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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?