How much water do you drink every day?
Doubtful you keep track, though many of you, like my daughter Ellie, always has a bottle at hand. So, including liquid accompanying meals, do you swallow 20 ounces? 40? 60 or more? Are you pishing it away all day? All night?
Water is said to be good for you. I accept that, but, honestly, I rarely have a thirst for it. Or for any other drink. I try to stay hydrated when playing pickleball but over the course of a 2-3 hour session I imbibe perhaps 10 ounces in the form of sugar free lemonade flavored Vitamin Water. Over dinner, I often cannot finish a 7.5 ounce can of Diet Coke.
I’m musing about water because I might once again be suffering from either kidney or bladder stones, a condition that may be flushed away, if one is fortunate, by the consumption of what I consider to be a prodigious amount of liquid, 80 ounces per day.
I’ve coped with the alternative medical remedy, details of which I will spare you, except to note that a catheter was involved.
So, one might assume that confronted with the choices I would opt for drinking lots of water. After all, more than half a century ago, in June 1970, drinking 80 ounces of water for 10 straight days kept me away from being drafted during the height of the Vietnam War.
My college deferment had run out. In the draft lottery at the end of 1969 my birth date, March 6, was picked 139th. At the beginning of June a formal letter from the Selective Service System ordered me to show up 10 days later at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn to take a physical to determine my eligibility to be one of 162,746 young men to be inducted that year into the military, mostly for service in Vietnam.
The Brooklyn College bookstore carried a booklet, “1001 Ways to Beat the Draft.” I had no debilitating disease or condition, nor was I a conscientious objector. I simply had no desire to get shipped to the rice paddies of Indochina. The booklet, however, did offer a glimmer of hope.
Seems the military has a standard of acceptable physicality based on a person’s height and weight. A six foot person—my height—had to weigh at least 131 pounds. I weighed 134. I was really skinny. But my path to survival of the not-necessarily-the-fittest was clear. Get thinner!
I had 10 days to lose enough weight to get under the minimum, and then some, because the booklet also said they could keep me for three days of observation. Read that, time to fatten me up for the kill.
God bless Dr. Stillman, as in Dr. Stillman’s Water Diet. His regimen, much like the latter day Atkins Diet, permitted only proteins and required drinking 80 ounces of water a day. For 10 straight days I avoided all carbohydrates, all fruit, anything but meat, fish, eggs and water. For years my mother had tried to fatten me up, forcing me to drink milk shakes spiked with a raw egg that my sister gleefully recalls preparing, even threatening to send me away to a special camp for the undernourished. Now faced with the prospect of her youngest child being shipped off to Vietnam, she reversed course. She worried I was eating too much of my restricted diet. She removed food from my plate.
The fateful day at Fort Hamilton, the scene played out much as it did to Arlo Guthrie in the film “Alice’s Restaurant.” The sergeant told us no one, absolutely no one, would fail the intelligence test. We walked around the physical area in our skivvies, holding our valuables in see-thru plastic bags. Medical technicians poked our arms to draw blood. They couldn’t find the veins of a really fat guy ahead of me. He fainted. He earned a deferment. At the urine sample station, real or sarcastic offers and requests for extra fluid abounded. At the weigh-in, I tipped the scales at 124 pounds. I was REALLY skinny.
Ten days. Ten pounds. They could still keep me for observation. I cautiously approached the decision desk. They could keep me on base for three days, or ask me back for another physical in six months. They deferred me for a year.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was forever safe. The draft never reached number 139 again.
To celebrate my immediate victory, I took advantage of the free meal provided in the mess hall. I remember eating breaded, yes, breaded veal cutlet, corn niblets, mashed potatoes, rye bread, banana cream pie, Coca-Cola. Army food was delicious.
Can I discipline myself again to drinking 80 ounces a day? The stakes are not nearly as high. Time will tell …
