Put it in the deep frying grease, it's a real crusty, I'm sure it's terrible for your system of boy that it tastes good.
So once a year you get homemade deep fried chicken.
Yeah, the girls were home free, but all the boys had to worry about being drafted because Vietnam had been going on for a couple of years and it was really heating up, they needed a lot more troops.
So all of the guys, if they were not in college, college could get them a deferment or not married by, I think it was the summer of 65.
Yeah, August of 65, that would get them a deferment or they weren't teachers, that would get you a deferment.
The rest of them, they all had to register for the draft and they were being drafted and they were being drafted right away.
Let's see how this thing looks in the daylight.
We graduated in 65, I was 18, at that time you figured you had about a year, you had to tell you about 19 or so.
I think he would have been drafted in June of 66, but he started looking around and he was really worried about it because usually you got drafted and you went for basic training and I don't know if you got any more training after that and then they were in Vietnam and it was like really, really fast.
This darn thing, I didn't know anything about it, I had to miss work that night because I didn't know what it took all day, it was a miserable, stinking day going through this physical, I'm cooked, I'm done for.
People we knew were getting killed.
To this day, I don't know how and why I thought I could, that I had a chance.
The guy, the recruiter at Nine Mile and Grashit seemed to take a liking to me.
He accepted me, I qualified, I agreed to enlist for four years, they found my paperwork and the lady told him on the phone that I was, my paperwork was still at a point where I could join the Air Force.
I wasn't actually drafted yet.
I had this 1960 Corvette, my pride enjoyed, drove down her right quick, identified myself with my driver's license, she gave me the paperwork, that's what saved me from the draft.
The nightly news had showed all the bodies coming home and everybody knew somebody who was there.
It wasn't a far off warning where it was like, the six o'clock news every night was showing what was going on in Vietnam.
So yeah, people were scared.
It's going to lay here.
People were starting to hear things from other people that had graduated and left with us and left for the service that summer of 65.
And even kids that went and joined in the summer of 64.
The information was starting to flow back how bad it was over there.
But the good thing about it was that he got stationed in Germany instead of being sent to Vietnam, which probably saved his life.
I was assigned to what they called a jet aircraft mechanic on jet fighter planes.
Where?
And the training was at Wichita Falls, Texas at Shepherd Air Force Base, northern Texas.
Then I had a 30 day leave and I was sent to Bittburg Air Force Base, Germany.
It's in western Germany near the Luxembourg border.
They had a policy for the jet mechanics that they didn't send jet mechanics to Vietnam straight out of school.
You had to have, at that time in 67 when I finished tech school, it was their basic policy that you had to have about a year's experience working on jet aircraft before you went to Vietnam.
After living through that, plus I had studied history, I was a history major, I had studied about a lot of wars.
And it seemed like we had wars like every 20 years or so.
When the economy got bad or our troops got built up and the military went to trial their new weapons.
For some reason, there seemed to be about every 20 years, if you looked at history, there was some kind of a war somewhere.
And when you were born and you were a little baby, I was thinking of that and I had held you in my arms and I made you a promise.
And I said they're not going to get you because I was thinking about the draft and how they did that to people's children.
And I just said they're not going to get you and I had no idea what kind of war was going to come up.
But they always seemed to manufacture a crisis somewhere in the world so that they can do that.
And I didn't know how I was going to keep you out or out of their arms.
But I knew something would come up and I still don't know how I'm going to keep you out of it.
But I want you to stay out of it because they don't do any good for the common person.
If Papa was still here, he would tell you what an idiotic scheme the army is and how they have no concern for your life.
Your father's been in it and it hasn't changed when he was in it.
My assignment was 36 months in Germany.
I liked working on airplanes and I learned a lot about mechanical stuff.
But the military bureaucracy, the military mindset, that's what I learned about.
How you are absolutely meaningless and nothing to them.
And it made me so thankful that I was a mechanic and not an infantry which the army themselves referred to them as grunts.
That's how little respect they have for their own infantry people.
The people with the most to lose their lives are treated the worst, get the raw end of every stinking deal, the poor guys in combat.
And they have the most to lose their lives.
And then they have a derogatory term for them on top of it and they call them grunts.
That's how rotten the military is.
