INDUCTION

My high school classmate Tee was really strung out. We were both at our induction physical for the Selective Service draft. It was 1970, the draft was in full swing, and we were both college dropouts. Tee had dropped out of college, I presumed, because he couldn’t take it anymore. I’d dropped out thinking I’d travel awhile. The Army, as it turned out, was going to make sure I did.

We hadn’t gone together to Ft. Hayes in Columbus for our physicals. We just met up there by coincidence, both having gotten “Greetings from the President of the United States” in the same batch. Now we were in a long line of other nineteen and twenty-year-olds, many of whom, with no special skills, Uncle Sam needed for cannon fodder in Vietnam. The others would be cast according to what they knew how to do and according to the needs of the Army and Marines. If there was no need for your particular skills, you’d probably end up in the cannon fodder category as well.

We were both skinny and shivering, maybe more out of fear than cold, but we gave each other a warm welcome when we met up. We’d never been close friends, just school acquaintances, but this was a place where you were glad to see a familiar face—any familiar face.

Like I say, we were both skinny, but he was skinnier, by a long shot. Christ-on-the-cross skinny, and I could tell he was hurting. He looked like a guy coming off drugs and I thought it was a pretty safe bet to guess he was.

I was thinking that he must have faced a real dilemma before coming here. If they found drugs in his bloodstream, he’d likely be out on a 4-F—unfit to serve on the basis of physical, mental and/or moral standards. But, in that case, wouldn’t they, perhaps, just turn him directly over to the narks? I couldn’t help but notice that there were State Police at the exits and didn’t figure they were there for show. From the looks of Tee, he’d opted to come in clean—if pretty shaky and paranoid-looking. Myself, I was thinking this experience would be a lot less daunting with a six-pack. Alas...

As if on cue, for those of us wondering what they were there for, the State Police sprang into action. There was a hulking guy who looked like a Caucasian sumo wrestler a few men up ahead in line, who suddenly stepped out of line, leaned up against the wall and lit up a Lucky. He stood there smoking placidly until a pint-sized buck sergeant with an MP armband and a chest full of ribbons on his dress greens, called out, “You! Hey, shithead! Put out that butt and get the hell back in line!”

The big guy feigned hardness of hearing and kept right on smoking.

“Hey, you, lard-ass,” the buck sergeant tried again, “you better douse that butt and get back in line before I count to three or you’ll wish to hell you had.”

The big guy half-turned and glanced at the sergeant with about as much interest as an elephant might look at a house-fly and said, “What’s yer problem, short-stuff? You ain’t got no authority over me, man. Go screw yourself.”

“One...two...” the buck sergeant counted as he moved purposefully up on the wrestler, who responded, “Screw you, hotshot!” tossed his cigarette and crouched in a fighter’s stance.

Draft protesters often gathered outside recruitment stations.

“Three!” shouted the sergeant and lunged. The big guy threw a wild haymaker, which the quick little guy easily ducked, and now the sergeant was behind the other fellow who was twice his size, grasping him by the back of his belt and a handful of collar and, with really impressive speed and uncommon strength, was rushing the hulk toward the exit, hurling him toward the two State Troopers guarding the door and shouting, “Get this sack of shit outa here!” And before the big guy knew what’d hit him, he was on the floor, face down, getting cuffed. Then the troopers pulled him up and hauled him away.

I wondered fleetingly if this all had merely been a show, some theater among friends to put the fear of God into the rest of us and keep us moving along without resistance, since, for all intents and purposes, we were still civilians—though not for long. But I didn’t figure it was a mystery worth solving.

They had just told us all to strip down to our shorts but to leave our shoes on. There were guys who were well adapted to this, wearing, as they were, the sandals that were popular at the time among college hipsters. They might have been going to the beach, if it weren’t Ohio, late February, and in the thirties outside. For my part, a musician nerd, I was shod in shiny black wingtips, which, with my size twelve feet, scrawny white body, extra-long legs, and white jockey shorts, looked anything but elegant. We were instructed to fold our clothes and carry them in front of us with both hands and with the folder full of forms that they’d given us on top.

The lottery system was a new addition to the Vietnam draft.

This was how we progressed through the large, warehouse-like building, from station to station, where medical personnel gathered data on us—height, weight, physical characteristics and maladies, blood pressure, pulse, etc. etc. At one point we were all lined up in a row in a large open space and were told to do an about face, and place our belongings neatly on the floor in front of us. Then an NCO bellowed, “Aw right, drop your drawers, bend over and spread your cheeks.”

There’s always a wise guy, and a fellow a few men down the line from me stripped down his underwear, bent over, stuck his index fingers into the corners of his mouth as if to whistle and spread his lips wide in double fish-hook fashion. A few of those closest to him chuckled, but the joker turned out to be the second one hauled away by the State Police. Now a doctor accompanied by a corpsman carrying a gross of rubber gloves passed behind us probing us for god-knew-what before permitting us to pull our shorts back up.

I had no problem with the subsequent urine sample since I’d been wanting to ask for the restroom for a long time by then. My only fear, as I stepped into one of the tiny stalls provided, was that the smallish plastic cup they gave us wouldn’t be big enough. But this test turned out to be a real challenge for Tee. I had already turned over my more than sufficient urine sample, and moved ahead in the line, while Tee remained for an inordinately long time out of sight behind the stall door.

Finally, a burly sergeant went up to the stall, hammered on the door and hollered, “Hurry it up, rookie! We ain’t got all day. What do you think, that were rentin’ you that goddamn stall?”

I heard Tee’s muffled voice from inside say, “I can’t piss,” to which the sergeant responded that he’d better figure out how to pretty damn quick unless he wanted to be a guest of the Army overnight. This must have literally scared the piss out of Tee, because within a few seconds he emerged with a paltry sample in hand.

The day dragged on from morning into the early afternoon. Finally we were done and were read our qualifications. Mine was 1-A, apt for immediate service. I was given a date in March to report for induction and active duty. Though I’d expected it, the reality of it hit me and I was stunned.

When I stepped back outside, the air was cold and clear and smelled like snow. It might have been the first time I’d ever breathed air for as sweet as it seemed. Not even the sentence of induction into the Army hanging over my head could dampen my joy at being back outside, at still being a civilian, at still being a free man, as I returned to my car.

As I was pulling out, I saw Tee standing by his battered Corvair, grinning from ear to ear.

“What’s so funny?” I asked, rolling down my window.

He held up a piece of paper that the classifying medical officer had handed him. “Four-F,” he grinned. And I immediately thought of his urine sample. But then he said, “Flat feet! Who would have guessed it?”

LETTERS FROM GOD

The letters came to me while I was news editor at the Buenos Aires Herald in the seventies and eighties. There were several over the years, neatly typed on a manual machine.

The first ones were addressed to the editor in chief. He would normally have tossed them into the waste basket—or simply allowed them to get lost in the avalanche of paper that he lived with and that littered every available surface in his cramped office. But since it was one of my duties to sort through each day’s mail, decide which letters to the editor would get into our readers’ section called “Your View”, and then edit them to fit the space allotted, the boss thought that it would be funny to send this particular crank message along to me noting that I should handle it, perhaps, since the guy was “from my neck of the woods.”

Each letter began with the same salutation: As Almighty GOD, I greet you. And it seems that Maple Heights, Ohio—my home state—was the new Nazareth. That’s where God’s son, Eugene Chaney, made his home. The letters came to Buenos Aires “FROM THE DESK OF EUGENE CHANEY”. God explained, more or less, that he was everywhere but that one of the trade-offs for omnipresence was the impossibility of physically writing the letters Himself—although I could only presume that he hadn’t lost his ability to sear letters into stone tablets, should the occasion arise.

There was always something divinely whiny in God’s letters. He had a bone to pick with the press. “It is almost unbelievable,” he wrote once, “that My Holy SPIRIT has been in My Son’s body for decades now. Unbelievable because of the eerie pall of silence which hovers over the newspaper industry. Editors and publishers suppress the news that I Am Actually Alive in My Son. Thus, humanity remains ignorant of My Existence.”

Certain of today’s so-called “evangelicals” might be interested (appalled) to learn that Almighty God was not the white supremacist deity that many of them seem to worship today. He was, it seems, indeed a white God, or at least he had chosen to materialize in the form of his white Buckeye son, Eugene. But he had a soft spot for minorities. “Just as the 12 tribes of Israel were My chosen people in Biblical times,” he wrote, “Blacks have replaced them in modern times.” They should know, he said, that “prayers of anguish that rise from humble dwellings and store-front churches do not fall on deaf ears.” And then he added, “Heaven is not only for Caucasians, but for Blacks and other denominations as well.”

He wanted to assure editors like myself, posted in what he considered far-flung corners of the earth, that “the Watchful Eyes of My Greater Spirit, which hovers over the universe” were emanating love to “all who are destitute and lowly in spirit throughout the world. Africa, India, South America, all underdeveloped nations are under My Watchful Gaze.”  

He confirmed that he formed part of a trinity—Father, Eugene and Holy Ghost. “Justice is not dead,” he said. There would be “Judgment for ALL humanity someday.” Those responsible for “the suffering of children and the aged” would have to answer for it when they met their Maker. “It is pathetic,” he continued, “the bloated bellies of starving children who cannot comprehend why their parents cannot feed them. Even in this affluent country, many children go to bed hungry.” Despite having an ostensibly flawed omniscience with regard to the level of development of some South American nations—at the time, Argentina, for instance, had one of the highest literacy rates on the planet, and had long served as ‘the bread-basket of Europe’ as well as being the sixth-ranked trading nation in the world for the entire first half of the 20^th century—clearly, God was nobody’s fool. He indeed appeared to see a lot, including the pockets of extreme poverty in the otherwise wealthy nation of Eugene’s birth.

But his empathy was not for one class alone. “I love the poor in humble Churches,” he wrote, “not just the congregations of Posh Cathedrals. I Am for the frail, weary and broken-hearted—all who suffer throughout the world. But let it not be said that I overlook the affluent. I Love All of humanity who do not let Worship die, like the petals of a faded, Crushed Rose.”

Eugene, God explained, was not a carpenter, like The One to whom he alleged to be Successor, but a machinist in a metals shop. Eugene put in a 40-hour week there and then devoted the rest of his time to the work of his father’s “non-profit organization”. From what God said, most of what they did was write letters, “which we send first class using our own money.” It wasn’t always easy. “My Son has a paltry three thousand dollars in His bank account,” he explained. But God, evidently, provided when Eugene couldn’t.

Their mailing campaign was directed not only toward editors and publishers, but also toward politicians. He once sent me some excerpts from letters Eugene had sent to US senators. In them he voiced his opposition “to the horrendous arms escalation and the deployment of nuclear devices.” All I could think on reading this was that if God Almighty was delusional, at least his heart was in the right place and in keeping with his son’s inherited legacy as the Prince of Peace. This was surely more than I could say for the parade of multi-millionaire evangelists who had wended their self-righteous way through the halls of the White House and Congress over the years giving their blessing to every war that my country had either started or gladly participated in for decades.

“Billions upon billions of dollars for defense, but no dollars for the underprivileged—this is the sad state of affairs in both the United States and Russia,” God posited. “Both super-powers are hogs for defense capital, as prestige is the main source of power between the two nations.”

God admonished the lawmakers that he wrote to, saying, “I would remind you, Senator, that you and your colleagues are servants to the people who put you in office. You are, therefore, obligated to them as to how you spend their tax monies, and to spend them wisely and justly.”

And then the clincher, which, I feel, had the subconscious sting of a Gypsy curse, even for those who tried to laugh it off as the ravings of a madman: “You and your Colleagues are obliged to abide by My Laws as well as Man’s. The destiny of countless starving people around the world is in your hands and those of your Colleagues. In this life as in the life to come, the just and the unjust must be counted. No one can escape the cog wheels of destiny as they turn and grind out Justice.”

Sometimes he apologized for such outbursts, saying, for example, that his heart was “heavy-laden because this Letter must end on a sour note.” His closings were often sad and less than optimistic, like the one in which he said, “With tears in My Eyes and a Prayer on My Lips for a brighter future, as your CREATOR, My Holy Spirit has Dictated this Letter to you through My Son, who wrote My Very Words. My Holy Name is void of form, so it is never written on paper. My Son will sign this Letter, as He will also Pray for a future that is void of tears.”

It was signed,

“Prayerfully Yours,

Eugene Chaney”

I received a final missive in the latter part of 1982, following the Falklands War. After the sadness and confusion of that conflict, I could have used an encouraging word from somebody. But if I expected to receive it from God and The Desk of Eugene Chaney, I was out of luck.

It began, like all the others:

“As Almighty God, I greet you.”

But this one had a different tone. It was mildly defeatist and resigned. Its mood could best be described as “weary”.

“The days are dwindling for My Son who looks forward to early retirement,” God said. “Eugene will be sixty-two on the twelfth of November, nineteen hundred eighty-two.” Eugene had been a machinist for forty years by then. “On Saturdays, Sundays and holidays, My Son and I spend Our spare time mailing Letters and Books to newspapers. We have not had a vacation in twenty years,” he went on. “The grind has been devastating. My Son has been hospitalized several times for nervous fatigue.”

His son’s life savings amounted to a few measly thousands of dollars. And, despite having put in four decades working in a metals shop, Eugene had never managed to own real estate, or even a car.

They were looking forward to their retirement, he indicated. But he lamented that although they would have time on their hands, they would no longer have the financial resources to maintain their campaign to spread The Good News and the Direct Word of God far and wide. This was a campaign that they had been nurturing, he said, since 1960. “To say that Editors and Publishers have been unkind to Us by not publishing Our Works in their respective periodicals is an understatement,” he complained. However, he said, “My Son and I will always be alive, dispensing Justice, in this dimension of Time and Light, even though newspapers continue to see fit to suppress The Word.”

That was the last that I ever heard from Almighty God and Eugene. They cross my mind from time to time. I wonder what happened to them. I figure that Eugene, mortal as he was, very likely passed on, since he would be nearly a hundred years old if he were alive today. But at the risk of giving an unintentional nod to Nietzsche, I can’t help asking myself if, perhaps, father and son died together, or were truly one to begin with. Or did Eugene and his father simply reach the conclusion that the salvation of the human race was a lost cause and decide to take a permanent vacation from Earth?