Robert Cooperman

Draft Board Blues Robert Cooperman

DRAFT BOARD BLUES is more than the story of a draft dodger. It's about a war and a generation's response to our debacle in Vietnam. As with all wars, old men declared war and then shoved young men into harm's way. And as always, it was mostly the poor and the most desperate who fought the war. The losses were heavy on our side, but for the Vietnamese, they were staggering, unthinkable. Cooperman's narrator at first passively acquiesces to serving and probably dying in that conflagration. But when he gets a brief glimpse that there are other possibilities, he decides he'd rather die than have the army or the Viet Cong kill him. With wit, outrage, irony, and "a touch of the blues," DRAFT BOARD BLUES chronicles that struggle. To read it is to be thrown back into a tumultuous time, a time not so different from our own.