"Greeting"

(See Cover)

The letter bore the nominal heading "The President of the United States." It was addressed to Gary William Wilson, and it arrived at the blue stucco house in Rosemead, Calif., two days before Christmas. Its terms were cold, its message unmistakable. "Greeting: You are hereby ordered for induction into the Armed Forces of the United States." Gary Wilson, 23, a bright, ordinarily even-tempered student then just six months away from a hard-won geology degree at California State College at Los Angeles, blew up. He crushed the letter into a ball, jammed it into his pocket and stamped out of the house. His mother shouted after him, "Be careful, Gary! Don't do anything rash." Furious, he climbed into his Volkswagen, rocketed the little car around the block a couple of times until he had calmed down slightly, then roared off to his draft board office to spill his spleen. "I was upset," he recalls. "And mad. And depressed."

Symbol of Futility. Gary Wilson's upset and anger and depression sum up the reaction of some 1,657,300 men in the Class of '66 as they face their No. 1 nemesis: Conscription '66. Not since Korea's bleakest days has the draft loomed quite so doomful in the eyes of high school and college graduates. Induction quotas are up threefold over last year; 319,887 men have been called in the past eleven months, another 150,000 are expected to go in the next year. The pool of single 26-, 25-and 24-year-olds is fast being depleted. Local draft boards are digging deeper into their files, searching for 23-, 22-and 21-year-olds. And there stands the Class of '66. Careers dangle in doubt; weddings are postponed; even hard-earned degrees suddenly seem to symbolize futility more than achievement. Add to that the chaotic and confusing situation in Viet Nam, and it is easy to understand the anxiety of Gary Wilson and his classmates across the nation.

Wilson is a stocky (5 ft. 9 in., 170 Ibs.), bespectacled young man--and a true son of the U.S. middle class. His parents have lived in the same six-room house on North Earle Avenue in Rosemead for 25 years. There they raised their three children--Gary; Jimmy, 21, a Navy Reserve seaman aboard the aircraft carrier Oriskany (which left last week for Viet Nam); and Carol Ann, 20, a Cal State junior majoring in art. The father, William Wilson, 48, is a World War II Navy veteran and a partner in a window-shade manufacturing firm. He affords two cars (a 1957 Chevrolet station wagon and a 1961 Rambler) and a color television set, last summer traveled to Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong. His wife Elaine, 45, a plump, outspoken little lady, likes to season her children with such salt-of-the-earth advice as "You'll never get anything you want unless you work for it."

Old Reliable. Gary played trumpet and football in high school, attended the University of Redlands for two years. Then on to neat-but-ivyless Cal State at Los Angeles, a state-financed, tuition-free college with an enrollment of 20,000 students, the bulk of whom are Los Angeles commuters (the San Bernardino Freeway slashes along the edge of the campus). Described by both his parents as "a real plugger," Gary Wilson has earned a rock-solid B average and the nickname "Old Reliable Wilson" for his industrious work as president and treasurer of Theta Chi fraternity and member of the Cal State interfraternity council, the college student disciplinary board and the Blue Key honorary society. Last week he was elected one of the school's top five all-round seniors.

For his college wherewithal, he has worked both part time and full time as an oilfield roustabout and, lately, as an assistant engineer for the Standard Oil Co. He has done well; Standard wants him to come to work permanently after graduation. He has steadily dated pert auburn-haired Sandra Sue Harper, 21, a Cal State classmate, long enough so that they admit to being "serious."

The draft casts both job and marriage into limbo. As Sandy Harper poutishly puts it: "There's just no use planning for the future. There isn't any future until we find out what's happening with the draft. I guess we'll just wait and see." Standard Oil can do no more.

SS-49342561. The draft became very real to Gary Wilson last fall after he took a pre-induction physical and was declared a healthy, if fretful, 1A. Like just about every other college student in America, he applied to his draft board in San Gabriel for a 25 classification--the occupational deferment normally granted full-time U.S. students. But the 1A wheels turned faster than the 25; his number (SS-49342561) came up at Christmas, and so did his "Greeting."

"I didn't object to the draft itself," he says. "I expected to be called eventually, but for me the timing was all wrong." During his first angry visit to the draft board, Gary was told to come back with another letter from Cal State testifying to his student status. He did. His induction was postponed, but only until Feb. 1. Grimly, Gary Wilson began a patient--and unrewarding--series of visits to the draft board office. "I'd go down there, wait three hours to see someone," he said, "and I'd get nowhere. I was getting the brushoff."

Trauma. Desperate, he sat down on Jan. 22 and composed a cautiously worded letter to the President of the United States. He laid out the facts of his case, explaining that he had had to work to make expenses and was unable to finish college in the standard, approved four years. He concluded the letter to L.B.J. by summing up the plight of the Class of '66:

"Undoubtedly this letter and the probably dozens of similar letters written by others will not aid me--or them --in receiving the necessary deferment. However, I might hope (that is, if you even get to read this letter) that I have in some way helped to present to you the trauma with which myself and so many other male college students are confronted. Agreed there are the groups which are professional objectors --but the majority of college men like myself have devoted over 80% of their lives toward achieving an education--only to have that education cut short by an induction notice when our goal is but a few weeks away."

"Very Glad." Lyndon Johnson did not get right on the phone to Gary's draft board. The letter, like the 350 other personal draft pleas that arrive each month at the White House, went to selective-service headquarters in Washington, then to California draft authorities. Hearing no word from anyone, Gary Wilson glumly packed his bags on Jan. 31, planned a farewell party, and prepared to report at 7:30 a.m. the next day to the Los Angeles induction center. But with nice nick-of-timing, the draft board phoned at 5:30 p.m. Gary William Wilson had been granted a IS(c) rating until June 19--the day after graduation. "I was very glad," Wilson understates.

Still, he must go. Like most young men in his situation, Gary Wilson faces the Army at a time when he is still suspended somewhere between the campus and full manhood (in his room at home, his Eagle Scout badges are hung on a wall not far from his plastic-encased draft notice). One moment he will shrug boyishly about his draft call, expected in July, as a "necessary evil." Then he will turn studiedly philosophical, frowning heavily and puffing on a Raleigh cigarette as he says: "Most students I know are more worried about actually going into the military than they are about what'll happen after they're in. Their worries center around whatever dislocation and interruption it causes them. We have our own personal dreams and hopes. We all want to have our personal freedom, and even the threat of the draft is a threat to that."

"You Don't Know." What's more, Gary, like his draft-besieged colleagues around the country, is bothered and puzzled by the meaning of the Viet Nam struggle. They are not Vietniks, or frenzied protesters. Indeed, they pay little or no attention to the thin demonstration fringe. But since it is undeclared and slow to take shape, the Viet Nam war has hardly aroused the star-spangled fervor of World War II, when entire fraternity chapters tramped off to the post office to enlist en masse. The fight does not seem to have the relatively crisp delineations of Korea, where the United Nations underwrote the U.S. commitment and the Red Chinese invaders were clearly an enemy.

Says Gary Wilson: "I'd have no qualms about going into the service if the U.S. was in a big regular war. If they were drafting a lot of guys for, say, a crisis in Berlin, I'd feel different. But Viet Nam is so foreign, so remote. I think I'd feel better about a situation where you knew who was the enemy. It seems over there that the soldiers don't know if the people standing behind them are with them or against them."

"If I Died There." Indeed, the attitude toward the war among a broad cross section of collegians is both pessimistic and disappointed. To many of them, Viet Nam is by no means a battleground designed for noble death. Powerful (6 ft., 215 Ibs.) Paul ("the Whale") Faust, 22, captain of the University of Minnesota's 1965 football team (record: 5-4-1) last fall, recent winner of the Big Ten Conference Medal as the league's top senior athlete-scholar and a 25 soon to be 1A, gets thoughtful: "I don't know how I'd feel if I were fighting there; it's quite a thing to sacrifice yourself for something if you're not sure it's completely right."

Emory University's Cully Clark, 23, a graduate student who expects to get a 2A deferment as a teacher, is disturbed about his own status as well as the rationale behind the war. "I feel I could do more for my country as a teacher. But if I were deferred, how could I justify my position here when others are being sent there? I don't think I have the courage to be a pacifist. I will go if I'm called. But if I died there, I don't think I would have died for the right cause." U.C.L.A. Senior John Hickey, 22, who as a boy twice broke his neck in falls, figured he was certain to be 4F, but X rays at his pre-induction physical showed nothing serious enough to keep him out of the Army. This week he is scheduled to be inducted. "It's like cancer--you worry about it, but once you get it you have to live with it," he says. "Still, it's bad; I'm having dreams about shooting at Viet Cong with my machine gun and my friends going by on stretchers. But you have to serve your time, so it's either a hole in Oklahoma doing nothing for two years or over in Viet Nam where the action is."

Political Suicide. The specter of combat in Viet Nam leaves some sophisticated draftees spouting disclaimers. "You can't get excited about it unless you're extremely pro-war," says Harvard Senior Charles E. Ryberg, 21, who plans to enlist in Army intelligence. "I believe that Johnson has his head wedged; the war is political suicide. I would do my job, but it would be about the only thing in my life I haven't gone into with a missionary fervor."

Fervor or not, there is really nowhere else to turn--and most members of the Class of '66 recognize it with good grace. Witness Boston University Senior David Belyea, 22, who will soon turn 1A unless he finds an opening in the Coast Guard: "You try to dodge, up to a certain point. But when the responsibility gets up to a certain level, you can't walk around it. If I got to Viet Nam, I'd try to do the best I could. All these people are dodging responsibility right up to the end. Then they become resigned--they accept their responsibility, become patriotic, and they're in for two years."

For a few rare ones among the eligibles, the draft fouls up well-laid plans for a specific future. Richard S. Hollander, 21, a restaurant-management major at Michigan State University, wants nothing more than to begin his career--now. But he is 1A and cannot.

"I had eight interviews for jobs," he says. "A vice president from the Hilton chain told me, 'We might take you on as a salad boy until you get drafted.' But they won't put you in any management-trainee program. They won't give you any responsibility because they don't want to train you, then lose you."

But many of the Class of '66 seem to see military service as an excuse for dodging the difficult decision of what to do now that they are grown up. Williams College Senior Douglas H. "Tuna" Stevens, 22, a C-average major in American civilization, will soon become 1A, but it really doesn't matter. "I hadn't thought much about it," says Stevens. "I always figured I'd find something to do--maybe I'd go on to school. By early this year, I decided I wasn't ready for graduate school and I wasn't really interested in teaching. So I'm kinda stuck with the services." In thousands of cases like Tuna Stevens', the military hiatus will actually be a benefit, a chance to grow up and make a realistic appraisal of adulthood.

The Big Stre-t-t-tch. Still, draft ducking--or talking about draft ducking--has become a favorite extracurricular pursuit of the Class of '66. Potential inductees kick around notions of claiming to be afflicted with everything from chronic bedwetting to bad eyes, from homosexuality to bad backs--all exemptible ailments if the doctor believes in them. Men with allergies easily controlled by medication talk about not taking their pills for days before the induction physical. But it is mostly just talk. More comfortable is the notion of stre-t-t-tching a four-year course into five. Or getting married and begetting children fast. Or taking postgraduate jobs in such potentially deferrable fields as teaching, engineering, farming.

But the legal escapes have a way of not working. Richard E. Lerner, 24, who is due this month for a Columbia master's degree in journalism, pondered them thoroughly. Another deferrable year in graduate school? No, because "I don't have the money." Armed-forces reserve units? "They are backed up." The National Guard? A group in Akron, Ohio, would accept him whenever it got an opening--"but I might have to wait around for a year." Critical-occupation jobs? "They're scant in journalism." USIA or the foreign service? "A lot of draft boards aren't deferring for that." Teaching? Without a Ph.D., that means public school, and "That's not really what I want to do." Richard Lerner gave up and prepared himself for an induction notice this month.

No Bullet, Just Pain. For collegians who haven't already gone that route, graduate school seems the best way out. All over the country, grad-school applications are remarkably higher than they were last year. Says W. Donald Cooke, dean of Cornell's Graduate School, which has 8,000 applicants this year, compared to 6,000 in 1965: "I'm sure there are some draft avoiders in there.

The trend has been up in grad school for a long time. But I'm sure the draft is a factor to some degree." And Dean of Students Harold R. Metcalf of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business said this spring: "Our applications from would-be students are up 75% above last year. It would be naive not to suspect that the draft has a great deal to do with this."

Rhiman A. Rotz Jr., 23, a Princeton graduate student in history, says: "Anyone would be out of his mind to come to a grad school as hard as this one strictly to avoid the draft. But everyone here has at least thought of the draft as a factor, however minor, in his decision." Explains Gene Blumenrich, 23, a second-year Harvard Law School student who candidly admits that he wants to stay out of the service for good if he can: "It's not really a question of dying. If it were, then of course the student deferment is immoral. For all but a few, it is merely a question of spending two years of drudgery. It is just a pain in the neck, not a bullet in the head."

Judging the Tricky. Of course, most members of most of the country's 4,050 local draft boards are aware of all the tricks. Many of them have been at work without pay ever since World War II. Says Dr. W. J. Greenway, eight-year veteran and chairman of the De Kalb County (Ga.) draft board: "If boys applying to graduate school stick to the same course as they had in undergraduate work, we favor that. But if a boy changes his major--well, there's where you run into your professional students. You can pretty well judge, though. And most of them are honest, anyway. The real tricky ones--you can cross 'em up with a few questions; they'll usually finally say they don't want to serve."

"My board tells me not to worry," sighs University of Utah Senior John Becker, 22, who has not yet been classified. "That's very comforting, but all the time you know they've got your file in front of them with their little rubber 1A stamp in their hand." Gripes Jeffrey Anderson, 23, a graduating history major at the University of California at Berkeley: "There just isn't any communication between the draft board and the individual. When I settle down with a family, I'm going to see about improving the local draft board system."

Of course, local boards are limited by the availability of fit males in their districts. Deferments are thus dished out on a strictly backyard basis. If an area runs out of nonessential, healthy single men. it is forced to move on to more essential healthy single men--such as students. Another board in another part of the U.S. may have enough 24-year-old out-of-school bachelors to last the entire Viet Nam period.

Undemocratic? Lately, dissent over both the mechanics and the morality of the U.S. selective-service system has reached a decibel count unmatched since the program first began--25 years, 81,000,000 registrants and 13,500,000 inductees ago. There are the predictable complaints about deferment of such people as New York Jets Quarterback Joe Namath (4F with a legitimately bum knee) and Lynda Bird Johnson's boy friend, $200,000-a-year Actor George Hamilton (3A because he is his mother's sole support).

But the hottest issue is whether students should be deferred at all--and if so, whether on the basis of IQ standards, class standing or performance in the newly revived college-qualification draft examinations, which 650.000 have already taken and another 200,000-plus are expected to take this week and on June 24.

Yale President Kingman Brewster is almost savage in his denunciation of the draft policy that allows broadside college deferments: "It is unfair; it is undemocratic; and--worst of all--it fosters a cynical disrespect for national service and corrupts the aims of education." Princeton President Robert Francis Goheen argues that because draft calls are still relatively small, the system is "unnecessarily erratic in what it does to young men's lives. Great inequities occur which are not compensated for by any real social gain. We have enough educated manpower that just the pursuit of a Ph.D. in history, classics or chemistry, for example, is not important enough to justify deferment."

Plenty of students agree, even those most deeply involved. Philip Pendleton Ardery Jr., 20, a cum laude (English) Harvard senior who has resigned himself to going into the service ("When rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it"), waxes cynical: "Students really have too good a deal. And with the tests, what you're doing is trying to decide what people have the right to die--and to do that on the basis of anything as arbitrary as intellect seems really wrong."

Who's Unfair? Oddly enough, high school kids--even Negro high school kids, who supposedly bear the brunt of inequity--are not terribly perturbed. Draft-bound Donnie E. Smith, 18. a senior at New York's Charles Evans Hughes High School, has kept his cool about it all: "If the college guys are sticking with it and want to get further, why take them out? Everybody tells you they want you to get an education; they're doing the opposite of what they say if they take the college students out." Donald ("King") White, 18, about to graduate from Manhattan's Louis D. Brandeis High School, thinks that it might be unfair to defer college students: "If they dodge the draft, I'm against them; if they're going to do good for the community, I'm with them.''

Lieut. General Lewis B. Hershey, now 72 and head of the selective-service system since it started, doesn't think it makes much sense to change policies now. "We have to start with the as sumption that American policy presumes a college graduate is better prepared to be a citizen for all reasons than a nongraduate," he says. Turning the statistical tables on his anti-college-deferment critics, he says: "Look at the people who are serving. Who are they? They're most likely to be the middle-class and upper-class person. Those denied a chance to go to school are not included: some 2,500,000 are rejected because they cannot pass the mental test. That's unfair to the college student."

But the demand for change is growing. Outright abolition of the draft (as suggested in recent years by, of all people, Adlai Stevenson and Barry Goldwater) seems unrealistic. For. as General Hershey likes to put it: "I don't believe we will ever see the end of the draft in my lifetime or yours. We've never had peace since I started this job, even after the end of wars, and I don't see that kind of peace in the future."

McNamara's U.M.T. The idea of a lottery in which every draft-age male in the country would have an equal chance of being picked has some advocates. In their view, it would be perfectly equitable: no one would get special treatment, the idiosyncrasies of local boards would be bypassed. But to Hershey, such roulette-wheel selection simply would dodge national responsibility. "A lottery says, I don't know enough to make a proper selection, so I'm going to hide my ignorance behind chance.' "

Universal military training, which would put every American youth into some kind of uniform, is probably even less popular now than it was in 1952, when the House killed a U.M.T. bill 236 to 162. The military dislikes the idea anyway, for it would work against a strong, dependable regular military service and put them in the business of rehabilitating a great many swept-up delinquents.

Another suggestion similar to U.M.T. --but softer--was advanced by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in Montreal two weeks ago. This idea, by no means original with McNamara, calls for a program under which each American youth must spend a year or so in a national organization of his choice --the military, the Peace Corps, the Job Corps, VISTA or some other public service. Last week, before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee, General Hershey pooh-poohed the idea as too expansive and too expensive. Since no fewer than 1,800,000 youngsters come of draft age each year, he seemed to be absolutely right about the cost. And the potential waste caused by plucking brilliant scientists or badly needed prospective doctors from college in the midst of their studies would seem likely to outweigh any benefits that might flow from their spending extended time serving the Government--no matter how altruistic their duties may be.

Whatever new schemes are presented by educators or Administration men in order to make the selective-service system fairer and more efficient, the current draft law must be renewed--or rewritten--by July 1, 1967. Already two congressional committees are studying the system, and when the 90th Congress convenes next January, one of the essential orders of legislative business will almost certainly be to present a refined draft bill.

But rewritten, renewed or simply reshuffled, conscription will continue to be conscription--a compulsory enrollment of men in the military service. And like it or not, Americans will continue to face it--grimly. As Cal State's draft-facing Gary Wilson said last week: "I'll go, but without enthusiasm."

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