When I joined the Peace Corps in 1967, the Hippie era was just coming into its own. Beards and shaggy hair were making an appearance, but most of us were still pretty clean-cut. There was only one Hippy among the twenty-three of us who went to India, and he was determined that nevermore would scissor molest his natural shrubbery.

This made him a standout in India, where short hair and the clean shave were de rigueur for men, save for the nearly universal, neatly clipped mustache. Even there, however, there was one excuse to let the hair grow—a visit to the temple of Venkateshwara Swami at Tirupati to sacrifice it in devotion and to receive blessings in return. If you saw an Indian with long hair and beard, he was going to Tirupati. No other reason existed.

So Peter told people he was going to Tirupati. The explanation satisfied, and he sported hair and beard for the next two years without a ripple.

These were the years when opposition to the war in Vietnam became explosive. Peace Corps service usually came with a military deferment. Draft evasion alone motivated some to join, but most still did it for altruistic reasons. At that time the awarding of deferments was the whim of local draft boards and was very unevenly administered across the country. Some boards were easy, other were downright vindictive.

Peter was unalterably opposed to the war. He was also the youngest member of our group. He’d be OK as long as he was in India, but when his Peace Corps tour was up, he’d still be vulnerable to the draft for the three years until he turned twenty-six. Accordingly, he spent much time in India trying to draft a conscientious-objector argument. Pacifist sects like Mormons, Mennonites, and Quakers were automatically exempt—as were Muslims, as we famously learned through Mohammed Ali’s travails. Peter’s Judaism did not protect him.

when his Peace Corps tour was up, he’d still be vulnerable to the draft

Many of us became involved in his predicament. It finally dawned on us that what the Selective Service System required, from that vast majority with the bad judgment to be born in non-pacifist sects, was that you convince them you had personally talked to God! They didn’t say so, but that was the net effect. The situation was impossible.

Peter and two others stayed in India for a time after their tour ended. That was when Selective Service decided, belatedly, to replace draft-board whim with a national lottery. Each day of the year was assigned a random number—1 through 365 (plus 366 to account for leap year). The higher the number your birthday fell on, the less likely you were to get drafted.

I’d returned to the States and blown my readjustment allowance to go with my girlfriend for a couple of weeks in England. A few of her college crowd had settled in London, cut an album for Decca Records, and afforded us housing and entrée to London’s bohemian circles. I sent our London address off to India so people could contact me, saw the sights, made an excursion to the North Sea, and befriended a large segment of London’s pub society.

If there were an American equivalent of the English pub, I would happily have died long ago of liver disease.

So there I was, getting blithered away in one of those selfsame establishments—the drafts of beer swirling my psyche with a mixture of Indian, American, and British cultures—when one of our London friends came in and handed me an aerogram from India. It was Peter. He’d been to Triupati and sacrificed his locks.

When the lottery came in, he’d started telling people not just that he was going to Tirupati, but that he was going in order to get a high draft number. So he went, did the sacrifice, and received his number. I read that number in the inebriated blur of a London pub. And it was . . . three hundred sixty-three! Virtually an ironclad guarantee that he would never have to visit Vietnam!

I was overjoyed for Peter. It was one of the most surreal moments of my entire life.