Quote

I had this 'War and Peace' thing of wanting to experience war as a kind of incredible human enterprise. I even applied to Officer Candidate School. Then the practical side of me kicked in and I thought, 'I really don't want to get drafted.' So I went down to the physical and checked every psychological disorder and drug on the medical history form.

I was drafted during the Korean War.

While in medical school, I was drafted into the U.S. Army with the other medical students as part of the wartime training program, and naturalized American citizen in 1943. I greatly enjoyed my medical studies, which at the Medical College of Virginia were very clinically oriented.

The other thing that happened was my last military assignment - this was in the air force; I had enlisted in order to avoid being drafted as a private, and of course I only practiced medicine or psychiatry in the air force so I was never in any kind of violent combat.

I remember the day I found out my draft status. I was really floored and kind of staggered around in a daze. It just hadn't occurred to me that I could end up in Vietnam.

Anyone graduating from medical school in 1966 had first to fulfill military service before launching a career. Fiercely opposed to the Vietnam War, I sought to avoid it through an assignment to the Public Health Service.

After graduation in June of 1984, I moved to Manhattan. My first stop was a psychiatrist, who in less than our first fifty-minute session again diagnosed me with depression.

I was drafted when I was 17, and I spent two years, and I lost a friend in war.

I grew up in Boston in a very, very, very Marine town. So back in my neighborhood in Boston, a working-class neighborhood, when you got your draft notice, you went down, and you took your draft physical. And then, if you passed it, you joined the Marine Corps.

I was drafted during the Korean War. None of us wanted to go... It was only a couple of years after World War II had ended. We said, 'Wait a second? Didn't we just get through with that?'