If a new person showed up at a VFW club, would they make you show your membership card or something?
I did say “Completely unworkable, of course”.
And I’ve been a pony/horse fan, but thanks for the offer.
Not sure. I’m not a member myself (though I keep getting solicited to join due to my 18 months I spent in the Balkans…Yes. We are STILL there and Kosovo Campaign Ribbon is still given to servicemembers who are deploying there to this very day).
But I’m pretty sure it’s all done online.
I’m sure that the vetting and getting the original membership is done online. My question is, what would happen if someone showed up at a post and started hanging out?
I know the closest American Legion hall to me has a bar open to the public (as did the town where I went to college). I don’t know if the VFW has the same or not.
But letting you hang out and buy beer (but not do any of the member stuff, whatever that may be) seems a reasonable possibility.
The American Legion is a completely different story. They allow you to join as an associate member if you are a spouse, child or grandchild of a vet.
The wealthy and powerful will always find a way to dodge, but somewhere on the continuum of poor households to rich households there would be a slice of kids in danger of being drafted that would otherwise not have volunteered.
There was fairly broad support for the second Gulf War. Some of this support would have evaporated if (a) people thought their kids would be drafted or (b) people thought they would have to take action for their kids to avoid the draft.
But you don’t have to be any sort of member to drink there - I’m wondering if the VFW also serves the public in their bar (I assume they have a bar).
I think you didn’t know that you were definitely going to be drafted, but you knew when your number would be in the lottery, and they were called in date order.
So for example, my Dad was of the right age for the 1969 lottery, was graduating college, and had a January birthday, so he decided that he’d be better off voluntarily enlisting in the service of his choice (USAF) than taking his chances on getting drafted and sent to Vietnam as an infantryman.
They were never called in date order. In the later years there was a draft lottery where for each year birthdates were randomly drawn. If your date had a low number (under 100?) you were certain to be called. A very high number was safe.
January 1st could have a lottery number of 350 for example.
The results of the 1969 lottery are below. They drafted up to #195 that year. There are a number of January birthdates with low numbers so your father was probably one of those.
His wasn’t drawn when all was said and done, but he was worried enough that he voluntarily enlisted in the Air force to avoid it.
A lot of people did that. It may have been that he would have been drawn but the enlistment made it moot. Theoretically, any of the services could have drafted people but in practice it was nearly all Army with a very few Marines. The Air Force and Navy filled up their quota without needing draftees in large part because of people not wanting to be infantry.
I know a man who did two tours in Afghanistan and/or Iraq, and while nobody in his platoon ever fired a weapon either time, he has PTSD and gets disabled-veteran benefits for it because it’s triggered by hot weather.
Even if he was never in combat that still sounds awful. 
He was on patrol and on high alert, so it’s understandable that he has PTSD even though he never “saw” anything that non-military people would consider a trigger.
I know that nurses should not minimize patients’ symptoms, but I once mentioned having PTSD from a job, and a nurse told me, “What could a pharmacist experience on the job that could cause PTSD? Do you have any idea what nurses see and do on a daily basis?” and I told that it was my boss who caused it.
(If you’re wondering if I’m talking about the same person whose TV and newspaper stories about a near-fatal car accident she was in a few years later led to the reporters’ e-mail boxes crashing due to the number of people who wrote in telling them what kind of person they really interviewed, you’re right.)
Never mind
Was the full lottery order published (or leaked) in advance?
The lottery result was public information and in its last iteration the drawings were themselves open for broadcast.
The lottery was done live on tv.