oday I carry 165 pounds on my 5-foot-9-inch frame. But 30 years ago, I starved myself down to a cadaverous 106 pounds (from an already skinny 125) because of the Vietnam War. Some readers of a certain age will immediately guess why. They will also understand that this episode is not my proudest moment.
I didn't start out to be a draft dodger. The draft hung out there in the haze of my postgraduate school future, but I took no steps to avoid it. No conscience-searching interviews with a sympathetic pastor to build a credible record as a conscientious objector; that would be dishonest, I thought, even though I couldn't imagine actually killing someone. No visits to draft counselors who knew how to trump up a medical disqualification. No thought about fleeing into northern exile, even after I drew the clinchingly low number of 66 in the draft lottery. I just drifted toward the inevitable, assuming I'd endure my destiny.
I was against the war, but I never thought I'd end up in Vietnam anyway. Someone said - I clung to the rumor as a certainty - that draftees who had master's degrees in journalism did their time in Kansas City writing hometown press releases. Getting into a nasty struggle with my draft board did not figure into my imagined scenario. But that's what happened.
The story began in the bleak midwinter of 1969. I was at Columbia University working toward that long-planned master's when the dreaded notice arrived from Selective Service (a misnomer if there ever was one). I was thereby directed to present myself at 0700 sharp on February something-or-other in southern Manhattan to undergo a preinduction physical.
On the appointed morning, I was sick. I mean truly, feverishly, diarrhea-and-vomiting sick. I called the Manhattan Selective Service number and explained. No problem, the woman on the other end of the line said, she'd notify my draft board and reschedule me. As I sank bank into my sickbed, I did not think to write down her name.
Somehow, and inevitably, the draft board back in southern Illinois didn't get the word. Some weeks later the board dispatched a terse ''Dear Registrant'' letter. Since I had failed to report as ordered on February whatever for my physical, I was thereby declared delinquent, my student deferment was revoked. They could now swoop into my life and send me off to Nam at any moment, where my records would be stamped with a big red ''DELINQUENT'' so all my superior officers would know at a glance I was an (unsuccessful) draft dodger.
Panic? Outrage? Despair? You have no idea. But as a college-educated son of the '60s, I was wise to things like legal process. Every draft board, it turned out, had an attorney appointed to look after the rights of registrants. My draft board's lawyer was a decent guy, and he instructed me on how to appeal the ''delinquent'' status. All I was looking for at that point was to be inducted in the normal course, without that scarlet ''D'' on my record.
But my life didn't stop pending a Selective Service appeal. Graduation approached. To my astonishment, The Boston Globe, where I had interned the previous summer, asked if I wanted to be a medical writer. My iffy draft status was no obstacle, they said. So my cats and I moved into a $200-a-month basement apartment on Beacon Hill, and within two weeks I knew that writing about medicine and health care in Boston was, for me, journalistic nirvana.
My boxes weren't even unpacked before I was summoned back to Illinois, clean-shaven and shorn, for my appeals hearing. It did not go well. Outrageously and illegally, the board barred its own attorney from the proceedings. I recall five beefy guys shouting things like ''Why did you go to Columbia anyway?'' It probably didn't help that the local newspaper, of which my dad was publisher, had been running articles about the draft board's roughshod handling of (other) registrants. Appeal denied. ''You're going in the Army tomorrow, boy,'' one of the board members actually said. I slunk back to my father's office and called Ian Menzies, then the Globe's managing editor, to explain they wouldn't even let me go back and collect my cats. ''That doesn't sound right,'' Menzies said.
A few hours later I had a call from the draft board's attorney. The board had heard from the state Selective Service office in Springfield, which had received a call from the Globe's Boston law firm. Decision reversed. I was no longer ''delinquent'' and I'd be afforded the privilege of a preinduction physical.
Here's the pivot point of this confession. Back in Boston, I contemplated my undeserved luck and became... well, radicalized is too strong a word, but angry - the anger of a naive liberal who believes that if you play by the rules you'll be treated fairly. I determined to beat the system. And not just out of anger; by now I had a good, solid reason. I wanted to remain a medical writer, and while the Globe would have to hire me back after my stint in the Army, I couldn't count on them holding open that particular job.
Consultation with a Quaker draft counselor in Cambridge revealed few options. One, to be precise, but it was surefire. You could not be drafted if you weighed more than a certain amount for your height, or less than a certain poundage. More was out of the question for my ectomorphic frame, but I thought I could do less.
It's amazing what one can do with motivation, but I can tell you: 500 calories a day is truly punishing. To stave off the hunger pangs, I got hold of some dextroamphetamine diet pills, otherwise known as ''speed.'' Even though I broke the pills in half to make them last longer, my bodily functions were still dramatically speeded up. Colleagues used to gather around to watch me type. Hunger was vanquished, though, and there was a silver lining: my sphincter muscles were so clenched I developed hemorrhoids. Duly documented, of course.
With the support of friends and colleagues in thoroughly antiwar Boston, I maintained the dietary discipline. By the time I got my induction physical notice I had met the goal and then some. So absorbed was I in the task that the ethics of my choice didn't hit me fully until I boarded a chartered bus in Uphams Corner early one drizzly morning to be ferried over to the South Boston induction center. In the next seat was a kid from Dorchester with an asthma inhaler in his hand. Armed as I was with doctors' letters documenting my hemorrhoids and a benign bone tumor - just in case the Army's scales were way out of whack - I asked my seatmate if he had any doctors' letters of his own to attest to the asthma. He didn't.
I've thought about that kid often over the last 30 years, and about the utter unfairness of my good luck, connections, and knowledge of how to play the game. And so, a quarter-century after the bitter conclusion of that war - and of a formative era that taught situational ethics to me and so many of my contemporaries, including First Draft Dodger Bill Clinton - I ask that Dorchester boy's forgiveness here and now.
I just hope to God he's still alive.
Richard Knox is a member of the Globe Staff.
Richard Knox in the 1960s (top), and today.
