Well, when you ignore your homework and get bad enough grades to flunk out of two colleges, the draft board has a tendency to feel you're not all that serious about college. They did that, and "offered" me a different position, one that took me from being fairly aimless into one where paying attention could save my life.
I got drafted in August 1966, and was eventually fortunate enough to be assigned to radio operator school (05B) at Ft. Huachuca, AZ. Cool, especially since the curriculum was Morse Code and radio operating procedures. I'd given a bit more thought to being an amateur radio operator than I had to being an electronics engineer, so I already had a leg up on most everyone else, including some of the instructors. Lots of practice on a code key, which turned out to be fun. Another cool thing was that if you qualified early (easy-peasy), you got sent to Radio Teletype Operator school (05C) at Ft. Gordon, GA, where I learned a valuable skill - typing 60WPM. That's still valuable today.
I was also fortunate enough to be sent to Germany while a lot of guys my age were going to Viet Nam. I'd taken two years of German in high school (by that time, three years earlier), so I was fairly able to get along in the local communities. We didn't do a lot of operating - the remote outpost (Prüm, in the Eifel mountain region), so much of my time was spent taking care of the trucks. Things were pretty easy for me, and sadly, fatal for two of my friends who have their names on the big black wall.
