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held any appeal. But his grades weren’t good enough, and he was told he’d have to attend junior college as a nonmatriculated, part-time student, which would not be enough to earn him the draft exemption. He then moved back to Oakland and made a last-ditch personal appeal to his local draft board, to convince them he had every intention of attending college full time.
    The board took him the following month.
    In the spring of 1951, he spent his last free nights getting drunk and listening to music at the local dives, before reporting, hung over and hell-bent, for basic training at Fort Ord, near the Monterey Peninsula. As far as he was concerned, he didn’t need any training. What could the army teach him that at the age of twenty he didn’t already know?
    Plenty, as it turned out, although not at all in the ways he might have expected.

TWO

    Clint and his wife Maggie at the Golden Globes Awards, 1971. AP Images
    Basically I was a drifter, a bum. As it has turned out, I’m lucky because I’m going to end up financially well-off for a drifter. But that really doesn’t change things … You can only dig so many holes in the ground
.
    —Clint Eastwood
     
    T he army quickly altered the rhythm of Clint’s life, from the jazzy syncopation of his unstructured days and nights to the beat of a military march. He was stationed at Fort Ord, near the Monterey Peninsula, for six weeks of basic training. To everyone’s surprise but nobody more than himself, his natural physical abilities gave rise to talk among the drill sergeants that he should be sent to Officer Training School—a suggestion he rejected out of hand. He had been drafted for the obligatory two years and didn’t want to spend one second longer in uniform.
No problem
, they told him.
So be ready for more training and toughening up before you’re shipped off to Korea
.
    Only something he had written down on his induction papers saved him from that grim assignment. When asked to mention any special skills, he had put down “swimming.” The camp brass had made note of it, and when he completed basic, they assigned him to permanent duty as a lifesaving swimming instructor at the Fort Ord Division of Faculty. The boy who had almost drowned in the Pacific and done so poorly in school was now assigned to teach the army how to swim. That kind of irony helped produce what would one day be known as the Eastwood smirk—an ambiguous squint-eyed half-smile that said nothing and everything at the same time.
    This “Clint luck,” as his friends always called it, didn’t stop there. His placement at the base pool brought him into frequent contact with Special Services, the army division created during World War II to utilize the popularity of Hollywood celebrities inducted into the service. Knowing that killing off movie stars was not the best PR or economic move, the army segregated them into Special Services and gave them essentially (but not always) a free ticket, most of the time saving them from active duty and using them for as much publicity and as many recruiting opportunities as they could. They spent most oftheir ample free time swimming. His real job was to save them from drowning.
    On duty, Clint met several young Hollywood contract players, including Martin Milner, John Saxon, and David Janssen, and dozens of other future familiar film and TV faces all congregated around the pool, turning it into a gathering spot for drinks and small talk, lacking only girls to complete the cool social scene. WACs assigned to the base were everywhere but were not allowed to fraternize with the men at the pool or after hours.
    Clint became friends with the exceptionally good-looking Janssen, who had played football for Fairfax High School in Hollywood before a serious knee injury ruined his chances of playing college sports and steered him instead into acting. Clint and Janssen shared an athletic bravado cut with strong sexual appetites, which made them legends of a sort on