DrakeNews #132 May 24, 2023
Dear People,
A couple of things happened to me around 1970 that changed my future in major ways. I was drafted in 1970 and sent to Nam. I hadn’t expected that. I was in the middle of Duke law school and had a deferment while in school. But Mr. Johnson’s lack of any plan for ending the war and Mr. McNamara’s series of bad plans that extended it led to the cancellation of most deferments, including mine. I didn’t get any physical harm in the army but it sure messed me up mentally. Then, after I got home, I fathered a son (Jonathan).
I didn’t spend a lot of time or thought on Jonathan and I didn’t think he got much from me but an education. Certainly, his athletics were no doing of mine. I didn’t encourage him to read SF and fantasy though that was what I read. I certainly didn’t try to make him become a writer. I just wanted him to be himself, not a copy of anybody else, certainly not me. As he approached high school graduation, he got recruiting letters from armed services. I was afraid he was going to accept one of them. I was proud of my military service, but it isn’t something I wanted and it wasn’t something I wanted for my son. It was an unpleasant experience. It messed up my head a good deal in 1968 when I got my draft notice and later when I was shipped to Vietnam in 1970. After I did return to the World, I became a father against my conscious desire. I was crazy as hell.
I thought both the army and fatherhood were unmitigated disasters. Nowadays, there’s a lot of personal good in both. They turned my life over in unexpected ways. I wasn’t injured in Nam and Cambodia. On the other hand, I came back a different and less good person than the guy who went over. I was very angry, sort of generally. Mostly at the army, at North Vietnam for defending itself, and a certain amount at Americans who were actively supporting the NVA for their own reasons (Jane Fonda among them) but mostly angry at myself at what I’d done and become in the army.
As for fatherhood, I basically didn’t trust myself. As it turned out, I didn’t kill anybody, including my son. I didn’t start drinking or doing drugs, So I kept all the control I had left and I started writing seriously. I had something real to write about now. This gave me a socially acceptable way to deal with my anger. I was very angry though.
I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be an involved father (I hadn’t been an involved son either). Jonathan had an involved mother, however. My job was to provide a family income. Greatly to my surprise I was able to do that by my writing.
That really was a surprise, because I didn’t have money as a major goal of my writing. I wanted to put food on the table for my family. I didn’t get good reviews or much of any reviews, but I was making a living wage which was the important thing to me. Occasionally a review struck me as unfair, but I was a Nam vet and didn’t expect the world to be fair.
Tom Easton the Analog reviewer described me in public as a pornographer of violence and told me before a panel which he moderated that I was going to hate his printed review in Analog. In fact, I didn’t like it but Nam wasn’t a popular war and Easton wasn’t the only civilian to take his displeasure with the war out on the draftees who fought it.
Jonathan didn’t join the military, but he did become a practicing Christian. I was not because my mother had a very restrictive view of Christianity and I was afraid he’d go the same way.
He didn’t.
Jonathan is a delight to know. He is pleasant to everybody and respected by everybody at the gym. It struck me that he got to where he is the same way I had: doing the job in front of him as well as he could he could. He didn’t get any special breaks. He got a job with a friend of mine but had to do the work set him. My friend cultivates a cult of personality. Jonathan never bought into that. There would have been job benefits if he had but he didn’t think the tradeoff would be worthwhile any more than I had wanted to be an officer in the army. Jonathan has a stable marriage and a son to be proud of, as I am of him.
I wasn’t much of a father. But I raised a man, by God.
–Dave Drake
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