Sam Smith - I graduated from Harvard in 1959 soon faced with the prospect of being drafted into the Vietnam War. President Kennedy would increase the American military presence there from 900 in 1960 to 16,000 in 1963.
Which is the ignoble reason I decided to join the Coast Guard - aka the Hooligan Navy - through its officer candidate school. After all I had started sailing as a young teenager and had been on the Harvard varsity sailing team.
I even graduated second in my class among classmates not already in the Guard but it turned out that the Coast Guard was really looking for public information officers and I had worked for a Washington radio station so my dry land skills were far more important
To my disappointment I was not only assigned as public information officer in St Louis, about as far away from the coast as you can get. My job covered the inland waterways from about Pennsylvania to Coloado. I took the post with the defense that inland waterways had two coasts and so were twice as hard to guard.
Fortunately, the admiral, for whom I was also his aide, was reassigned to the east coast and offered to get me a better assignment which led me to being the operations officer for Rhode Island's Coast Guard cutter Spar for which I happily help in posting aids to navigation and leading search & rescue efforts. Whatever doubts I may had had were squashed by the fact that I was not in Vietnam.
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