Background
It was 1968, and I was stuck with a draft classification that prevented my getting a decent job, or going to graduate school, or, for that matter, getting drafted. I kept thinking back to the HHS Guidance Offices, where this part of my life had been planned. Since 1964, I had been adapting and living those plans - and at the moment, they needed some good Plan B content. How could my plans offer me no reassurance about the choices to be made once the draft preempted things?
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No one was at fault; it was just part of being a leading-edge Baby Boomer. The first Boomer cohort had overwhelmed America's schools; now it was overwhelming Selective Service. You'd think that would have happened in 1964, when we all turned eighteen, but no. That year, a good percentage of us went on to college, and Selective Service had saved lots of time and money by giving many of us student deferments in lieu of physicals. Four years later, most of those deferments were expiring, and the Army was especially hungry for new draftees. Selective Service had until the end of the year to find 300,000 of them. That meant about 400,000 physicals - one man in four would fail the physical.
And so, we were reclassified, and labeled provisionally eligible for the draft (we weren't really eligible; you had to pass your physical exam before they could say that).
Of course, in the real world, on the streets we walked and in the places we went, the word provisional meant nothing. Graduate schools would not provisionally admit us; corporations would not provisionally add us to payrolls. Businesses were getting annoyed. The year before, they had hired new graduates, given them on-the-job training, sent them on professional courses, and then watched as they were drafted. This year, employers refused to even speak with applicants who had our draft classification.
Thus, as summer took hold, many of us were not looking ahead to graduate school after all, or beginning that career-starting job we had expected. For us, even summer jobs might be out of the question: undergraduates and graduates both were competing for them this year. We were in limbo.
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