Vietnam.

I'm a lazy person. No denying it. But laziness is not a virtue.

Just a generation ago, our country was involved with a conflict far different from the one we are currently in. Communism was spreading, like dominoes, down from Red China. As any God-loving tax-paying self-respecting American citizen knows: Communism is evil. So we had to stop it. And protect the helpless Vietnamese junglefolk from falling under it's awful shadow.

My father enlisted after high school. He went through Basic Training. He really had little doubt he would be shipped out to Saigon to fight for his country.

So my Dad's out there, on an airstrip. He's waiting for a helicopter to land. This helicopter will take him to somewhere, then he'd go to another somewhere, then he'd go to Vietnam. My Dad's in his pressed uniform, a bit worn from the sand blowing down the field. The sun is out and hot. He's sitting on the large green Army-issue duffel containing everything he needed for the trip, neatly folded and packed efficiently. The chopper is late. He's been waiting all day.

A voice comes out over the speakerphones on poles. It's calling his name to come to Headquarters.

He's tired. He knows if he goes and hears whatever bullcrap his superiors had to say to him before he left that he would miss the chopper, and then have to wait even longer for the next one. He's sitting on his bag, thinking, fuck those guys.

But my father is not a lazy man. He got up, hefted his bag over his shoulder and trotted off back to the base. He was to the office of the commanding officer of the base, where the CO and his superiors were waiting for him. But it was not a reminder of something trivial and useless. It wasn't a court-martial or reprimand for anything, it wasn't even a "Goodbye, solider, and good luck over there."

They told him he was part of a program, called Sole Surviving Sons. This means he was the last male in his family (his stepfather had passed not long before). This means the American government did not feel obligated to send him off to war, for the sake of his family and his future line.

So my Dad did not go to Vietnam. He was instead positioned at a base in Germany, where he went on many an adventure across Europe. And after he went home and met my mother, I was born.

All because my father didn't say "fuck you guys," and not go in and miss the chopper.