by Jack McLean
Yet by the time the first wave of baby boomers entered college in 1965, the war in Vietnam was turning hot, and military service—combat military service—was becoming an increasing reality for the millions of boys who were nearing draft age. Avoiding war service reached an art form. Sympathetic physicians were called on to overstate physical infirmities.
President Bill Clinton tied his local draft board in knots with verbal hijinks and did not serve. President George W. Bush used family connections to gain assignment to a local National Guard unit, which was at the time a sure way to avoid going to Vietnam.
By staying in school, manipulating local draft boards, and exercising political influence, the country’s educated class was able to avoid war service almost completely. Thereby, the coming war in Vietnam would be the first American conflict fought almost exclusively by the lower classes of American society. Their available numbers were enormous, and they had neither the resources to avoid the draft nor the inclination to do so.
With high school nearing for me, my father planned that, like my brother, Don, I would attend boarding school. Donny went to Deerfield Academy in western Massachusetts and had an agreeable experience. Dad had attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. To him, Andover was an obvious choice. He was also on the board of trustees. I was ever eager to please. The following fall I arrived at Andover.
On a rainy mid-September evening in 1961, four months after my fourteenth birthday, I sat in the large auditorium in Andover’s George Washington Hall along with the two hundred other incoming boys.
Included in the select group that day was George W Bush, a future president of the United States. We would spend the next three years together.
Andover had long prided itself on its ability and desire to attract “youth from every quarter.” Looking about the hall that evening, however, it was apparent that the quarter that included white upper-class males was predominant. Each boy wore a jacket and tie. We ranged in age from fourteen to seventeen years old. Had shoes been visible, one would have seen only Bass penny loafers.
The headmaster and the dean of students were seated alone on the left side of the large curtained stage of George Washington Hall facing the sea of well-scrubbed and attentive new faces that included mine. Before them stood a single lectern upon which hung the official seal of Phillips Academy.
Summit Junior High School did not have an official seal.
I was to struggle badly during my first year and was forced to repeat it. Consequently, for the next five years, I would see the headmaster and the dean of students in the same two chairs at exactly the same place twice a week at each all-school assembly. They had their act down. I didn’t sense that they were as curious about us as we were about them.
The headmaster spoke, reinforcing the gravity of our mission.
“You are tomorrow’s leaders today,” he began.
The school mottoes were put forth—finis origine pendet (the end depends upon the beginning) and non sibi (not for self). Fortunately, my parents had decided that I would take Latin. Apparently, it would be needed.
Then the dean of students spoke. “You will adhere to a strict set of rules.”
One of his favorite rules was “abjure the hypotenuse” (stay on the paved paths; don’t cut across the grass). “Abjure”? My vocabulary was going to need work. This was a serious place.
Socially, I adapted well to Andover. We wore jackets and ties, attended chapel every morning, and lived in dormitories. There were no parents. I liked the structure and, as it turned out, the discipline as well. It was a place of history, purpose, and tradition.
Coming as I did from a rigid, conservative upbringing, I responded well to history, purpose, and tradition. My parents knew that Andover would reinforce this in me as it had done for generations of boys before me.
They couldn’t imagine at the time that this same reasoning would lead me to enlist in the United States Marine Corps five years later.
3
THE YEAR WAS 1966.
The old Victorian house was silent.
Home from Andover near the end of spring break, I was more accustomed to the raucous activity of a dormitory. Outside, a bus ground its gears up High Street, the sound muted by heavy storm windows and thick rhododendron bushes. The late-afternoon air was cold with not even a hint of the spring to come. Dark clouds coursed across the winter sky. Inside, the once glowing embers were slowly dying in the parlor fireplace. The occasional hissing and clanging of the radiators had ceased.
I was alone.
The occasional moments of quiet that I felt in the big house could be disconcerting. My family had moved from New Jersey to Brookline, Massachusetts, the previous year. I had never really spent time in this house except during vacations and weekend stopovers. Consequently, there were neither real memories—fond or otherwise—nor old neighbors eager to catch a glimpse of my rare visit home.
On the front hall table sat the day’s mail, carefully deposited in the gold tray by my mother. As was her custom, she had picked up the pile from the vestibule floor below the front door mail slot, taken that which applied to her, and left the balance for my sister, my father, and me to sort through. At the top of the tidy stack was a letter addressed to me.
I stopped.
Two things immediately and simultaneously caught my eye—the origin of the letter was the office of admissions at Colby College, and the envelope was thin.
I was about to commence the spring term of my senior year. I was taking five courses and was in serious danger of passing only two. It had been an exceptionally rigorous five years for me at Andover. College admission was a concern but was darkly overshadowed by the prospect that I might not even graduate from high school. I had passively applied to five colleges, had already been rejected by four, and was now waiting fatalistically for the last. It appeared that moment was nigh.
Acceptance letters came in fat envelopes.
Everyone agreed that I was a bright boy. When I was ten, I could instantly recompute a baseball average with each at bat but was somehow unable to translate such talent to academics. That I was able to survive five long years at Andover was a testament both to my resilience and to the feeling among the faculty that I was a good kid who really was trying.
I picked up the envelope and slowly pulled open the flap. As suspected, I was now oh-for-five.
Surprisingly, relief enveloped me.
My clouded future began to clear. I hadn’t wanted to go to college right away, and, having given the process an honest try, it was apparent now that college didn’t want me either. No doubt the powers at Andover would put their full efforts into getting me in somewhere, but I didn’t want to go somewhere just for the sake of going to college. To me it seemed … well… sort of dishonest.
The next several years would find me elsewhere.
There would be two issues that I would have to face should I decide not to go to college. The year was 1966. There was a draft. If you were eighteen or older, male, and of sound body and mind, it was your duty—indeed it was the law—to serve the country in the military for a minimum of two years. Second, there were my parents. I was certain that their vision for me included college—any college.
An hour later, my mother scurried through the back door, fresh from her day at the museum. She had seen the envelope earlier and was curious and hopeful about the contents. She wasn’t attuned to the “fat envelope, thin envelope” theory of college acceptances.
There was silence when I gave her the news. She paused to compose her thoughts while slowly looking about the room.
“What are you going to do now?” she finally asked.
It was important to my mother that one always have a plan.
“I dunno. I’ll think of something.”
“Well, you have to have a plan.”
On rare occasions, when she felt it necessary to make her point, my mother could resort to melodrama. This was one of those times.
“If not c
ollege, the only other choice you have is the military. Those are your two choices, right? Have you considered the military? I can’t imagine that you have. It would seem to me that you should be giving serious thought to what other colleges you may be able to get into. Make a new list. Get on with it. There are plenty of good ones right here in Boston, you know. Make the list so that you’re prepared to speak with the college people at Andover when you get back. Take charge.”
The military?
While trying to impress upon me the dire straits in which I found myself, her comments had had the opposite effect.
The military.
It was a simple, albeit far-fetched, solution.
I had options. Or at least an option.
The last person in my family who had had anything to do with the military had been discharged within months of the end of World War II. My father, like everybody else in the so-called Greatest Generation, had been in the military. He had served in the Pentagon and then as an army lawyer in Berlin shortly after the war. He told me once that he carried a pistol. There were people in his life who still called him Colonel.
I grew up in the 1950s, when the military was still considered an honorable profession. I enjoyed war movies, particularly To Hell and Back, the story of Medal of Honor winner Audie Murphy. We sang “The Marines’ Hymn” in kindergarten. Everybody knew the words. Dwight Eisenhower was the president of the United States. The army’s officer ranks were populated with some of the most brilliant minds of the time.
A generation of young boys in search of role models needed to look no further than the American military heroes of the Second World War.
By the early 1960s, however, the glory of the enormous victories of World War II was fading. Military service was losing relevance to our mushrooming generation. It was not even faintly considered as a post-high school option for my generation of Andover boys.
The military.
I really did not want to attend college—at least not anytime soon. I was ready for a change, and here one was. And it was, after all, the law.
“No, Mom,” I finally responded. “I hadn’t thought of the military. Maybe I’ll look into it.”
Without waiting for a response, I slowly rose and headed for the desk drawer under the phone and pulled out the large Boston phone book.
Where to look?
Under A for “army” or “air force”? Let’s see, navy—that’s right, there’s the navy. What else? The marines. Coast guard? Is the coast guard considered the military?
I have often wondered what was going through my mother’s mind at that moment. What mother would want her son in the military? Certainly not mine. She had introduced the subject, in characteristic style, to get my attention. Now that she had gotten it, what was she thinking?
I fumbled through the pages and busily wrote down the locations of the downtown recruiting offices of four branches of the military.
I would visit them the next morning.
4
IN THE EARLY SPRING OF 1966, VIETNAM WAS STILL A country and not yet a war. I was eighteen and without a plan. But now I had an option.
The following morning, I walked down High Street to Brookline Village, crossed Route 9, and boarded the Green Line trolley to Boston.
Five minutes later the train passed through the deserted Fenway Park station. My heart began to quicken. Opening day was weeks away. If Jim Lonborg’s arm held up, if Yaz could rise to the level of bygone local hero Ted Williams, this could finally be the year. It was an impossible dream to consider. The Sox were one-hundred-to-one long shots to win the American League pennant.
They were awful.
The next stop was Kenmore Square. My father’s office was nearby. He was the president of Boston’s prestigious Lahey Clinic Foundation. What was going through his mind this morning? The previous evening, he had arrived home on schedule and listened to my plans without comment or visible emotion. I suspected that on his “to do” list for today was a call to Andover to begin hatching a strategy that would get me into some college, somewhere. I’m sure that any thought of my actually entering military service had barely registered.
Five minutes later the trolley slowly screeched around the hard turn from the Boylston stop and lumbered into the always-busy Park Street station. The train emptied.
The United States Army recruiting office was directly across the street from the top of the subway escalator. I was in and out in less than four minutes.
“Three years,” the recruiter said in response to my inquiry about enlistment terms, “unless you volunteer for the draft. Then it’s two years.”
I had decided by this time that I wanted to take only two years off before beginning college, for I did expect to go to college eventually. I felt that three years was too long. If I volunteered for the draft and a two-year enlistment, it could take months to be called up. That would still result in a three-year break from school.
That did it for the army.
The navy was next—four years.
The air force—four years.
Now I was becoming discouraged.
After barely fifteen minutes, the military was rapidly dwindling as an option.
My last stop was the old Custom House, which housed the recruiting office for the United States Marine Corps. The recruiter, Sergeant Miller, looked sharp in his dress blue uniform. He explained that they had a special two-year program. I could enlist now and then wait one hundred twenty days to begin active duty. There was a certain sense of urgency to his explanation; it seemed the program might not be available in June.
He suggested that I take a physical the next day, before returning to school. I would be under no obligation to actually enlist but would have the physical out of the way should I later decide to enlist. This made sense. The timing was ideal and it was only two years. I would have time to seek counsel from my parents and Andover teachers in order to make a well-informed, educated decision.
It did not occur to me to wonder why the marines were being so aggressive in their recruiting.
On March 7, 1966, two weeks prior to my visit to the United States Marine Corps recruiting office, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara requested an authorization to have a total of 278,184 United States Marines on active duty by June 30, 1967. This was a dramatic increase over the current force level and would make the marine corps the first branch of the U.S. armed forces to have troop strength greater than its peak during the Korean War. It also explained why the marine corps just happened to have a freshly minted two-year enlistment program waiting for me.
They needed fresh bodies to meet their ballooning war quotas.
I decided to take Sergeant Miller’s advice. I spent my final day of spring break walking through the surreal world of the pre-induction physical. Five of us met at the Custom House at eight A.M. and were driven to the Boston army base, the location at which all military physicals for the Boston region were administered. There were hundreds of men in their underpants wandering from one station to the next throughout the cavernous old pier. This was not the protected world of Andover. This was the real world. I felt curiously comfortable as I was herded from station to station. This surprised me. I knew my life was about to change. Even though I had not as yet enlisted, the exciting prospect of actually being a United States Marine was beginning to ferment inside of me.
Late that afternoon, as evening began to fall, the five of us were stuffed back into Sergeant Miller’s automobile for the return trip to the Custom House. We’d all passed.
The sergeant first looked to the kid next to him sitting in the middle of the front seat, tousling the boy’s hair with his hand as he spoke.
“Waddya say, Murphy?”
“I’m there, Sarge. When does the train leave for Parris Island?”
“Eight o’clock tonight, South Station.”
“Any place I can get something to eat before I go?”
What?
My heart stopped.
I felt s
uddenly light-headed. I wanted to throw up. Murphy was going to Parris Island tonight? Parris Island—the notorious Marine Corps boot camp? This boy with whom I had spent the day strolling from station to station was on his way there? Tonight? What would he tell his mother?
Boy by boy, my new comrades fell to the solicitous Sergeant Miller. One was to go the next day, one after graduation, one after his sister’s wedding. Finally Miller got to me.
“What about it, McLean?”
Four sets of eyes craned to look at me. Sergeant Miller kept his eyes forward as he navigated through the Boston rush hour traffic.
Too stunned to answer, I remained silent.
“McLean?”
Decisions, decisions. What was I to do?
Unlike five different colleges, the United States Marine Corps actually wanted me.
It was a most agreeable feeling.
The United States Marine Corps.
The eagle, globe, and anchor.
The hymn.
Tarawa.
Iwo Jima.
Me.
I had already decided not to attend college right away. There was a draft. I was healthy, and I didn’t want to try to get out of it. It would be an honor to serve my country. It was the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do. Two years? I could stand on my head for two years.
I can’t recall a time in my life before or since when a looming decision seemed more obvious.
I did think about Vietnam.
The prospect of war provided brief flashes of tingling excitement. I was, after all, an eighteen-year-old boy. My whole young life had been filled with endless television shows and movies of cowboys killing Indians, and Americans killing Germans and Japanese. Now it was my turn. Probably, though, my fate would be in a supply center someplace, or perhaps embassy duty. Like the recruiting posters, I would wear the distinguished Marine Corps dress blue uniform.
The prospect seemed manageable.