I was living in Berkeley in 1965. I’d graduated from UC Riverside and was working for an insurance company in Oakland. Susan, my then wife, was an undergraduate at Cal.
 

     Lyndon Baines Johnson was President, having succeeded John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. JFK had kept our involvement in Vietnam fairly small. But it was clear that President Johnson was going in. Big time. He was promising a major escalation in the number of troops we’d send there. And a few weeks back, he’d changed the draft laws to make married men eligible for the draft. Me, in other words.

     Susan ordered a pizza from Telegraph Pizza and dispatched me to pick it up. I walked in and I saw a guy I knew from my year at Cal. We started talking and, inevitably, the subject of the Vietnam War and the draft came up.

     “What’ll you do if you get drafted?” he asked.

     “I don’t know. Maybe move to Canada. Or Mexico.”

     We chatted a while longer, waiting for our pizzas. His order came first and he was about to leave when he looked at me and asked.

     “Have you thought about the Peace Corps? It’s a two year commitment and you get a deferment while you’re there." 

     I did not know that.

     Susan had talked about the Peace Corps. She’d given me some written material to look over and asked if I might be interested in joining. I hadn’t seriously considered that. But now things had changed. My life was in danger. My married man deferment had vanished. I might get drafted and I did not want to die in Vietnam.

     “Do you still have all that Peace Corps stuff you showed me a few weeks ago?” I asked while we were eating the pizza.

     “It’s on top of the refrigerator where you left it.”

     That’s how it happened. We filled out the forms and took a written test and were invited to a program for Venezuela. We accepted. We were there for two years, 1966 to 1968.

      (Susan and I have been divorced for many years, but we remain good friends. Over 58,000 American soldiers lost their lives in the Vietnam War.)