Thanatopsis

III

To kill. I had not thought about it seriously until shortly before my 25th birthday at which time my student deferment status would be lost. I had taken an aptitude test given by the Navy at the end of my senior year at BYU, and had done well. The recruiter thought I would be a good candidate for fighter pilot and invited me to come to Alameda Station in San Francisco for further testing, some orientation and a free weekend in the big city. I went.

We rode there in a troop transport aircraft that had those webbed slings for seats and bare steel bulkheads. I thought I was in a World War II movie ready to parachute out into the night sky, tracer fire all around. Sure hope the anti-aircraft guns don’t pick me out of the sky. Very heady stuff.

I did well enough at Alameda to be offered a commission in the Naval Air program. Jet planes. Giant aircraft carriers. Combat. Shot down in the jungles of Vietnam. POW camp. Walter Middy the intrepid.

In a more rational moment and after giving it a lot of thought I declined the Naval Commission and at the same time thoroughly offended my recruiting officer who gave me some textbook hard sell for a period of time. Mostly, it just did not seem right for me. I was frankly non-plussed by some of the pilots I had met at Alameda whose main goal in life, aside from killing Viet Cong, seemed to be getting out of the Navy to become commercial airline pilots. Nothing against that profession at all (honest, Elder Uchtdorf!), but in my naïve idealism I thought it was more appropriate for a guy to serve his country for the sake of service and not as a means to a professional end. I mean, we were at war, already! And shouldn’t we be focused a bit more on the job at hand?

Then within a few months came the My Lai massacre and all of the sordid finger pointing. My main question was how would I stand up under the pressure to kill innocent people? I thought a lot about the Nuremberg trials and all of those people who were supposedly following orders. How easy to lose control of one's self while "following orders."

Then about in the Fall of 1969 there was an invitation posted around campus for all interested male returned missionaries who were draft age to attend a special orientation to be given at the old Mission Home which was on the present site of the Conference Center. I went (there were perhaps 200 of us present). I think one of the speakers had some connection to the local Salt Lake draft board. The gist of the meeting: if you have a dangerously low draft number your best bet is to join the National Guard so you can avoid combat. Period.

Within a couple of months I was invited to get my physical exam preparatory to receiving my draft notice. It fulfilled all the stereotypes I had been exposed to for such an exam.

I passed the exam, and began to think very seriously about going to war.