Society

2-S

Barry Trutor

I flunked out of the University of Vermont in May 1968. For the last forty years, I’ve told folks that the Dean of Arts and Sciences, based on my stellar performance, instructed me to go on sabbatical. Nine thousand miles away, the Vietnam War was raging. In light of my sabbatical, the Selective Service board changed my 2-S student deferment to 1-A. 1-A equaled a direct do-not-pass-go induction into the United States Marine Corps. I didn’t see myself as a Marine.

My father was a career man in the US Army. He started as a buck private during the Depression and retired as a Lieutenant Colonel in 1957. Dad was in World War II. He occupied Japan. That’s where I was born. He served in Korea on MacArthur’s staff. Dad wanted me to join the Army, though he never said it directly. Actually, he wanted me to graduate from college. Being in the Army was second. I tried my hand at ROTC in that first and only year of college. I did good. I passed that one. The only other option in that class was failing. Learning to field strip the M1 rifle was right up my alley.

The rest of my academic record was mixed. I got an A- in paddleball. The minus was the one class I missed when I was too hung over to get out of my lower rack in Buckham Hall. The 28 I received on my first Zoology test, followed up with a 14 offers a better reflection of my collegiate career. It provided the Dean with the impetus to mandate my sabbatical. That Zoology textbook, complete with explanations of zygotes, mitochondrion, and cytoplasm, still sits on a bookshelf in my basement with the two tests inside the front cover.

Before the draft board got a hold of me, I found summer work as a laborer on a dormitory building at Middlebury. They soon promoted me to mason tender. Laborers dealt in long handled shovels. Mason tenders performed skilled jobs, such as lifting hundred pound facing stones into place sixty feet up on perceptibly swaying staging. In my introductory business class, I failed to fathom Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, though I understood immediately the class distinction between my $3.05 an hour and the master mason’s $20.00 per when he would take the butt end of his trowel and tunk the top of my stone already curing in the mortar with a “there!”

While I spent the summer as a day laborer, my mother decided to enroll me at nearby Castleton State Teachers College. I was to live at home in our tiny town and matriculate in the fall, allowing me to go back to 2-S. No hoo-ya for me. I remember my mother driving up to the job site with my father early in August, waving papers and announcing proudly that I had been accepted at Castleton. I would become a teacher!

In the second week of classes, I started cancelling my school days early and showing up at my friend Tyson’s father’s house building job. I had previously worked for his father, who went by the name Rust. Rust was a superb carpenter. Like me, Tyson was in his second year of college, off at the University of Maine studying forestry. Rust told me he could use some help, but wondered why I wasn’t busy with teachers’ college.

“Yes,” I told him, “I am. But I’ve arranged my schedule so I can work most days.” Around the first of November, Rust started doing inside work and didn’t need me anymore. I found myself leaving for school each day and driving my father’s International Harvester pickup to places like Rochester, a village nestled up in the Green Mountains, forty miles northeast of Castleton. What I did on those days and the on-going thought process that fueled it escapes me. I’m sure I must have gotten some coffee and donuts. I was lost and waiting for fate to rescue me. My third semester ended as did my college days with a withdrawal from Castleton in early December. I didn’t have to take the final tests.

While I was busy with Rust’s house and daytrips to Rochester, much of America was experiencing a very different 1968. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army launched a series of surprise attacks across South Vietnam during the Tet lunar New Year. President Johnson announced that he wouldn’t seek or accept his party’s nomination. The Oakland police shot an unarmed Black Panther twelve times. Mayor Daley presided over a police riot at the Democratic National Convention. North Korea seized the Pueblo. I got my 1-A back for Christmas.

Barry Trutor is a writer from Burlington, Vermont. He is working on a memoir about his experiences during the Vietnam War.