With wars raging in Iran, Israel, Ukraine, and Lebanon, and the proposed reinstatement of automatic registration into the Selective Service System, memories of my Vietnam experience have been coming back.
In 1966, I dropped out of UConn, 18 years old and with no direction, and I moved back in with my parents. My father suggested I consider joining the military, so I went to the recruitment center in Norwalk. On my way out the door, my father implored me to not sign anything.
The recruitment officer found out that I was bilingual and suggested I would be valuable as an interpreter. He showed me photographs of the language school in Monterey, Calif. It was winter in Ridgefield and the images were inviting so, like an idiot, I enlisted.
I started with basic training at Fort Jackson, S.C., in April 1967, then went on to Fort Gordon, Ga., for infantry training. In August, I received my orders to go to Vietnam as an M50 machine gunner. I went to the second lieutenant and told him I was supposed to go to language school; he told me, “Son, you can go to language school after your one-year tour of duty in Vietnam.” I was stunned.
I was given a one-month leave before reporting to Fort Lewis, Wash., the debarkation point to get on a boat to Vietnam. The scene at Fort Lewis was chaotic. The only thing you had to do was show up for roll call three times a day to see if you had been called to report to duty. I asked around with other G.I.s who had been there for a while and found out it would be weeks before my name was called.
So I started to hitchhike after the morning roll call to hang out with hippies around the University of Washington in Seattle. They would challenge me as to why I was going to war. After a few days, I came to my senses and realized it was crazy to go to Vietnam. So I went AWOL and flew to Youngstown, Ohio, where a college friend who had also dropped out was living.
I decided I would call my parents and ask them to mail me my passport so I could go to Canada and, from there, fly to Nicaragua, where my brother had a rice farm.
The day the passport arrived, there was a knock on the door. It was two F.B.I. agents. I learned later that law enforcement personnel would receive cash rewards for capturing AWOLs. My parents and I surmised that the F.B.I. had tapped their phone and knew I would be receiving a passport by mail. I was terrified and uncertain as to my fate.
I stayed in the Youngstown County Jail through the holidays. In my 10-man cell, there were nine African Americans and me. When I sat down on my bunk, they asked me if I had a jacket, and I said, “No, but I have three sweaters on.” The whole cell block burst out laughing: It turned out that a “jacket” meant a criminal record. I felt like I was 2 feet tall.
It was a challenge to navigate the personalities in the cell, and one inmate was quite threatening. One night, he started attacking me, and fortunately the oldest man in the cell, who was in the bunk next to mine, came to my rescue.
After the New Year, two M.P.s came to get me and brought me, handcuffed and in a special train compartment, to Fort Meade, Md. Early the next morning, I was put in a holding cell in the commander’s building, which was like a country club compared to the county jail.
When the commander arrived for work, he looked in the cell and pointed at me—I had long hair by that time—and said, “You look like you’ve been out for a while. Why don’t you tell me what you’ve been up to.” He was an African American colonel who had done three tours of duty, was about to retire, and was disillusioned by the war. He said he would see what he could do for me.
A few weeks later, my parents flew down to see me and arranged a meeting with the commander. They were decorated heroes in the French Resistance and had saved a badly burned American pilot and helped him get back to England. They brought their plaques, signed by General Eisenhower, and my mother brought a loaf of French bread she had baked and a jar of homemade apricot jam. He told them that he would do what he could.
A few weeks later, in April 1968, I was released from the brig, with a general discharge under honorable conditions. I went back to UConn on the G.I. Bill and spent my college years protesting the war.
Years later, at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., the only real friend I had made in infantry training, Hood Hunt, was among the names of the deceased. I felt both deeply sad and extremely lucky to have not gone to war.
Michel Venghiattis now lives in Nicasio.