Hanging on the wall in the foyer of our house is the brown leather bomber jacket my mother's father wore during his stint as a radioman on a World War II C-47 transport plane.

In my closet hang the clothing remnants of my own father's war. His military-issue shirt and fatigue jacket each have a bold "A," for Army, sewn onto the green fabric of the left shoulder. The soldier who wore those clothes was small for his age, and both shirt and jacket fit me, his daughter, well enough that, at 17, I could wear them to school during my brief bout of post-September 11^th patriotism.

Today, my father does not identify himself with the young man whose uniform hangs quietly in my closet. Where that man was clean-shaven and crew-cut, my father is neither. That man hoped one day to practice psychology, while my father thoroughly enjoys practicing law. Most of all, that young man was a soldier; but my father does not consider himself a war veteran.

He is, as he so loves to remind me whenever we differ on one issue or another, a holder of several academic degrees. After studying political science at City College in New York, my father went on to obtain a master's degree in political psychology from Columbia University and ultimately received a law degree from Brooklyn Law School.

He is a lawyer, representing the federal government as an Assistant US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. He is also a brilliant wit with a sharp, self-deprecating sense of humor that he has done his best to pass on to his daughters; a faithful husband whose take on life, slightly skewed toward the absurd, is the perfect complement to that of his wife; and a loving father who dotes on both of his daughters equally, but who expresses unabashed favoritism for one of the family's dogs over the other. He is a baseball fan who cheers for the Mets when no one else does, and who enjoys lamenting the fact that his own Major League potential was ruined by a bad knee injury and a general lack of talent. He is a voracious reader who daily gets his news from four different papers, and who can always be caught in his free time reading books on organized crime, the Civil War, or current political events.

My father is many things to many people, and his personal narrative is, like anyone's, a complex tangle of relationships, people, and places. Part of that narrative must include that period of his life between June, 1970 and December, 1971 when he became, in addition to the many other facets of his identity, a 24-year-old soldier drafted into the United States Army.

That soldier, I believe, has never really told his story. There is no space for it in my father's idea of his own narrative; it does not appear, to him, to fit in with what he sees as his "real" identity. It wasn't me, he says of his time in the Army. It was something I did, but it wasn't me.

I have come to realize, though, that so much of what I know of my father, from his choice of profession to his choice of facial hair, can be traced back to this single eighteen-month stretch that he considers a blip, an outlier in an otherwise seamless lifetime narrative. It wasn't me, he says, and maybe it wasn't; but it contributed to the shape his life would ultimately take, and for that reason, this story, the one belonging to the soldier whose clothes hang in my closet, should be told, too.

"I was going to go, either way."

I got the notice in the mail. It included a [subway] token; they sprung for the thirty cents so I could take the trip down to Whitehall Street. It wasn't unexpected, really, because they had just switched from a draft in which they were taking the oldest first to a random lottery. I was in the oldest group and I had an early number, so I was going to go either way.

My mother reacted terribly, of course. You know, oh my god, oh my god, you're going to get killed. Listen to your father and go to Canada. My father calmed her down but she really wanted me to, I guess, leave the country. They eventually agreed that as long as I wasn't freaking out they wouldn't freak out. And I wasn't freaking out, you know, because when you see something like that coming for so long, you're psychologically prepared for it.

My father's advice was, see what you can do. Don't do anything prematurely. Take it day by day. You can always leave-you can go AWOL, which is more onerous than not going at all, but it's always an option. You get a weekend leave, you get on a plane or a train, and you don't come back.

My feeling about it was I really should at least try. I didn't have that point of view of not going. Some friends of mine who were opposed to the war in Vietnam left, and I didn't think that was the honorable approach. I had some friends who went to Toronto and we both respected the positions we took, though I think they were more defensive about what they did, having left the country. I think the correct approach was simply to refuse to go and go to jail; going to Canada was an easy way out, though really it wasn't easy because they had to leave the country. They're Canadian citizens now, they have nothing to do with the US. You respect people's choices and what they have to live with.

Others got a psychiatric disability claim. They'd walk in and pay the psychiatrist and then the psychiatrist would keep them out of the army; I didn't want to do that, either. I could have said I was a pacifist, but that wasn't true. I didn't want to lie about it. Besides, as a pacifist, they just drop you in the front without a gun and that was even worse. If I'm going to go, I'd rather at least have a gun.

I could have gone to jail, but I didn't want to go to jail. I didn't want to do what [my friend] Herman did, you know, become a teacher and then spend the next thirty years counting down the days until you can retire. I figured, let me go in and see what happens. I would go and see if I could get into the medical corps. I didn't want to go in and kill people for a conflict I didn't believe in, but I didn't have a problem providing medical support to injured people.

The draft really was not fair to begin with, for a number of reasons. Johnson's position, and later Nixon's position, was they didn't want to activate the National Guard and create even more hostility, so if you could squirm your way into the National Guard, you were certain to stay here. The draft rewarded people who could figure out a way around it. But the view people had was either you were a murderer and wanted to be there, or you were too damn stupid to get out of it. If that's how you feel, then that's how you feel.

The building at 39 Whitehall Street became New York's military induction center in 1886. The "Whitehall Examining and Entrance Station" began its career sharing the four-story space with a vegetable shop; by 1969, the building had been converted into an eight-story building complete with a barbershop that shaved the heads of new recruits. A hated symbol of the draft and of the war in general, the Army Recruitment Center at Whitehall Street was twice bombed and ultimately forced to move to a more secure location in Brooklyn. Today, although a sign above the building's stone steps still implores young men and women to "Join Now," the building is home to a branch of the New York Health and Racquet Club.

They let me finish up my semester at Columbia, and then the first day of June I took the 1 train down to Whitehall street. It was some godforsaken early hour of the morning. I had my New York Times under my arm and my cup of coffee in my hand. At Whitehall, they had you go into a large auditorium, and as I always did in any large lecture, I sat in the back. After a few minutes, the Marine Corps came in, asked the first three rows to stand up, and told them 'Congratulations, you're in the Marines.' I said to myself, 'This is not going to be good.' But I guess it did pay to sit in the back.

Built in 1917 as Camp Dix, Fort Dix originally served as a training and staging ground for three military divisions during World War I. Camp Dix became the more permanent Fort Dix in 1939, and it was named as the United States Army Training Center, Infantry, on March 16, 1956. Fort Dix expanded rapidly during the Vietnam War, providing soldiers with Vietnam-specific training-including experience with a constructed mock Vietnamese village-before the soldiers headed overseas. Today, Fort Dix is a major training and mobilization center for the Army Reserve and National Guard.[1]

"I wasn't worried about flunking."

After we went through all the processing paperwork, they moved us on buses to Fort Dix, New Jersey. That day or the day after, we were given the aptitude tests. I was just exhausted from the whole thing. I colored in the dots so you could see the outline of a turkey.

The results were supposed to come back with what your specialty should be, you know, they're looking for what you're best suited for. They told me my results were kind of mixed. I think it varied from I was good enough that I could teach something or other, to I really couldn't read or write at all. I was comforted, though, knowing that the worse I would do… you don't get fired from a job like that. I wasn't worried about flunking the exam.

The theory of basic training

I did basic training at Fort Dix over a period of about 4-6 weeks. It was a combination of moronic classes interrupted by periods of athletic maneuvers, you know, handlebar overhang, pushups, basically getting you in physical condition.

The theory of basic training is they attempt to tear down any reservations you have about following orders. They want you to follow orders instinctively, where as soon as they say something you do something. You're not letting people get any sleep, you're moving them from very early in the morning to very late at night. You're wearing people down to the point that they will automatically respond to orders, that's the overall theory.

Obviously, you have the usual drill sergeants, most of whom are from the south, most of whom are biased against people from the north and college educated, so of course, I fit right in there. The commanding officer of the unit I was in was part of the biased crowd. And if the CO doesn't like you, you're not getting any type of leave on weekends, you're being forced to stay and do all sorts of nonsensical tasks in the barracks, like counting the number of people coming into the building, that kind of thing.

"They can make you work, but they can't make you work hard."

One thing I learned about the army, though, is they can make you work, but they can't make you work hard. I'd have kitchen duty, you know, and I'd start mopping the floor at 10 at night and by 11:30 I'd be on the other side of the room. I'd stop to get drinks of water. They had to let you drink the water, even though it drove them nuts. I'd have a glass, put it down, rinse the glass. Then I'd start going again with the mop across the floor.

That was basic training with kitchen duty. We used to do these ten- to twelve-mile hikes, too, where I discovered that if you straggle too far behind, they come to pick you up in a car at the end. They'd say, 'Don't you feel humiliated?' and I'd say, 'No, not at all.' I'd take a book and read. I'd say I twisted my ankle.

"I would just read my newspaper."

Basic training was mostly physical, interrupted by periods when they would try to give us an orientation regarding what was going on in Vietnam. It was a political orientation, but really just political indoctrination. They gave us the usual. You know, we're fighting communism, if we don't fight them here, we'll be fighting them in California. I actually never understood why that was so bad. California is at least closer. It would make logistics a lot easier. But I don't think that's really what they were looking for.

It was some poor soul who was charged with giving us the political indoctrination. He gave us the political indoctrination, all right, but no one in the audience believed or listened to him. Probably 95% of the people in those classes were drafted, like me. They weren't stupid. They realized that the stuff about fighting people in Vietnam so you don't fight them in San Francisco was crap. They knew the government we were supporting was a dictatorship that didn't have popular support. It was a civil war, and we were supporting one side of the country. Anything people were saying about the domino theory and everything else, that was nonsense, everyone knew that.

Some of the guys would raise their hands and disagree and argue. Others would just say, you know, go f-k yourself, you're lying.

I would just read my newspaper. I didn't pay attention to much of any of that. That guy, it was just his job. He probably didn't believe it, either.

Caught up in the crossfire

The guys I was in basic training with, most of them were delightful. Some of them had committed crimes, and that was why they were there. They got a choice of going to jail or going to Vietnam. I was always sort of annoyed by that, you know, because we all ended up in the same place, anyway. I could have gotten a free crime? I wish I'd known that.

People that came back from Vietnam were also being bivouacked in the same area, but they had a different attitude-it was, basically, 'you're screwed.' The commander was unable to separate the returned guys from the new recruits. He'd tell them to get up, they'd sit down, you know, that kind of thing. They had a real attitude with the CO and he had an attitude with them.

I was living in the barracks with them so I was getting caught up in the crossfire between them and him. A lot of them came back with drug problems; some of them would talk about wanting to re-up and get back to Vietnam because the drugs were so good. They'd break open Contact capsules, cold medication, and separate the belladonna from the rest of the pill. They'd mix the belladonna with cheap wine and then they'd shoot it. It wasn't something I was into. They'd ask me, you know, 'Aren't you afraid we'll do that to you when you're sleeping?' but I'd say 'No, you're not going to waste the belladonna.'

Some of them had gone off the deep end, and they'd take out a gun and shoot you if you gave them a reason. On one occasion, the CO started hassling one of them who had been wounded. You know, telling him to get himself together, 'I want you to do this, I want you to do that.'

The guy says to him, 'You know what I want? I want to put five bullets in your head,' and he takes out his gun and starts chasing him. The CO got security, and then security and the CO were chasing the guy all around the barracks, and everyone thought it was the most hilarious thing they'd ever seen. Next thing I knew we were all on a plane headed to Saigon.

When we got there, of course, everyone there was sort of baffled. They told us we couldn't be there and we should get back on the plane. We weren't trained, we couldn't stay there. You can't just force people at gunpoint onto a plane headed for Saigon because they've annoyed you somehow. Or, really, you can do that, and he did do that, but you can't expect them to stay there, not before they've had any type of training.

In the Army, people were always saying, you know, 'I shouldn't be here, I don't belong here,' but really, for us that time in Saigon, it was actually true. We weren't due over there for another eight weeks.

Arching over the entrance to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, TX, are the words "Welcome to Fort Sam Houston: Home of the Combat Medic." From 1910 until World War II, Fort Sam Houston was the largest Army post in the continental United States. At the end of the Second World War, the Army chose to make the installation its principal medical training facility. Today, Fort Sam Houston is the largest and most important military medical training facility in the world.[2]

"It wasn't my idea of an ideal assignment."

After New Jersey, I went to San Antonio, Texas, where I was supposed to be trained as a medic. The reason they put me in the medical corps, I think, was not out of any belief that I had medical knowledge, but because they thought I wouldn't steal the morphine, and so when someone needed it, it would be there, and I wouldn't have shot it into my arm 3 days earlier. I got that impression when they showed me a picture of the human body and then handed me a kit and told me I was qualified.

I supposed to be doing MedEvac.[3] You know, those guys who come down off helicopters, they jump out of the Huey gunships and Air Cavalry helicopters with the huge red cross on the side. The helicopter is hovering above tree level and you're coming down off maybe a 15-foot rope ladder and you jump the few extra feet to the ground. The landing zone is too hot to come into on the ground, so they're dropping you on top of it. Meanwhile, everyone around you is firing at you, so as soon as you jump, they pull the chopper right up and get the hell out of there.

This is my job. I'm wearing a big red cross on my hat that might as well be a bull's-eye, I've got a bright red scarf and a medical bag, and I'm coming off a helicopter taking fire in a landing zone that's too hot to land in. Between coming off the helicopter and hitting the ground, the fatality rate for a medic was pretty damn high.

It really wasn't my idea of an ideal assignment.

"If you could do this outside, I'd appreciate it."

It was while being trained as a medic that I injured my knee. Instead of dropping me on dirt, they dropped me on concrete.

You have to understand, most of the helicopter guys were like something out of Buck Rogers, with the wraparound glasses and the scarf. They all dressed like that Peanuts cartoon where Snoopy is a pilot. Think about the personality type that volunteers to be a helicopter pilot-and they did volunteer, they weren't drafted. You're flying low over war zones, you're taking small arms or rocket fire, I mean, you've got to have a certain kind of mindset to do that. They were cowboys, just reckless. Everything was 'how close can I come on this one.' When they say go, you go, and I went. I saw I was going to hit concrete, but it's not like I was wearing a parachute. There wasn't anything I could do.

I jammed my knee and it swelled up to two to three times its normal size. They fixed it right there, outside on the concrete. The Army didn't believe in hospitalization. It was like their dental plan. If you were drafted and you had tooth problems, they would pull it; if you were enlisted and going to be there for a few years, they might try harder to save the teeth. So the hospital's idea was probably to cut the leg off, anyway. My idea was, if you could do this outside, without involving the hospital, I'd appreciate it.

Brooke Army Medical Center (BAMC) is one of eight United States Army Medical Centers. From its beginnings in 1870 as a small medical dispensary located in a log cabin, BAMC has today grown into a bustling Level I trauma center charged with providing tertiary care to US servicemen, servicewomen, and their dependents. A major research center and the Department of Defense's most modern medical facility, BAMC is also home to the world renowned Army Burn Center.[4]

The practical applications of a political psychology degree

I couldn't finish the medic training on helicopters, because of my knee, so they switched me to psychiatric social worker, given my degree. I had told them my degree was more in psychology than political science. Actually, I left out the political science part of it altogether. I didn't think they'd understand the nuances.

"There's not an awful lot you can say."

There are a number of military hospitals, some of which have particular specialties. Walter Reed[5] specializes in cardiac care, for example. At Brooke Army Medical Center, their specialty was burn patients. A lot of the burn patients were victims of napalm or white phosphorus, so you had a lot of flyers, a lot of airmen who had been injured in plane crashes. You also had some other people, people who weren't flyers, who just happened to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It's extraordinarily painful, having burns like that. Then there's the risk of infection. The chances of recovery vary with the severity of the injury, but these were all bad injuries.

The way treatment works for burn patients is, there's only so much you can do for them. You're talking to people, many of whom are going to die. You know it, they know it. There's not much that anyone can do about it. Motivation-will to live-is very important, and you try to motivate people to want to live. You try to move them past being depressed to show them that there are opportunities, it's not all over. But they know that you're telling them things sometimes that aren't entirely accurate, because you're trying to motivate them. People's features, their faces were all burned off. There's not an awful lot you can say.

You want to get their family to support them, and you don't want the family to freak out when they see them. So you're basically showing the family photographs. You're trying to get them to be supportive of their husband, their son, their father-although that was less often. You're trying to get them to not walk away and to deal with it. The chance of survival with these burns isn't great, but it's even less where there's no motivation.

It's hard, because you know it's never going to be the same. You'll never have what you had again. The people there were extraordinarily damaged in terms of the burns; nobody's going to be the same after that. Your chances of living are not particularly good, but if you do live, you're not going to be the person you were before. You won't look 'normal.' People are always going to stare at you. People will look at you and they'll say, 'My God, what happened?'

And people knew that, there was a lot of depression because of that, and, you know. What can you say?

On dreaming

Well, you see people, you see horrific injuries like this, and at some point, I just stopped dreaming. I really still don't dream. The last few years, on and off, but I don't dream about the patients at all. That's buried pretty far down. I really don't go there. Even now, as I'm talking to you, nothing's coming to mind, no faces, no pictures. I'm not seeing anything. Which is good, because I really don't want to.

Costing $10.5 million to build, Walson Army Hospital was billed as a "showplace health center" when it first opened in 1960. In 1967, its peak year, the hospital had a staff of more than 1,500, admitted 35,684 patients, and treated 249,906 outpatients. Today, the building's fate is uncertain; it stands empty and crumbling, waiting for a decision on the dramatic renovation it requires.

"Fort Dix was a lousy place to be."

When I came back up from San Antonio, after seven months at Brooke, I was assigned to Walson Army Hospital at Fort Dix.

Fort Dix was just a lousy place to be. People didn't want to finish their enlistment there, everyone would have preferred to be somewhere else. It had a reputation for being extraordinarily 'Mickey Mouse' about regulations. Most other places were a little more relaxed.

A story from my time there, and this could only have happened at Fort Dix, is I was on my way to breakfast one day, wearing my fatigue coat, but I didn't have the caduceus on and I didn't have the red cross on my jacket. So I'm walking up to the hospital's mess hall and I see this guy standing behind a tree, and he's looking at me. I say 'whatever' and keep walking. All of a sudden he runs out at me and starts yelling about, you know, 'what are you wearing,' 'where are you going,' 'you don't have a red cross or a caduceus,' 'you're a disgrace.'

He identifies himself as some major in the unit and asks to see my ID card, which doesn't have a red cross on it yet, either. He starts yelling again about that, and I'm telling him 'yeah, yeah, I understand. If you give me a crayon, I can put the red cross on right now.' So he says, you know, 'I don't like your attitude, where's your commander, you'll hear from me on this one.'

Later that day, my CO comes and reads me my rights and then says, 'Ok, so what'd you do?' I say, 'You just read me my rights, I'm not going to say a thing.' He says, 'What are you, a wiseguy?' and I say, 'No, but I'm not going to say a thing.' So he says, you know, this major spotted you out of uniform, doing this and that, I didn't have a red cross on my ID card, whatever. I say that I just arrived here. He says, 'Fine, we'll forget about all this. You lose two weeks good time,' meaning I'd have to stay on base for two weeks. This is all according to Article 15, nonjudicial punishment, administered with consent of command and me, if I accept.[6]

So I tell him I'm not going to accept it. He says 'What do you mean, you're not going to accept it?' and I say that's exactly what I mean, I won't accept it, so he says, 'Well, we're going to go up higher.' I said the only thing you can do, I can reject everything other than a court martial. If you want to carry this thing to an absurd end, I want a lawyer. I want a court martial.

They basically dropped it after that. They just told me, 'We're not going to forget this.' I made a lot of friends with that one. No punishment, but no friends either.

"That was Bob."

I was working in the mental health clinic at Walson. I was mostly dealing with depression and adjustment reactions. My friend there, Bob, had an even better specialty. At Fort Dix they trained people to work on power lines, and people would volunteer to do that so they wouldn't get shot in Vietnam. So they would take that specialty, but they'd be afraid of heights. They would come in to get treated for fear of heights.

So I'm talking to this guy, my friend Bob, I'm saying, 'how do you treat this?' He says, 'First thing, I get them to stand on a little stepstool. Then, they move up to a little chair.' I said, 'Are you out of your mind?' I said, 'That's not exactly the same thing as a fifteen-foot pole.' And he never cured anyone. That's according to him, that's according to the CO, who was really not pleased because these people were still terrified of heights after however many weeks of this treatment. Bob's point of view was, 'Yeah, well, it takes a while.'

That was Bob. He would complain to me, he would show me these different proposals he was writing up on why he should be let out of the Army soon. They were talking then about taking applications from people who had reasons to be discharged early-this was under Nixon, before Nixon was attempting to go to a volunteer army-and Bob's argument was that he was falling behind all his contemporaries from college. I was standing right next to him. I said, "I'm your contemporary, I'm standing right here next to you." He wasn't too happy with that. He didn't view it as being constructive.

Another one of Bob's jobs was to count the people who were coming in to eat in the hospital's mess hall. The food was better there, and the commander didn't want people just sponging off the food or we'd be feeding the entire base. So he gave Bob a counter. Bob would engage in drug use sometimes, and he happened to be high on something. So it's about 11:30 am, people are coming in, and I'm looking at him. He's just clicking away. I can see maybe 85 people. I said to him, 'Are you counting?' and he said 'Yeah, I got 20,000.' He just liked to count.

"I just couldn't empathize."

At Walson we were dealing primarily with the dependents of active duty personnel. I had a problem with that, and the problem was that I was coming from dealing with people who were quite severely burned, who had problems that really were a lot more serious than the ones I was seeing here. A woman would walk in and say she was depressed, she didn't get along with her husband, and I didn't have the empathy or inner fortitude that I could really address that. In my mind, I'm saying, 'You don't know how lucky you are, that this is what you have to complain about.' It's not that I didn't take it seriously. I just couldn't empathize. I couldn't find the energy to address the problems.

Sometimes I would see something that was beyond my expertise. Once, I had this woman come in and sit down. She starts talking and she seems very normal, we're having a normal conversation, so I say, 'What's your problem?' She says, 'Everyone can see my thoughts.' I say, 'Why do you think that?' and she says 'Well, my head is made of glass.' So this is obviously beyond my scope. If her head is made of glass, everyone can see her thoughts, she's afraid the glass will shatter. I would move those people on, usually to be admitted into the psychiatric wing of the hospital.

I was in the army until December 31^st of '71, when I was discharged. I served eighteen months. At that time, Nixon had been trying to phase out the draft and make the switch over to a volunteer army. He was cutting the size, and in doing so he cut six months off my term.

The day I was discharged, I was there at 10 am. The CO has to sign a release paper to let you go; and this guy, he hasn't been pleased with me ever since the incident with him reading me my rights. He was there, and he didn't sign until 11:30 at night. He would come out periodically to say, 'I'm not signing yet.' I just sat there and read.

At some point, somebody said, 'Have you thought about re-upping for two more years?' and I started laughing. I said, 'I don't think so.'

"People would look at you and say, 'Murderer.'

In New York at that time, there was a lot of animosity toward being in the military. When you would come back, from basic training or being discharged or wherever, people would look at you and say, 'Murderer.' My friends were my friends, but people who didn't know me or who I would bump into at the airport or Port Authority or Penn Station would make remarks. They would give you hard stares. I heard 'murderer' more than a few times. That was a constant theme, all the way through when I got discharged.

I didn't hide what I did. They had their views, I had mine. I never murdered anyone, I'm sorry they thought that. If your point of view is if you give any type of support to American forces you're supporting war, no matter what, then there's not much you can say. My view was I was providing support to people that were there. I'm not apologetic about it. I helped people suffering from significant trauma. People say you prolonged an evil war, well, that's their view.

"I don't identify myself as a Vietnam veteran."

I don't think Vietnam vets are a particularly cohesive group. People never liked the war to start with, and veterans were an embarrassment to them. People played down what they did. It wasn't the War to End All Wars or World War II, the Finest Hours. It was the war we lost.

I don't identify myself as a Vietnam veteran. Basically, I just took off the uniform and never wanted to deal with it again. I walked away from it. I wasn't there, people didn't shoot at me, I didn't have the year of being in a jungle. I don't belong to veterans' organizations. I more or less block it. It was something I did for that period of eighteen months or so, but that was it. It was never me. I was there, but it wasn't me.

I've never been to the memorial. I didn't want to. The memorial is there, in my mind; I didn't need to see stone. I know some names on it. People I'd gone to college with went there and died, people I'd gone through basic training with went there and died. I just didn't want that.

When I came out, the CIA was looking to recruit people. They wanted me, but, I mean, my specialty was psychiatric social work. What do you do, call me up in an emergency if a van of mental patients escapes? I wasn't too responsive. I had no desire to do anything like that. I just wanted to get away.

I worked for the VA for a while as a psychiatric social worker, and then as a therapist on campus with different veterans, but I just did not have the motivation. I could not empathize with people whose problems really were significant to them. I changed the focus. I decided to go to law school.

 

My father received his law degree from Brooklyn Law School in 1977. His military service has engendered within him no hard feelings toward a government that, as he puts it, "made me an offer I couldn't refuse" in that spring of 1970. He has made a career of representing government interests in criminal trials at both the state and the federal level.