By Jeffry Scott
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
He was a kid who didn’t want to be a soldier. There was a war in Vietnam and a peace movement in America.
But then he got the government's letter. So he quit his job at a furniture store, quit thinking about college and found himself on a cold December morning in 1970 standing in front of a post office in Sumter, S.C., listening to a soldier read names off a clip board until he heard his: “Clyde Green!”
With that, the 20-year-old kid climbed on the bus with the rest of the recruits and headed to a U.S. Army base where he’d get his hair shorn to stubble, a uniform, shots, a bunk in a barracks and quick indoctrination into the military.
“I didn’t want to join the Army,” Clyde Green said last week. “The Army came and got me.”
When he retires as a chief warrant officer in a ceremony Thursday morning at Ft. McPherson — after 39 years, 9 months and 15 days of continuous active duty – he will be, by the best accounting, the last U.S. Army draftee who fought in Vietnam.
Welcome home Chief, and thank you for your service!