Loon - Jack McLean [7]
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.