Outlaw Buddhist
On the Ways of War and Women Chapter 2
As the first winds of desert war flamed past,
I sat on a porch in the Pacific Northwest drinking
coffee and smoking cigarettes, thinking back to the
Sixties with Elsa, a Berliner, who moved to the
States (with a Jewish husband, fifty years and
a Hitler ago).
"When Peter was fighting the draft board for
his conscientious objector status. We told him we were
behind him one hundred percent. After all we had fled one
country for political reasons. We could do it again."
I recalled the time then President Lyndon Johnson
upped the stakes in Vietnam with a massive troop
buildup. I was in Germany playing low rent soldier
slaving over antique IBM machines and thinking of
ways, in which paper clips might render the machines
inoperative; thereby, destroying the efficiency level
of my work and decreasing the chances that a nebbish
such as myself would be deemed critical to the war effort.
During a long distance phone call to the States
A few days after the President's speech
my mother suggested I make the army a career.db