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Telling History: Vietnam Era Draft

On Dec. 1, 1969, a draft lottery was held to determine the order of call to military service in the Vietnam War.
Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund
On Dec. 1, 1969, a draft lottery was held to determine the order of call to military service in the Vietnam War.

Once President Lyndon Johnson brought U.S. power to bear in Vietnam, America’s military build-up required substantial increases in draft calls, which surged from 112,000 in 1964 to 230,000 in 1965, before peaking in 1966 at 382,000. Because the nature of Selective Service left men eligible between the ages of 18 and 25 – an eight-year draft window – for the nearly 27 million baby boomers who came of draft age between 1964 and 1973, the prospect of military service in Vietnam became the generation’s preeminent consideration. In truth, no American communities were left wholly unaffected by the Vietnam era draft, nor any families with draft age husbands, sons, or brothers.

So, greetings, you are hereby ordered for induction in the Armed Forces of the United States. But I’m Joel Rhodes “Telling History.”

Around one-third of the military during the Vietnam War were indeed draftees, roughly 1.8 million. Early in the sixties, 23 was the average age of an inductee, but as the war went on, they got younger, falling to almost 20 in 1966. The remaining two-thirds were enlistees, men who joined as a vocational choice or sense of patriotic duty, but frequently as a conscious alternative to being drafted. Increased enlistments corresponded positively to rising draft calls as eligible young men – usually with higher levels of education – preferred to enlist in order to enter the military under more favorable circumstances.

The preponderance of draft eligible men avoided the military, however, with a convoluted number of legal and extralegal means inherent to the Selective Service system. Local draft boards classified all eighteen-year-old registrants as either available for service (1-A), exempted, or deferred. Those designated 1-A received pre-induction physical and psychiatric examinations, and upon passage were required to report for service in order to meet the Defense Department’s monthly draft requests. Failure on any of the test’s physical, mental, psychiatric, or moral components brought exemptions to slightly over five million young men.

Commonly, potential draftees pursued a series of deferments to either delay or permanently avoid conscription, principally on the grounds of education, occupation, hardship, marriage, or fatherhood. Prior to Vietnam, these various deferments operated as the Selective Service’s Cold War method of allocating human resources, by utilizing the draft to “channel” manpower into civilian and military occupations deemed most important to national interest.

Student deferments remained popular. Male college students making progress toward their degree at a four-year institution were deferred until turning twenty-four. Not surprisingly college attendance rates for men increased relative to women almost seven percent in the 1960s.

But education still paled in comparison to family deferments. Initially, getting married kept you out of Vietnam. Again, surprising no one, youthful marriage rates rose immediately by ten percent between 1963 and 1965.

That year, Selective Service replaced marriage deferments with paternity. Thereafter, only husbands with dependent children qualified. Yet again, the birth rate for young Americans likewise jumped seven percent in the summer of 1966, roughly nine months after the policy changes. Fatherhood and hardship deferments eventually outnumbered student deferments almost two-to-one.

As yearly draft calls steadily declined by decade’s end, Richard Nixon overhauled Selective Service in 1970, replacing the channeling system with a randomly chosen “draft lottery” and eventually transitioning to an all-volunteer military.

Joel P. Rhodes is a Professor in the History Department of Southeast Missouri State University. Raised in Kansas, he earned a B.S. in Education from the University of Kansas before earning his M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of Missouri-Kansas City.