The Little Blue Capsule

  

During my senior year of high school, I had something to think about besides what colleges to consider. I needed to know my draft number.  In 1969, the draft lottery began to fill the military’s need for soldiers to take an all-expense paid trip to southeast Asia.  This was a serious jolt to an 18-year old’s reality.  One day, you’re concerned about high school football playoffs and homecoming dates – then in just a few months, the Vietnam War is front and center. The first year of the draft lottery, over 162,000 teenagers had to trade in their high school letter jackets for olive drab fatigues.

The system was very easy to understand.  The first of each year, the Selective Service put 366 blue capsules in a container. Inside each capsule was a day of the year. The order the capsules were removed  determined your draft number.  A low number meant you had to make some decisions; go in the Army, go in the National Guard, go to Canada.  Or you could be creative. When I attended my first college rush party in the fall of 1971, I ran into Larry - a friend who graduated from my high school a year before me.  Because of his low number, he had just been drafted.  So to get ready for his upcoming physical, Larry was consuming nearly 10 pounds of white granulated sugar a day.  His plan was to raise his blood sugar level so high that he would be diagnosed with diabetes and become classified 4F. According to the military, 4F meant “unfit for military service due to physical, mental, or moral reasons”.  It sounded to me like Larry was at least two out of three. 

If you were lucky enough to have a high draft number, you basically received a “Get Out of ‘Nam Free” card.  You got to go school, get a job, and live your life like there weren’t young men being shot at in rice paddies half a world away.

My lottery number was 130. Not bad, but I wasn’t completely in the clear. The Secretary of Defense said they estimated that 125 was going to be the cutoff number for my year. I was aware that the number of draftees in second year dropped to 94,000, as Nixon made good on this promise to wind the war down. Since 1972 was an election year, I thought the downward trend would continue. Still, it was a little nerve racking. All it would take is an offensive from the North Vietnamese, and my number could come up. 

I would almost certainly have to enlist.  My father was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge, and my brother volunteered to go to Vietnam.  How could I not go?  Fortunately for me, I didn’t have to decide because the draft number only went to about 75 that year. One of my best high school buddies and college roommate, Jack, was not  so lucky.  His draft number was 38, so he belonged to Uncle Sam. However, Jack’s low draft number and subsequent hitch in the Army turned out to be a one in a million chance of good fortune for him. 

Jack became interested in skydiving his senior year of high school.  He jumped almost every weekend.  During our first semester at Alabama, Jack was a member of the Bama Skydive Team. When he was drafted, he became a member of the Golden Knights, the Army’s elite skydiving team. So instead of running thru the jungle, Jack spent his enlistment falling from the sky, making appearances all over the world.  In 1974 he won the Men’s National Parachuting Champion competition.  

I never saw Jack again. I do know that when he got out of the army, he became a technical consultant for the movie industry, and appeared in a few feature films. The last I heard, he was involved with prototype parachutes. 

Once I heard James Dobson say  that a 20 year old makes decisions that a 50 year old has to live with. That’s a true, profound  statement.  However, sometimes tiny little events  we have no control over can completely change the course of a life. The draft lottery was certainly one of those things.  If Jack’s draft number was different, his whole life would’ve taken a different direction. He might’ve finished school, become a CPA, and skydived as a hobby. If my number had been picked earlier, I may very well ended up in Southeast Asia. That year over 60,000 of my contemporaries were drafted. Some of them were deployed to Vietnam. Some of them returned with physical and mental injuries that they bore their entire lives  Some didn’t return at all. 

All because of a little blue capsule.