Classical Values :: Where were you in '72?

February 21, 2004

Where were you in '72?

At the risk of repeating what I said earlier, I was 318. (Still can't verify that number because I cannot find the damned 1954 birth year lottery -- the one which assigned Sharpton number 103 -- so it's from memory!)

But I am relieved to know that Chris Satullo, the editorial page editor of my local newspaper, was 177:

Mine was 177.

That served - so I didn't have to.

In 1972, that fact made me both glad and guilty.

Still does today.

I speak of my number in the Selective Service lottery. If you lived through that momentous spin of the drum, as I did at the age of 18, you never forget the number that chance assigned you.

By that stage of the Vietnam War, the number 177 was high enough to spare me a summons from my nation.

If I were to claim that I know what I would have done had my number left me vulnerable, that would be a lie.

I guess it must be a fad, everybody suddenly talking about their Vietnam War lottery numbers. Fair enough as a topic -- especially now that Kerry and his supporters are hell-bent on turning this election into a sanctimonious referendum on the morality of a sanctimonious group of people still smarting over their fractured sense of manhood.

As was I in my essay, my local editor is quite self-effacing about his non-role:

Heck, while he was playing weekend pilot, I was sitting in a college dorm, watching other people smoke dope. Who am I to judge?

What's more, I twice marked my presidential ballot for a guy who did markedly less to serve than Bush, and was just as evasive in explaining his actions: Bill Clinton. On the spectrum of duty, Bush falls somewhere between his predecessor and the man he'll likely face this fall, John Kerry.

In using his family's pull to get into the National Guard, Bush only did what thousands of others did - or would have done if they could.

In gliding through his Guard duty, showing up some times and not others, he only did what that era's fundamentally classist system allowed hundreds like him to do.

Gotta disagree there. Satullo is implicitly setting up a false dichotomy. He wants readers to imagine an America divided between RICH people who used their POWER and INFLUENCE to get their kids into the Guard and the rest of us ordinary folks who....

Ordinary folks who what? Instead of facts, we get another implied dichotomy. In discussing his own number and the lottery system, Satullo makes no mention of the fact that the lottery system was only instituted very late in the war, replacing the previous system of prolonged deferments with one of certainty and predictability. (In my view, it was one of the smartest things Nixon ever did.)

The reason I don't think this omission was inadvertent is because it was the old deferment system that dominated the Vietnam War. Not only that, but it was the ability to get the precious deferment (NOT service in the National Guard) that marked the real class division in America. To get a deferment, you had to be able to afford a college education. That was the real cultural division. Why is it being downplayed?

Thus, while it is comfortable for Satullo to say that Bush "did what thousands of others did - or would have done if they could" ("what that era's fundamentally classist system allowed hundreds like him to do"), he very conveniently forgets that in the case of the college deferment system, we're not talking about hundreds. We're not even talking about thousands, or many, many thousands.

It's millions!

Putting aside for the moment whether service in the National Guard is less honorable than a college deferment (although in logic how could it be?), let's look at some real numbers.

First, here's the overall scope of Vietnam War service:

Between 1964 & 1972, 2.2 million American males, out of the 26.8 million that reached age 18 during that period, were drafted into the armed services for two years of military service. Of the remainder, 8.7 million volunteered, leaving 15.9 million who escaped the draft entirely. 209,517 men were officially listed as draft dodgers, making no effort at all to avoid the draft using college deferments, ill health, citing family commitments or listing themselves as conscientious objectors.

Deferments, of course, were overwhelmingly a middle-class privilege:

Selective Service regulations offered deferments for college attendance and a variety of essential civilian occupations that favored middle- and upper- class whites. The vast majority of draftees were poor, undereducated, and urban—blue-collar workers or unemployed.

Here's a more detailed breakdown:

Of the 27 million men eligible for conscription during the Vietnam era, 8,720,000 enlisted, often to beat the draft; 2,215,000 were drafted; and almost 16 million never served. Of that 16 million, 15,410,000 were deferred, exempted, or disqualified, and an estimated 570,000 were draft offenders. Of that number, over 209,517 were accused of draft violations, 8,750 were convicted, and 3,250 were imprisoned.

According to the numbers I have seen, the typical young American male during that period was more likely to have not served than served, and if he served more likely never to have been in Vietnam. Thus, it can reasonably be argued that Bush and Cheney more typify their generation than Clinton or Gore (and maybe even Kerry).

Statistics maintained by the Selective Service System and the Department of Veterans Affairs suggest that Bush and Cheney are more typical of the Vietnam-era generation than, say, Gore and Kerry. And very few voters under age 45 have served in the military at all.

Between July 1, 1964 and June 30, 1973, just before Bush won an early release from the National Guard to attend Harvard Business School, 18.3 million men registered with Selective Service. Just 8.8 million of them, including 1.7 million draftees, served on active duty. And of those who served on active duty, just 2.6 million served in Vietnam.

As of mid-1966, when Cheney's daughter was born, there were more draft-age fathers deferred from service, 3.5 million, than the total number of men and women who served in Vietnam throughout the war.

I am worried that John Kerry is shooting for a role as the Ronald Reagan of a guilt-ridden Vietnam War deferment crowd whose opposition to the war was based on dissembled self-interest. Does he legitimize them and makes them feel proud and powerful? Unlike Bill Clinton, he fought in that war, and came back to oppose it. Might this validate their non-service as the honorable thing to have done? If so, it will be a powerful motivating force, and it may explain the Kerry euphoria I'm starting to see.

After all, who doesn't want to feel honorable?

Certainly not those who opposed peace with honor.

Is it, as this commentator asks, time to let it go?

We have a choice this election between a guy who can be accused of using National Guard service to avoid going to Vietnam and a guy who went and then used his exemplary service to savage his fellow veterans.

I submit for your consideration that it is time to let Vietnam go. The decisions we made were individual, and the decisions we made have had consequences we have all had to live with for the rest of our lives. It was a confusing and crazy time. What we did or did not do during the Vietnam era doesn't matter any more.

Let it be.

Easy enough for me to do, personally. It wasn't my fault that I drew a high number, and never had a deferment. I can certainly forget about the draft, the deferments, the Guard.

What I do not want is be lectured once again about the immorality of the war by people who did everything they could to make the United States (and South Vietnam) lose it. It wasn't enough that Nixon ended the draft, and ended the war. They wanted North Vietnam to win, and they got their way.

I'll never forget the image of the last American helicopters leaving.

Betrayal? Or Watergate fallout?

I do have one nagging question, completely unrelated to the draft. Did Kerry want South Vietnam to lose?

posted by Eric on 02.21.04 at 11:43 AM

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Comments

What do you mean when you talk about people enlisting to "beat the draft"?

Skip Perry · February 21, 2004 10:53 PM

Where was I in 1972? Hmmm....

I'm quite certain that I was not standing on my head in the middle of Wisconsin.

There's a little tale behind that, more or less: Way back around 1968, as I recall, I was staying with my Aunt Nancy and Uncle Pete in Seattle (all my relatives on my Mama's side live in the Seattle area, my Dad's relatives dwell mostly in the Olympic Peninsula area). Aunt Nancy and Uncle Pete have 2 sons, Maury and Marty. One day, she called them to dinner and when they were a little late from playing a baseball game, as I recall, she said: "I don't care if you're standing on your head in the middle of Wisconsin! You come to dinner when I call you!" That phrase always stuck in my mind ever since then.

I'm quite certain that I was not standing on my head in the middle of Wisconsin in 1972. Nor in any other year. I have never been in or near Wisconsin in my entire life. I stopped at an airport in Chicago once on the way to New York to visit my brother (that was in 1978). I may have flown over Wisconsin once or twice. The _name_ "Wisconsin" (derived from some Native American word) has an interesting sound to it, and it has an interesting shape when I look at a map. But I don't recall ever having been there, much less having stood on my head there, and certainly not in 1972.
I was in Central High School in Monmouth-Independence, Oregon, in 1972. I was just beginning to get into ideological spectra at that time.

But John Kusch of Madison, Wisconsin, and Arnold Harris of Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin, who comment regularly on homosexual issues (from opposing sides) in Dean's World, may very well have stood on their heads at some time or other in their lives. In fact, for all I know, those two very interesting gentlemen may both have been standing on their heads in the middle of Wisconsin at the very moment when my Aunt Nancy said: "I don't care if you're standing on your head in the middle of Wisconsin! You come to dinner when I call you!"

Call me anything, but don't call me late for dinner.

Steven Malcolm Anderson the Lesbian-worshipping gun-loving selfish aesthete · February 22, 2004 01:27 PM

I know, I know, I sounded like a "Conservative Astronaut" (H. L. "Bill" Richardson's "Slightly To The Right!" [1965], one of my favorite books.) I took us all the way from Viet Nam to the middle of Wisconsin. ha! ha!
I must confess that the closest I ever came to Viet Nam was eating Pho in Vietnamese restaurants. I wasn't drafted and I didn't volunteer since I was against that War at the time. I did volunteer for a National Guard unit in Salem, Oregon, shortly after that War, but they wouldn't take me because of my asthma condition. I'm too old to fight now. So, sorry, no medals for me. That's just the way it is. Them's the breaks.
My Dad, on the other hand, a different story. World War II. Normandy, Battle of the Bulge, Purple Heart. He fought some of the SS once. He was a hero, and I boast about him whenever the occasion arises.

Steven Malcolm Anderson the Lesbian-worshipping gun-loving selfish aesthete · February 22, 2004 06:42 PM

Well said, Eric, you're exactly right. (I was something like lottery number 117 in 1971, by the way, after several years of college deferments just as you described. I didn't get drafted that year — even though the national call up exceeded that particular number — 'cause my local draft board happened not to get that high.)

Michael McNeil

Michael Edward McNeil · February 23, 2004 11:02 AM

Thanks all! Skip, I think what that writer (not me) meant by "enlisted, often to beat the draft" was that if you enlisted without waiting to be drafted, you could choose which branch of the service to enter, and might be able to wangle a deal over the eventual work you'd be assigned. This further illustrates the hazards involved in adjudging people "cowards" by rating the forms of their service. My dad was a general in the Army Reserves, and he used to remind me that I could get a much better "deal" if I enlisted. Would it have been "braver" to wait for the draft and become an ordinary grunt? Or to sign up for some sort of advanced technical training in advance? (I see no easy answers.)

Steven, your medical disqualification -- or Michael's deferment -- have little bearing on either one of you as a candidate for office (unless you tried to hide it). That was the system we had. But had you given testimony before Congress about such topics as whether we should abandon an ally, that would always be relevant to voter concerns. It's part of a public record. Kerry and his supporters seem eager to hide it, too.

I liked what Glenn Reynolds said today: "if they thought his stands then were worthy of praise now, they'd be praising them -- instead of concealing them."

Eric Scheie · February 23, 2004 03:34 PM

I was born in 1954; this was the first cohort that did not have a draft lottery. The only number I got was the 1-H classification on my draft card, which I have saved all this time in case an occasion arises to burn it.

Allan Beatty · February 23, 2004 11:22 PM

Thanks Allan,

But now I am more confused than ever, because I remember getting a high number (of 318, I think....) and not considering it relevant at the time.

I can't make sense of reports like this:

Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina received a relatively high number in the draft lottery in 1972, the year he became eligible. But even a low number would have had little meaning, as only 646 men were drafted in 1973, the draft's last year. In any event, he had a student deferment until 1977, long after the war and the draft had ended.
The Rev. Al Sharpton was in a similar situation. Born in October 1954, he was also eligible in the 1972 lottery, when his number was 103, a relatively safe number since even in the previous year, the draft reached only as high as 95.

Guess I need to do more research.

But what's the point? I'm not running for anything!

Eric Scheie · February 23, 2004 11:30 PM

I drew 198 in the first year of the lottery: 1970. Selective Service went up to 195, as I recall. I had already taken out "gay insurance" and gotten a permanent deferment, so I wasn't holding my breath, just contemplating grim ironies. Instead of "don't ask, don't tell," it was "tell, don't go" in those days.

My partner had been an Eagle Scout and tried the same ruse, but his draft board refused to believe him. An Eagle Scout couldn't possibly be gay!

Alan Sullivan · February 26, 2004 05:22 PM