I was a junior at the University of Wisconsin when the first draft was held. I was living with four roommates at the time. My number was 36, the rest of my roommates had numbers in the 200 and 300’s. I was allowed to graduate in January of 1971. Six days later I was at Fort Campbell, Ky trainng to be a soldier.
I decided to make the best of it and earned the award for Outstanding Basic Combat Trainee. I graduated from Basic in May and headed to Ft. Monmouth, NJ for training in security coding equipment. May to August is not a bad time to be 15 miles from the Jersey shore, where we went almost every weekend. My permanent duty station was EUCOM headquarters near Stuttgart, Germany. I spent 15 months in Germany with six weeks assigned to a Royal Airforce Base in a suburb of Bristol, England. I was at the ’72 Olympics when members of the Israeli Olympic team were kidnapped and killed. At EUCOM I was responsible for the security coding equipment–the early computers of the day. Although I didn’t want to join the Army, the two years spent were a growing experience.