I was going to go. Although I couldn’t see myself actually using a rifle. My father was an Army paratrooper during the Korean War and had a career in the Air Force afterward. He met my mom in 1951 – in Japan. My mother was definitely against me being drafted as my sister had died tragically several years earlier and she didn’t want to be without any of her children. At the time, even in the Bay Area, there were few Asians. Asians were called Orientals back then and I wasn’t too keen on killing people that looked similar to my mom. The Bay Area was definitely fairly prejudiced against different folks back then. I saw how my mom was treated and I feared that Americans in Vietnam were going to be worse in Vietnam and I couldn’t figure out why we were there anyway. I was really naive like a lot of us were as far as politics worked. As I said I was all set to go but my birthdate never came close to being called. I never had to deal with the trauma of war unlike so many on both sides of that war.
