Loon - Jack McLean [6]
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 college, 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