Paul Tucker:  

How I Won The War (apologies to Richard Lester and John Lennon) I graduated from Nathan Hale High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1965 along with 775 of my fellow baby boomers. I spent the next four years at the University of Oklahoma, protected from the Vietnam War by a college deferment. The deferment was a trade off. If a draftable student (any male over the age of 18) remained in college, he was immune from the draft. Dropping out, flunking out, or graduating equaled imminent entry into the military. Prior to my graduation from OU in 1969 I had become opposed to the war in Vietnam. Like Dick Cheney, Vietnam wasn’t one of my priorities. Unlike Dick (and W.), hiding from the draft wasn’t one of my priorities. The alternatives I saw for at that time were: 1) To wait and to be drafted. 2) To refuse the draft and go to prison. 3) To flee to Canada and become an expatriate. 4) to enlist. It felt like all of the options represented a form of incarceration. Either being drafted or enlisting constituted incarceration within the military system. Going to to Canada seemed an equivalent to incarceration in that I would not be free to return to the United States if I wished to do so. I ultimately chose door number four. I felt that my incorporation into the military was the form of incarceration that was the most acceptable. Although enlisting meant at least three years of military service instead of the two I would serve if drafted, enlisting gave me some choice as to the branch of service and, to a degree, the MOS (military occupational specialty) in which I might be trained. While the Marines offered a two year enlistment, I would have opted for prison if those were my only two choices. As a budding bleeding heart, I had gotten my degree in social work. In exploring my enlistment options, I hoped to find an MOS that would allow me to help, rather than to napalm others. I was particularly interested in finding an MOS in a psychiatric setting. Not only might I be doing something that might help others, but it would also likely be performed somewhere other than in a combat zone. Sanity and war are mutually exclusive concepts. After talking with recruiters, I learned that the Army offered a guaranteed MOS enlistment program for neuropsychiatric corpsman (MOS 91F20). A guaranteed MOS meant that if an enlistee had a sufficiently high GT (general technical) score on testing everyone entering the military had to undergo, they were guaranteed entry into the training program for that particular MOS. I enlisted and was inducted on 3Oct69. After completing basic training at Fort Polk, Combat Medical and Neuropsychiatric Corpsman schools at Fort Sam Houston, I was assigned to Chambers Pavillion, the psychiatric ward at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas. Working in Army psyc...Expand for more