The show is in a story arc where a son is seeking to learn about his father’s experiences in Vietnam so he can better understand himself and the dynamics of his own family. Lots of them saw the lottery episode on The NBC television program This Is Us back in October. They can’t believe no one talks about this. They want to know the details they can’t believe the details. Those of one generation want to share those of another have questions. Some are wonderful: a business leader’s father told him later in life that he’d had it all planned that if his son was drafted, the entire family would move with him to Canada. Some are terrible: a friend called his father with his 300+ number and instead of rejoicing was told he should now be a man and enlist.
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Many comments are about the generation gap between patriotic WWII parents and Vietnam-era children, who knew this war was very different but not how to articulate it to be understood by mom and dad.
Those of the time still want to share their stories of chance won or lost, survivor guilt, close calls, friendly doctors, fortunate injuries, mixed-up records, turning the upper age limit of 26 just in time, being thankful for once in their lives for being too short, too tall, too fat, too thin. I get emails with only a number in the subject line: 151…263…319… and from a surprising number of people who were born on September 14.
“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right.”ĭuring this fall’s launch of my novel, which coincides with the time frame of the build up to first Draft Lottery, I’ve had many audience members share their lottery numbers, or those of their fathers or other relatives. The last line of “The Lottery,” sums it up best. How had this already surreal war come to this? I was astonished at the time, wondering if Jackson would demand royalties for having her concept usurped by the military. Not quite Wheel of Fortune, but right up there. Seriously? Regardless of how it worked out in the end, on December 1, 1969, the Draft Lottery presented as a sick game show to determine who would die first-and on television! This was a formal government program being administered as a spectacle. And, though people with high numbers felt they were “lucky,” and if pressed you’d had to concede it was “fair,” no one thought it was humane. Even today, it’s still impossible to forgive.Īll those capsules with “winning” birth dates, mixed up really good, chosen, opened, and pinned in order to a bulletin board. That’s how I’ve always felt about the actual Draft Lottery. The New Yorker just ran it again for Halloween and I shared it, netting an angry comment from a Facebook friend who’d had the wits scared out of her by being forced to read it in sixth grade by a teacher she still can’t forgive. I read it in school, as so many of us did. I’d already learned not to trust the word lottery. The first horror story I’d ever read was “The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson’s Twilight Zone-like story of a drawing where the “winner” is stoned to death. You’d never think of it the same way again. All you could do was hold your breath and pray as you waited to hear your birthday, a date once so joyous, to be called in fateful order. And, in fact, the definition of a lottery is “an event with an outcome governed by chance.” And chance is always fair, right? Just like destiny.īut it’s also something you can’t hide or protect yourself from. The new system would be “fair,” they said.
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If your number was 300 or higher, you were considered safe, and could feel free to “live your life as you’d planned,” and also, according to President Nixon, stop protesting the war, which was the whole point. If you were in the 200s, you were in limbo. If your number was 100 or under, you were most likely a dead man walking, on your way Vietnam. If your birthday was the first date pulled, you were Number One, and so on. Pieces of paper with each of the 365 days of the year were placed into individual plastic capsules, mixed together in a giant container and pulled out, one by one.
It was the day a new program was implemented to determine the order of the draft-age men who would go to Vietnam at a time when the life expectancy under fire could be as low as six seconds.