In what would eventually have been a mismatch, I once got provisionally accepted into Officers Candidate School, while attached to the National Guard unit in Gallup. Completing the training would have turned me into a second lieutenant.
    Looking back, I can’t fathom having made such a decision. Was it the example set by my brother, who worked full time with the Guard for 45 years? Was it the encouragement of a district judge who was our battalion commander?

    Things were different then: We didn’t worry about Iraq or Iran, although Vietnam was beginning to percolate. And as many soldiers and can attest, membership in the guard was far from a draft-dodging scheme; rather, the guard — at least in New Mexico — was vulnerable in war time.
    A major reason for declining the appointment (I turned them down, not vice-versa) was because of the total loss of privacy, or modesty, if you will, when one joins the service.
    I can explain everything:
    Though I can’t claim to be one who’s so physically modest that he showers blindfolded, I appreciate privacy and would rather shower alone than in a room with a dozen others. I’ve never understood or appreciated guys in the military or in athletics who strut around for the whole world to see.
    The day I joined the National Guard unit in Las Vegas, a crusty supply sergeant called “Willie” issued us our fatigues by guessing at our sizes. We all had civilian clothes on, and a recruit attempted a measurement of his trousers by placing them against his waist.
    Willie hollered in Spanish, “If you want to know if they fit, you have to take off your pants first.” Then he added, “And besides, nobody’s going to look at . . .” and here his voice trailed off.
    You mean we’ve gotta take off our pants in front of all these guys? That was an abrupt introduction to the loss of privacy for 16- and 17-year-olds who thought certain things ought to remain private.
    Years later, while living in Gallup, I drove to Albuquerque for my O.C.S. physical examination. There were several of us candidates huddled in a room in a quonset hut, staffed with physicians. I got to be first.
    The routine was for us to get pinched, popped, patted, pestered, poked, pried, prodded, made to cough, do a million jumping-jacks, dry-shave while double-timing, and finally, walk a ramp, worse than walking a plank.
    Remember I was first, unschooled in the protocol. Reduced to one item of apparel, I needed to walk up the incline to be observed by the entire armed forces. Actually, it was only a half dozen doctors, but the warm, stuffy and crowded room made everything seem quite palpable.
    For a while I imagined being center ring in an ancient Roman coliseum ritual. When I got to the top of the ramp, with the trepidation of one escaping a lynch mob, one of the spectator doctors hollered, “Private, we’re not here to admire your body; we want to see if you have any Å’conditions’ we need to know about.” I didn’t like the way “conditions” sounded.
    Translation: you need to walk up the ramp completely naked. Although I was told by the candidate who followed me that I had been on stage about five minutes, I would have guessed seven hours, or the length of a Wagnerian aria.
    One of the doctors polished his monocle and stroked his beard pensively as he ordered me to walk back and forth several times. There is little that compares to the feeling of being eye-balled so thoroughly.
    A candidate who later completed the course and received his commission told me that the size of the room, its temperature and the not-so-loving ambience were deliberate. Soldiers had been weeded out purely by their performance on the ramp. I never learned my results and graciously asked to be allowed to withdraw my candidacy. Besides, runway modeling was not my bag. “Runaway” would have been a better term.
    That experience remained a distant memory. I assumed I’d never again need to get inspected by medical throngs with hands as large as catcher’s mitts.
    But then came graduate school. Later, as a married man and father of a toddler, I needed to take a physical examination to enter graduate school in Virginia. And it seemed that the same beard-stroking, monocle-wearing doctor was there too. Coincidence? I think not.
    I lined up with a slew of other male students, clad only in shorts, waiting to be inspected by one of three doctors seated on benches, equipped with tiny flashlights. One of the three doctors — the one with a beard and monocle — was positioned in such a way that the student he’d inspect would be in the line of sight of millions.
    I counted the number of students ahead of me and determined that I was in line to be probed by the one doctor all of us were trying to avoid. So I stepped out of line to tie an invisible shoelace. “Ha!” I thought, “the poor fool behind me is up for some humiliation.”
    But as I approached a “safe” doctor, another student in front also stopped to tie his non-existent shoes, leaving me next in line, doomed to be observed by all of the Atlantic Seaboard.
    The doctor who got up close and personal had a dismaying similarity to a character, dressed as a Nazi soldier, who appeared on TV’s “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.” He uttered only two words, week after week: “Varrry in-ter-esting.” I wondered, “Has someone with a perverse sense of humor planted a ersatz Nazi to play Doctor?”
    Back in the car, where my wife and son waited, I sat dejected. Bonnie noticed right away. Had I been diagnosed with a terminal disease? Did the medical staff discover a “varrry in-ter-esting” “condition”? Even our son reacted to my mood and began to cry.
    I explained the ordeal to them, but didn’t get far before my wife burst into uncontrollable laughter, so much so that she was unable to drive us home. Her sides ached. I explained all about lining up and about the doctors who sat in their white coats ready to observe the collegiate mooning they instigated.
    With ashen face and trembling hands I unfolded the woeful tale. The woman who had promised to love and honor me through thick and thin continued to laugh.
    She reminded me that pregnant women have to undergo much more than we males. She told me that not only was my story funny but that she felt relief that my tight-jawed manner, my hysteria and strange color were occasioned by excessive modesty, even prudery, and not poor health.
    She especially enjoyed the part when I told about the way the doctor hummed as he went about his work. It’s great to see a man so happy in his work, even at my expense.
    Such invasions of my privacy were these two examinations that I obviously hesitate even to mention the ordeals here. And they explain why I eschewed a career in the military.
    So, only as a public service, I’m explaining the perils of being a male. And I didn’t hum or whistle as I wrote this.