In the early 1969 the male members of the Garland Gang faced the
biggest obstacle in their young lives: how to avoid being drafted.
To my knowledge I was one if the only one who actually served in the
military during that time. If there were others, I was never able to determine
who the other lucky participants were.
Jimmy, Frank, Garrick, Bob, Alf, Wayne Hoover and all the others each
found their own unique way of escaping military service.
The big difference is that while they were trying to find a way to stay
out of the army, I was desperately seeking a way to get in.
I had fallen in love and was totally confused and saw the Army as a
kind of French Foreign Legion where I could go off to contemplate my future. But
each I applied the doctors in Newark rejected me because I had some kind of
kidney ailment that precluded me from serving.
Frank kept telling me how lucky I was only I didn't see it that way.
In those days we all had to go to the Federal Building in downtown
Newark, a huge black Spike on Broad Street where we all had to go through the
ritual of physical.
Many of us had heard the strategies for how to get rejected which
included taking a lot of drugs the night before or in the weeks before and then
getting rejected on account of strange blood ailments.
This was Wayne Hoover's solution; he took so many drugs of such a
variety that they rejected him immediately. Unfortunately overtime this proved
detrimental to his kids who wound up with a series of problems that included
seizures.
Bob Warren had heard that if you ingested massive amounts of cotton
balls the X-ray would show a growth inside of him which he did. But he had also
done so many drugs for so long that it is hard to tell whether it was the
massive use of drugs or the detection of a mass inside of him that ultimately
gave him the 4f status he so desperately wanted.
Garrick had hearing so bad even then he could not hear half the stuff
that was being sent through the headset. He kept asking them when they were
going to start the test, and so eventually they came to realize he couldn’t
hear and gave him a 4-f distinction.
Frank was deathly afraid of needles -- something that would get him in
deep trouble later in life. When the
Army doctors took blood, he fainted. This
combined with how frail and underweight he was giving him a 4-f distinction as
well.
Jimmy, of course, should have been exempt because of his conviction on pot
possession. He had been caught copping pot at the Agora coffee house in
Montclair at some point earlier.
But just to make sure he went in and talked to the army
psychologist. They were behind closed
doors for almost an hour. Nobody
actually knows what Jimmy said and he never revealed it either. But when he got out, he had a 4-f stamp on
his forms.
Meanwhile after being rejected by the Army doctors because of blood in
my urine, I went to a local doctor at St. Joe's to get a re-evaluation. When those tests confirmed the Army's test, I
stole a piece of letterhead from the doctor and then typed out of clearance
form on my grandmother's typewriter in the attic.
Then when it came time to take the urine test in Newark, I switched
cups with someone else and thus passed.
all this would later become my salvation when the Army decided to change
my MOS and send me to Vietnam.
Jimmy was delighted at my becoming a soldier not because he wanted to
see me fight in the war but because he had other uses for me as someone in
uniform.
He would fully exploit this over the summer of 69.
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