'You are hereby requested to report to the United States Army Induction Center at 122 Peabody Street, Scarsborough, New Hampshire at 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday the 19th of September.'
I held the letter in my hand and stared at it uncomprehendingly. They had just recently reinstated the draft, and now they were drafting me. If I passed the physical, (and why wouldn't I?) I would be going into the army. Horrible thought.
The envelope dropped from my fingers onto the floor without my even noticing. I sat down heavily on the couch and stared over and over at the awful sheet of paper. I had never even considered that this type of thing could happen to me. The army was a place for farm kids. For factory kids. For high-school dropouts who wanted to continue their education.
I was a college graduate with a top job in advertising. I didn't want to lose my job. I had fought hard to get it and I wasn't going to let the army take me away from it. Oh God. Where was Hilda? She was usually home before me. She was the one who usually picked up the mail. But today I had picked up the mail. I had picked up the letter from the United States Army.
I heard the key in the door. It was Hilda. She looked at my face and knew right away something was up. "What's wrong?" she asked.
She approached the couch, and I held out the letter. She took it and read it. "Oh, Warren. Oh, no." We had been planning to get married in the near future. She had been selecting china patterns in the Tiffany catalogue. All that would be now on hold. "What are we going to do?" she asked.
"What I'm going to do is report for my army physical next Wednesday," I answered. We ate a quiet dinner, watched a little television and went to bed. We did not have sex. We definitely did not have sex. I was in no mood for sex. Not that night, or the next night or the night after. All I could think about was my physical. It haunted me.
On Wednesday the 19th of September I got up at six a.m., got dressed in the dark, trying not to disturb Hilda, had a light breakfast, and drove down to 122 Peabody Street. The Induction Center. There were a lot of young guys going in the front door, as well as a number of snappily uniformed military types.
I entered the building and stood in the large front hall, looking around me.
"Excuse me. Do you know where to go for the physical examination?" asked a young fellow about my own age.
"No, I don't. I have to go there too."
"You got a notice in the mail?" he asked.
"Yes," I admitted.
"Me too. You can't begin to imagine how thrilled I am," he said ironically.
"So am I," I said. "Warren Cobb," I added, introducing myself and stretching out my right hand.
"Doug Haney," he said. And we shook hands. After that we tried to read the building directory without much success. We stopped a soldier, showed him our letters, and asked him where we had to report.
"I'm going over there. Follow me," he said.
He was Sergeant Carl Merrill, according to his nametag, a compact, solid, muscular man. He marched with military crispness, leading us to the third floor medical department. "Sign in at the desk," he directed us, and walked away.
We were with about thirty other prospective inductees, and we were directed to a bank of lockers and told to strip to our shorts. We kept the locker keys around our wrists.
An army lieutenant, Lieutenant Edgar Driggs, according to his nametag, marshaled us into a large room where attendants were taking blood and urine.
"I drank three gallons of orange juice yesterday," Doug Haney whispered to me. "They say if you drink a lot of orange juice your albumin level goes way up and maybe they won't take you."
"I wouldn't count on that," I advised him.
"Yeah," he nodded his head, agreeing sadly. "Boot camp, here I come."
"I don't want to go either," I said. "But there's no way out of this. I hear they're taking everybody. A skinny friend of mine who was underweight told me they added twenty pounds to his weight on his chart, and marked him with a medium-heavy build. They took him."
"Isn't there anything we can do?" Doug whined pleadingly.
"I don't think so. If you're breathing, you're in."
"Great," he lamented. "Maybe we could say we're gay. You know. 'Don't Ask. Don't Tell'. They definitely won't take you if you're gay."
The army had a policy of 'Don't Ask. Don't Tell.' Meaning if you told them you were gay they would kick you out, but they weren't supposed to ask if you were gay. But they did ask. And they even conducted witch-hunts to ferret out any gay military man whom they promptly discharged. (They claimed that homosexuals were bad for unit cohesion. And besides it was creepy having these sexual predators in the same barracks with the straight normal guys who would even have to shower with them. Ugghh.) That was 'Don't Ask. Don't Tell.' And Doug was proposing telling.
I thought for a minute. "You know, that's a damned good idea. I think I'm going to try that. I'm going to say I'm gay."
"You are?" He was amazed. "I don't think I'd have the guts." It had been his idea to begin with and now he was backing down.
"It's easy," I said. "You just tell them you're gay. Tell them you suck cock. I'm going to do it." I raised my hand until Lieutenant Driggs noticed me.
"Yes? What is it?" he asked me.
"Sir. Can I speak to you a moment?"
"What is it?" he asked again brusquely.
"I need to tell you something privately," I explained, nodding my head to an empty part of the room. We walked over to it.
"Yes?" He asked again. "What's on your mind?"
"I have something to confess, sir," I said ashamedly, hanging my head. "I'm gay."
"I didn't hear you, son," he was speaking very loudly. "There's a lot of noise in here. You'll have to speak up."
He had heard me. If I spoke any louder the whole room would hear. I didn't know what to do. Finally, I raised my voice, but not quite enough to blast through the room. "I'm gay, sir," I repeated.
"You know there's so much noise in this room, I still couldn't hear what you said. Why don't you sit down, son. You're going to get your eyes and ears examined now."
Maybe he was the one who needed his ears examined. He couldn't hear me? Bullshit. It seemed that they weren't going to let me out for being queer, which I really wasn't. But so much for 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'. I returned to my seat next to Doug.
"What happened?" he asked me.
"They're either not buying it or they don't care. The bastard kept pretending he couldn't hear what I was saying.
"Fuck!" he exclaimed. "They're shameless."
"Even if he had acknowledged hearing me, he might not have believed me. I have a feeling he would have told me to prove it."