Clinton Case Revives a Generation’s Vietnam Flashbacks

New Hampshire voters have passed judgment on presidential candidate Bill Clinton and found him only slightly wanting. Inasmuch as they were quite sweet on him a few weeks ago, we must assume that his second-place showing is largely attributable to their feelings about his alleged marital infidelity and his apparent efforts to delay or avoid being drafted for the Vietnam War.

I haven’t much to say about infidelity (I’m opposed, unless there’s a darn good explanation), but the Vietnam War and the draft summon thoughts easily recalled to any healthy male who was in college in the late 1960s.

Some discuss Bill Clinton and Vietnam as if 1992 and 1969 are somehow compatible slides that can be placed under the same microscope and viewed with equal ease. To do so is to say that events occur without context.

These are times of relative peace. Even during the Gulf War, no one talked seriously of reviving the draft. The threat to today’s college boy is whether he will get hit with a cream pie if he’s politically incorrect.

By contrast, 1969 was a tumultuous time of rapidly fading innocence and narrowing lines of sight. You didn’t have to be claustrophobic to feel things closing in around you.

We had grown up with stories of our fathers’ glories in World War II, and now it was supposed to be our chance. But many among us saw no glory in Vietnam. If it had only been indifference or a mere lack of enthusiasm for the upsetting of one’s life that going into the Army would cause, that would have been one thing. But the revulsion over the war policy and the mounting sense of wasted lives was so strong as to become a blinding rage.

That was the context in which many college students made their military-requirement decisions. We saw hypocrisy and wavering all round regarding the war effort--from the politicians, from the public and even from returning veterans--and yet we were the draft bait, not anyone else.

The lucky ones, I suppose, were the guys who supported the cause and couldn’t wait to get over there to do their part. The troubled ones, as captured so poignantly in Clinton’s now-famous 22-year-old letter to a local draft board official, were those who didn’t know what to do about Vietnam.

My roommate in my freshman year of college received conscientious objector status. My roommates for the last three years were ROTC enlistees. Neither route was right for me, nor was fleeing the country. Yet I couldn’t picture myself in the Army.

In late 1969, the guys on our dormitory floor at the University of Nebraska, like those around the country, sat around radios listening to the lottery that would decide those most likely to be drafted. As your birthday was picked in a blind draw and matched with a number from 1 to 365, you became a believer in the randomness of life-shaping events.

The aural image lingers these many years later: When guys heard their birthdays read out loud and matched with a low number, there would be a groan or epithet heard up and down the hall. When a birthday was matched with a high number, a whoop of delight swept the floor.

I got No. 140, which permitted me neither a groan nor a whoop. It was in the middle range--well within the number that was being drafted at the time--but because I still had a deferment for another 18 months, I was in limbo. I knew there was the chance that by the time I graduated in the spring of 1971, they wouldn’t be drafting guys with numbers that high.

What it meant was that I could bide my time and try to figure out what to do.

Before I could decide how or if to dodge the draft, the draft dodged me. While driving down Ames Avenue in Omaha one fall day in 1971, the radio reported that no one with a lottery number over 100 would be drafted. With my 140, it was the equivalent of a condemned man’s eleventh-hour reprieve from the governor.

All my story means is that I never had to decide what to do. I, like millions of others my age, opposed the war as much as Bill Clinton did. But we paid no price for our opposition--and all because of the luck of the draw.

So, from our cushy vantage point of 23 years later, it strikes me as the height of unfairness to condemn Clinton for opposing a war that most people came to oppose and, yes, for even maneuvering to avoid it.

Would we for some reason feel better about Clinton today if, as an ardent war opponent, he had joined the Army in 1970? Should he have volunteered for Vietnam to enhance his future political viability? Would joining the National Guard make him more electable today?

The passion and anguish that clouded the Vietnam era has been dissipating slowly over the years. It has taken a long time because the clouds were so dense and threatening.

To pretend in 1992 that we can draw profound insights from what a college student did about Vietnam in 1969 is to pretend that those clouds never existed.