YOU CAN'T GET THERE FROM HERE

Excerpt from Boney TeenHobo
Autobiography of Lloyd E. Lawrence Sr.

Whoever said, "YOU CAN'T GET THERE FROM HERE" never knew Boney.

On three separate occasions, in attempts to runaway, Boney used an early fraudulent draft card to prove that he was old enough to join the military. On all three occasions the Army, Navy, and the Marines, for a persistent kidney condition, rejected him. It was the result of chronic nephritis; it almost took his life earlier. Albumin showed up in his urine tests and they all refused to take him into the military service.

Boney was desperate when he had his dad's permission on his seventeenth birthday. The induction center had lines around the block to intake draftees for the Korean War. Most of them didn't want to go, but Boney was praying for acceptance . like he had never prayed before. A sickening feeling came to his gut as he saw the familiar white cells floating in his urine specimen. "Oh no!" Boney screamed aloud. The guy in the stall next to him asked "What's Wrong? You get your thing caught in your fly?" Boney replied, "No, I just failed the physical exam again." The guy asked, "What's wrong with that?" He, thinking Boney was getting drafted also.

When he found out Boney wanted to go to war, he flipped out. "You're nuts!" he replied. "Five hundred guys are here today praying that they will flunk the exam and here you are with the pot at the end of the rainbow and pissed off!" Boney looked at him with a sheepish grin and asked, "Ya. wanna trade piss?" The guy lit up like a Christmas tree when the possibility hit home. He snatched the specimen out of Boney's hand and said, "You bet your ass I do!" Boney fraudulently passed the urine test and some guy went home a happy 4F deferred person.

He often wondered for years if the guy ever got re-classified. If he did, all he accomplished was to defer combat to a time when more guys were killed than any other time of the war. As peace was talked about over the armistice table, lives were being sacrificed to take and re-take a few yards of soil for the final lines to be drawn. Boney was there to witness the blood bath.