When Col. Harold Joseph O’Grady drove his only son downtown to register with the Selective Service System back in 1972 he may have been thinking, “This kid will last about as as long in Vietnam as an ice-cream cone.”

The old man brought some experience to bear, having done his bit in (and above) the jungle during World War II with the New Guinea-based 65th Squadron, 433rd Troop Carrier Group, Fifth Air Force.

Thirty years later, those halcyon days spent rocking a biscuit bomber out of New Guinea must have looked like R&R in Sydney compared to sharing quarters with a smart-ass peace creep/wanna-be hippie who favored Abbie and Jerry over Tricky Dick and Spiro; a hairy asthmatic nuisance who couldn’t mow the grass without wheezing but smoked acres of it without complaint and then ate everything in the house.

Well, now he was 18 and that’s Reveille you hear, son! Just ’cause you had the good fortune to be born into a career Air Force officer’s family doesn’t mean you get to skip your turn in the barrel. Especially with your GPA. Sign here, dismiss, and await your letter from the president.

Thus I duly registered with Selective Service as required; continued my cursory antiwar theatrics at college; and voted for a WWII B-24 pilot in November’s presidential contest.

Then, in December, the last induction call was issued, and the authority to induct expired in July 1973. They may have had my number, but they couldn’t put me in that barrel anymore, and I certainly wasn’t going to get in there by myself. I knew what the knothole was for.

What I don’t know, a half-century down my own long and winding road, is whether my opposition to the Vietnam war was a principled stand or a simple exercise of privilege. Peace for everyone, or just for me?

O, to be a sprat again, with no question weightier than what’s this interesting sticky bit up my nose? My only connection to that plump munchkin above is an unstable and unreliable continuity of memory; I had sinus problems then and I have them now.

When I finally graduated from college at age 23 — about the same age as my old man when he was matriculating at the Pacific Theater — my parents presented me with a used Japanese pickup. That’s was mom’s doing. I never saw the old man driving a Japanese anything. He wanted to buy me an Edsel.

Today, my hiking boots, running shoes, and more than a few of my shirts were made in Vietnam.

There’s a lesson here somewhere, and you’d think I’d have puzzled it out by now. I’ve never been smart, but I’ve often been lucky.