Soldiers’s grim message found 25 years after Vietnam

by William Wayne Page –

 

This jar was found in a sealed off loft apartment over a garage, the location on the ridge in Jersey City overlooking lower Manhattan.  It was sitting on a kitchen table. I picked it up and looked at the barely visible signature, R. Haynes 11/5/68.  It was on the corner of the drawing of a soldier being plucked amidst a graveyard marked by crosses with helmets on them.  It decreed inside “a different kind of selective service”.  The decree dated 12/12/68.  The drawing delicately rolled up and sealed in a mason jar.  The war it was referencing was Vietnam and the artist was making the statement to the “draft” that would be bringing death to thousands of Young American Men.   

 

I was drafted for deployment to Vietnam, pulling the number 15.   The numbers went to 366.

With lower numbers you’d get drafted.  Higher numbers could be called into draft too.  The break for my year was 194… and lower…but the conflict was being refuted, the plan to withdraw in motion….

We had lined up on the airstrip in the dark early morning preparing to be deployed to Vietnam 1970.  Before we boarded we were surprised to hear our orders for deployment were cancelled.

It was dark, the lights on the plane bright. We mustered at 4:00AM on the runway, 80 of us Marines trained as a weapons platoon.  Our thoughts were stark.  We had the sense of no return, killed in action, numbered in a body count shown on evening news.  1970, there had been a request for 200,000 more men to overwhelm the enemy in Vietnam. 20,000 of us needed and transported a month became the bleak realization.  A soldier could be seen up front with a clipboard talking to the Captain.  A hand to a forehead was no salute but a reasoning of circumstances.  The soldier left, the captain turned with a faint smile and called out loudly, “Attention!”  Everyone stood pulling their duffel bags against their legs. “Orders changed, deployment cancelled.

25 years later I found this message in a jar, seeing it for the terror it really represented.                                             

I honor deeply those woman and men that did serve, many still suffering from that experience.  They trusted to serve an administration that in moral ineptitude held the fear of ideals higher than the value of their serving military personnel’s lives.