The notice came in 1972.

I was young 18. Everybody was young then. That was the point of it.

I read it and I knew what it was before I finished the first line. Everybody knew what it was. You did not have to read it.

What I did next is the part I have never told straight.

I went down to the recruiter and I enlisted.

Now understand what that meant at the time. A drafted man served two years. A man who walked in and signed served three, sometimes four.

I signed away extra years of my life on purpose.

I did it because a drafted man goes where they put him. An enlisted man takes a test and picks his job.

That was the whole reason. I wanted a say.

There were other roads that year and I want to name them, because a man telling this story straight does not get to leave them out.

Canada was open. Men went.

Deferments were being handed out to anybody with the money to find the right doctor or the right school. That was happening all around and everybody knew it was happening.

I did not do any of that.

I walked into a government office and put my name on a paper that said I belonged to them for the next several years.

So I took the test. I sat there and I did the work and I did well enough.

Then the recruiter looked up at me and asked me where I would like to be stationed.

He gave me two choices.

Vietnam or Germany.

I want to slow down right here, because this is the moment I have been carrying for fifty four years.

Two choices. One of them had a death sentence hanging off the end of it and the other one did not.

And I did not think about it. Not for one second. There was no weighing it. There was no long pause while I searched myself.

I looked at that man and I said, do I look stupid.

Germany.

And that is where I went.

That is the story. That is all of it.

Now here is the part underneath it.

I have told that story a lot of times over the years and I have always told it as a joke. Do I look stupid. People laugh. I laugh.

I put the joke on the front of it so nobody could get behind it.

Because the thing I actually wonder is not whether I made the right call.

It is that I made it so fast.

Some part of me has always thought a serious man would have struggled with that. Would have sat with it. Would have felt the weight of what he was choosing and what he was choosing away from.

I did not feel any weight. I felt relief.

And I have wondered ever since whether that says something about me that I would rather not know.

I have thought about it long enough now to say where I have landed.

The choice was his to offer. He offered it.

The Army decided Germany was a place they were willing to put me, or it would not have been on the table. Slots were slots. There was no man who went in my place because I said Germany. That is not how any of it worked.

And the speed of it was not weakness. It was clarity.

Wanting to live is not a character flaw. If I had sat there and made a show of agonizing over it, I would have been performing something for a recruiter, and he had seen that performance a hundred times already.

The men who went over there and came back are the ones whose opinion I would actually take on this. And in my experience the ones who were in it never wanted company in it. Every one of them I have known said the same thing about anybody who caught a Germany. Good. Take it.

Nobody who was in that place wished more men into it.

I served. I did my time. I did it in a cold place a long way from home and I did it because a piece of paper came and I answered it.

That is the whole of what I owed and I paid it.

So no. I do not think I was wrong.

I think I was a kid who got handed a real choice, which almost nobody got that year, and I took the one that let me come home.

And I think the reason it never settled in me is not that the answer was hard.

It is that I never once told it without the joke on the front.

Fifty four years of telling a story with armor on it. A thing you never say straight is a thing you never actually look at.

So I said it straight. Right here. One time.

If you have got one of those, and most men my age do, I would say the same to you.

Tell it once without the joke.

You might find out you have been carrying something that was never yours to carry.

U.S. military draft ends, Jan. 27, 1973

On the day in 1973, as the Vietnam War drew to a close, the Selective Service announced that there would be no further draft calls.

Another reason I built the Faust Baseline. Truth has a price. We pay it forward out of our own history, and this one is mine.

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This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.

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