It’s 1963 and the word is out: there’s a war on.
It’s in a small country I’ve never heard of—Vietnam. A former French colony in a part of Southeast Asia, formerly known as Indochina. Previously portrayed in Hollywood Geography 101 as a place where slit-skirt Eurasian beauties seduce world-weary Soldiers of Fortune at the behest of devious Oriental spies.

The French are gone now, worn down by a ten year insurgency , which ended in a humiliating defeat at a place called Dien Bien Phu by a Communist revolutionary named Ho Chi Minh. Ho rules North Vietnam and has launched a guerilla force called the Viet Cong to conquer the south.  All this is news to me.  And to the orators in Union Square Park. They’ve been so busy channeling Mao, Trotsky and Che they didn’t even notice this slight man with his wispy beard and black pajamas creeping out of the jungle.  

South Vietnam is ruled by a family of decadents, druggies, orgiasts and dragon ladies. Christians oppressing Buddhists. Despised by everyone, including its C IA handlers. But they are fighting Communists and JFK launches  an uncertain military adventure to prop up their regime.  His strategists  are anonymous for the moment—the  Bundy brothers, William and McGeorge; Robert McNamara, Walt Rostow, Dean Rusk, William Colby. Soon their names will become anathema. They’ve been sneaking troops and dirty tricksters into Vietnam for over a year. Now the force has reached critical mass and gotten the world’s attention. Peter Arnett, an AP reporter, is  on the scene when American “advisors” suffer their first defeat at Ap Bac. When the dictator Ngo Dinh Diem invades a Buddhist pagoda, slaughtering a thousand monks and nuns. When a monk sets himself on fire to protest Diem’s persecution of Buddhists and sets off an epidemic of immolations across the country.

I’ve been a radical by style, not conviction. I’m good at alienation. I find the role of the disaffected rebel a successful romantic strategy; you can’t get laid waving a flag in Greenwich Village. But secretly I believe Americans are the Good Guys. We provided sanctuary for my grandparents.  Beat Hitler and freed Europe. We gallop to the aid of the oppressed.  Overthrow dictators. Restore democracy and freedom of worship. I get chIlls at ball games. when I hear the Star Spangled Banner. 

Now I’m confused. Are we supporting dictators who kill monks? Who torture dissidents and fix elections? Union Square is a circus, but suddenly, the clowns have become prophets. Morris Krieger, the ancient anarchist in the Florida shirt with alligators chasing bathing beauties, gumming his wife’s cheese sandwiches while he predicts that “Camelot will have its war.” Lonnie, the one-eyed wino in the fatigue jacket, guzzling Gallo sherry and talking about the “secret assassination missions” he undertook in Guatemala and Lebanon for the “Special Forces.” The Nation of Islam preacher who says the war is a plot “to keep restless black men under military control.” The twin brothers with deranged grins who walk through the park talking in tongues and brandishing signs reading USEFUL IDIOTS FOR THE CIA. 

The pimply kids at the Communist Party bridge table, who everybody says are really FBI agents, have a new speaker—a crew cut Southern boy with a US ARMY tattoo, coiling snakes, screaming eagles…

“Who is the most expendable person in the world?” he demands in a strident twang. “The common soldier. They give you forty days of trainin’, but most of that is learnin’ how to make your bed and about face and obey orders no matter how dumb. What good is marchin’ in step and havin’  a neat foot locker when you’re in combat against troops who have  spent years under arms on their own terrain? The Army’ll drop you in the jungle and hope you outnumber the enemy ’cause you sure ain’t gonna outfight him. Oh you’ll get good at it if you live long enough. But you can’t win. You ain’t  fightin’  human beings, you’re fightin’ history…” 

I’m  working as a copyboy at the New York Post. I come in at 8am, just as the trucks are pulling out with the Late City, the first edition. The lobster shift editors and rewrite men shuffle blearily past me  The city room is the size of a factory floor. It fills quickly as the day shift begins. The clatter of a hundred typewriters, the voices calling, the rumble of the presses bringing the news—and I’m part of it.

Every morning I sharpen a few hundred thick, black One H pencils. Make hundreds of “books”–three sheets of copy paper, two of carbon paper for the reporters. Run down to the luncheonette on the first floor for breakfast orders. Saul, the owner, knows everybody’s breakfast; all I have to do is say a name. Run stories from the city desk to the copy desk. Run page dummies to the printers in the composing room. Pick up the galleys from the proof readers. Run up to the mail room to get a stack of the next edition– fifty papers which I deliver to all the offices all over the building, ending up at the 15th floor aerie of the publisher, Dorothy Schiff. The paper changes eight times a day, stories added or rewritten, front page recast, until it is “put to bed” with the “Final Market” edition, which gives the closing prices on the Stock Exchange. On my first day I was told: “everybody in this room is your boss.”  I go on personal errands. Get clippings from the library or the “morgue.” Run last minute headlines or rewrites out to the composing room as a new edition is going to press.  I change typewriter ribbons for lady reporters who don’t want top get smudgy. Make liquor runs; get soda and ice for the editors’ cocktails. Get lunch orders: it’s amazing how these people eat the same lunch every day as well and Saul knows them all. I bolt a turkey sandwich with Russian dressing while I’m waiting. 

At 4:30 I leave work with a copy of the last edition still warm from the press. I’ve got carbon paper and graphite smears on my face, blisters on my fingers from the pencils. If it’s hot I sweated through my shirt and smell myself on the subway. I go to the Cube Steak House on Sixth Avenue for meat loaf with mashed potatoes and baked beans. Spread the paper on the counter and read every word. Then after rice pudding and light coffee with four spoons of sugar I hit the street. Within a half hour I run into someone I know—sometimes it’s even a female. We go to one of the four art houses in the Village to see an old movie. 

It’s not the war. It’s not the capitalist oligarchy. I just don’t want this life to end. 

Curt, the chief copy boy, got himself declared 4F, “permanently unfit for service,” which means they’ll never bother him again.

“Tell ‘em you’re queer,” he says. “My girlfriend gave me a good idea. Polish your nails and then scrape most  of it off so it looks like you were trying to hide it.”

I get the polish, but chicken out at the last minute. Ditto the eye shadow and the cheap perfume.

Selective Service Headquarters on Whitehall Street has  a fortress vibe. Broken pickets are scattered on the sidewalk, along with scraps of signs and a torn flag, the remnants of an anti-draft demonstration the day before. Two Shore Patrol guys (Navy MP’s) stand guard at the door checking draft cards. There are more  non-coms inside, walking up and down the line.

The first time there was silence. Now there is nervous talk in the ranks. One kid who enlisted says the recruiter told him to volunteer for the paratroops. “You get special treatment,” he says. “Plus 16 dollars jump pay the Sergeant told me.”

An older guy in gray-green Army underwear shakes his head. “You won’t make it, you’re too short.” 

Another kid says he and his friend are going in on the “buddy plan” where they’ll get to serve together.

“That’s just a come on,” the older guy says. “They’ll put you were they need you…”

“But they signed a contract,” the kid says. 

“You have no rights in the Military,” the older guy says. “You’re under the Military Code of Justice. Bend over, spread your cheeks and kiss your ass good bye…”

He is approached by two MP’s. “You back again?” He turns away.  “This is a public building,”he says. They tell him to step out.  He refuses. “I wanna see the OD,” he says. “I wanna speak to an officer. I have a right to express my views.” They grab him by the arms. He breaks away. “Don’t fall for their lies,” he shouts. Two more MP”s run down the corridor. They carry him, flailing and yelling: “Don’t give them your lives…Resist…Resist!” Then he’s gone behind a slamming door and we move on in uneasy silence. 

I had stared at “homosexual experiences” on the form for  minutes until a Sergeant prodded me, “let’s go” and then hurriedly checked it off. Every medic along the line sees it and gives me a quizzical look. 

They send me to cubicle at the end of the corridor. A kid brushes by me with his head down. An old man in a white coat, looks over my form, hands trembling. 

“You live in Greenwich Village?” he says with a slight German accent.

“Yes.”

“This is the homosexual quarter, no?”

“Yes.”

“They have special bars with code names, right? A color and an animal means it is a gathering place for homosexuals. Like Pink Pussycat. Or Green Parrot. Right?” He looks up at me with beagle-brown eyes.” Do you frequent these places?”

He’s trying to trap me. “I can’t afford to go to bars,” I say.

He nods, appreciating my answer. 

“So…Do you do fellation?” he asks. 

“What?”

“Do you take a big penis in your mouth?”

Say yes, what difference does it make?

I shake my head.

“Do you like a cock rammed up your anus?” he asks. 

Say yes, for God’s sake, you have to say yes to something.

“ I don’t…”

“Maybe a fist?” he says. “This was a popular practice in the Turkish forces…”

Can’t do it.

“Foreign objects? In the military hospital we found the most amazing things in rectums…”

“No,” I say.

“So,” he says, tapping his pen on the table. “Sado-masochistic? Devices of restraint and punishment. Whips…Cock rings? Very popular with the SS… Do you know what a cock ring is, Mr. Gould?”

“I uh, am not, uh…”

He looks past me, irritably. A small line has formed outside his door.

“What is the dream of many homosexuals, Mr. Gould…?”

“I really don’t…”

“To be surrounded by young men, correct? To train with them, eat with them, sleep with them, take showers with them. To be at sea with a thousand handsome young men in sailor suits. In other words, to be in the military…Wouldn’t it make sense that some homosexuals would pretend to be heterosexual so they could get into this wonderful paradise?”

“I don’t know…”

He cuts me off, impatiently. “Have you ever considered a career in the theatre? Don’t.”

I rise, sensing the interview is over. The old man writes on my form, saying: 

“The American military has a theory that any young man who is so anxious to avoid military service that he will pretend to be homosexual, should not be given the privilege of serving. So, anyone who walks through my door is automatically exempted. But soon there will be a need for manpower and so the theory will be modified to fit the necessity. In other words—” he waves his pen and says loud enough for the kids outside to hear:

“Next year this little trick won’t work.”

NEXT: A PERFECT JOB FOR A LIAR

THE PHYSICAL
Part 3

It’s 1962 and Morris Krieger’s dire warning is ringing in my ears.

“World War III is coming.”

I’m taking my Army physical with several hundred other kids in Selective Service Headquarters off Wall Street in downtown Manhattan. A red faced Sergeant, crewcut bristling, hash marks covering his khaki sleeve, sharply creased blue trousers with a red stripe strides along our line, shouting:

“Strip to your shorts and shoes. Guard your belongings. If you lose your pants you will go home to your mothers bareass naked…”

Krieger, the last anarchist orator of Union Square, greeted JFK’s election with a prediction:

“Camelot will have its war…”

I kept myself awake all night smoking Gauloises to increase my heart rate; chugging Coke to turn my urine brown. Now I’m lightheaded. I stumble into the kid in front of me. He turns with a snarl: “What the fuck’s the matter with you?”

After the Bay of Pigs, Krieger became more strident.

“No one will remember the poor fools left to die on the beach…Millions more will be led to their death…”

I’ve been in high school locker rooms, but have never seen such a grotesque profusion of male flesh. Fat and woebegone, buff and arrogant, slight and timid…Red pustules on white flab, acne clusters, pimples, sores, weird Rorschach bruises. Gray jockeys, bulky boxers with stripes and flowers. The undersized sneak covert looks. The muscled strut and sneer…I try to place myself along this continuum. I am tall, but slouched and narrow-shouldered. I always made the team, but was never a star. I can do sit ups and push ups, but strain at pullups and chins. I’ve fought to defend myself, but have never attacked anyone in anger…

The Russians move their missiles out of Cuba. Krieger scoffs at claims of victory.

“Russians don’t blink. They merely look for another battlefield.“

They give us a form to fill out.

“Print clearly,” an older man in a doctor’s white coat says in a German accent. “If we can’t read it you’ll do it again.”

I curse my good health. There’s an endless column of diseases, but I’ve never had one.

The mental disorders are more promising. Bed-wetting, problems in school, visits to a psychiatrist, arrests, convictions, feelings of persecution, sudden eruptions of rage, homosexual attraction…

I’ve been advised I’ll arouse suspicion if I check them all. Just pick one aberration I can defend.

I check “use alcohol and illegal drugs…”

” Word War II was just a sideshow,” Krieger says. “The Tsar and the Robber Baron tried so hard to get Adolph on their side. Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, Mosley, Chamberlain, Joe Kennedy, JFK’s dad. If only he wouldn’t be so stubborn about the Jews. Even Uncle Joe Stalin wanted to make a deal. From one mass murderer to another. You keep your camps I’ll keep mine. But Adolph wouldn’t share. So they formed an uneasy alliance to silence his Wagnerian oompah band. And when it was over they couldn’t wait to return to the eternal debate on what is the best way to control a subject population–Communist regimentation or Capitalist exploitation…”

We form a single line and shuffle into a large room, the size of a gymnasium where doctors in white coats are waiting. They are elderly, probably retired, and bored. Stethoscopes are pressed to our chests. “Deep breath…Breathe out.” Lights are shined in our eyes, noses and ears…A tongue depressor is thrust so deep in our mouths we gag. “Say Ahhh…”

Some kids are taken out of the line and sent to smaller examination rooms. They’re the lucky ones, but they walk with heads down as if they’ve been found wanting.

A doctor with a hammer gestures impatiently to a chair. “Well, sit down…” He taps our knees lightly. The kid ahead of me shudders and his knee shoots up. Mine hardly moves. “You waiting for the second feature?” he snaps. “Get up.”

Krieger spots me carrying Camus and Hesse.

“Alienation and mysticism,” he thunders. “The cheap thrills of the bourgeois state. Meant to distract the intelligentsia from its oppression.”

It’s pointless to explain that I use the books to start conversations with girls in coffee shops.

“Drop your drawers,” a doctor shouts. A kid walks up to him. He thrusts his hand under his right testicle and orders:

“Cough.”

Then moves the left.

“Cough.”

And does this a hundred times.

At the end of the room a doctor commands:

“Lean over and press the wall with both hands. Now reach back and spread the cheeks of your ass…Spread ‘em!”

He walks up and down the line looking up every one’s ass.

“Did he lose somethin’?” some kid whispers and we all get hysterical laughing.

We walk into a room with rusty sinks, faucets sputtering, along all four walls. A man in a white coat hands out plastic vials.

“Piss in the vial and bring it to the desk,” he orders.

Another moment of truth as we check out the line of pissing penises. Dark ropes, purple veined monstrosities, fragile pink wands; it’s amazing that they are all the same organ. I am abashed by the larger ones, but not encouraged by the smaller.

After all that Coke my urine rust brown.

The man at the desk hands me a tiny dipstick.

“Stick it in your specimen,” he says. “Show it to me.” He hardly looks. “Dump it in the sink…”

We’re done. Our journey through the rooms has taken us back to the entry hall. A man in a white shirt covered with medals checks my form. Suddenly, I am sorry that I checked off drug use.

“Down the hall to the left,” he says.

A line of kids is waiting outside four offices. We hear snatches of conversation.

“How many times a week?”

“Was there a police report?”

“Don’t give me the letter. Send it to the Draft Board.”

I am steered into an office. An old man with two brown moles, each sprouting a hair, on his bald head looks down at my form.

“Drugs?” he asks.

I nod.

” Heroin? Opium? Hashish?”

“Marijuana,” I say.

He writes in a blank space on my form.

“Drinking?”

“Wine…”

“Sweet wine, dry wine? Beaujolais, Chablis?”

“Italian Swiss Colony,” I say. “Whiskey, too?”

“Rye, vodka, gin…?”

“Scotch,” I blurt.

“What kind?”

I panic. Try to remember the weird-shaped bottle in the sideboard that my father sneaks shots out of while my mother is in the kitchen.

“Haig and Haig…”

He looks up with a smile. “Haig and Haig. Can’t afford that on a private’s salary…”

JFK is sending 16 thousand “advisors” to help the South Vietnamese repel the Communist invaders from the north.

“The Tsar cannot take his army away from oppressing his own people,” Krieger says. “He will use the Vietnamese as proxies. The Robber Baron will send his own young men to keep them from making trouble in the Civil Rights movement and Organized Labor…”

Krieger’s wife comes to keep him company. A wiry old lady with sun-leathered skin, she knits while he rants. Unwraps salami sandwiches and pours coffee from a thermos.

“Were you in the Army?” I ask.

“It was important to defeat the Nazis,” he says. “But I did not support the oppressive military system…”

“He was a good soldier,” his wife says, placidly knitting.

Krieger twitches in irritation.

“I was not,” he says.

Three weeks later I get a letter from the Selective Service System. I have been classified “1Y”, which means I am deferred for a year.

It’s what I wanted. Still, I feel rejected and vaguely ashamed.

NEXT: A VERY SHORT REPRIEVE

Igor Yopsvoyomatsky,
editor-in chief, paranoiaisfact.com
answers readers’ questions.

Dear Igor,

I sell souvenirs to tourists on the Staten Island Ferry and after eight years of Dubya I can’t give America away. Nobody wants Statue of Liberty piggy banks, FBI caps, “Brooklyn Rules” tees…Not even Michael Jackson wind up dolls. People used to be in awe of how cool we were–NYC, DC, the Grand Canyon, Hollywood. Now they come to sneer and feel superior. Our plunging dollar makes us a cheap date. Our leaders get no respect. After Bush trashed the American brand I thought Obama would turn it around, but his novelty has quickly faded and now I’m stuck with a gross of “Yes I Can” hoodies. I’m afraid America will never be cool again. Is this paranoia or fact?
Distressed Peddler
Sunnyside, Queens

Dear Distressed,

This is fact. According to a recent Pew survey,the US ranked 117th on the cool index, right under Tierra Del Fuego. Only Russia, China, the UK and Zimbabwe were considered less cool than the US.

America created the 20th. Century in its own image. Victorious in two wars, innovative in industry and the arts, it was a magnet for the best minds and most energetic workers in the world. Everyone loved Detroit cars, Broadway musicals, Hollywood movies, American cigarettes and Elvis. American Capitalism vanquished Soviet Communism by promising eternal, exponential wealth.

America was cool.

Now the American financial house of cards has collapsed. General Motors is begging Government handouts, Broadway is ruled by British imports, Hollywood is a limping subdivision of bloated conglomerates, the Marlboro Man died of lung cancer and Graceland is controlled by Scientology.

Uncool.

In its ascendancy, the US had the coolest leaders. FDR betrayed his class to bring the US out of the Depression. Harry Truman fired MacArthur and stood up to Stalin. Dwight D. Eisenhower, wartime commander and Five Star General, turned on his brethren to warn about the “Military-Industrial Complex.” JFK, brought hipness, taste and sophistication into the White House and called Krushchev’s bluff in Cuba. Even Lyndon Johnson had the dignity to withdraw from public life when the people rejected him.

Cool.

During its slow decline the US has experienced an unbroken chain of bizarre nonentities. Nixon inexplicably recorded his own incriminating statements; Carter, a peanut farmer with delusions of prophecy, left office with a 19% interest rate; Reagan, an underpaid Warner Bros. contract player, actually believed that the rich would allow a minuscule portion of their wealth to “trickle down” to the working class; Clinton, a glib, small town Lothario, enabled Wall Street to take over the American economy. The Bushes are the greatest argument against ruling class inbreeding since the Hapsburgs. Obama has seen ingratiation turn into antagonism and doesn’t know what to do about it.

Uncool.

American celebrities were the coolest in the world. Could anyone top Marilyn or Einstein (he was a citizen), Astaire, Grace Kelly, Jonas Salk, Jackie O, Brando, Duke Ellington, Broadway Joe–the list is truly endless.

Now you have OJ, MJ, Lindsay Lohan, Elliot Spitzer. You have the dangerous nonentities of reality TV. Sports stars who turn themselves into bionic chimeras with steroids and surgery.

But don’t feel too bad, Distressed. At least you can complain. Three quarters of the world must suffer in silence. They live under the heel of oligarchical thugs who maintain their power by censorship, repression, torture, rape and outright massacre.

Uncool

China hasn’t been cool since Confucius, France since Sartre and Belmondo; the UK since James Bond and he wasn’t even real. Italy has a seventy-three year old President who brags to teenage girls about his sexual prowess. Russia was cool with Rasputin, but Putin poses shirtless like Mr. Universe and Medvedev, the little man who wasn’t there, makes pronouncements that no one hears.

The entire planet is totally, hopelessly…

Uncool.