One of my listeners wrote me to ask: “Can you imagine your life without having had the military experiences you have?” As a non-veteran, he had other questions, too, such as: “How does the discipline of the military experience transform the future of young people’s lives? Not career people, but just those who do their stint.”
Frankly, I can’t imagine my life without my military experience. I suspect it would have been a lot more boring, a lot less traveling, and a lot less career success, but perhaps more family success. Hard to say.
One of my listeners wrote me to ask: “Can you imagine your life without having had the military experiences you have?” As a non-veteran, he had other questions, too, such as: “How does the discipline of the military experience transform the future of young people’s lives? Not career people, but just those who do their stint.”
Frankly, I can’t imagine my life without my military experience. I suspect it would have been a lot more boring, a lot less traveling, and a lot less career success, but perhaps more family success. Hard to say.
American Veteran
If you’ve listened to my podcasts, you know that I’m a veteran. You know that with active duty, reserve and National Guard time I’ve served over thirty-five years. My military service has been a formative and normative part of my life.
Let’s get something straight at the outset here. I’m no hero. I wasn’t a SEAL. I wasn’t a Ranger. I didn’t earn any medals for valor in combat. I am just a guy who showed up, went where Uncle Sam told him to go and did what he was told. Just like hundreds of thousands, indeed millions of veterans, have done.
For my generation, the infamous boomers, military service, at least among the working class and lower middle class, was a fact of life. The “Greatest Generation”, those who fought World War II, were hale and hearty when I was teenager. Millions of men and a lesser number of women of my parents’ generation were veterans of that conflict. My younger uncles were veterans of Korea, while my cousins, my classmates, my brother and I faced the Viet Nam draft.
There have always been objections to compulsory military service. History tells us, if one listens, of draft riots during the Civil War. One of the reasons for the War of 1812 between the US and Great Britain, was the involuntary impressment of American sailors into the Royal Navy. Objections to military conscription rose to a crescendo during the Viet Nam War with objectors burning their draft cards, leaving the country for Canada and millions more seeking legal ways to avoid the draft, with college student deferments leading the way.
An entire industry grew up in the 1960’s educating young middle-class men on how to avoid the draft. Those options, by and large weren’t available to working-class young men.
Every American president from Harry Truman to George H.W. Bush served in the American military during World War I or World War II, even if their service was brief and not particularly hazardous, such as Ronald Reagan’s stateside duty in public relations, or Lyndon Johnson’s seven months of active-duty Navy service from December 1941 to July 1942.
In the 1950’s, ‘60s and 70’s, veteran status was virtually a requirement for a successful political career. That changed in the 1990’s when Bill Clinton, who successfully avoided the draft, defeated George H.W. Bush, a World War II naval aviator. Since 1992 no American president has held veteran status. Although George W. Bush served in the Texas Air National Guard during the Viet Nam War, he never served enough time on active duty to be considered a veteran.
Although American males are still required to register with the Selective Service System in the event a draft is ever reinstated, compulsory military service, for all practical purposes, ended in December 1972.
The military conflicts we have fought since Viet Nam, although long and grinding, have not required the massive numbers of servicemembers of the World Wars, Korea and Viet Nam. Even though the nation maintains a significant military force, far fewer people today have military experience than during the last half of the twentieth century. Virtually all of the World War II veterans and Korean War veterans are gone and the Viet Nam veterans, now in their seventies, are rapidly passing from the scene.
A lot of history there to get to my subject. One of my listeners wrote me to ask: “Can you imagine your life without having had the military experiences you have?” As a non-veteran, he had other questions, too, such as: “How does the discipline of the military experience transform the future of young people’s lives? Not career people, but just those who do their stint.”
Frankly, I can’t imagine my life without my military experience. I suspect it would have been a lot more boring, a lot less traveling, and a lot less career success, but perhaps more family success. Hard to say.
I give all that history about the draft and veterans and expectations in mid-twentieth century because it shaped my life. And the lives of my contemporaries, both in age and class.
My brother and I were both expected by family, friends and ourselves to serve. It’s what working-class kids in the age of the Cold War and Viet Nam did. We played with toy soldiers. Our bicycles were fighter planes shooting down Kamikazes and Nazis. Every stick was a rifle. The Boy Scouts taught us to salute and wear a uniform. Our uncles kidded our dad and each other about whether the Navy or the Army was a better outfit.
I applied to the service academies and received an appointment to the United States Merchant Marine Academy. My eyesight in my right eye was too poor to pass the requirements for commissioning, although two years later it wouldn’t be too poor to flunk the draft physical or prevent enlisting in the Air Force.
Forsaken by the academy, I took the full scholarship offered by the University of Illinois, where I proceeded to major in pinochle and beer drinking for a year. The combination of which lead to a less than stellar academic performance and an invitation to leave the halls of academia.
The Selective Service System required me to maintain “adequate academic progress” to keep my student deferment. Adequate progress was defined as thirty semester hours per year. Having failed Spanish, my transcript showed twenty-six successful hours. I knew an invitation to serve my nation would soon be forthcoming.
I left Champaign, got a job working on the welding line at Caterpillar, where my dad worked, and bought a car. Ten months later I got a letter demanding my appearance at the Chicago Military Entrance Processing Station to take a physical examination to determine my fitness for service.
After being poked, prodded and subjected to various humiliating procedures, many of which you may hear described in Arlo Guthrie’s masterful Alice’s Restaurant, I was found to be physically fit for induction. From that point I knew I had but a few weeks before I would be drafted into the US Army.
I began a round of calls upon military recruiting offices. I knew I wasn’t going to go to Canada to avoid the draft and rather than be subjected to the whims of the draft I wanted to have some control over where I’d be going and what I’d be doing. Four of my fellow football playing classmates had elected to join the Air Force, a couple of others the Marines, while yet others were drafted. Even though the term of service was four years, rather than the two years required by the draft, I signed up for the Air Force. Why? I’m still not sure, other than I didn’t like the fat, bleary-eyed, old Navy recruiter and I hadn’t been able to see the Army or Marine Corps recruiters, so fly boy it was.
The draft-fed military didn’t have to pay recruits much. Even though draftees weren’t assigned to the Navy or Air Force and seldom to the Marines, many, if not most recruits, joined those services in preference to the Army. My pay upon entering the Air Force, was reduced seventy-five per cent, which gave me plenty of reason to hate the Air Force. The training was neither physically nor mentally taxing and my military duties were by and large spectacularly boring.
The best thing about my three-years, nine-months and two days of active duty was that I was able to pick up another year and a half of college during that time, which enabled me to graduate a year and a half after discharge from active duty.
What else did the Air Force do for me? It gave me nearly four years to mature and to gain enough academic work ethic to go from flunking out of college to maintaining honor roll grades while working part-time jobs to add to my GI Bill stipend. My military service also provided me the GI Bill and the Illinois Veteran’s Tuition Waiver Scholarship. Using those educational benefits, I graduated with a journalism degree and no student loan.
Armed with that journalism degree I went to work at a small city newspaper as a sportswriter and later a police-beat reporter. Those were the days of Watergate and Washington Post reporters bringing down a president. I quickly learned that the glamour of newspaper writing didn’t pay enough for me to escape the paycheck-to-paycheck poverty of working-class America that I grew up in and desperately longed to escape.
With enough GI Bill benefits remaining to fund law school, two years after graduating from journalism school, I started law school. I hated law school with as much passion as I hated Air Force basic training. I was poor. I was subjected to mental discipline. I had professors who were just as bullying as drill instructors. I persevered. I had no choice. I had to escape poverty and I saw no other way out.
Law school was an endurance event. I survived it. By using my remaining veteran’s benefits, I graduated with only a $1,500 student loan. Since my eleven-year-old Volkswagen Karen Ghia convertible with a hundred thousand miles wasn’t worth more than a few hundred dollars, my net worth showed a negative balance, but I had a new union card…a law license.
Without the veteran’s educational benefits, it’s unlikely that I would have ever obtained a bachelor’s degree, let alone a law degree. Without the discipline I learned, or perhaps a more accurate phrasing might be: without the discipline I had imposed on me in the military, it’s unlikely I would have finished law school.
I stumbled into the Army National Guard much like I stumbled into the Air Force. A couple of years after graduating from law school, I had my student loan and some other bills I needed to pay. My legal career was off to a slow start, and I needed some extra money. I joined the National Guard thinking I’d stay a couple of years to use my once-a-month weekend paycheck to pay off my debt. With the law degree I could get commissioned as a First Lieutenant and as a veteran not be required to go through basic training, not to mention receive a nice pay bump as an officer with six years enlisted service.
Thirty years and many adventures later, I retired as a major general. Had I stuck to my original plan and left the National Guard after a couple of years, I might not have had the adventures, travels, boredom and excitement of thirty years in the Army National Guard, but I would still would have had the discipline, the maturation process and the veteran’s benefits provided by my initial term of service.
Luckily, I did stay in the Guard, which provided me with much of the grist for the mill of my podcasts and stories. While I’ve made many mistakes in my life, I don’t count my military service among them. And I wouldn’t change any of the mistakes that I’ve made, for I learned from each of them, and they shaped the path which I’ve trod to arrive where I am today.
Some of the scars from those mistakes hurt and some of the pain will never go away but I am grateful. We keep that one-word sign on our refrigerator: “Grateful”. It’s a reminder to be grateful for the many things for which we owe gratitude. Among them, my military service.
So, the answer to my listener’s question is: No, I can’t imagine what my life would be without my military experience.
Just as I can’t imagine what my life would be without my military experience, so must it be for all those other veterans out there. Whether a single hitch or a thirty-plus year career, the discipline instilled, the team values learned, the adventures beyond a hometown and the veteran’s benefits accrued all shape the lives of millions of American veterans and their families.
Don’t get me wrong, military service is not all peaches and cream. There are the family separations, the dreary, dull duty in the back of nowhere, the danger of wartime wounds both mental and physical, the toll on bodies from clambering out of helicopters, trucks and Humvees, laden with rucksacks, weapons and ammunition. Countering all of those is comradeship, esprit de corps, the mingling of races, creeds and religions. There is the growth in self-knowledge, self-confidence and loss of selfishness.
Back in the 1950’s my dad and many of his contemporaries wore tatoos from their time in the military. Many of the soldiers I’ve served with have tatoos. Most of those tatoos in some way commemorate their military service. Some are rifles, some are bayonets, some are American eagles. On the veterans my age the ink is fading. On the young ones it’s still fresh and bright. I never got one. I never had the money to waste on one. Now that I have the money to get one, it’s not anything I feel the need to have, but if I were to get one it would simply read “American Veteran”. No need for anything fancier.
© William L Enyart, 2022
Email: bill@billenyart.com
Audio production by: Tom Calhoun, www.paguytom.com