It's understandable that your father would feel weird about it, the whole affair left people at the mercy of a breakdown in civilization with perverse injustice everywhere. But I hope he has no unearned feelings of guilt over the difference between where he went versus what happened to his friends. As you wrote, he had no say in the matter.

Vietnam could not have become another Japan economically because of entirely different levels of civilization and the dominating role of the entrenched ideological communists (who went on to impose mass slaughter). Japan was going to fight to the equivalent of 'the last person' -- and saw what was going to happen to the last ones all at once. Truman's insistence on unconditional surrender enforced by the atomic bomb led to American occupation and demilitarization that allowed the best of the Japanese to grow. The Singapore island had been a British port, was likewise re-occupied from Japan after WWII, and was far enough away to escape the fate of Vietnam.

You are "not having much luck here" because of your strident advocacy of conscription on grounds of ideological Statism, anti-intellectualism, and false narratives of historical revisionism and speculation of what was possible. Some things do not "have to be experienced" to be understood.

Actually, Lee Kuan Yew was one of the people who advised Eisenhower and Kennedy the US must get involved in Vietnam. He originated the domino theory. A very smart guy but, more interested in saving Singapore from communist influence than in democracy or what benefited us.

I believe, although I'm not having much luck with this crowd, no war is worth fighting unless one is willing to fight to annihilation, exhaustion or until the enemy changes his mind. I believe the most wise, economical and humane way to fight wars is by changing the enemy's mind before the fighting starts.

Germans became firm proponents of capitalist democracy very quickly, as did the Japanese. We fought the Germans to exhaustion but, not the Japanese. They changed their minds. South Koreans were already capitalists and have a history of democracy.

The Vietnamese had no history of capitalism. They were subsistence farmers or fishermen or French serfs. They had no history of democracy. Had we tried, starting in 1945 to imbue them with the ideas of democratic capitalism, they might now be Singapore writ large. Instead, due to FDR's intrigues and disdain for Truman, we ended up helping the French and, when the French failed, picked up the burden without stopping to think why.

I've never felt guilty about missing Vietnam but, I am always aware it is an experience that shaped many of the people around me, changed them forever. Most of them lost more than a few years of their lives, they lost faith.

It's the case that some things cannot be transferred from one person to another. Some things must be experienced and, those of us who didn't experience it must refrain from judging those who did or, risk being and doing wrong.

"I had to register for the draft but, my number was high enough so I wasn't going to be drafted."
My dad got his conscription letter on the day he graduated from college. Apparently there was some test to get into OCS, which would result in a better job in the armed forces. So people were really sweating this test. He said they quested him and checked his references wrt to the strong pro-peace movement in Madison. He passed the test, went to OCS, and was scheduled to head to Vietnam. The Jordanian crisis caused him to be sent with the Navy to the Mediterranean. The crisis never materialized, so he got a relaxing assignment in the Mediterranean while some of his friends went to Vietnam. I think he feels weird about it, although he had no say in the matter.

I heard these stories from him and my aunts and uncles. I read about it recently in They Marched into Sunlight, which covered parts of the war and the demonstrations for peace in Madison. It's weird how things seemed so similar yet so different.

Your point about winning those other conflicts illustrates how little I understand military history. Japan was going to fight to the last person, yet it quickly became a prosperous ally. If that formula had applied to Vietnam, it seems like Vietnam could be Singapore.

The whole system was corrupt from its roots to individual bureaucrat decisions.

Deferment was definitely available to people born in '52. Lots of people of that age that I went to college with were on college deferments. I could have applied for one at that time. Those born in '53 could not under Nixon's changes. Have no idea what the case was in your day since I was more worried about the term paper that was due and my draft eligibility was years away;^)

The following comments are from a government source and therefore can't be trusted ;^)
Per the selective "service" site at:
https://www.sss.gov/About/History-And...
"Before Congress reformed the draft in 1971, a man could qualify for a student deferment if he could show he was a full-time student making satisfactory progress in virtually any field of study. He could continue to go to school and be deferred from service until he was too old to be drafted."
"Before 1971, state and local boards used a "quota system" under which they assigned a certain number of men to the draft. Because the boards determined who would be drafted, there were instances when personal relationships and favoritism played a part in deciding who would be drafted."

And they claim favoritism doesn't happen today... HA! What a load of looter-pucky.

It's a pretty minor point now, but I was born in 1950, Would have been class of '72. I got a low lottery number, was drafted but failed the physical. Had my deferment still been good, I can't imagine I would have missed that, nor many of my same-age friends who did go...

That is correct. Nixon (who had daughters and no sons) changed the rules so the class of '75 and later (those born in '53 and later) would not be eligible for the college deferment and would be treated as cannon fodder instead starting in 1971. I think this also lowered the demand for those with higher numbers in the lottery in earlier years because so many more were draftable starting in '71.

Unless my memory completely fails me, as I went through it, I had a college deferment, but that eventually was considered unfair, and I and other students with deferments were subject to the lottery, so that option was no longer availability to me (or Mike).

The rules changed through the Vietnam era. At first educational deferments were routine, then they started pruning them in the name of "fairness". The anti-draft explosion at universities took off when they removed all graduate student deferments and cracked down on college students. It was still possible to avoid, through getting the right kind of job or rigging a job description or marrying, or as a matter of degree by "volunteering" for the national guard or coast guard in the hope of not being shipped off for cannon fodder anyway, but it took a lot more effort to figure it out.

The left exploited it to the hilt (such as the communist National Lawyers' Guild), providing all kinds of legal information on 'conscientious objection", going to Canada, medical deferments, and otherwise how to navigate the bureaucratic rules and avoid the draft, even though they politically supported national servitude; they wanted the Viet Cong to win.

The political elites like Clinton had additional connections they could exploit.

But escape the draft or not, everyone whose life was targeted was inescapably disrupted, put on hold at a crucial period of development, and threatened, all with permanent affect. There is a lot of history in this worth going back and learning.

The "best and brightest" slogan referring to themselves as in power was only the current version of the PR for the standard Progressive elitism claimed to successfully implement their statism. It of course failed miserably, as always.

The 'guns and butter' fiasco was the attempt to finance destruction through inflation, which in turn was supposed to supply the "butter". That, too, failed miserably, as always. The result was the run-away inflation, unemployment and wage and price controls of Nixon and Carter -- while the "best and brightest" scratched their academic heads over how "stagflation" could be possible.

The draft was there because of the altruist-collectivist ideology demanding servitude. They used it for Vietnam because it was there, then tried to parlay it into universal servitude for both military and non-military national service -- that would have been the next level of failure of FDR's massive alphabet soup make-work bureaucracy for the statism.

The American sense of life rose up against all of it, eventually resulting in the Reagan campaign, but it took 15-20 years to bury the New Frontier and Great Society. in name, while they remained entrenched but not popularly embraced. Even George McGovern and Hubert Humphrey were thoroughly trounced without even having to say that they were socialist. The people saw through it.

But the philosophical principles of reason and individualism were never explicitly understood on the scale needed, and so we have Obama and the Clinton dynasty. But how many today know the history?

Unprincipled conservative collectivists who denigrate Ayn Rand and the rights of the individual as not "intersecting" either "truth" or Pragmatist "usefulness", and who promote collectivist rationalizations equating "voluntary" with its opposite of 'follow the rules and be a slave to the group or get out of the country', don't belong on this forum.

Our lives are not subject to your authoritarian collectivist decrees of "the rules are stated", do as you're told or "get out of the country". Our lives do not belong to your collective and are not yours to sacrifice. You do not tell anyone where we can't live in order to be free of your impositions. This is fundamental. We will not sacrificially serve you and will not leave.

There is no polite way to put it. Get lost. We stay, free of your statist conscription, and you had damn well not try to interfere through your authoritarian impositions of human sacrifice in the arrogant mentality of stuffy European conservative collectivism. The American people made that clear enough when they demanded and got abolition of military conscription decades ago despite conservative demands for oppression under their "our country love it or leave it" nonsense for servitude.

As I said, I'm interested in Rand only in so far as she intersects the truth and usefulness.

Your issue, or your version of Rand is outside truth and usefulness.

You were born here but, you don't have to stay. The rules are stated. If you don't want to abide by those rules, you are free to go. Thus, your association with this group and acceptance of its rules are voluntary.

Goodbye.

The principles of the rights of the individual are, in fact, "useful"; they are not "dancing on the heads of pins".

We were born here -- as individuals; we didn't "form a group for the common good under agreed terms". "Agreed terms" and conscription are opposites.

You have no right to impose conscription on anyone for the sake of any "common good" of a group. That is collectivism, which is not only "not useful", but destructive. This country was founded on the rights of the individual, not collectivism and not mandatory military service -- which abomination came to this country later from the European counter-Enlightenment, including Prussian conservatives in Germany.

You don't get to tell anyone to "take it or leave". The national crisis that arose over Vietnam and the draft did in fact result in the American people overwhelmingly rejecting the imposition of the draft. They didn't have to "leave", they told the politicians to get rid of the draft or leave. That is why we have an all volunteer army today despite those conservatives and leftists trying to impose collectivist duties of mandatory service.

For those who are on this forum because they understand the value of Ayn Rand's philosophy and sense of life as more than the conservative denigrations of useless "dancing on the head of a pin", here is more from her Ford Hall Forum lecture on the "Wreckage of the Consensus" during the rising crisis of the early Vietnam era in 1967:

"Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy, the military draft is the worst. It is an abrogation of rights. It negates man's fundamental right—the right to life—and establishes the fundamental principle of statism: that a man's life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time.

"If the state may force a man to risk death or hideous maiming and crippling, in a war declared at the state's discretion, for a cause he may neither approve of nor even understand, if his consent is not required to send him into unspeakable martyrdom—then, in principle, all rights are negated in that state, and its government is not man's protector any longer. What else is there left to protect?

"The most immoral contradiction—in the chaos of today's anti-ideological groups—is that of the so-called 'conservatives', who posture as defenders of individual rights, particularly property rights, but uphold and advocate the draft. By what infernal evasion can they hope to justify the proposition that creatures who have no right to life, have the right to a bank account?..."

I only care about Rand where she intersects with the truth and it's useful. Otherwise, life is short and one can only dance on the head of pins so long.

Groups form for the common good under agreed terms. If one doesn't agree with the terms, one must leave the group.

The group of the United States of America formed with its terms, including potential mandatory military service. It's there, take it or leave it but, don't say it's not fair if you stay.

Yes, a war has to be fought to win and get it over with to return to civilization as soon as possible. Not doing that was one of the problems with Vietnam, but not everything. It was not in this country's interest to be there at all, the draft was a moral abomination, and the US political leaders were philosophically corrupt, ignorant, and confused as they tried to cover it all up with a public sell job to keep it going. More on this same page https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...

If you would, go to my second question, read my thought then, let me know what you think.

It appears to me if one won't engage in a war of annihilation, one must change the minds of the enemy.

Wars used to be fought to annihilation or exhaustion. That's when they'd end, when one side was completely vanquished or no longer had the will to fight.

Now we seem not to have the stomach for that but, that means we can't be successful unless we change the minds of our enemies.

To me, although it seems we did many things badly in Vietnam and in Washington, our failure there was an example of the failure to understand this metatruth about war itself: every successful war will be fought to annihilation, exhaustion or, until the enemy changes his mind.

I'm happy to hear your thoughts.

That was all the left's propaganda at the time.

We were fighting a large, bureaucratically organized war in a far away place we had no right to be in. The people on the other side were fighting for their homeland. There is no way to win that kind of war short of just killing off all the indigenous people.

The mass murders by the communists after the US left were much worse.

Assuming for the sake of argument that losing meant the next "domino" was going to "fall" -- so what?

(1) At least when we first went in, South Vietnam was so badly governed that communism probably wouldn't make things much worse.

(2) For the communists, South Vietnam would not be an asset worth owning. It would not help them win the Cold War. It would be a burden, costing them money and effort -- and if they didn't bear that burden, those considering Communist uprisings in other poor countries would find out about it and think twice.

In short, US leadership should have known better than to pay any attention to the domino theory or the people who asserted it.

"Baby killers" referred to babies among civilian casualties, trying to propagandize that the US was in
Vietnam to kill innocent people. The New Left was not against the draft and war, they wanted communists to win. "Baby killers" had nothing to do with abortion. All abortion was still illegal in the US, and so were contraceptives under the influence of the Church.