Reading through this thread got me thinking about something else - reenlistment. During the Vietnam war years, if someone in the armed services wanted to reenlist, was he just automatically taken for another 3 years, or whatever the enlistment term was? Was the process different for a draftee vs. an enlistee?
Terms of enlistment varied depending on what you got back. There might for example, be a monetary bonus for completing an enlistment period of a certain length, and it might be more or less depending on what your job was-- jobs in high demand had higher bonuses.
Generally, deployment for a draftee was one year, but that didn’t include training. Most draftees were drafted for the infantry, but infantry training was not the longest training possible. You could get out of the infantry by volunteering for something with a long training period. You’d spend more time in the service, but most of it would be in training, where you were safe, and if you volunteered for something like interpreting (a year-long training), you’d be fairly safe during deployment too-- a lot safer than an infantryman.
Depending on what kind of deal you struck with your recruiter, though, you might decide to enlist for four years to be even safer. You might get to study Dutch and sent to the Hague, rather than study Vietnamese and sent to a MAS*H unit, if you agreed to a four-year enlistment.
As far as re-enlistment goes, once somebody is trained and has a proven record, the Army likes to offer various bonuses to get them to stay, so someone about to be discharged might get lots of attractive offers. Someone who had been deployed once and agreed to be deployed in country again, as opposed to taking a teaching position stateside might get big bonuses.
How many years he signed on for depended on the individual person’s contract. As a general rule, the Army doesn’t like to process people in for less than two years, but getting a deployment-ready soldier for Vietnam probably was attractive enough to get them to agree to take people for a single year.
Whatever your previous contract was didn’t dictate what your new one would be.