How many doors do we pass through in life? A thousand? Ten thousand, maybe a million? Most often, it’s a familiar door, where there are no surprises awaiting you on the other side. Your front door, your bedroom door, your office door. Sometimes, though, the unknown or even the dreaded awaits on the other side of that door. A job interview, for example, or a doctor’s visit to hear a diagnosis, or calling on someone to whom you are about to break some very bad news. And sometimes it’s just an unassuming door, one you don’t give any thought to as you pass through it; but it is, in fact, the door that moves your life in some totally new and unexpected direction.

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It was August, 1967, and my 18^th birthday was looming, less than a month away. Back then, all 18 year old males were required by law to register with the Selective Service System, more commonly referred to as The Draft. So on a hot summer morning, I jumped on the Madison streetcar and took a ten minute ride to the corner of Pulaski and Madison, which was still called Crawford and Madison by my father and most people his age. They didn’t like the city renaming their street for a Polish guy, I guess. Three or four doors north was 43 N. Pulaski and one flight up an old staircase was the regional office for the Selective Service System. I opened the glass door and entered.

The office wasn’t much, maybe 14 feet square, fans blowing, no air conditioning. Six chairs against the wall, three of them occupied by my peers. A table with some pencils and a stack of single page questionnaires. At the far end of this little office sat a middle aged lady in a flowered dress, cigarette in the ashtray. She sat at a desk with an old Underwood typewriter, smoking and typing. She told me to sit at the table and answer the questions on the paper and then to take a seat. I would be called. She was pleasant, but it was obvious that this little office was her domain and she apparently ran it all by herself.

So I filled out the form, which included all the items you might guess as well as my current student status. Having graduated from a high school seminary, I was on my way to Niles Seminary on my soon-to- be-sidetracked pathway to the priesthood. When my turn came, she looked over my answers without comment. She began typing on a form from which I could see a small portion of which would become a wallet size perforation card.

She extracted the form from the typewriter and tore off the little card piece, handing it to me and saying “You’re 4-D.” Anticipating my next question, she added, “That means you’re a divinity student. You’re exempt from the draft as long as you stay one.” So I tucked the card in my wallet and left. Nothing happened to me that day, but it did to so many others.

If you went through that door and could prove you were going to college, you left as a “2-S”, deferred as a college student. But if you were a high school grad with no college plans, or just working a job somewhere, you left through that door as a “1-A”. And as a “1-A“ in 1967, you would find yourself within 30-45 days at another door, early in the morning on the day you were informed by registered mail to report for a physical at 615 W. Van Buren Street. You would spend most of that day walking around in your underpants, following a taped colored line on the floor with a bunch of other guys in their underpants. At some point you would be standing in a line with ten other guys all buck naked while some medical type poked around your genitals and made comments to an assistant.

And at the end of the day, you would go home, but you would shortly receive official “greetings” from the Draft Board that you needed to report within a matter of days to a bus depot or a train station or an airport. You could find yourself fighting for your life as an “11-Bravo” rifleman, or grunt, in Viet Nam within as little as four months. Tens of thousands of kids did. And more than 58,000 saw the end of their lives there.

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If the recent documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick makes any point about Viet Nam, it is just this: It was a raging twenty year storm that consumed our nation, consumed the lives of thousands of Americans, and continues to haunt veterans, protesters, and in a way all of us to this day. It was a colossal series of misreads, bad assumptions, and outright lies over several presidencies that needed to be exposed. Going through that door at 43 N. Pulaski and all of the 43 N. Pulaski’s around the nation was how most young men entered into that storm.

It is a masterful documentary, told in first person by the soldiers and officers on both sides, now all old men. And in the case of the North Vietnamese, old women, because women fought that war side by side with the men in North Viet Nam, and in great numbers. Their stories are sometimes heartbreaking and sometimes uplifting. The transformation of those at home who became radicalized by Viet Nam is a big part of that story. And then there are those who both fought as soldiers and became radicalized after, and their stories are the most powerful and the most haunting at the same time.

We’ve never needed a “feel good” story as much as we need it now and the Burns documentary is a sobering downer, mostly. All of the bad stories are there: My Lai, the naked little girl running from the napalm strike, the public execution of a Viet Cong guerilla, Jane Fonda telling the camera that U.S. POWs should be executed, Kent State, campus demonstrations at home, the 1968 Democratic Convention, helicopters being pushed off our aircraft carriers, the final defeat. You find yourself shaking your head at how this nation could be so wrong for so long and at the enormity of the sacrifice. Ken Burns has worked on this for years, and I’m sure he didn’t anticipate the current sorry state of American leadership coinciding with the release of this film, but there it is.

And you find yourself a little conflicted, because the intense singleness of purpose and incredible willingness for self-sacrifice shown by the Vietnamese in the North begins to resemble our revolutionary war forefathers. They just wanted us out of their land and we wouldn’t go. The final irony is that after we did leave, and they tried their textbook communism with no luck for ten years, they are now almost a functioning democracy and certainly a thriving economy. Check out your shirt label that says “Made in Viet Nam.”

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It was never black and white. There were patriots and heroes and cowards and scoundrels, but who was who? There were thousands who enlisted, true believers eager to fight for their country or to stem the flow of communism, or just looking for some action. Some outstanding combat leaders, career soldiers, stoic POWs, whistle blowers on atrocities, and those who saw it through to its end. But they are the few bright lights in the storm. For most of us, no one wanted anything to do with Viet Nam in 1967. It was a meat grinder and it went on and on, funneling more and more soldiers “in country.” And “The Draft” became the focus for all of us, looming out there as either inevitable or somehow to avoid.

There were ways out. You could enlist in some other branch like the Navy or Air Force or Coast Guard. Even if you went to Viet Nam, it was considerably safer than as a grunt. You could sign up with the Reserves or National Guard, and do your basic training and MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) training on active duty, then six years of weekends and summer camps, but the waiting lists were long and the draft might catch up with you before you got in. You could go to Canada, and some 30,000 did.

You could stay in school, but you better carry a full load and not flunk out, or your 2-S deferment was immediately turned into a 1-A. You could join ROTC in college, look for a safe officer’s MOS, but that boomeranged on more than a few guys I knew after they graduated.

And it wasn’t just civilians who wanted no part of Viet Nam. I knew a draftee who volunteered for Officer Candidate School and did 26 years in the Army. In his retirement I asked him why he chose that route. He told me he didn’t want to go to Viet Nam, although he caught the tail end of it anyway. A college friend did two years as an officer in Korea, and when I asked him why two years, he told me it was to get out of Viet Nam, which he succeeded in doing.

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So now we’re all old men, having made our decisions at that young age, or maybe having those decisions made for us. The Draft is no longer. The medical exam station at 615 Van Buren, once a place for processing humans is now ironically a headquarters for a meat processing company. The office at 43 N. Pulaski is still the middle of the West Side, but now maybe in the most dangerous neighborhood in the city.

Those 1-A kids who fought and somehow made it home have long since earned our respect and they retain the solemn pride that is theirs alone. Those kids who volunteered and went looking for a fight and got through it untouched can bask in their conviction. The wounded, both physical and mental, have to soldier on, missing an arm here, a leg there, their eyesight, maybe some of their sanity. Some of them were taken years afterward by the defoliating chemicals used there. They never made it into their 60’s and they were casualties, too, although their names won’t appear on any monuments. The dead are remembered on a long black wall in Washington, D.C., listed in the order in which they fell, and by those who loved them. And in the end we lost that war, as was foretold by many as early as 1963.

But I think back to that terrible storm that lasted so long and took so many and I think of the nice lady in the unimpressive office at her typewriter and I wonder how many kids took their first step into the storm that day and never knew it.

Such an unassuming door they went through and such an unseen storm on the other side.