Chapter 2: SPUTNIK, THE DRAFT,
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Footnotes including new notes since publication
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See Section_01 "S.C."
See Section_02 "Greetings"
See Section_03 "White Resigns"
See Section_04 "Mr. Oread"
See Section_05 "Reception Station Scoops Up College Grads"
See Section_06 "This is Basic Trainin'"
See Section_07 "Prepare to Rush...Rush!"
See Section_08 "Special Training Company"
See Section_09 "A Direct Commission (for a BAD DETAIL
See Section_10 "McNamara and Remembrance"
See Section_11 "
See Section_12 "Is the Cold War Really Over?"
S.C.
Around
Not that it was easy to get comfortable. The Army sent us from the Entrance and
Examining Station in
---
Tuesday night, three days before, a college friend from GW had
come over, and on my last night of freedom we had played some games of
chess. I think I won the last one with
White. I also played a recording, on the
1962 Voice-of-Music stereo, of Haydn's exuberant 104th Symphony, the last
classical music I would experience for four months.
Wednesday, I took a Greyhound to
Thursday, we took some pencil tests, and then another quick
draft-type physical. Some of the recruits were tawdry indeed. One had walked in off the street, and just
said, "I just wanna join the Army," and had no idea what this was all
about. Some sergeant said, "Sign
him up for supply."
Around
three in the afternoon, we were sworn in by a Navy officer in a small
classroom. There were perhaps fifty of
us, going into all the services, most actually enlisted. Fortunately, the Marines were no longer
drafting.[1] There was one guy enlisting for his fourth
tour, and his fourth service, the Army this time. After swearing us in, the
officer immediately warned us about going AWOL, and then congratulated us for
being "in the Service."
We
had a couple of hours free, until the bus left.
The recruiting station gave us meal tickets for the Greyhound "Post
House." I actually felt proud to be
in the Army, like I had joined something and become bigger, almost like
marrying something. Technically, I had enlisted for two years, and would carry
a “Regular Army” (RA) rather than draftee (
I finally really did doze off, and when I awakened, the sign now
read, "
The bus driver took maybe fifteen more minutes finding the
Reception Station, and gave me another grace moment to relax in fantasy before
facing the demands of the world - but the opening rounds of Total Regimentation
went quickly indeed.
---
After an hour of Army life, you tend to feel you've been in the
Army all your life, like the previous world "on the outside" was
really a wet dream (climbing Jacob's
Ladder) from which you just awakened.
Actually, the first moments of “reality” were about what I had
expected. A babyfaced teenage corporal
yelled orders at us to file into a dingy auditorium, and pick up field
jackets. "You ++no-goods++ from
We waited outside for a few minutes¾it wasn't too cold, perhaps around 40 degrees
F., but the air reeked with coal and sulfur.
In a few minutes, a Hispanic NCO (non-commissioned officer) wandered by,
and asked, "how many of you mans (sic)
has been to college?"
Everyone had advised keeping the mouth shut to overtures like
this, but the guy sounded sincere. I
spoke up. After all, in grad school a colleague had predicted, “they’ll put you
in charge of something.”
Perhaps I was duly rewarded for honesty. Ten minutes later, I
was "supervising" the punching of pasteboard nametags in a noisy shop
behind the clapboard auditorium. The
other soldiers actually did the work ¾ rotating a disk to the next
letter and slamming a press ¾ and I carried the tags over
to another desk and manually sorted them.
I enjoyed my thirty minutes of management-class prerogatives and
privilege, as if this could be lifelong.
It was almost as if the Army were poking fun at its own hierarchy of
command and narrow span of control, a mockery that would take hold in the
civilian workplace in grand fashion twenty years later.
Greetings
Almost two years later, as I prepared to stop playing soldier
and finally become a vigorous, independent grownup at twenty-six, I braved a
seedy
Military conscription and its “civilian” enforcement agency, the
Selective Service System, would provide the fulcrum for most young men’s
concern with the Armed Forces. During the 1960’s, compulsory military service
provided an electric fence adolescent boys would have to scale to get to enjoy
adulthood. Some would be sacrificed like chess pawns ¾ killed or maimed ¾ during their passages. The most gifted or
privileged might have a gate opened for them (deferments), or, if recruited,
given relatively (or even completely) sheltered non-combatant jobs. Unfit men
were “rewarded” by permanent exemption, a practice that amounted to reverse
darwinism. And women were not required to risk their lives at all. Only a
generation before, they had died often enough merely by bearing children.[2]
The general public is barely aware that every male is still
required to register by mail with the Selective Service System within 30 days
of his 18th birthday. The registration requirement ends at age twenty-six.
Selective Service information bulletins, available at any post office,
emphasize that “registering with Selective Service does not mean that you are
joining the military,” but also that “registration provides our country with a
means to develop and maintain an accurate list of names and addresses of men
who might be called if a return to the draft is authorized.”[3] Men would be called up by lottery, starting
at age twenty.
The Selective Service System is still very much alive, if not
entirely well, today. Its 1995 Annual Report shows that, while downsized, it
survived the worst of the budget cuts for FY 1996, and still employs about 180
civilians, 550 reserve military officers part time, and many “volunteers.” Selective Service cooperated
enthusiastically with my recent Freedom of Information Request, sending me
considerable historical information on the various draft status categories even
if they suspected I have political aims to put it out of business. The Service,
when it sent me my own draft status history, improperly included a sheet
showing the handwritten comparable history of a number of other registrants, at
least one of whom I remembered from high school.
In 1994, the Pentagon did a “bottom-up review” to update the
mobilization requirements for Selective Service. The government wants to be
able to induct recruits starting thirteen days after a mobilization order, and
to accumulate 100,000 recruits within thirty days, should the tactical need for
a draft arise. The Pentagon believes the current volunteer force could handle
simultaneous conflicts in the
The Selective Service System still vigorously defends the
legality of a male-only draft by mentioning the “continued restriction on women
performing duties involving direct ground combat.”[5]
The Selective Service Law, in 1996, still expresses the old national belief
that the survival of our democracy ultimately can require that men,
specifically, lay down their lives ahead of women and children.
---
Prior to the
Even during World War II, Selective Service maintained a long
list of deferments, including student and “essential” occupations (starting
with scientists[9]).
Conscientious objector status was recognized with variations allowing the
possibility of non-combat duty. Peace
Corps or
Today, we forget that marriage - “family values” - was for a
long time associated with special rights to avoid or postpone being drafted.
From 1948 until 1951, married men living with their families were deferred;
after 1951 (when
But President Kennedy would make a public show of wanting to
excuse married men from the draft, ironically as part of his nationalist
liberal agenda. In September 1963, a new Executive Order provided that 1-A
(available for immediate induction) single men and delinquents would be called
before 1-A married men, called “Kennedy husbands.”[10] In August, 1965, shortly after the escalation
in
I was oblivious to most of this, becoming much more preoccupied with
the double edges of student deferments, and with whether my past history of
mental treatment and statements about latent homosexuality could be used to
brand me for life if I was ever called up. The clock was indeed ticking on the
student deferments and the draft; first, deferments for graduate students
outside of the sciences were ended, and then most deferments were replaced by a
lottery system that would begin under Nixon in December 1969 and last until the
termination of conscription in 1973 after the peace treaty was signed
guaranteeing American withdrawal from Vietnam.
---
The other side of “liberal” government’s attempt to prefer
“family” men in draft selection would always be its inconsistent but sometimes
downright sordid treatment of homosexuals in the military.
Until shortly before World War II, the military never gave much
thought about gays as a nettlesome class of misfitted soldiers; it satisfied
itself with punishing homosexual acts. The Navy had developed its notions about
“sodomy” from old English seaman’s law; other services had developed their
punitive approaches to sodomy from a combination of martial and ecclesiastical
law. In 1919, the Articles of War were
amended to make “sodomy” a crime under military law. Assistant Navy Secretary
Franklin Roosevelt, however, would approve a purge of gays at a Navy Base in
As World War II heated up, the mental health industry was
selling the military on the notion of homosexuality as a “sickness,” and that
homosexuals could be identified and excluded or separated even while still
“latent,” before ever being caught in the act.
Until mid-1941, the Selective Service’s draft boards did the
screening for homosexuality and other “psychiatric disorders,” until this
responsibility was turned over to the military services themselves, who now ran
the induction stations.[11] At times, Selective Service enjoyed its
prerogative to turn over draft records of “mental” rejects to civilian
employers. Ever since, regardless of
military anti-gay policies, Selective Service has registered only men and
(until 1973) sent them to draft physicals regardless of sexual preference. Were
the draft to be reinstated, the same would hold today: gay men would be ordered
to report, but women would not.
Quickly, the Army and Navy would (somewhat separately) develop
complicated regulations and administrative procedures that honored
contradictory aims: to punish homosexual acts, to keep in the service straight
men who engaged in essentially “prison homosexuality,”[12] medically evaluate and exclude the sissy
“latent homosexuals,” but, as manpower needs intensified, “rehabilitate” and
redeploy “reformable” homosexual soldiers after all. With the mental illness
paradigm, it was less acceptable (and practical) to imprison gays, and efforts
focused on the degree of embarrassment the services could cause with a
discharge category, including the notorious “Section 8” discharges for essentially
moral turpitude or insanity.
At times, the military’s efforts to identify practicing
homosexuals became comical (if Gestapo-like and medically wrong-headed), by
testing suspect soldiers for their oral “gag” reflex, or ability to achieve
erections. In time, however, the military became more concerned with the
“personality” issues. A Navy directive in 1944 created for the first time an
administrative category of persons with self-declared “homosexual tendencies,”
or “latent homosexuals.”[13]
The military’s growing preoccupation with homosexual status would help create
the climate for my own William and Mary experience, including the Dean’s
“understanding” but intolerant attitude. Military correspondence would complain
that gays exuded a smugness and superiority complex ¾ artistic, intelligent, cliquish, a special
elite rather than a group of town queers ¾ that would undermine unit
cohesion.[14] Induction stations would sometimes question
male conscripts about whether they “liked girls.” At the same time, commanders
in the field, short of manpower (even as only about 25 percent actually saw
combat), often ignored all the regulations about gays. In quieter times, there
were sporadic but frightening purges. Marvin Liebman was “hospitalized” and
then discharged for when a letter to a gay friend was intercepted.[15]
Another soldier was discharged for running a gay newsletter for civilians.
By 1945, however, the Secretary of War had issued an order
reviewing all gay discharges with the idea of deploying men who had not committed
any “overt” acts, and the War Department even considered releasing convicted
“sodomites” to join units with other military prisoners. When it really needed
men, the military was not afraid of stop-loss.
After World War II, the emerging Cold War and paranoia of
McCarthyism would emphasize driving gays out of civilian government employment
and purging other fields (such as entertainment) more than the military.
Despite General Eisenhower’s awakening to the presence of lesbians in his field
units during the War, he signed as President an Executive Order in 1953,
directing the federal government not to
employ those guilty of “sexual perversion.” As a corollary, no person (military
or civilian, government employee or private contractor) known to engage in
homosexual acts could hold a security clearance.[16] The circular notion that gays were security
risks was fueled in a large part by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s desire to
cover up his own homosexuality and relationship with Clyde Tolson.[17] Circular myth held that effete homosexuals
formed underground networks that somehow ruled the world.[18] In fact, various witch-hunts, especially in
the State Department, had, even by 1950,
ferreted out gays by going after those caught in johns or bar raids and
offering deals to those who would “name names.” Government astronomer Frank
Kameny was called in by his superiors in 1957 and confronted with accusations
of his homosexuality by a former boyfriend and then fired. He would live
hand-to-mouth for several years, only to become one of the country’s leading
gay activists.
The military services, during the postwar period, would
gradually reformulate their regulations. They had just started the
uncomfortable process of racial integration, as ordered by a defiant President
Truman in 1948,[19]
against the advice of commanders who threatened to resign and who complained
that white men would not want to bunk with or fight alongside blacks. There were half-hearted attempts to adopt
and maintain a uniform no-homosexuals policy. In 1949 the Department of Defense
(DOD) issued a memorandum requiring immediate separation of “known” homosexuals[20].
In 1959, the DOD issued a regulation authorizing (less than honorable)
administrative discharges (without court-martials) for “sexual perversion.” In 1965, a DOD directive allowed
servicemembers faced with a less-than-honorable discharge for homosexuality
“the chance to present their cases before administrative discharge boards and
to be represented by counsel.”[21] By 1967, there had emerged a Committee to
Fight the Exclusion of Homosexuals from the Armed Forces; already young men
realized that homosexuality was indeed a dangerous “poison pill” for evading
the draft.
The chain-of-command structure of the Armed Forces, however,
gives individual services and commands within them tremendous discretion in
interpreting many policy directives. For gays, this tended to encourage the
services to rewrite the details of their gay policies to their likings. In
1946, the Army actually experimented with allowing some gays (those not caught
in the act) honorable discharges. In
1949, the Army defined four categories of homosexuals. Class I comprised those
who had engaged in overt acts with aggravation, such as force, rape, or
involvement of minors. Class II comprised those who had engaged in overt acts
with consenting adults, in or out of the military. Class
The utilitarian approach of the military towards homosexuality
and its concerns about the public perception of servicemembers would continue
throughout the 1950’s and into the 60’s as public opinion of the military fractured over the Vietnam War.
The Navy would discharge only a third as many men per year during the Korean
War as in the year that followed the armistice at Panmunjon.[22] In 1954, the Navy entrapped and discharged
one’s of its most celebrated young physicians, Tom Dooley, when the rumors
about his homosexuality became too much; yet Dooley’s humanitarian service in
“Indochina” would provide military commanders with a warning preview of the
Communist aggression that would eventually lead President Johnson to his crisis
over Vietnam.[23]
In 1957, the Navy commissioned a study
updating its information on homosexuals in the military. The study
report, which became known as the Crittenden Report, found no reason to
conclude that homosexual men were inherently unfit for military service or even
for security clearances. The report also
contained a rather bizarre section of double-talk which conceded that the
military must not progress ahead of the civilian society it served on social
issues as sensitive and fundamental as sexuality.[24]
The
looseness of the military’s anti-gay rules and the military’s proclivity to
ignore the regulations when it really needed men, would, by the 1970’s, begin
to weaken (among more progressive circles) the public credibility of the
military’s ban, which the military had always feared it needed to retain public
respect. Nixon’s ending of the draft in 1973 and the sudden self-interest of
the military in replacing draftees with women (and the military’s quick
recognition that women could do the jobs) seemed to contribute to even more
softening of the military’s everyday attitude toward gays, and even
old-fashioned notions of military machismo. Even so, there were several
high-profile cases, such as Navy Ensign Copy Berg[25]
and Air Force Sergeant Leonard Matlovich. Berg’s lawyers would actually unearth
the Crittenden Report. In the 1970’s,
Judge Giselle would rule, in the Matlovich case, that military policy was
illegally ambiguous about when a servicemember must be discharged or could be
retained. Matlovich, already well-liked as an instructor in race relations,
would eventually win a large settlement and become the subject of a TV movie.
Throughout the middle Twentieth Century, from World War II
through the Vietnam War, the government would capriciously play with its power
over the lives of young men. It could draft them to fight into wars ¾ sometimes but not always necessarily fought
to protect the freedoms of the rest of us ¾ and then could label and
exclude certain young men as morally unfit to too “girlish” to fight and
therefore subsequently fair game for exclusion from many areas of civilian
life. The Armed Forces’ need for men where there were real wars to fight would,
of course, mitigate this temptation to government. Perhaps my comment sounds
paranoid, as politicians have always had other hot potatoes to play with
besides homosexuality. But, it is still a chilling thought: with a Selective
Service in place, the legal right to draft, and a strong political sentiment
today that known homosexuals must still be kept out of the military, a future
Administration, if sufficiently hostile, could still turn its guns and butter
against us “queers.”
This draft-and-gays conundrum raises a practical, psychological
question. Should men (other than those obviously disabled through no fault of
their own) be required to prove themselves as “breadwinners” and “protectors”
of women and children before they will be respected as individual adults, as
well as have their basic political citizenship rights?
A lot of “old-fashioned” people really believe that all
“able-bodied” men do owe such an obligation. But consistent with this belief
would be limited but mandatory military service for all men (maybe even women).
The Swiss do it. So does
Throughout the years following my debacle in college and
subsequent “hospitalization,” I would gradually show the world that I was not a
parasite. I would be no hero in uniform, but would at least take my turn as a
citizen “on call.” Only gradually would I question the moral right of the
“state” or of others to demand this of me for their own political purposes.
White Resigns
Filmmaker Ken Burns is right.
The sea-change that led to today's schizophrenic society had first been
seen in baseball.
In late 1957, both the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers
packed their bags and moved to
The worst days of McCarthyism, and the memories of the horrors
of war (both World War II and
Part of this, of course, was motivated by race. So some families
decided they would “legally” segregate themselves by moving away from their old
city neighborhoods, and businesses would inevitably follow. They would try to provide their children culturally
homogeneous and prosperous backgrounds rooted in family, financial stability,
safety, and cultural simplicity.
I continued to follow baseball ¾ the “new” Senators in the
1960’s. I still enjoyed the mere physics
of the game, the spectacle of the sliced or pulled batted balls in fight,
caroming off outfield “Green Monsters.”
And the team still gave me a geographic identity, as a part of a
particular community. The old team had already moved to
---
But just as professional sports began to reflect the
increasingly decentralized personal values of Americans by the late 50's, the
Cold War began to push the issue of sexual roles into two directions at the
same time. Since Sputknik, the
government had, by 1968, become absolutely eager to excuse promising young men
from military service if they could carry out critical research or production
in chemistry, physics, aeronautical or mechanical engineering, medicine, or,
just now barely visible as a career field, computers - and if they remained
politically loyal.
I saw this as an opportunity.
It seemed, nerds suddenly could be valued as they were and would not
have to prove themselves as macho men. Since
I had always liked chemistry (there was a copy of the 1928 edition of Smith's College Chemistry in our home),
I decided to go into it. Perhaps my interest was aesthetic; I was fascinated by
the colors and textures of various metals and compounds. My father wanted me to
stay in the sciences, and let my music and piano playing remain "an
avocation," for purely pragmatic, and probably patriotic, motives. A field
like chemistry would promise a stable career in, say, manufacturing or perhaps
pharmaceuticals, or safer yet, the Federal government. In the days before William and Mary, I saw
chemistry as an anchor into “reality,” a bridge between real recognition and
the cheaper attention that comes with self-effacement.
At the same time, the likelihood of war, and the need for men to
be ready for it, seemed to be increasing.
But now, there were going to be obvious exceptions to the ukase to
serve. And the tide was turning from excusing men because of their conventionally
expected roles as fathers and husbands to protecting the new model of
self-motivated students, scientists, and engineers.
Everybody believed that young men who didn’t date girls but
stayed home with their books, slide-rules, or chemistry sets turned out to be
better students. A major in the hard
sciences (at least, as compared to liberal arts or something like music) could,
even when carried to graduate school, keep a young man’s bod from getting torn
apart or scarred up on the “conventional” battlefield.
The unfairness of the draft would fuel rapidly growing
opposition to the war in
A new cultural divide was developing. Just as society was beginning to realize that
discrimination on the basis of race was wrong, a new kind of stratification
based not just on race, but more on economic class or background and
intelligence was forming, and was becoming legitimate in the eyes of government
and the ruling "industrial complex."
The Bell Curve[31]
would set up a privileged meritocracy. Getting married and becoming a parent
would not necessarily protect you, and adopting conventional family commitments
was beginning to count for less. That
animal recklessness that many young men exhibited and which had once been
necessary to provide for women and children, as on the American frontier or
perhaps today in volunteer fire departments, was now becoming a liability. If poor young men got drafted and went away
to war, big government might take care of their dependents with all those new
"Great Society" programs. Still, the privilege of inheritance and, to
a large extent, race, seemed a predictor of life and death, and expendability.
These circumstances, which I knew to be unjust, could remain hidden even in my
own mind.
The sudden recognition that many young women were capable in
science and math (going back to Navy Commander Grace Hopper, who had invented
several of today’s programming languages) and the encouragement for them to pursue science
careers, provided me with a welcome excuse for not wanting to court them. In 1957, a major women's magazine had
published an article encouraging young women not to go to college, because they
would be denying spaces for the men who were supposed to support them.
("Who would you rather have the degree, you or your husband?") Our high school Science Honor Society had
included one woman. Women, I thought,
wouldn’t need to be supported by men much longer. We could do what we wanted,
if we could just win one more war.
In retrospect, it seems shocking today that “national liberal,”
Democrat government should have been allowed to get away with playing political
games with the lives of its young men (often black), for ambiguous foreign
policies. Lyndon Johnson’s motive for murder was (we learned twenty years
later) apparently something as uncomplicated as not wanting to be the first
American President to lose a war in the morning box-scores[32].
Today, government plays with lives in more insidious ways. But, given the
currency of World War II, Korea, and more recently the Cuban crisis, it becomes
more understandable that respect for young men’s lives in a democracy like ours
(or, say, Israel today) would have been relative at best.
---
After I left NIH, I lived at home and went to school full time
(except I went part time the year I worked for National Bureau of Standards)
until I graduated from GW, with honors, in the spring of 1966. The four years went without incident; I never
talked about "it." Well, not
quite.
During that period, I redirected by career from chemistry to
math. I had been pretty awkward in the
lab at work, getting chewed out once for breaking a viscometer. At night, I was taking notorious Organic
Chemistry, and every Wednesday night there was a three-hour lab. (Organic is the kind of course where, if you
don't keep up with the memorization every day, come the first test, you'll get
a "big fat 20 just as sure as the sun rises in the east.") We had to
finish all our “preps” in the 16 sessions (with no make-ups), and I fell behind
quickly. One night I broke a beaker, and
cut the palm of a hand on it. A
chemistry professor gave me first aid to stop the bleeding, putting his arm
around me in an embrace of consolation.
I was already hopelessly behind on the lab assignments, and
decided the next day to drop the course and change my major. A couple of weeks
later, and a few days before John Kennedy was assassinated, I was sitting in
the canteen in GW's "firehouse" student union on
I mentioned the chemistry professor’s partial
hug of me. The rather homely student
gesticulated and talked about another professor: "He put his arm around me
once and I brushed him off. If he does it again, you think I wouldn’t go down
to the police station on
I jumped in my chair, but I dared say nothing! How can somebody get arrested just for being something? Or for an innocent, if careless, gesture that
suggests, but doesn’t prove, that he might be doing other things in his
"private life." I let it pass, though. Even living at home and
attending a school with a very practical administration, I sensed a danger.
Quickly, I would prove my acquaintance wrong on the value of a
degree in mathematics. My last
undergraduate summer, 1965, I got a summer job at the Navy's
Randy Shilts, in fact, reports that it was not unusual for
colleges through the mid 1960’s to conduct purges of practicing homosexuals,
and for campus police to call in students and force them to “name names” under
the threat of flunking out (and getting called up for their draft
physicals). At one school in
---
During my undergraduate days, I took up one other avocation (besides
music) which would quickly become important: chess. My father had taught me how to play, and I
quickly had learned some of the tactical fork and hurdle tricks and crude
opening traps. My father used to talk
about the power of "a pawn and a bishop." The GW chess club met on Friday afternoons in
the Library tower on
My own “career” bears that out. I have never had the time or
concentration to become a consistent tournament (as opposed to club) player. As
with music, I had too many interests to master just one and gain full
recognition for obvious accomplishment.
If I am “on,” I, like a knuckleball pitcher with his “stuff,” can be
very difficult for anyone to gain advantage over and beat. I have upset masters
and lost to C players[34]
in the same tournament! I am one of those players for whom, in any contest, the
lower-rated player wins almost half the time, and who often scores better with
Black. Playing with White is like having home-field advantage in other
“sports”; the privilege of moving first gives one an initiative to
“defend.” Losing with White is like
starting out in life with the advantages of good upbringing and still failing. Well, not quite - maybe resigning
(particularly as White) is just a lesson
in how good it can feel to yield to a better man.
Chess
theory development seems to parallel other moral issues and values in life. One notion in chess theory is “control of the
center.” But when is a pawn center strong, constricting the opponent and
keeping his minor pieces separated into isolated detachments on the edges of
the board, where they can get picked off? And when, instead, is the pawn center
just a sign of over-extension and weakness or congestion behind the lines? Or, take the notion of initiative, which
means control of the course of events. But many games are lost when pressing
for “initiative”; one burns bridges, and
leaves a critical square permanently weak as one advances past enemy lines.
Taking the initiative means commitment
and giving up some options, which one’s opponent can then reclaim in a winning,
if reactive, counterattack. Sometimes one plays “positionally” and forces the
opponent to declare his intentions first with a bad move. In purely psychological terms, one could
believe “Black is better,” or “less is more.” In the 1960's, “closed openings”
(particularly Queen Pawn Openings) were becoming popular; the theory was that
building up a position slowly, posing problems for the opponent and giving him
the opportunity to self-destruct, is more likely to succeed than direct attack.
This became a “moral” dilemma for some players, who preferred the direct
attacks in open games (as symbolized by 1 P-K4 with White, and the Sicilian and
Kings Indian with Black), as a way of keeping control over their situations, or
of asserting their “masculinity.” The more patient (feminine?) players would
let their opponents beat themselves.
The endgame provides another mirror for undeleting life. The
King, who has to keep his clothes on modestly early in the game, becomes a
formidable fighter on his own, like the scrambling quarterback. Positional
advantage often resolves itself as better King position (or “the opposition”)
in the endgame.
Chess
games sometimes become ego battles, where the winner feels he has “demonstrated
his superiority.” The deterministic
quality of the game (when compared to poker, bridge, and backgammon - but not
to Go!) makes players see a contest as a test of personal power, or at least competence. One friend would become so “addicted” as to
flunk out at GW, and get drafted in 1967. He would write to me about his fears
of a ground attack on his Signal Corps bunker in
I spent a lot of time on openings in those days, as I tried to
define my own psychological identity by mapping it to the paradigm of the
chessboard. The world of sports and games provided a sense of stability; by
capturing our rooting interest, it models the “moral” battles of the larger
world with sacrifices, stolen bases, field goals, punts, and mates. Chess
opening theory, and conceptual understandings of “initiative” and space
advantage, would soon change rapidly, especially with the use of computers, as
would human social life in general. Deploying a chess opening repertoire for
the individual club player came to be like managing a baseball team’s pitching
staff. I didn’t like to hear proposals to let the visiting team bat last in
baseball, or force openings to be drawn out of a hat in chess tournaments. It
will be a personal loss for me if computers ever play chess out; now the
Chess, after all, is a model of teamwork - and even “unit
cohesion.”
In February 1966, I began working on a Master's in Mathematics
at the
Graduate school was a bit of an adjustment. The courses required a much deeper
understanding of the theoretical material, and the ability to apply theorems in
new settings, rather than spew the "proofs" (in the spirit of
syllogisms of “statements and reasons”
from high school plane geometry) from a textbook or lecture. A typical blackboard hour examination might
comprise four new "theorems" to prove, with solutions not always
easily motivated, any more than a chess problem "mate in five" is
easily seen. For recreation, I tried to
continue my music with private organ lessons, having been inspired by a young
organist I had met at the
One guy on my floor in
the dorm used to brag about "rolling queers" in
The second semester there, I had a freshman pre-med roommate.
Even he picked up on the homosexual theme, embracing me (with his legs) once in
jest and making jokes about a janitor who had supposedly been fired for giving
a student an earring. But this time the jokes were really “in fun,” and they
never created any real tension. I wasn’t going to let another “William and
Mary” happen. The largely female dormitory staff used to say about the student
help, “The boys are wonderful.”
The third semester, I finally had another math graduate student
(by request), a physical but normally docile fellow who would scream during his
take-home tests, “I cannot work problems!” but he always did. I would try to
draw him into debates about the unfairness of the sacrifice required by the
draft, and he would answer, “War is war, and anything goes.” Then how did an international tribunal have
legal authority to conduct the
I did
become close to several people, and eventually roomed for a semester with a
slender engineering student, Rick, who would introduce me to objectivism and
the ideals of author Ayn Rand. We formed
a little club that met in the cafeteria, or sometimes in the dorm stereo
listening room, and extolled the principle that most accomplishments that make
the world work for everyone derive from the initiative and efforts of one
person. I read The Fountainhead and
my roommate and I, as we talked before going to sleep, would enjoy mapping its
characters, the “heroes” and the “second-handers” (like Howard Roark and Peter
Keating, respectively) to real people we both knew. Our discussions got as far as the notion of
“self-concept” and the desire to break away from depending on the opinion of
others. Rick (enthusiastically heterosexual) may have been the first person to
articulate to me the notion that a person should set his own goals, regardless
of social approval. Enlightened “selfishness”
had become virtue. The idea that one owed service to others or to, most of all,
the state (that is, our country) as an underlying citizenship obligation, was
viewed as intrinsically evil. With Rick, and several other friends, I did a bit
of traveling out west for the first time, with two trips to the west coast and
one to
More concern about the draft drew out of this little
“fraternity” (which did include women). We sponsored informal debates about the
draft and deferments, with some speakers insisting that the draft was
absolutely immoral. Government has no right to force anyone to give up his life
or limb, let alone conscript into what amounted to at least temporary
servitude. “Enlightened self-interest” would lead men to volunteer to fight
together when their homes and families were really threatened. The University
never objected to these forums, since they were always orderly; there was never
the unrest that occurred on other campuses.
Sunday mornings, I would walk a mile into downtown
---
I had
been called up for my first draft physical in September 1964, well before major
escalations in Vietnam, during the year I was a part-time student and therefore
1-A (which meant, available for immediate induction). I had once discussed the draft with my
individual therapist after leaving N.I.H., and he replied, “I wouldn’t worry
about it. You’re being very cooperative with the draft board, and you’re not
qualified.” I didn’t worry too much
while working full-time that year; my attitude, after the
We
had been bussed to
At
that time the Armed Forces questionnaire included, as its last question, a box
to check off admitting to "homosexual tendencies." I did mark it, and wrote a sentence trying to
communicate what had happened at William and Mary. I was pointed to another table, where another
“doctor” questioned me only briefly, and I again stated that I had regarded
myself as a "latent homosexual."
I actually thought I was being honest. “That’s all I need to know,” the
doctor said. A few weeks later, I
received the results, a “4-F” classification, meaning not available for
induction under any circumstances. I might as well have been a girl.
Once
By 1966, the Armed Forces
had dropped any mention of homosexuality on the questionnaire forms. Unofficially, the policy had become,
"don't ask, don't tell."
However, the examination station had a copy of the records from my
previous physical. Once again, there was
a very brief interview. “We see you have a history of mental illness,” the
doctor said. “I don't know why they called you in.” But my draft classification was upgraded to
“1-Y,” which meant I would be conscripted only in a genuine “national
emergency.” As I rode back on the bus, I sat next to an Army PFC (Private First
Class) who assured me that Basic really wasn’t too bad, and that he was
starting Officer Candidate School (OCS) in thirty days.
Finally, in August, 1967, I was examined a third time in