Loon - Jack McLean [4]
My older sister, Ruth, was especially dear to me. She was closer in age and a rebel, particularly when it came to our parents. While I was trying my best to please them, Ruthie was constantly pushing the edge. I adored her and was admiring of both her directness and her ability to live life on her own terms, usually against high odds.
Barby, six years younger than I, felt that she missed the experiences that the older three shared and was doomed to be brought up in a separate family as an only child. That wasn’t true, of course. We older three had so worn Mom and Dad down that there was no negative energy left for Barb. Like our mother, she was artistic, expressive, and sensitive.
Summers were spent with extended family on a large lake in southern Quebec, near the small border town that spawned my mother. Childhood times at the lake were the happiest of my life. Summer days passed like years.
Although we knew some boys who went into the military after high school or college, it was not all that common. Most were deferred from the draft by attending high school and college. Those who did serve were normally sent to Korea, Germany, or Japan for a year and then quietly came home. If you were called, you served.
In the fifties, it was that simple.
The change began in the 1960s. The escalating war in Vietnam played a role, as did a feeling of privilege and entitlement among many in the baby boom generation. Although our fathers and perhaps even older brothers had served in the military, many of our number increasingly felt that service was an inconvenience that we need not endure.
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.
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