Looking back on Vietnam War draft

"Random Destiny" by Wesley Abney provides a compact history of one of the most tumultuous times in U.S. history, the era of the Vietnam War draft policy and protests, 1964-73. Those of us who lived through those years of war, defiance, domestic violence and uncertainty will never forget them, but a younger audience might find Abney's book informative and, at times, intriguing.

Abney breaks down the history of U.S. military drafts since World War I, focusing on the years of the draft to supply troops for the Vietnam War in the final years of Lyndon Johnson's presidency and Richard Nixon's first term.

As anyone who was affected by military draft policy will tell you, the regulations and laws were complicated and sometimes irrational. Abney provides explanations of the draft laws and deferments with individual chapters on medical, moral and mental deferments; conscientious objectors; deferred occupations; college deferments; sole surviving son and other family deferments.

He also has chapters on the various military services that some potential draftees turned to in order to avoid the much greater risk of ground combat in Vietnam and on the fundamental dissent and disobedience of some draftees who refused to participate in the Selective Service system, which could lead to criminal charges.

He concludes the book with the amnesties for draft resisters and AWOL soldiers offered by President Ford and expanded by President Carter after the draft ended in 1973 and America began fielding an all-volunteer army.

The Dec. 1, 1969, draft lottery is the nexus of this review of U.S. military draft policy. Implemented to reduce uncertainty about the draft and opposition to the draft, the lottery affected all males of draft age, a span of several years. By night's end, 366 numbers had been drawn, and men's futures were determined by where their birth date fell in the numbers. The certainty that those with numbers below 100 would almost certainly be drafted and those with numbers above 300 almost certainly would not changed the lives of millions.

The stories of those lives, collected over a period of years on a website that invited Vietnam-era men to share their experiences with the draft and the war, are the heart of this book. The review of the various draft laws, deferments and exceptions are thorough but can be rather dry. The personal narratives are poignant and powerful.

Abney has organized these fervent narratives to follow each chapter on the laws and regulations that sparked these personal accounts. The vast majority of stories are about the many ways young men of the late 1960s through 1973 sought to avoid the draft. Those with low draft numbers were left in limbo, unable to complete their college degrees or to get long-term employment. Some were married (not a deferment — but an excused absence early in the war), and some had dependent children (a deferment that ended in 1967). The impact of draft deferments is cited in the rise in marriage rates when marital status could get you a deferment and a rise in the birth rate when babies could get a man out of the draft.

After setting up a website to collect draft lottery stories in 2007. The website collected 840 narratives by 2017. One-hundred-sixty of these stories are included in the book, and all of the collected stories are still available on the website, www.vietnamwardraftlottery.com.

These stories show the diversity of experiences and personal opinions about the war and the draft. Some of the young men were adamantly opposed to the Vietnam War or to war in general. Others went willingly to their "random destiny," a fate they saw as their duty. Most fell somewhere in between the few who would resort to deceit or violence to avoid the draft and those who were already in military service or who were willing to comply with the government's induction orders.

I found the stories of those who entered the military service (most of them electing to enlist in a "safer" branch of service) especially interesting. Many found their military experience positive and constructive. It changed their lives. They are proud of their service in uniform. Those who returned from Vietnam combat were deeply angered by the reception they received coming home. Some protesters shouted insults ("baby killer!") and threw rocks or pig's blood at the returning soldiers. Some of the most earnest protesters of the war disapproved of such behavior.

"I would not have volunteered to serve, but having been drafted, I am proud of being a veteran," one contributor wrote. Another wrote, "I didn't want to go, but it sure changed my life. It was the best thing that ever happened to me." Don wrote, "My Navy service was one of the highlights of my life. Without the draft, I would not have done it." John, who served in the National Guard, wrote, "In retrospect, the experience made me a better person and a better student."

"Random Destiny" would make a great textbook for a college-level course on the Vietnam War's impact on the home front. The book is thoroughly footnoted and has an extensive bibliography. Still, the personal narratives are the most compelling aspect of the book. Today's generation of college students, 45 years removed from the war and the draft, could learn a lot from such a course.


Hal Tarleton

If Islamic State is a sovereign nation ...

The proclaiming of Islamic State as a sovereign nation, a caliphate, gives Western nations an opportunity to address I.S. terrorism as acts of war with all the consequences of that term. The West has reacted in shock and anger to the heinous murders in Paris last Friday, but Islamic State's thumbing its nose at the international community goes back much further.

Leaders of the terrorist group captured vast expanses of Syria and Iraq long ago, defeating government troops in Iraq and other insurgencies in Syria to lay claim to towns and cities. Sketchy reports (Islamic State territories are not safe for news reporters) indicate that ISIS has set up governmental services and is behaving as a legitimate, sovereign nation.

If ISIS is to be a sovereign nation, it must live by the rules of the international community, among which is you don't attack other countries without suffering the consequences. The United States, Russia, Britain and France, however, have not responded in the way that they would to a military threat from a more traditional enemy. All have provided degrees of support for those opposing ISIS, but they have not declared war; they have not deployed their armed forces against the self-declared caliphate; they have not acted to protect themselves and their allies.

After Friday's attacks in Paris, why was the NATO treaty not invoked? NATO was built on the idea that an attack by an outside power on any member nation is an attack on all NATO nations and must be opposed in the same way. The ISIS attacks in Paris were surely an attack on France by an enemy that claims to be a sovereign country. If all of NATO's military assets were deployed against ISIS, the caliphate could be ground into the desert sands in a matter of weeks or days. Russia also has been a target of ISIS terror and appears ready to join with NATO to obliterate this threat against Western Civilization.

ISIS has made it clear that it is not satisfied to control territory in the deserts and villages of Iraq and Syria. It wants to bring down Western culture; it wants to kill all infidels and apostates throughout the world. This ambition will not be abandoned; it must be obliterated and replaced by more moderate countries and organizations willing to live at peace among the community of nations.

The Civil War sesquicentennial and the horrors of war

It's the 150th anniversary, the sesquicentennial, of the Civil War, so I have attended two 150th anniversary events in the past year. In September, I went to Winchester, Va., for the commemoration of the Third Battle of Winchester, where my great-great-grandfather took a bullet to the abdomen while advancing with his 43rd North Carolina regiment and disappeared from the historical record. He presumably is buried in one of the unmarked graves at Winchester.

At Bentonville Sunday, I watched the re-enactment of the three-day Battle of Bentonville, where a badly depleted and outnumbered Confederate army tried to halt, or at least slow, the advance of Gen. William T. Sherman's march from Georgia up the coast to close out the Civil War.

I thoroughly enjoyed Sunday's event. We wandered among the sutler tents selling uniforms, weapons, civilian clothes and the provisions of the 19th century. We sat on the ground and waited for the re-enactment to begin, then watched as dedicated re-enactors fired historically accurate muskets, pistols, repeating rifles and cannon in an effort to show an audience of thousands what the March 19, 1865 battle was like.

For all of the fascination I and others held for this event, we have to admit that this was a sanitized, bloodless, danger-less, fairy tale version of war. The muskets fired black powder, which made huge clouds of smoke, but no musket balls or more accurate minie balls whizzed through the air. The re-enactors followed 19th century military procedures. They marched in formation. They wore authentic, handmade clothes and wore shoes and boots of the period.

Missing, however, was the horror of the war. A few re-enactors fell in battle, but they fell from the directions in a script, not because a minie ball had shattered a femur or because a cannonball tore off their heads. This was a battle without carnage. In a typical battle, scores of horses might die from artillery fire or bullets. Their carcasses would lie for days or weeks on the putrid battlefield as the hundreds or thousands of dead soldiers were buried first.

No one exploded into a red cloud when struck by a cannonball's shock wave. No one lost an arm to gunfire or to a cavalry sword. No arms or feet or legs littered the battleground when it was over, as would have been the case in a major engagement such as happened at Bentonville 150 years ago when 80,000 soldiers engaged in well-planned and pitiless murder.

This Civil War sesquicentennial is growing to a close, and that may be a good thing. I have been fascinated by the Civil War for more than 50 years, when America celebrated the centennial of that awful conflict, and I have visited many battlefields and museums dedicated to the war. But I see now not the glory of battle but the horrors of it. That is one thing we must not lose sight of at this sesquicentennial or at any other time.

An honest look at the horrors of war

I have been reading Rick Atkinson's "Liberation Trilogy" tracing the U.S. Army's march across North Africa and Europe during World War II. Atkinson's account is extraordinarily detailed and frank about the errors and shortcomings of some American leaders and the horrific experiences of soldiers and airmen.

In reciting the statistics, still startling 70 years later, of morbidity among Allied bomber crews — an 89 percent casualty rate (which includes injured and captured as well as killed in action) — he quotes a poem by Randall Jarrell, who was a member of a bomber crew before winning fame as a poet. These three lines capture the horrors of the air war:

Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I awoke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Young men, the contemporaries of my parents, went forward to almost certain death for their country, for their families, for democracy, for their own sense of responsibility, and because their government, their families and their neighbors expected it of them. The gut-wrenching opening scene of "Saving Private Ryan" is an accurate portrayal of what infantrymen faced on D-Day and on many other days throughout the war. Punching their way into Germany, Allied infantrymen went for days without leaving their stinking foxholes, which were bedroom, dining room and bathroom to the soldiers. Many went weeks or months without changing their socks or underwear. They developed trench foot, sunstroke and frostbite.

I read these accounts not because I share their experiences but because I wish to know what it took to secure the freedoms and advantages we share today.

The experiences of foot soldiers have changed little in the past 200 years. By World War II, the means of killing had been improved by machine guns, heavy artillery, aerial bombs and land mines, but the wretched lives of World War II soldiers were not appreciably different from the lives of our forefathers who huddled in trenches around Petersburg, Va., or who set out across an open field toward batteries of cannon and riflemen on the high ground at Gettysburg. All faced the likelihood of death or mutilation or, if they survived, the nightmares that put their minds back in those trenches or foxholes for decades thereafter.

Gen. W.T. Sherman's aphorism, "War is hell," does not to justice to just how cruel and inhumane war was 150 years ago and still is today.