They sent a bus to pick us up and take us to the recruiting center. We were fifty plus draft age young men living in a college town. Some of us had graduated. Most had dropped out. Local government made an effort to round up our addresses. Draft notices were sent. We were to report for a physical. Euripides lived in an attic on River Street. We gathered there the night before. His old lady was there and a few other chicks. We did massive quantities of drugs. We made plans. I read case histories of schizophrenics and practiced paranoid delusions. I got amazingly high on acid, grass, and hash. A lot of what happened between midnight and dawn remains fuzzy, but in the morning we were on the bus, as ragged an assortment of freaks as imaginable. Among us was a genuine madman. He sometimes ate glass for the attention it brought, letting a stray shard cut his lips for the effect of the blood. His name was Paul but we all called him Glass.

Once we got inside the induction center there was nearly a riot. Together in one room we chanted antiwar slogans, we screamed obscenities. Soon though they broke us up, lead us off into small rooms, and we got lost among the several hundred young men being inducted that day. When it was over, when we were all on the bus back home, everyone had a story. The one who wore panties and a bra. The one who laughed at every question. The one who stole pens off the psychiatrist's desk.

When the notices came, we were all 4-F. All of course except Glass, who was 1-A, and eventually went to VietNam.

I remember someone in a bar around that time said to Euripides that we beat the system and what jackasses they were, and Euripides got pissed off and told him to open his eyes, that we didn't fool anyone, that they knew exactly who we were and what we were doing. Then he was shouting and the bar got quiet. They didn't draft us, he said, because they didn't want us. Then he seemed embarrassed and muttered something else and the noise picked up again and the evening went on.