In my late twenties, I was working as a maintenance gardener at a private high school in Ross, California.
One morning, a young and very serious freshman started walking with me as I descended the brick steps from the upper to the lower campus with a bucket full of grass seed in one hand and a chip on my opposite shoulder. When we got to the bottom, he let out a long sigh, turned and looked me right in the eyes and said: “So…I heard you fought in Vietnam.”
“What?” I said
“Mr. Honick told us in history class that Steve the Gardener fought in Vietnam”
“Yes” I wanted to say “I was deployed as part of an elite unit of second grade boys who, with their Planet of The Apes lunchboxes packed with C4 plastic explosives, were dropped into the jungles north of Khe Sahn. Ho Chi Minh didn’t see that coming.”
But instead, I told him there must be some mistake, as I would have been too young. He appeared immediately disgusted, shook his head and turned his 14-year-old back to me, as if I was some sort of draft dodger. I wanted to yell after him “Don’t blame me, blame Nixon for ending the war ten years before I was eligible for the lottery! History grade F, by the way!” but instead I just watched him go, no doubt to share with his friends how their beloved Steve The Gardener was revealed to be a Communist sympathizer and should probably be kept an eye on.
It turns out, there was a gardener named Steve who worked at the high school years prior who actually did fight in Vietnam, and Mr. Honick just believed that the students would either assume as much or simply conclude that I looked incredibly good for my age.
Elite unit of second grade boys!!!