This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Cal Poly chapter.
Photograph by Nesrine Majzoub
“What is your best memory?”
“Oh wow. I mean, I’m 67, so there’s a lot of memory going on here. I mean, on a slightly serious note, I was in graduate school at the university of Hawai’i in 1967, and you probably know that that was the height of the Vietnam War. As an undergraduate, they’ll give you a 2-S, which is a student deferment that you would have through four years, but they wouldn’t give you student deferment during graduate school. And I had went ahead and gotten into graduate school, but after that first semester, I would be drafted. So in December of ’69, they did what they called “The Lottery”. Basically what they did is took all the males who were from eighteen to twenty-six and they put all their birthdays in a hat. Then, they’d go and pull one and say that everyone born on March 15thpull one and say that everyone born on March 15th was number one for the draft, so they were going to the war. So, I was sitting out there listening on the radio to this and, you know my birthday is in July, so I heard “Julyyyyy 10th–oh I’m safe”. It was just a few days off. I still remember my number; it was 289, which meant that I was not going to be drafted. So, I always say that I won the lottery that day. And it was one of those moments where my life would have been a whole lot different.”
“I had no idea that they did it like that.”
“Well, they thought it was unfair because all the rich kids were getting deferments and stuff so, this way, everybody was equal. It was just your birthday, so everyone had a fair shot. But all of my contemporaries were doing funny things to their bodies, losing weight, gaining weight, trying to flunk the physical to not go. Guys went into the Peace Corps, others fled up to Canada, others did other things but I didn’t have to make that choice.”
“It’s crazy that those events that are out of so many different people’s control is what ends up defining that era. Like so many people were against that war and so many people fought in it and so many people hated the fact that they were there. The people who lived there hated the fact that we were there.”
“I mean, that’s just one of the difficulties of dealing with that. My father was a World War II veteran, but I mean, that was kind of the ‘good war’, in the sense that it was pretty clear who was good and who was bad. And there was a definite ending, you know, we won the war. In Vietnam, we just kind of left, and obviously, Iraq is turning into a mess. So, there’s no clear thing, where someone signed a peace treaty and everybody goes home.” ~Doug Gates, Library Guru