I would have been infantry on the front lines - or, I could try to enlist in another branch and have a better chance of doing something a little safer. My dad was in the Navy. He spent part of WWII attached to a Marine unit as a radioman and fought in the Battle of Leyte Gulf....the deciding Naval battle of the war. My uncle had been in the Air Force and was stationed in Korea smack dab in the middle of the Korean Conflict. Now it was my turn and I weighed all of my options. I could just go ahead do my Army duty but, instead, I chose to enlist in the Air Force. Even knowing that I was committing to 4 years instead of 3 and that any duty in S.E. Asia was 18 months instead of 12. The deciding factor? I liked the uniform better. When I left for basic training in April of 1966, it was very early in the morning. By the time my mom got the mail that day, I was in a bus, on my way to Texas. In her mail was my reporting date for Army boot camp. I had made it by about 6 hours. I went to S.E. Asia in 1966. I spent most of my time in the Philippines with TDY's (Temporary Duty) in Saigon. It was just across the South China Sea and when they needed extra bodies for a few days we would go to do pretty menial stuff. I spent my entire 4 years either driving a fork lift in a warehouse of typing bills of lading to ship stuff. Not very dangerous at all. On January 10, 1970, I stepped off a plane in San Francisco. I was home safe and semi-sound. As tedious and mundane as my work was for 18 months, there is, to this day, absolutely no doubt in my mind that the joining the United States Air Force had been the right choice.