Part three, and the conclusion, to the Alice's restaurant blog post.
After once again being 1-A for a few months, I received orders to report to my Draft Board office at 5 a.m. on a certain date for a physical examination. A week later I received another order canceling the first one. A few weeks later, I received another order to report for a physical, and then another cancellation. The third time was the charm.
At 5 a.m. one sunny, spring morning I was once again standing on the sidewalk in front of the Draft Board office. This time, however, I did not have to skip school, and I was accompanied by about 20 other guys. We were put on an old school bus and started the hour drive to the Army base.
In my pocket was a letter from my doctor stating I had a severe form of hemophilia and really wasn’t what the Army was looking for. After my initial 1-A classification, my doctor had sent a copy of my entire hospital record to the Selective Service, but I took a letter from him to the physical on the off chance no one had noticed the three very large cartons filled with papers detailing my medical history since 1958.
The morning was devoted to psychological tests. About 150 guys from all over southeastern Michigan were sitting at school desks in a room with nice, large windows overlooking a broad lawn. On each desk were two #2 pencils, nicely sharpened, and a rather thick booklet with a front cover that was blank except for the statement: Do not open until ordered.
The tests had sections that asked us to pick the most moral choice in what were often very bizarre situations. There were sections that asked us to indicate which of three things we would rather do. There were sections that dissected our family relations, hopes and dreams and brought to light whole forests of unresolved conflicts we didn’t know we were denying. By the time we were done, they knew pretty much everything about us, including if, unknown to you, you had a latent tendency to look at apple pies in a disturbing way.
Finally, after I had confessed a sneaking admiration for Adlai Stevenson, they said we had finished the psychological part of the examination. A corporal took us to a very large locker room and told us to undress down to our underpants and shoes, no socks, and put any valuables in the paper lunch bag provided along with the key to the locker. Then we were to line up at the far door.
Once we were in line, we were taken outside and across the lawn to another building. Here and there, usually under a tree, were picnic tables. At most of the tables, people—a large percentage of them women—were eating their lunch. Their overwhelming failure to take notice made me suspect that the sight of 100 or so young men going from building to building in nothing but their Y-fronts (there were also a few boxers and one or two of what we called “French bikinis”) had lost a lot of its novelty.
In the next building, things got down to business. The rooms were labeled with large numbers, and we were told to make our way from Station 1 onward and upward. We were weighed, blood was drawn, hearts listened to, vision and hearing checked, blood pressure checked, lungs listened to and urine collected. In one room with a row of cubicles we, one by one, stepped up and turned our heads and coughed. Every time I came across someone with clothes on, I would show them my letter, and they always responded, “Station 26.”
They looked at our feet quite carefully and at how we walked, and we had to verify which was our dominant hand. Finally, we came to a very large room with five long rows of squares marked out with tape on the floor. As we came in, we were lined up in the last row of squares and told to drop our drawers, take our shoes off and set our bag of valuables down next to our right foot. There we stood carefully concentrating on the back of the head of the guy in front of us, while the guys in the front row went through a few calisthenics.
As soon as the front row was done, they put their underpants and shoes back on and left. Then each row would move up one square, pushing their shorts, shoes and paper bag along with their feet, and a new bunch would come in and fill the last row. Why we had to get naked as soon as we came in was never explained.
Eventually, it was my row’s turn at the front. We were told to touch our toes, do a couple jumping jacks (not an exercise made for nude execution), and do three deep knee bends. I tried to raise an objection because my knees, the left one especially, were not really strong enough for deep knee bends. I was given the choice of bucking up like a man and doing the squats, or I could stay overnight for further examinations. Trying the squats sounded like the better alternative.
The first one went pretty well, but it wasn’t deep enough for the guy in charge, so on the second and third ones I went as far down as I could. Meanwhile, a kid two spaces to my right kept mumbling about banging his something or other on the cold floor. During my third squat there was a pain in my left knee, and I had a little trouble getting up. I knew this was not going to end well.
Then came the finale. We were told to turn around, bend over, and spread ‘em. Just bending over three feet away from another nude man has, all on its own, a few aspects that are, well, awkward, but having an old man examine you like you were a beagle in a dog show just added layers of absurdity and humiliation that took my mind completely off my knee.
After pulling up our underpants and slipping on our shoes, we made our way out the exit to the next station, which happened to be the locker room, which, you will remember, was in a building on the other side of the parade grounds. Now, our first trip across the grounds had been as a large group, and just as a wildebeest finds comfort in having a few thousand fellow wildebeest around him to divert the attention of the local lions, I felt much more naked and exposed walking across the lawn with this smaller group that I had that morning. When we got to the locker room, we were told to get dressed and then walk across to another building for our final stations.
This was Station 26, and I got my letter out again. This station was a large room with several desks for different letters of the alphabet. I waited my turn at the desk for “A-B” and looked around. At one end of the room was a smaller room with just one desk, and it was labeled “Station 29.”
The unique aspect of Station 29 was the person running it. She was beautiful. Except for the clerks at the distant picnic tables when we made our nearly naked migrations across the lawn, everyone we had met that day had been male, definitely past middle-aged and usually in a less than pleasant mood. Station 29, however, was female, young and gorgeous. She was wearing a rather short skirt and had very long, very dark red hair.
When I was called up to the chair next to the “A-B” desk, I showed this doctor my letter, and he looked at it briefly. Then he took a long, hard look at the results of the various tests and measurements performed that day. He asked me if the hammer toe on my left foot ever bothered me and then asked if I had any questions. I asked him how you got to Station 29. He kind of smiled and said you had to have been convicted of a sex crime, like rape.
From there we were put back on our bus and taken back to the sidewalk in front of the Draft Board Office we had started from about 10 hours previously. By the time we got there, my leg had started swelling, and by the time my parents picked me up it was bad enough that we just drove straight to Ann Arbor so I could start getting some treatment. That hemorrhage took three weeks to get under control, and it was close to four weeks before they let me out of the hospital. My father tried very hard to sue the Selective Service, but it was, at that time at least, one of those departments that had to give you permission to sue them before you could sue them, and for some reason that permission just wasn’t forthcoming.
Several weeks after I got home I got my new draft card, and found out I was I-Y. It was that hammer toe on my left foot. While not quite good enough for the peacetime Army—it could keep me from marching for long distances—I could be called up if war was finally declared. The years passed, and in due course I turned 26. That week I received another card with a new listing. I was now too old to be drafted. Three months later another draft card came in the mail. I was 4-F (meaning “unfit for service”).
You can get anything you want at Alice’s restaurant.
Read more Guy Boss at the Missing Factor.