It’s worth noting that in some countries (but not the US or Canada) there isn’t a legal distinction between draft evasion and desertion; conscripts are automatically enlisted into the army whether they swear an oath or not. Anybody who fails to report for duty is subject to court-martial for desertion. It did not work that way in the US; conscripts had to swear the enlistment oath to be subject to military discipline, draft evaders were prosecuted in civil courts.
Back in the mid 60s there were lawyers who specialized in keeping people out of the draft. They would run their clients through all the various deferments, then appeal, etc. If you had the money for this, you didn’t get drafted.
Habeed writes (in post #18, which was quoted in post #53):
> The same story talked about how a bus showed up full of inner city blacks.
No. The bus that showed up after the one full of Harvard and MIT students just departed was full of lower-middle-class white 18-year-olds (from the Chelsea neighborhood of Boston) who largely were just high school graduates. About 80% of the Harvard and MIT students got deferments, while 80% of the Chelsea boys didn’t get deferments and went straight into the army. Getting deferments was a matter of money, not principally of race. As I said in a previous post, I linked to that article early in this thread. Here it is again:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2009/0911.fallows.html
A friend told me he was drafted during Vietnam but he joined the Air Force and never left the US.
My father enlisted in the Navy and the local draft board kept trying to induct him while he was on a ship in the middle of the Pacific. The family went through hell trying to get that paperwork straightened out.
Ask Dean Martin about his son.
Flying jet fighters is not like hopping on a Southwest flight.
The Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard had long waiting lists. IF you were drafted, you belonged to the Army or the Marine Corps, you didn’t get to go join another service. If that was the case, everyone would have joined the Coast Guard.
Also, the Peace Corps was an option that took you out of the draft.
So high numbers were good and low numbers were bad. Was that the case?
According to this link who would have fared well?
Al Gore: 030, March 31, 1948
Oliver Stone: 113, September 14, 1946
Sylvester Stallone: 327, July 6, 1946
Billy Crystal: 354, March 14, 1947
Got it!
The draft in the Viet Nam era was a lottery, with low numbers being called first. Young men registered with Selective Service (as they do today) and were given draft cards with their number on it. High number, less likely to be drafted. Also, when protesting the war, many young men burned their draft cards.
That was answered in this quote from the earlier thread Vietnam era draft lottery question.
Thus, the hoax came to be known as Ra[sup]th[/sup]ergate.
Another major give-away, IIRC, was the address on the letterhead, which included the ZIP code. Only the letter purportedly came from a time before there were ZIP codes. Oops.
ETA: One popular conspiracy theory was that the hoax was perpetrated by Karl Rove and associates in order to destroy Dan Rather. If so, they succeeded brilliantly.
And the upshot was that not only was the focus taken off the fact that Bush apparently blow off his NG service when he transferred to Alabama, but the credibility of the “liberal” media was dealt a major blow. All conservative commentators had to do was say “Dan Rather” and any claimed fact immediately came into dispute.
My lottery number was 93, which would have gotten me called up if I hadn’t had a 2S deferment from 1969-1973.
After graduation in 1973 I was reclassified as 1A, but by then the draft was effectively over.
Much as I sympathized in 2004 with a war veteran severely trashed by people who had used many of the tricks listed here above to avoid the draft, I do find it amazing that NOBODY in Rather’s group had the smarts to see these glaringly obvious errors. I tend to think someone threw it together as a joke for a private little deception; they never expected it to take on the importance it did. The only attempt at obfuscation was to Xerox it several times until it was ragged to make it look “old”.
But yes, if that was the best Rather’s team could do with fact-checking, either he was willfully blind or galactically stupid. Or both.
I’m surprised nobody here has mentioned Dick Cheney’s draft-dodging trick - his daughter was born 9 months and 2 days after the draft began taking childless married men and his student exemptions had run their course.
Please. As much as I hate Dick Cheney, how do we know that his daughter wasn’t in the womb for 9 months and 4 days? You don’t create a child on schedule like a cake.
^ clearly the devil’s work.
My apologies for misremembering. I also checked a statistical account of casualties - blacks were not killed any more often in Vietnam than their relative ratio in the population. The war screwed over poor people roughly equally harshly.
You don’t remember correctly. ZIP codes have been around since 1963.
But you do remember something. I think. There was some forged letter or mailing purported to be from or to JFK that was initially “authenticated”, but was later identified as a fake by its use of a ZIP Code. I think.