Identifying Marks

We got our flu shots today. We decided to get them at Walgreens. The idea is to have some immunity for our upcoming travel and exposure to lots of people.

The rest of my day was spent on yard work. Not a lot to blog about so I thought I would share an incident from my past.

I was drying my hair this morning and while looking in the mirror I noticed that there was an evident indentation under my left eye. I knew what it was. It’s the location where Robert Mester shot me with my B-B gun. Fortunately the gun was a hand me down (as most of our stuff was) and was not very powerful. The B-B penetrated the skin and was stopped by the bone under my eye. Dr Turetsky, our family doctor, simply pried it out and that was it.

As I age my skin is losing its flexibility and and these old scars are becoming more evident. There’s the one on my forehead from running into a parking sign in front of Bullards. And the one on my nose where a dog snapped at me in our kitchen and caught my nose. I also have a wonderful set of deep lines radiating around my mouth, highlighted by the deepest one where I broke open my lip in Texas 2 years ago.
This revealing of marks is funny only because way back when I was 21 I had a hard time finding an “identifying” characteristic when I took my draft physical. A little background here for you youngsters. In order to maintain the necessary manpower to fight the unpopular Vietnam War the government eliminated most draft deferments for the military draft and replaced them with a lottery. Going to school no longer kept you out of the army. This was before all the state lotteries so the technique employed was not actually a random draw. Instead the “mixing" was done by dumping the 366 balls (you were selected by your birth date) from one container where the balls were ordered jan-dec into a second larger container. The result was an uneven selection of dates near the end of the year. My birthday occurring in Nov resulted in a number 34. The guidelines provided were that if you got a number of 180 or smaller you were likely to be drafted during the year.

I got my letter of “Greetings from the President of the US” in the summer while I was working at the Cape. Again there was prevailing advice that it was better to sign up with the AF than to be drafted into the Army. At least there was less risk of getting killed. That’s what I did. I took and passed the AF test for induction and all that was now needed was to pass my physical. Since I had a scheduled draft physical the AF recruiter said that that would be used. Which brings me again to the physical and finding identifying marks.

When filling out the physical paperwork I had to answer a series of questions. One very reassuring question was “What physical identifying marks do you have?” The room monitor assured us that we all had some kind of scar or birthmark. The obvious reason for the information was to make a positive identification of your body. This was pre-DNA.

“Be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box”—Country Joe

I really had to stretch to find something. I ended up listing a small ½-inch scar on my left wrist. I got that mark when the license plate of my motorcycle dug into my wrist as we were lifting it into a car to bring it to the shop.

Now, in 2009, I have marks all over. With 7 surgeries under my belt and skin flexibility waning I could probably fill a page describing my identifying marks.

I failed the draft physical—but that’s another story.