Let me cede the moral high ground straight away by saying I was determined to dodge the Vietnam War in 1970 by almost any means. In the end I was declared medically unfit for military service, tentatively diagnosed with "tropical sprue", a serious intestinal disorder that I had seemingly contracted while serving as a US Peace Corps volunteer in Costa Rica, Central America.
That I was psychologically unfit for soldiering I knew already, thanks to Frank Sullivan, a cantankerous boss and 20-year US navy man who - when not yelling at me for some dereliction of duty - used to advise me for my own good never, ever to enlist in the military.
I enlisted in the Peace Corps in 1968 instead, only to find myself two years later flying in a US army plane from Costa Rica to Panama, where my pre-induction exam for army service had been scheduled at Fort Armador in the US Canal Zone. The following 36 hours were among my most unnerving and surreal ever, all still etched in memory: the multiple-choice aptitude test that first morning, The Band's Up on Cripple Creek, which played all afternoon on the coffee-shop jukebox at my hotel, or Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, which I took in that night in a futile attempt to forget about my medical exam the next morning.
It ended happily however when a US army doctor handed me my 1-Y deferment. The tropical sprue eventually proved to be only "severe parasite infestation", a mere gut full of bugs, yet sufficient to save me from taking other measures to avoid the draft. It's a fairly humdrum non-war story, I know, which is why I like recounting how my good pal John sewed an eye-dropper into his boxers, and successfully doctored his urine sample during his draft physical exam. Doctored it not just once, but twice, after he was told enough albumen had turned up in the first sample "to kill a horse".
Let me also say, without trying to reclaim any moral high ground, that John and I, along with opposing the war in Vietnam, opposed the very idea of putting on a uniform, never mind carrying a rifle, or being trained to use it. As such, joining the National Guard, the means by which President Bush also dodged the same war, albeit one he professed to support, did not figure among our options to that same end.
There were, of course, tens of thousands of our peers, many of them working class or minorities, who hadn't the benefit of third-level education, personal contacts, teaching contracts, albumen sources or whatever other avenues of escape socio-economics and class offered many of us, Presidents Bush and Clinton included, out of that war.
There were also those like Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, who came from real money, went to Yale, yet ended up fighting in Vietnam. Awarded a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts, Kerry became a leading spokesman for the Vietnam Vets Against the War, speaking out against the futility of the conflict, and testifying to the atrocities carried out by some fellow US soldiers on Vietnamese civilians.
Ultimately over 58,000 American soldiers died in Vietnam, together with at least 1.5 million Vietnamese, North and South, both soldiers and civilians.
Studies also show that a million US Vietnam veterans subsequently suffered post-traumatic stress disorder, many of them so lost to substance abuse and depression that they in effect never made it home from the war.
Thirty years later we have the US embroiled in another misconceived military undertaking, Vietnam for slow-learners if you like, this time in Iraq. It's one thing to be ignorant of history, but what happens, I wonder, to a nation that so flagrantly flouts it? Or to those who flout their own personal history, as President Bush did last year, inviting the Iraqi insurgents "to bring it on" - as if he, unlike the National Guard soldiers currently in Iraq - had ever been under enemy fire. My stomach turned when I heard that, and I can't imagine how such chicken-hawk talk played to parents who have a son or daughter in Falluja or Baghdad.
It happens John Kerry will be the Democratic Presidential candidate next fall, a war veteran and US senator who can speak credibly on matters of national security, and hopefully challenge the domestic fear-mongering and international militarism waged by the post-9/11 Bush administration. It's a lot to ask from a US Presidential election, but my hope is Kerry might also move the debate towards the heart of the matter, wherein my America might confront such questions as whether waging "war on terrorism" is the way to best meet that undeniable threat? Or to what degree does the US addiction to oil underwrite US foreign policy?
Or what needs to be done immediately in both Washington and Tel Aviv to secure peace and justice in the Palestinian conflict?
One thing's for sure: given the sorry state of our one world, it's no longer enough simply to be anti-war.
Or, as was said back in my draft-dodging days: "If you're not part of the solution, then you're a part of the problem."
But those millions who marched around the globe last year against the war on Iraq, or turned out more recently first to mourn, then vote, in Spain, were arguably in their hearts also mobilising to wage peace.
Let's bring it on.