Please understand that what follows took place before I got right with God and Country. I'm not proud of my past, but it is what it is, and I was at the time very much a product of the environment I grew up in.Jumping Frog wrote:My draft lottery number was 017, pulled on March 20, 1974 for birth year 1955. However, they were no longer drafting at that time. By then, everyone knew we had stopped active combat in Viet Nam and I didn't see much point in enlisting to be one of the last people there.The Annoyed Man wrote:Like you, I had a high lottery number (339), did not get drafted, and did not enlist.philip964 wrote:I had a deferment, then a high lottery number. I did not serve.
If the draft was still active, I would have been called with a number like 017. If called, I would have gone.
I was the hardcore liberal son of hardcore liberal college professors, steeped in academic culture, and fully vested in the coolaid.......AND a dual citizen (US/France) to boot. When my lottery number 339 was pulled, I was actually in France at the time, and I was seriously considering staying there if my number was "too low". I followed the lottery progress in the English language newspapers in Paris.
I did not "hate" the military......my dad's generation and earlier had a proud history of service, I had at least a rudimentary understanding of "just war theory", and I was then and remain today very proud of my dad's WW2 service. If it has been either peace time, or if we had been involved in another war like WW2, with a very clearly defined "axis of evil" that HAD to be stopped, I would not have resisted being drafted, and I might well have enlisted. But that was not the situation with Vietnam. I was extremely anti-war when it came to the Vietnam war. I never believed back then that it was good policy, and I still have my doubts today. I participated in anti-war protests, smoked a lot of dope, and was generally disreputable. I had peers in my circle of friends who were either drafted or enlisted, and I never lost my regard for them personally, or for the fact that they were willing to endure whatever the nation asked of them, and I never bought into the myth that all the draftees who served were just dumb pawns who were "victims of The Man", but I absolutely would not be a part of the war myself. And having French citizenship, I could have simply stayed in France at the time and not come home to face the draft. I really wrestled with that possibility because, although I enjoyed France and spoke the language fluently and had family there, my national identity was that of an American, and I preferred to come home. Fortunately, I never had to make a final decision in that regard.
So now, fast forward 45 years (the number 49 in the title of this thread is incorrect since Saigon fell in 1975), and in the passage of years from 1970 (when I was 1A) to 2015, I am not anything like the person I once was. If I were a young man today, I might well enlist, if for no other reason than my belief that the lessons learned in military service make for a better rounded adult. But one thing has never changed for me: I still have serious doubts about the Vietnam war.......not about the valor or honor of those who fought it, but whether or not we had any business fighting it. Certainly we had no business as a nation fighting that war without the political will to fight it to the finish and win. It is my understanding that we never lost a major battle militarily, and that the fault for losing the war lays squarely in the laps of politicians.........a species of animal for which I have very little respect. Upon being debriefed at the end of hostilities in WW2, a German general said "The reason the American Army does so well in wartime, is that war is chaos, and the American Army practices it on a daily basis."
He was right, war IS chaos, and you can't realistically expect to micromanage chaos because that is a fool's errand. All you can do is to set some general parameters, and then turn the thing over to those who are trained in managing chaos to keep the thing moving forward inside of those parameters. And it is not just democrats. There are WAAAAAAAAAYYYY too many stories even in our recent wars of special operations troops actually in contact with the enemy, waiting for SecDef Rumsfeld's personal permission to proceed with taking down a target. That is micromanagement on a level never heard of before. Politicians have to learn that war is what we do ONLY when politics and diplomacy fail, and then to make sure that when they fail, then they are no longer qualified to manage something as chaotic as war, and it is time for them to sign the checks and get the hell out of the way..........OR end it NOW. There is no room for fecklessness and half-hearted effort in war.
