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Location: Upper Canada

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

a little less drafty today

I was pleasantly surprised to see a bipartisan U.S. Senate effort to move towards withdrawing American troops from the Middle East. W finally makes good on his promise to be "a uniter, not a divider."

I grew up in a time when the draft was very present in our lives. I had a selective service registration (draft) card in 1974, when I turned 18. Since my eighth birthday, 1,857,304 American teenagers had been drafted, many being sent to serve in Vietnam.

When I count all of the many blessings in my life, I have, in recent years, neglected the relief it was when my birthday came up as 344 (of, I believe, 365) on March 12, 1975 for the 1976 induction year. By 1973, when I was 17, all the high school juniors I knew knew that the war was lost, and was winding down to the helicopter evacuation from the embassy roof. We knew then that our older brothers and neighbours were probably the last to be drafted. But most were still wary, and those with a lower number in the lottery were the most skittish. Even had the call-ups been resumed, in my freshman year at college, I knew I was in less danger than most.

here is a table of selective service call-ups by year.

1917:
1918:
1940:
1941:
1942:
1943:
1944:
1945:
1946:
1947:
1948:
1949:
1950:
1951:
1952:
1953:
1954:
1955:
1956:
1957:
1958:
1959:
1960:
1961:
1962:
1963:
1964:
1965:
1966:
1967:
1968:
1969:
1970:
1971:
1972:

1973:

516,212
2,294,084
18,633
923,842
3,033,361
3,323,970
1,591,942
945,862
183,383
0
20,348
9,781
219,771
551,806
438,479
471,806
253,230
152,777
137,940
138,504
142,246
96,153
86,602
118,586
82,060
119,265
112,386
230,991
382,010
228,263
296,406
283,586
162,746
94,092
49,514
646


As the father of two sons growing closer to draftable ages, at a rate that seems to be accelerating as a function of my own increasing awareness of looming geezerdom, let's not go down that road again.

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