Don Graham retired from Chico State in 2007 as the university's Associate Vice President for Student Affairs (he and wife MaryAnne now live in Sonoma County) but his Chico State connection goes back decades.
In the summer of 1968, he writes in his well-crafted memoir, Chico State had accepted him into the master's program in psychology, and he and MaryAnne "would be renting a very small house at something-and-a-half Cherry Street" near campus.
Though his draft board had been hounding him even as the U.S. War in Vietnam raged he was confident he'd be safe. As MaryAnne continued packing at their Napa home, Graham drove north on Highway 99 toward his destiny. It did not go as planned.
The story is told in "Coming Home Whole: A Draftee's Foretold Journey To And From Vietnam" ($13.99 in paperback from Valley of the Moon Press). A car accident sends Graham back home; that same day he receives a draft notice. Alice at the draft board tells him: "'Don ... if the quota for Napa County next month is one person, you're it.'"
His choices are few. Canada was unappealing; he didn't have a history of conscientious objection (though years later he and MaryAnne would work in the peace movement); he didn't really want to maim himself to get 4F status; he didn't want to go to prison. So, he writes, he gave up, was drafted on election day in 1968, and promptly ushered into the Army.
What follows is not a gruesome tale of war but rather a series of meaningful "coincidences." Graham had sensed a kind of spirituality ("some immensely powerful force") watching over him, mediated by his mother, her spiritual mentor David (who had died), and a psychic who predicted he would return whole from the war.
He is assigned artillery duty in Vietnam, but he and his friends survive. R&R is in Hawaii where a kidney stone attack brings him to Tripler Hospital in Honolulu and a military job away from the war.
"How is this possible?" he asks himself in this story of a grateful young man amidst the twists and turns of life.
