MIKE
My grades were bad enough though that I lost my financial aid and earned an unscheduled visit from the parents.

Before they came to me though they stopped in for a little chat with the Dean of Students. His desk sported a prominent sign that shouted, “Stop SDS!” As in Students For a Democratic Society, the premier college radical activist group for whities. Except that on our campus its membership consisted of just one guy, whose main activity was dealing, and not in political ideology.

After getting the dean’s old college pep talk, the folks gave it the old college try and ordered me to do the same. I categorically refused. I just wanted to get away from all the phony crap and plunge into the real world, where everything was happening all at once and we would seize the time and throw out all the old rules and older rulers and change the world and the chimes of freedom would ring out across the land, and the seas, and the cosmic consciousness would bring peace and love and unending orgasmic joy and freedom and no more going to school, which was all I’d ever done, gone to school and enough already, OK, I want to live my own life, that’s all, so leave me along and just let me be.

To all this, or whatever it was that came out of my mouth, which was probably (and fortunately) only a crude approximation, to be sure, of what was swirling around in my addled brain, Dad bellowed,“You can’t just drop out Mike! If you do, you’ll get drafted for sure, and goddamn quick too!”

In the haze of my certainty about everything, I’d never thought of that. I was all of 19, prime draft bait. The type draft boards loved to snap up and cut down to size, especially my draft board back in gung ho New London, Connecticut. Preferably into little fragments of flesh splattered all over rice paddies currently controlled by little yellow Reds.

I didn’t have an answer for Lou. I was shocked into silence. He looked smug and knew his one statement had destroyed my entire campaign of liberation.
Because he was right. Dad had outflanked me on the field of harsh reality, despite my dead certainly that I was the one who was dead right.

So I reluctantly agreed to stay in school, and thanks to my child psych teacher’s D I could. The parents and I reached a compromise of sorts. I would try to transfer to a school in NYC I’d heard about, one where real and relevant learning was happening.

Two months later, in February 1969, I got their call informing me that Don Walsh had been snuffed in Nam. Beneath their condolences I imagined Dad being smug again, even though he wasn’t and I was doing all the imagining.

Lou had won this battle, and kept me marching to his orders. The tramp, tramp, tramp of time, however, promised to keep us entrenched in combat, with no way out of our escalating war either.