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JUST THE OTHER SIDE of the airport, on a bluff overlooking the Minnesota River, is Fort Snelling National Cemetery. It's a classic military cemetery, with thousands of identical markers laid out like poppies in Flanders fields.

The cemetery abuts the area where I walk my dog, so I pass through there frequently. Few people buried there were killed in battle. If you served in the armed forces, it's your right—and your spouse's—to be interred here. But I always pause a moment when I see on the marker a death date between 1965 and 1972. And think, "There but for the grace of God is me." It takes me back to my experiences with the draft. I'm a little hazy on it. It was 1969, the haziest year of them all.

I was full of the zeitgeist, and full of contempt for LBJ and General Hershey. I had a dozen plans for my life, none involving rice paddies. I remember toying with the idea of filing as a conscientious objector, but it didn't work for me. They asked you whether you'd smack Ho Chi Minh with a tire iron if you came upon him raping your Aunt Sally. I had to admit I wasn't too hot on the idea.

When the Selective Service form asked if I advocated the overthrow of the United States by force or violence, I wrote, "Force."

I was a nominal draft resister. I read in Paul Krassner's magazine The Realist that your draft board had to file everything you sent them. So I sent them a 6-pound bonito, a handsome ocean fish I purchased at the Central Market in downtown Los Angeles. The idea was that the draft board would be helpless except to live with the stench of a decaying fish in their file cabinet. Instead-figure this-they drafted me.

I was in the U.S. Army, technically, for a couple of weeks, classified as AWOL. I wasn't even aware I'd been drafted; I was hiking around in Alaska at the time, without a thought in my head, and only found out about my induction later. Then I applied to the nearest college I could find and cowered under its protective ivy until the lottery replaced the draft. So I never went to Vietnam, and I never missed it. But the war was part of my life anyway. I escorted my childhood friend Paul Plato to his ship when he shipped out from San Pedro.

For a while, I knew a couple of actual deserters in Los Angeles, a pair of goofy guys who claimed to have escaped from interment at The Presidio. I never believed their stories, but one night they were rousted from their beds and led away by MPs.

At my first high school reunion, I learned our one fatality was Skeeter Barnes, a sweet kid from the wrong side of the tracks, who stepped on a land mine somewhere and was no more. We played Little League together. It is hard to say who was the coward and who was the hero. Poor Skeeter was just a poor dope who couldn't work the system like I did. I fancied I was an intellectual hero, full of subtle ideals, but I kept myself far from harm's way, didn't I? One more thing I have in common with George W. Bush.

When I think of 56,000 of my generation tossed out there to die defending our "Laugh-In" way of life, it still hurts 30 years later.

When the war ended, there were reports that returning soldiers were routinely called baby-killers and spat on by those who didn't go. I always wished that these things hadn't happened. Or if they did happen, that they were anomalies.

Vietnam vets suffered from a host of problems, from post-traumatic stress disorder and Agent Orange to unemployment in the stagflation of the '70s and early '80s. Many wondered where their reward was for their time in hell. Where was their GI Bill?

What a choice our country foisted on a generation of boys: be good and die stupidly, or be smart and survive but feel like a traitor to your own generation.

And I look at these graves at Fort Snelling, row upon row upon row upon row, their faces gray from jet exhaust, and I feel the urge to salute. MM

Michael Finley is co-author of "The New Why Teams Don't Work." He lives in St. Paul.