Viet Nam

Wow! Viet Nam was a significant influence throughout my teen and early adult years. There is a really good novel entitled Saigon by Anthony Grey that goes into some of the dynamics about what caused the Viet Nam war and how the US got involved so I won’t go into that in any major way.

Clearly the US was sending ‘advisors’ to Viet Nam during my high school days and by the time I went to Rice the US was involved in the fighting.

There is another book by Stephen Kinzer entitled The Brothers that describes the effects of John Foster Dulles and Alan Dulles on the United States foreign policy. These two guys did tremendous damage to the country and I certainly ‘benefitted’ from their ineptitude.

I had registered with the Beaumont draft board, as required, when I turned 18 and immediately applied for a II-S exemption - college student exemption. My exemption was granted and I went off to Rice.

Viet Nam

Aside: There was something a little unfair about how this system worked. In that era a lot more white kids went to college than black kids. Thus, the draft rolls were disproportionately biased toward poor black kids. I suspect that the ‘butcher’s bill’ from Viet Nam was also biased in the same manner.

The common thinking at that time was that once a young man finished his bachelor degree, he would either volunteer or be drafted unless he could get a coveted grad school deferment.

In the 1964-1968 period the truth about the horrors of Viet Nam were filtering back to the US and there was intense civil unrest about Viet Nam (along with the civil unrest about racial segregation). There were campus demonstrations, burning of draft cards and the exit to Canada to avoid the draft.

At Rice we were pretty heads down and I don’t recall any on campus demonstrations. Of course, I was taking a full course load (19-22 semester hours) while working part time to support myself. I did not have time for the ‘foolishness’ of demonstrating against the US government.

I was still thinking that it was a person’s patriotic duty to serve and so I was pretty much opposed to the demonstrators and protesters. In retrospect, this was a really messed up situation and the US involvement in Viet Nam was doomed from the start. I just wish that smarter politicians had been in charge.

Kathy and I were married in November of 1967, unfortunately about a year after the marriage exemption to the draft was terminated.

In 1968 with graduation approaching, someone in the Rice administration had an insight into how to deal with the draft on behalf of the engineering students.

I was in a 5 year professional masters program in which we received a bachelor of arts degree at the completion of 4 years and then the masters at 5. Unfortunately, the draft boards considered this BA to be completion of college and that made us prime cannon fodder. So the administration allowed us to defer our bachelors degree for one year, sent a letter to each of our draft boards describing the deferral and the five year degree and got us all a one year extension of our II-S deferments. Yay!

In this same time frame Lyndon B. Johnson, the President, was continually escalating the war and sending more and more soldiers into that hell hole.

I loathed Lyndon and his minions (note: I had particular venom for Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense, who tried to run the war like a business). On the evening of March 31, 1968, I was driving home from studying or from work and listened to Johnson on the radio. He made his famous announcement that he would not seek reelection. I was ecstatic.

So I finished my senior year at Rice without getting a BA and that summer I left my part time job at the Houston Speech and Hearing Center and started working for Technology Incorporated under contract to NASA in Clear Lake. This turned out to be a cool job and I got Don Mauldin hired on as well. So my entire fifth year at Rice I took a heavy load of classwork and worked about 20-30 hours a week at NASA in order to support my sweet wife and my new daughter, Britany.