A Reluctant Soldier Completes His Duty
When his draft notice arrived in 1972, Ralph E. Rigby immediately thought of Canada and the refuge it offered just down the road.
Forty-two years later, Chief Warrant Officer 5 Rigby is one of the last draftees to leave the U.S. Army, ending a military career he almost left the country to avoid.
“I can pop across the border and see you now and then,” he had assured his mother, Dorothy Rigby, in the kitchen of their Auburn, N.Y., house, two hours from Ontario.
Mrs. Rigby was having none of it. “You won’t have to worry about the government coming to get you,” she warned him. “I’ll come get you.”
So instead of avoiding the military, he ended up making a life of it. This week, Chief Rigby is leaving his last duty station as one of the final remnants of the days when obligatory service and the Vietnam War tore apart the nation’s social fabric.
“I never planned things far out, and next thing I knew, 40 years was up,” Chief Rigby said in a phone interview from Camp Red Cloud in Uijeongbu, South Korea. “It becomes a way of life.”
During the latter years of the Vietnam War, the Selective Service System employed a lottery system to call up young men. In the first such televised drawing, in 1969, a congressman pulled from a vase 365 blue capsules, each containing a unique birthdate. The first date drawn was assigned No. 1, and men born on that day were the first to be summoned for service. Men born on the second date drawn went next, and so on.
Chief Rigby’s birthdate came up 10th in the 1972 draft lottery, making his conscription a near-certainty. When the letter came in March, it read: “You are hereby ordered for induction into the Armed Forces of the United States.”
He was 19 years old and spent his days working on cars at a local garage or at his mother’s house. (She and his father were estranged.) He sported mutton chops, listened to the Grateful Dead and Steppenwolf and planned to open his own body shop. He didn’t join the Vietnam protests that rocked the country, but he didn’t want to go to Indochina, either.
When his mother made it clear that she wouldn’t tolerate his moving to Canada, he resigned himself to his fate.
“He really didn’t want to go,” recalled Mrs. Rigby, who worked in a factory making television tubes. “Other than the fact that he had to go.”
At 6:45 a.m. on April 26, 1972, he waited glumly in front of the Selective Service office in Auburn for the bus that would take him to Syracuse for swearing in. He remembers an official there asking any of the conscripts who wanted to join the Marine Corps instead of the Army to take one step back; nobody moved.
Next stop was boot camp at Fort Dix in New Jersey, then California, where he learned that instead of Vietnam, he would ship out for South Korea and work as an Army mechanic.
It turned out military life, and Korea, agreed with him, and, when he had the option of leaving the Army, he chose instead to stay. Again and again.
At first he found that he felt a profound sense of affection for Koreans; he spent hours walking through villages and mountains around his bases, snapping pictures as he went. As he rose to the top rank among warrant officers, he discovered he enjoyed mentoring junior enlisted soldiers. As his retirement neared recently, he received emails from old soldiers thanking him for helping them succeed in the military.
“I’m going to miss the younger soldiers I worked with,” he said.
Chief Rigby served six deployments to Korea, including the latest with the 2nd Infantry Division. Initially reluctant to go to war in Vietnam, he ended up fighting in the first Gulf War, then later doing two full combat tours of Afghanistan and serving another in Iraq.
“If I had it to do again, I can’t think of anything I would really change,” he said.
Now 62 years old with a grown son of his own, Chief Rigby said he still keeps up with the young soldiers, running two miles in 15 minutes in his most recent fitness test. He is an avid sky-diver. If the Army let him, he says he would stay in. Instead, he plans to get a civilian job with the Army.
Last month, soldiers crowded into a theater at Camp Red Cloud to honor Chief Rigby and mark his retirement. A brass band played. The division commander presented him with a folded flag, and his 83-year-old mother, who sat next to him on the stage, with the Outstanding Civilian Service medal.
In her view, he has done his duty and more. “I’ve been trying to get him out for 25 years,” she said.
Source: Wall Street Journal
By: Michael M Phillips
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