1960's era conscription

Factual Questions
1

In general, I have a pretty fuzzy idea of how the military drafts actually worked. Can someone break down military induction in the 1950’s-70’s for me, Bert and Ernie style? Would really love first hand, if you are willing to share.

I know you had to sign up for the Selective Service when you turned 18, but then what? They sent you a draft card in the mail? What next? Put your life on hold indefinitely?
How did they choose who got drafted and who didn’t? What was so different about the lottery?
Is it true that they went down the line of inductees and said “Army, Army, Army, Marine…”?
Was there any advantage to volunteering instead of being drafted?
Could two brothers be drafted and then both be sent to Vietnam? I heard from someone that due to the Sole Survivor Policy, certain military branches would not send more than one drafted brother to the same combat zone.

Thanks for your service and for sharing.

2

I guess I can tell you second hand, from what I’ve heard from my dad.

As I’ve understood it, the marines only took volunteers, and that’s where my dad applied and was rejected from due to flat feet. He instead went to college for a few years, and then when the Korean war rolled along he was drafted into the army (ended up serving in Berlin with the 2nd armored). I’m not at all sure, but I have some memory that you couldn’t be forced into the navy as a conscript, but had to volunteer to go on a ship. I have no idea about air force conscripts.

Anyway, somebody who actually knows about this subject will probably be around soon and fight my ignorance =)

3

I was under the Selective Service.

You signed up at age 18. You were then sent a draft card and were eligible for the draft.

There were various classifications: 1-A meant you were ready to be drafted. If you were in high school or college you were classified II-S and were exempt until graduation (or until the college didn’t notify them you were attending – I was 1-A for a week or two until that was straightened out). There were also exemptions for defense jobs, for being married (and having a child) and other things.

If you were a conscientious objector, they added an O to the classification (e.g., 1-A-O). You’d be drafted, but would not be put into a combat post. You also have to prove that you were a CO, especially during the Vietnam period, and they were very skeptical of those claims.

The draft board would select who would be drafted. Draft boards were local and there were probably thousands of them in the US. I assume they got a quota from the Army and then selected draftees from the pools of 1-A’s. When the lottery was instituted (I was #86 – prime meat), it merely put some order in the drafting. If you were a high number, you knew you wouldn’t be drafted. If you were low, you knew you would (and some enlisted to get better treatment).

I’m not sure how you were assigned, but most draftees served in the army, probably because the other branches were more glamorous and thus were able to fill their ranks via recruitment.

4

My era, too. I was #107.

If your real question is what we did between the time we turned 18 and the time we were or weren’t drafted, we pretty much lived our lives. Some of us went on to college (or quickly decided that we wanted to go to college after all.) Some of us enlisted, either because we sincerely wanted to, or wanted to get it over with. The rest of us got jobs and waited to see if we’d be called up, just like our brothers had during the peacetime draft, our uncles during Korea and our fathers during World War 2.

At the height of Vietnam, the Marines were drafting, as well as the Army. The Navy and Air Force always filled their quotas through enlistments – mostly because you had a much smaller chance of being shot in the Navy and Air Force than in the Army or Marines.

RealityChuck and I went through roughly the same thing. When you turned 18 you went down to your local draft board office and filled out a form. They sent you a card. If you were still in high school, you were classed 1-HS until a few months after you graduated. If you were in college, you were classed II-S until you flunked out, dropped out or graduated.

If you weren’t eligible for any kind of deferment (there were a lot of classifications beyond student and conscientious objector,) you were classed 1-A and you waited for your number to be called. The lottery gave you a better idea about your likelihood of being called up, although if the local pool of draftees was small, the board would call higher and higher numbers until it reached its quota. During the peacetime (post-Korea, pre-Vietnam) draft you were never quite sure if you’d ever be called. With the lottery, you were grouped by year. If your number was called, you got a physical and were given a number of other tests. Assuming you passed all of them, you got your notice to report. If you weren’t called during your year, you probably wouldn’t be called at all.

The “Army, Army, Army, Marine” thing was actually a joke from World War 2. My father told it to me. For that matter, it might have been a joke from World War 1.

One thing you need to remember is that the services filled their quotas through the draft, NOT by activating members of the National Guard and Reserves. In those days, a lot of servicemen filled their military obligations by serving one or two years on active duty, and then transfering to a Guard or Reserve unit. I guess the idea was that it would be unfair to rotate them back into active duty. That made for the unintended consequence of those with connections being able to enlist directly into the Guard/Reserve and avoiding active duty.

The Sole Surving Son exception didn’t include being drafted (you could still be assigned to a non-combat role) and it didn’t extend to brothers being assigned to combat. Also, it wasn’t automatic – you had to ask for it.

5

"Is it true that they went down the line of inductees and said “Army, Army, Army, Marine…”?

This is true, although not in all cases. First, you must recognize that when you were drafted, you were drafted into the “Armed Forces.” This meant that you could have been assigned to any branch. I doubt anyone was ever taken into the Navy or Air Force because many that were about to be called enlisted in those branches to escape the Army and (hopefully) Vietnam.

Because the Maine Corps is a much smaller organization and because there are always guys who want to be Marines, it did not have to rely on the draft as heavily as the Army. However, in the mid-late 1960’s the Marines did need to pull from the Selective Service System.

Speaking with other Marine draftees, I heard of many instances of “Army, Army, Army, Marine.” However, in my case, it was different. I was one of two out of 113 reporting in May of 1969. The Marines waited until the end of the day when all physical and written tests were completed prior to making their selection.

W/regard to being treated differently, it did happen because a draftee was most likely to leave the service after two years of active duty. Ergo, he would rarely been assigned an MOS that required lengthy schooling. It could also effect promotions. About 6 months from being released from active duty my CO told me I was eligible for promotion. He then told me that there was another Marine, slightly less qualified, that he was going to recommend. He was candid in explaining that the other guy was probably going to be in the Corps longer. Very understandable decision.

BTW, some who entered the Navy for the aforementioned reasons became Corpsmen and were sent to Vietnam where they were attached to Marine units. In many ways those guys faced and endured situations as bad as any grunt in the Army or Marines.

6

I’d forgotten that the Marines drafted people too…thought it was just the army.

On the subject of exemptions, there were actually quite a few ways to avoid the war. One thing is important…Lo these 30-40-odd years later, it is impossible to overstate the amount of public resistance to the Vietnam conflict. Even among my Republican rock-ribbed-rightie family, Dad a WW2 combat vet, uncle who fought in Korea, even among these folks there was an understanding that this war was different…worse somehow, and they didn’t want their kids to go there. It seemed the experience had ended badly for everyone we knew who went to Vietnam. People were captured by the viet cong and tortured, they came back missing limbs, drug-addicted or crazed, or they didn’t come back at all.

There were a lot of “outs” available and, especially during the final years of the conflict, a lot of people willing to help a young man use them. Certain professions were elegible for exemption…Teachers for one. It is said that a lot of the problems that developed in schools post-Vietnam were due to the fact that so many men with no aptitude for teaching and no desire to had gone into the education field simply to avoid Vietnam. Certain defense-related and transportation jobs were considered “essential” and could be exempted. Farmers were largely exempt, although I believe one had to actually be a farm operator, not just a hired hand. A lot of men I knew opted out of the war by staying on to run the family farm. One of my uncles, a scrawny little guy, starved himself down to well below the accepted limits and got out by failing the physical. Another fellow I knew ate himself into obesity and got to stay home.

I was one of the lucky ones, had a couple of good options. I could have stayed on the farm, and I had a couple of high-ranking family connections in the state’s national guard which assured me of a billet if I chose to enlist directly in the guard. As it happened, I didn’t need to use them…The conflict wound down and conscription mostly ended shortly before my 18th birthday. We all breathed a sigh of relief. Had it been necessary, I’d probably have taken the National Guard route. This was considered distasteful by some…The guard didn’t have a very good reputation at the time, but it looked pretty good to me.
SS

7

The lottery coincided with eliminating most classes of deferments. Guys were making major life decisions, like going to college and getting married, just for the draft deferment status. Or volunteering for the less-likely to get shot at services. The PTB decided that this was a Bad Thing, so they started the lottery so you could plan your life knowing you were or weren’t going to get drafted (unless, of course, your number was somewhere in the middle).

I was in college with a II-S, hoping the war would end before I graduated. When they switched to the lottery, I pulled #249, so I could relax and get on with life without doing anything rash.

If you walked into your draft board, sung a bar of Alice’s Restaurant, walked out, and got assigned to the Group W bench, you were classified I-W. That was enough to put you in line after the I-A’s, so you’d only get drafted if they really needed you.

8

The lottery was put into place because there was a public perception - probably a true one - that too many children of privilege were able to find ways out of the draft. Part of it was the number of possible deferments, but part of it also was the way that the thousands of individual draft boards considered individual cases. Lots of people got what was considered to be special treatment. Hippies and other enemies of the state - blacks and minorities - didn’t.

So the draft went to a lottery system. For people of a given birth years, each day was randomly assigned a number, from 1 to 365. (366 for 1952) They literally pulled balls out of a big tub, just like a television lottery. When it came time to draft x number of kids, they took all of those whose birth date was 1, then those whose birth date was 2 and so forth. (Actually they grouped several dates together because the draft need was getting that high.) They cut down on the number of exemptions and made it much tougher to get out for reasons that earlier were allowed.

You were only vulnerable during one calendar year. If you had a high number you knew you were safe. Those in the middle sweated it out.

The draft ended officially on January 2, 1973. However, call-ups stopped at some point in 1972. I’m not sure when the last draft class was inducted, but I’m sure they didn’t appreciate the irony.

9

I turned 18 in 1967 at the height of the Viet Nam war. My birthday was in the summer, so I went to my draft board physical before going off to school. I was relying on luck, mostly, that I wouldn’t be called up, since by then the II-S deferment was pretty much out of the picture.

Fortunately, due to a history of rather severe asthma, I was classified 1-Y, which is similar to 4-F but in an emergency the 1-Y’s would get called up first.

I think I was 19 when the lottery came in, and again I blessed my 1-Y status because my birthday got a very low number.

My first serious lover, whom I met when I was 25, had enlisted in the air force to avoid combat as much as possible. He succeeded - he spent 4 years partying in England. But that was luck, too, he might have just as easily ended up at some AF base in the war zone.

The other point to remember is that the more money you had at your disposal, the less likely you were to end up in combat infantry. Draftees seemed to be disproportionately poor and disadvantaged. We were middle class but I feel pretty certain that if I hadn’t been 1-Y I would have been drafted (or enlisted at the last minute to avoid it).

This was truly an awful time, and (not to hijack the thread) I believe we owe it all to anti-communist hysteria and the domino theory.
Roddy

10

"The other point to remember is that the more money you had at your disposal, the less likely you were to end up in combat infantry. Draftees seemed to be disproportionately poor and disadvantaged. We were middle class but I feel pretty certain that if I hadn’t been 1-Y I would have been drafted (or enlisted at the last minute to avoid it). "

While you are correct about the influence of money, it’s most significant effect was that of keeping you out of the draft vs. your assigned MOS after you were drafted.

11

How the lottery system worked

12

I never could understand the “Flat-Foot” classification of 4-F. Couldn’t they just issue arch supports or special boots or something? At least put them in a clerical position where they don’t have to stand on their feet much?
(I was in the Army '59 - '62)

13

18-year-olds were still required to register for the draft for another couple of years after this, as I did in 1974. (Classified 1-H, for “Hoo the hell cares, we’re not gonna draft you anyway.”)

14

And those with low numbers often decided to end the suspense by enlisting – at least then you got to choose which service to join. (My cousin did this. He had a low number, and was very likely to be drafted soon. So he looked around, and decided to enlist in the Coast Guard. Served his term there.)

So the numbers for enlistment are a bit misleading – there were many servicemen who enlisted just to avoid being drafted.

15

Enlistment was for four years; the draft was two. That made the choice much harder for most people.

16

My father was at a recruiting station (or something) during the Korean war/police action. He said that the guys from the Army Infantry were coming down the corridor, picking out men to go into the infantry. He said that he scurried down the hall and enlisted in the Air Force, where he still had a miserable time in Korea, but at least he wasn’t shot at so often.

17

Also the Navy & Air Force had higher standards than the Army so it was possible to try to enlist in the Navy/Air Force, get rejected, and still end up eligible for the Army. My father didn’t have a hard time choosing between 2 yrs in the Army vs. 4 in the Navy. The local draft board still tried to draft him while he was on an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific.

Men are still required to register for the draft in 2010. At least the SSS has long since given up trying to classify people let alone conduct those mass physical exams where you got to spend the day naked & being treated like a piece of meat courtesy of Uncle Sam.

I’m pretty sure one of the secretaries at my HS just automatically filled out registration cards for every male studen. Even our *exchange student *from George got an SSS card and it scared the crap out of him.

My WWII veteran maternal grandfather had zero objection to my uncle pretending to be “a queer” and faking TB to get his 4F. My other uncle got his 4F legitimetly by having a bunch of pins in his leg.

18

I turned 18 in 1975, by which point they had stopped doing even that much.

19

Selective Service registration has been required continuously from the 1950s through today. Ref http://www.sss.gov/FSwho.htm .

I turned 18 in 1976. Registration was still 100% required at that time. I don’t recall what sort of response I got after I mailed in the form. I don’t recall ever having a “draft card” as such.

Naturally, *enforcement *of the requirement to register was pretty well nil in the immediate aftermath of Viet Nam, and AFAIK has not increased much since then.

ETA: There’s some interesting history in that site in the various FAQ pages.

20

Hmm. Per Wikipedia:

…which accords roughly with my memory of the resumption of registration at the beginning of the '80s (with a publicity campaign consisting mainly of notices in post offices). Why you had to register in 1976, I dunno.