War is not fun to remember. Maybe that’s the best reason for remembering it. War is even less fun to remember when you were forced to fight one, whether or not you believed in the righteousness or necessity of the fight. In my “Making History” classes we talk about the dreaded Draft, and how it affected the Baby Boomer men bound for Vietnam. These stories are painful to hear. By the early seventies there had been huge war protests in nearly every major American city. Chanting slogans such as “Hey hey LBJ how many kids did you kill today?” and “Hell no we won’t go!” some draft-age young men burned their draft cards. Some left for Canada to avoid the draft.
One such man, “Doug,” remembered the day the first Draft Lottery numbers were announced, in December of 1969 when he was a junior at the University of Washington. He, along with many of his fraternity brothers, didn’t go to class that day, because they were so nervous. Your Lottery number was associated with your birthday. A low Lottery number was bad – it meant you were sure to be drafted. A high lottery number, the best being 366, meant that you wouldn’t have to make any difficult decisions, like between exile to Canada or dying in a Vietnamese jungle.
Doug and his frat brothers sat on the veranda of the fraternity house, drinking beer and telling dirty jokes, trying to pretend that they weren’t scared while waiting for the Lottery numbers to be read over the radio. Doug even remembered the jokes, and the guys who told them. But what he doesn’t remember is hearing his number. His memory stops dead at the point the announcer began to read the list. He doesn’t remember anything else about that day, or days after. The next day he remembers is the day, weeks later, that he joined the Navy, to avoid being drafted. Doug’s number was 10. “It was such a shock,” he said. “Everything in my life just went blank.”
Do you have a story about Vietnam, or the effect of the draft on your life, or the life of someone you knew? If you’d care to share a story about this topic, please leave a comment here. At the end of each month I’ll gather up the Sharing History comments and pick one at random from a drawing, and send the winner of the drawing my e-book: your choice of a Making History Workbook.
Technorati Tags: history, stories, draft, lottery, LBJ, 1969, Vietnam, Vietnamese jungle, war, baby boomer
