PART TWO VIETNAM

WORDS BY: BRIAN DAHLEN

How do you forgive a dead man? Particularly when he’s your grandfather?

In this limited series, Moody Radio host Brian Dahlen takes a five-year journey surrounding family mystery, forgiveness, and faith in the face of generational sin.

PICTURE THIS: It’s December 1, 1969. You’re twelve years old, and it’s a cold Monday night. Mom’s in the kitchen making some Shake ’N Bake, and Dad has his nose in the sports section of the newspaper, as usual. A seventh straight loss for the Giants? This time to the Packers. He looks at the clock and puts the paper down. It’s time for your favorite show. Every Monday night your whole family, along with millions of other Americans, gather around the TV to watch the hit show “Mayberry RFD,” a spin-off of the Andy Griffith Show. So you can imagine your disappointment when a CBS news special report interrupts your favorite Monday night activity.

To make matters worse, your routine was interrupted by what felt like a mash-up of bingo, a Powerball drawing, and the Hunger Games. Seriously.

Here’s how it worked: there were over 350 game pieces in the form of small, blue plastic capsules. Hidden inside of each was a neatly folded slip of paper with some writing on it. And instead of a slick gameshow host reaching into the container to pull them out, it was officiated by Washington bureaucrats.

As boring as that sounds, you kept watching.

And nobody wanted to win.

What was going on?

It was the first draft lottery since 1942. But instead of being sent to Europe or the Pacific, American young men across the country would be shipped to the jungles of Vietnam.

Those blue plastic capsules each contained a birthday. The order in which they were randomly drawn would determine which men of draft-eligible age would have to report for induction into the military in 1970. The earlier your birthdate was called, the more likely you would be going to war.

General Lewis Hershey, Director of the Selective Service System, opened the ominous event by nervously referring to himself in the third person. New York Congressman Alexander Pirnie, the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, reached in to grab the first capsule, opened it up, and read the first date.

No young man in America with a birth year between 1944 and 1950 could avoid being assigned one of those numbers.

Pat Sajak from Wheel of Fortune? His number was 7.

Bruce Springsteen? 119.

Jay Leno: 223.

Meanwhile, Sylvester Stallone and George W. Bush both breathed a sigh of relief when their shared birthday was the 327th called.

Then there was my soft-spoken, introverted dad, Bill. His number? 82.

But what did these numbers mean? The closer your number was to 1, the higher chance you had of getting drafted into the military. I asked my dad about his experience during the 1969 draft.

“I was [number] 82, and that was sort of this sinking feeling, as I recall. There was a pretty good chance that I’m going to get drafted… [I had a] better chance of getting drafted than not because it’s close to

1. If you were 1, you were drafted… I remember one guy in class saying he got 360 or 364, and he said, ‘I was thinking of enlisting.’ And I said, ‘can we trade?’”

My dad explained his options: If you were enrolled in college, you could get a deferment. That would allow you to postpone being drafted, as long as you’re carrying at least twelve credits per quarter and passing all your college courses. Since my dad was already a freshman at the University of Minnesota, he could keep working on his degree and avoid the draft temporarily. But the government only gave you four years to defer the draft for college.

A few months after my dad got his college degree, something came in the mail.

“I got a notice from Richard Nixon, President of the United States, [and the letter said] ‘Greetings, you are hereby ordered to report to the Armed Forces Entrance and Examination Station in Minneapolis.' I ended up—after I got that—I enlisted for two years, and I could defer my enlistment. So that meant that I could delay the entry into the Army, and I could delay it 180 days, and the recruiter and I counted out 180 days, and that’s what I did.”

Once his deferments were up, my dad still did not really want to go to Southeast Asia. So he took one more shot at delaying the inevitable in a pretty hilarious way. The way he saw it, there were two strategic ways that he could fail his physical. First, he had what’s called a pilonidal cyst. What’s that, you ask? Well, it’s an infected pocket of skin right near the tailbone, specifically—as I saw on the Mayo Clinic’s website—it indicates that it typically is “at the top of the cleft of the buttocks.” Anywho, once infected, it’s swollen and painful and needs to be drained. My dad figured if he could enflame and rupture this pilonidal cyst, the Army physician would not only be grossed out but would reject him from the draft. Of course, the problem is how do you get a pilonidal cyst to rupture? Well, Dad tried to figure that one out—

“So I bounced up and down on the cement floor in the basement for a while to see if I could get it going, and it didn’t work. But this was before my regular physical.”

His second strategy had a sort of music connection. You see, my dad was playing drums in the band at the time, and the wife of one of his bandmates had an idea—

“At the advice of [a] bandmember’s wife who was diabetic, I drank two bottles of Reactose, which is something diabetics use to get their blood sugar up. But they don’t drink two bottles. And then I chased it down with a Coke before the physical. Went in and had the urinalysis and came back, [and the doctor said] ‘Hey, you made it!’ I think they ignored the [blood sugar] test…”

Then it was eight weeks of basic training starting in March of 1973. But due to his college degree and manly typing skills, he managed to become what’s called, in our family, a “Chairborn Ranger.” The real title was “Clerk Typist,” and that eventually meant he would be stationed in Udorn, Thailand, which is in northern Thailand, not too far from Hanoi, Vietnam, on the other side of the border. He worked in the Personnel Office at the military base as a Records Clerk.

As you might imagine, contacting Minneapolis, Minnesota, from Udorn, Thailand, in 1973 wasn’t so simple. There’s no Skype, there’s no FaceTime. There’s no texting. So, of course you could hand write a letter. Or you could go through a short wave radio operator to contact home. But my mom and dad came up with a 1970’s trendy way to communicate with their family back home: they communicated with audio tapes and sent them through the mail. It was a way to hear your loved ones’ voices. Now this wasn’t instantaneous, like it is today. It took time to send and receive those tapes.

After two years of mandatory service filled with cassette tapes shipped across the world, my parents were finally back home in Minnesota by March of 1975.

Where did they live? With the man who would later disown us over a birthday card. My Grandpa Tom and Grandma Betty welcomed them into their home for a few months as my dad looked for work and they readjusted to life out of the army. By June of 1975, they moved into their own apartment.

Then just six months later, tragedy struck. And it was likely the beginning of the end of my dad’s relationship with his father. //