BLUEWATER BAY The day his ice cream truck wrecked on an Alabama highway rolling five times after running into a washout and hitting another car was, believe it or not, just the next-to-last straw for Ramon Pulliam.
The last straw came shortly after, when he and a friend thought they were close to getting jobs at a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Alabama. Both were told, in fact, that they would be hired, except for one thing both were classified 1A by the Selective Service System, meaning they were available for military service.
Should they be drafted, Pulliam and his buddy were told, their jobs would have to be held open for three years, a gamble the plant wasn t willing to take. It was 1960, and U.S. involvement in Vietnam, under terms of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization agreement signed six years earlier, was ramping up.