I have a lot in common with Tom Clancy, the famous author of military-based thrillers and war games, who recently died of undisclosed causes.

• • He was one year older than I was, which means that we were probably brought up on the same steady diet of comic books, Mad magazine, westerns, the Mickey Mouse Club, and Walt Disney. I bet that he filled up his Big Chief tablet with stick drawings of American planes strafing German or Russian troops just as we did.
  • We both went to Jesuit high schools. He probably also went to a Catholic grade school, as I did. we were therefore first taught by the nuns how to memorize the catechism and then by the Jebbies how to think.

From Loyola’s website

• He went to college at Loyola U. in Baltimore and graduated in 1969. I attended a debate tournament at that same school in 1968. I may have actually seen him, although he was into chess, not debate.
• We both have myopia (near-sightedness). He apparently had a rare type that got worse as he got older. He donated a lot of money to Johns Hopkins because one of the surgeons there evidently fixed the problem when he was in his fifties.
• We both have ties to the military. I was drafted after I graduated from college. According to Loyola’s website he was in a Ranger platoon for Green Beret training in ROTC at the university. One of his professors said that “He really was a frustrated soldier, and his eyes kept him out.”
• I read one of his books. Well, I got to page 8 or 9 before I discarded it because I could not identify with any of the war-mongering protagonists, and I found the style very annoying.
• Someone gave me one of his board games many years ago. It is still unwrapped. One day I hope to sell it on e-bay to one of his fanatical followers at an exorbitant price.

The legend is that Tom Clancy desperately wanted to be a soldier, but he was denied the opportunity. Maybe. My recollection is that the people who were in ROTC in the sixties got scholarships, and they did not need to make commitments until they had completed two years. I knew a guy who financed his first two years of out-of-state tuition at Michigan that way, and the only price that he had to pay was to sit in a chair and get yelled at for being a traitorous scoundrel for one entire day. I was unable to determine how many years Tom Clancy spent in ROTC.

I wonder who determined that Tom Clancy was unfit for the army and whether he was ever drafted. I searched for information about this subject, but I was unable to find anything substantive. His obituaries all address this topic using the passive voice (“he was denied the opportunity to serve”) or with an indeterminate subject such as “they.” After the fact most guys in our generation do not like to talk about how they avoided the draft even though that was by far the premier topic of conversation at the time.

Clancy graduated in 1969. The draft was extremely unpopular then, but it was still operated by local draft boards. Each of those boards had a quota to meet. How they reached it was more or less up to them. In some localities there were considerable shenanigans, or at least that was the rumor. The situation was bad enough that in 1970 the whole system was replaced by a lottery that was just as unpopular, but at least it eliminated the discretion of the local boards. Clancy reportedly gave up his college deferment in 1969. All that his graduating class had to do to avoid service was to make it to December 31 without being drafted. Whether he was drafted or tried to enlist in this period is unclear. No one else seems to think that the matter is worth researching. De mortuis nil nisi bonum.

I remember back to my own induction physical. Plenty of guys failed, but each of them (at least to my recollection) had one thing in common. They all brought briefcases full of affidavits and documentation from doctors. At the time there were physicians who hated the war and the draft so much that they would certify questionable ailments. One of the guys with whom I worked over the summer got his doctor to certify that his knees were too bad for military service. The doctor told him to be careful not to do a squat when asked to do so. This guy, who was the quarterback of his high school football team, played at a high level in every sport imaginable at every opportunity with no difficulty.

The physical itself was a joke. My feet are as flat as Donald Duck’s, and I thought that that might disqualify me. The guy running the physical did check for this. We were barefoot, and he asked us to face the wall. The guy (doctor?) performing the ritual told us: “Raise your right foot. Left. Thank you.” The whole process took less than five seconds. Half of the guys never raised either foot.

I don’t remember any vision test other than the one for color blindness. My vision has always been correctable to 20-20. I do not know whether Clancy’s vision was or not. I tried to find out if he had a driver’s license in the seventies and eighties, but I was unable to locate any information on the subject. Again, no one else seems to think that this was important.

Tom Clancy’s eulogies reminded me that in Basic Training I met a guy named Houston who happened to be from Houston, TX. He had bright red hair and glasses that resembled the bottoms of coke bottles much more than the ones shown in Clancy’s photo from Loyola. This guy Houston ran into things all of the time. He could not find his place in line. He was, in a word, hopeless. Yet, he enlisted and was not rejected. Houston apparently also brought a briefcase with him to his induction physical, but his contained an affidavit from an eye doctor that certified that his vision was sufficient for military service.

All of this is by way of preface to the point of this diatribe. I was actually in the army. Clancy got all of his information second-hand from gung-ho lifers and contractors. I wonder if he would have spent a lifetime extolling these guys and their lethal toys if he had actually had to wear olive-drab for a few years.

I had very little respect for any of the lifers whom I met in the army. A few of the junior officers were OK, but to a man (I did not meet a single female officer) they were just there to avoid the draft. Each draftee and most of the enlisted men always knew exactly how many days they had left and could not wait for their term of service to end. They just wanted to get on with their lives. The lifers, on the other hand, were mostly insufferable jerks who probably would be failures on the outside. They reminded me of the characters in Catch 22. Believe it or not, there was even a naval officer named Commander Commander. The Army general who commanded our base in Albuquerque was uniformly deemed incompetent if not senile. The Air Force colonel who eventually replaced him rode around in a jeep listening to the police radio even in the middle of the night.

I almost made sergeant even though I was only in the Army for eighteen months. I owed my rapid advancement to my platoon sergeant in MP training, who was a real piece of work. Unless it was his turn to lead the company’s marching, he shot pool all day while we went to training. He never talked to us. Never. At the end of the seven-week period we had to prepare for inspection by the lieutenant. The sergeant gathered us together and told us that if anyone asked us if we had been checked out before the inspection, we were to tell them that he had. Twenty or thirty minutes later he came over and looked at my locker. Then he asked me if anyone had checked me out before the inspection. I said, “Yes, sergeant.”

He asked, “Who did?”

I replied “You did, sergeant.” He took down my name, and I was nominated for promotion the next day. None of my friends were.

One day when I was at my first permanent duty assignment in Albuquerque, Sergeant First-Class Edison, the highest ranking NCO in the outfit, came into the office in which I worked. He announced that he was pretty sure that at least one or two people in the MP Company were using drugs. The fellow who worked with me and I reacted with mild shock without looking up from our work. After the sergeant left we both burst out in uncontrollable laughter. Dozens of guys in our company regularly used drugs. A few of them were stoned virtually all of the time. I swear that one guy who lived on the University of New Mexico campus had a pair of eyes that never were in focus during the ten months that we worked together.

I also had a little first-hand experience with the weaponry of the age as well. I helped some guys in another training company with their M-16’s, which were continually jamming. It took me ten seconds or so to realized that they had been oiling their guns but not cleaning them. They were full of a muck that resembled molasses. I was later qualified to carry a .45 even though I was a horrendous shot. I was afraid of that hand cannon, and I knew that I could not hit anyone with it anyway. I therefore kept my clip in my pocket unless someone was going to inspect me. In Basic Training someone demonstrated a shoulder-borne antitank weapon and launched one missile. It was cool, but we were not allowed to touch it. I also had a close-up view of the aircraft used by the Blue Angels when they buzzed the UNM golf course one day in preparation for their exhibition.

On the other hand I got to play a lot of golf and whiffle ball when I was stationed in New Mexico. I had an air-conditioned single room. I can’t complain too much. I never had to go to Vietnam. I met only a few guy who had been there. One of them wanted to go back. He thought that he could make a fortune selling drugs.

I hated every second that I was in the army. I felt that it was an inconscionable waste of my time, and I was bitter at Richard Milhouse Nixon from stealing it from me.

During the decade after Tom Clancy left college, on the other hand, he sold insurance. If he had had an experience like mine, I wonder whether he would have still devoted himself to writing about this imaginary world in which the enemy is both dangerous and ruthless and where the “good guys” are confident, clever, resourceful, and armed with flawless weaponry. Somehow I doubt it. The people who served with me all became jaded quite rapidly. The famous people who beat the war drums in the last three decades have almost all been chicken-hawks who somehow avoided serving during the Vietnam era. I do not hold it against them that they dodged the draft. I just wish that they would keep their mouths shut when it comes to national security decisions. Clancy blamed the Democrats for 9/11 because they allegedly gutted (!) the CIA budget. Most of the rest of the chicken-hawks for some reason blamed Saddam Hussein and invested hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives to replace him with people with close ties to Iran.