Lottery Rolled the Dice of Life for Draft-Age Men

On the evening of Dec. 1, 1969, a New York congressman named Alexander Pirnie stood beside a glass bowl in a tiny Washington, D.C., auditorium. Just after 8 p.m., he got the signal to plunge his hand into the cylindrical bowl, which was filled with 366 blue plastic capsules. Each one contained a slip of paper inscribed with a birth date.

Pirnie randomly chose a capsule and handed it to another official. “Sept. 14,” someone called out. The date was posted by the number 1 on a huge tote board.

Three thousand miles away, in a house off USC’s fraternity row, 21-year-old Denny Freidenrich, born on Sept. 14, 1948, was dumbstruck at the announcement on his television, which was tuned to the live national broadcast of the Washington drawing. I have just won the lottery, he thought. But it was no cause for celebration.

Back in Washington, the solemn recitation of birth dates continued for more than an hour. April 24 . . . Dec. 30 . . . Feb. 14 . . . Oct. 18 . . . Sept. 6. . . . Even the leap year date of Feb. 29 had not been overlooked.

As the dates were read and ranked, 20-year-old Edmund Rodriguez was working at his printer’s job in Alhambra. Unlike Freidenrich, he was so oblivious to the drawing that he did not bother to check his ranking until it was printed in the next day’s paper. His number: 137.

But 19-year-old Greg Starkebaum, huddled in a dorm room at the University of Colorado in Boulder, had been waiting anxiously for this moment. When his birthday came up, No. 154, he heaved a sigh of relief. He was safe--or so he thought.

The event was the nation’s first military draft lottery since World War II, one of four that would be held from 1969 to 1973. The targets were 850,000 American men ages 19 to 26--men who had not yet served in America’s longest and most hated war.

Among them were Bill Clinton, No. 311; David Eisenhower, No. 10; and Dan Quayle, No. 210.

The lottery system set the order of the draft call for the remainder of the Vietnam War.

Having one of the first 100 or so birth dates called meant that you’d better start packing your bags for Vietnam. Or Canada.

Landing in the mid-100s through the mid-200s meant you would spend a year in the “sweat zone,” hoping the draft board would meet its quota before it needed you.

Falling anywhere in the last third--the mid 200s to 366--meant your sentence had been commuted, your years of uncertainty were over, you were home free.

“We’d spent all of our high school years worrying about being drafted, and all this tension had been building,” recalled Mitchell Jacobs, who in 1969 was a Harvard junior unnerved by several years under the draft cloud. “It was as if the people who lost the lottery would be shot with the dawn, and the people who won would have a life of peace and plenty. . . . I worried every night of my life about what I was going to do.”

Delighted at Getting a Favorable Number

Watching the lottery on a television set at Harvard’s Winthrop House, Jacobs nearly cried when he heard his blessedly high number: 362. Others with similar good fortune cheered and danced. But one classmate with a low draw was so enraged that he charged at the TV and shattered the screen.

Trying to explain the hypertensive conditions of his young manhood to his 14-year-old son recently was “like explaining something from the moon,” said Jacobs, a Boston entrepreneur who just turned 50.

Until that December evening a little more than 30 years ago, American men were vulnerable to the draft for an eight-year period from age 19 to 26; the oldest were at the head of the line. For many men, this meant living with foreshortened options for years.

Under pressure to reform the system, President Nixon signed an executive order on Nov. 26, 1969, that he promised would “end the agony of suspense over the draft.” Instead of being vulnerable to conscription for up to eight years, now most young men would be susceptible for only one year.

By using randomly chosen birthdays to determine the order of draft selection, the lottery also was intended to level the field, putting all eligible men at equal risk of mandatory military duty, whether a budding Renaissance scholar in the Ivy League or a dropout pumping gas in suburban L.A. The types of deferments typically granted by draft boards were pared back; graduate school, for example, would no longer keep a young man out of the Army.

Yet those savvy or affluent enough could still avoid a draft call that would probably send them to Vietnam. College undergraduates could get a deferment for four years; the National Guard and the military reserves also were popular havens. Quayle joined the Guard a few months before the lottery; Clinton benefited from a Reserve Officer Training Corps deferment but abruptly withdrew from the program before starting training when his high lottery number virtually ensured he would not be drafted. Eisenhower, breaking the family tradition of service in the Army, entered Navy officer training after graduating from Amherst in 1970.

The lottery also served a political end: Hoping to quell the shouts across college campuses of “Hell, no, we won’t go,” Nixon saw the new system as a way to deflate the antiwar movement. It was a canny move.

“There were some real political benefits to instituting a lottery system. You deprived a generation of a point of protest when the entire generation was subject to the draft,” said Lawrence M. Baskir, co-author with William A. Strauss of the 1978 book “Chance and Circumstance: The Draft, the War and the Vietnam Generation.”

Whether the tactic succeeded is debatable; a major rallying point for antiwar leaders came barely six months later, when National Guardsmen killed four student protesters at Kent State University in Ohio.

What is certain is this: Every draft-age man who wasn’t exempted or deferred faced the same menu of unpalatable choices: He could fight, he could flee, he could risk permanent exile. Each path brought the possibility of guilt, sacrifice and moral confusion.

“In a very real sense,” Baskir noted, “every member of that generation is a veteran of Vietnam.”

For thousands of those men, the lottery hastened a long moment of reckoning.

His Birth Date Was Beside Number 1

For Freidenrich, the moment is flash-frozen in his memory. When he arrived home to watch the lottery with his roommates, he had already missed the drawing of the first several numbers. Shooting a glance at the TV screen, he saw his birth date posted beside the number 1.

“Awww, s---,” he said.

At first, his fraternity brothers did not believe his awful luck. Then they were on their feet, slapping his back with the adolescent glee that might have greeted a slip on a banana peel. Freidenrich had fallen, while nearly all of them had gotten away with high lottery numbers.

When the drawing was over, Freidenrich wandered out onto 28th Street. It was jammed with USC men who had poured out of the fraternity houses, some to celebrate, others to commiserate. He caught snatches of conversations: So-and-so came up No. 120. So-and-so came up No. 41. Nobody, Freidenrich noticed, had “won” the lottery as well as he had.

But Freidenrich believed he had a sure-fire escape. He had fallen off a cliff while in high school and fractured three vertebrae, an injury that left him with severe chronic back pain. He felt confident that he would qualify for a medical exemption. He planned, however, to take no chances.

He transferred his draft registration from his Palo Alto home to Seattle, which allowed him to take his induction physical there. Seattle was the most popular destination for young men who wished to avoid service in Vietnam. According to Baskir and Strauss, nearly every potential draftee who presented a letter from a doctor or psychiatrist was disqualified by the examiners in Seattle.

Freidenrich flew there when his time came. At one point he was handed his Selective Service file, crammed with all the correspondence he had sent to his draft board since registering at age 18. Back then, he was, as he later described himself, a troubled believer in the war who wanted the U.S. to “fight the forces of evil.” But after a few years at USC, he’d changed. He’d seen enough of the procession of body bags from Vietnam on the nightly news. The ghosts of the South Vietnamese civilians slaughtered by American soldiers at My Lai had begun to haunt the national conscience. He was a believer no more.

So now, staring at the 18-year-old’s signature, with its careful dips and curves, on the papers that held his fate, he began to shake uncontrollably. This is the hour of truth for me, he thought.

The hour took all day, as he paraded in his underwear through countless long lines to have his height and weight recorded and his hearing and vision screened, to hand over his urine in a jar, to endure undignified pokes and prods in private places.

Finally, he heard a few names called out. One was his.

He was directed to an office down a long hall, where a doctor sat talking on the telephone. On the desk beside him was Freidenrich’s hefty file.

Several minutes passed before the doctor finally hung up. Staring at the anxious young man, he was blunt.

“You want out?” he asked. Freidenrich nodded.

“You’re out,” the doctor said. Freidenrich walked out in a relieved daze.

Creative Ways to Avoid the War

There were many ways to avoid the war. Some men contacted draft lawyers the day after the lottery, hoping for a loophole they could crawl through. Others discovered a sudden enthusiasm for the National Guard or other form of stateside service. Many feigned medical or mental conditions, or took extreme measures to create one. Dick Eiden, a UCLA law student in 1969, was not unlike many of his generation’s draft targets: He limited his food intake to one glass of grapefruit juice a day for two weeks, shrinking his normal weight of 145 pounds to 128, just missing the weight minimum for induction. He flunked two physicals, then drew No. 326 in the lottery--safe.

James Fallows, whose lottery number was 45, tried a similar tactic. But the real clincher came during his induction physical, when he was asked: Have you ever contemplated suicide? Fallows, then a Harvard undergraduate, looked the examiner in the eye and lied: “Yes.” The doctor wrote “unqualified” on his chart. He was free.

For Fallows, that moment was “the beginning of the sense of shame which remains with me to this day.” In writing about the encounter in a 1975 essay for Washington Monthly, he became one of the few members of the privileged classes to acknowledge who was really fighting the war in Southeast Asia: not the sons of the elite but those of society’s disadvantaged. On America’s steaming civil rights front, it was a fact blared from the podium by such leaders as Stokely Carmichael, Adam Clayton Powell and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The lottery did little to address the inequities.

Freidenrich says he feels no shame for taking a bona fide exemption. He went on to graduate school at UCLA, became a congressional aide, ran a highly praised voter education project and worked on campaigns for Tom Hayden and others. Now he is a 51-year-old father of three who runs a fund-raising and public relations company in Laguna Beach.

“What’s important to understand is, this was life and death,” he said recently. “Once you made your decision on which way to go, there was no stone left unturned.”

Was Antiwar but Lacked a Way Out

Although Greg Starkebaum was immersed in the antiwar scene, he knew no friendly doctors who might trump up a medical exemption for him. He knew no savvy draft counselors nor had connections in Canada. He was a hippie, not a detail man, who wound up in Vietnam out of a warped notion of revenge as much as for any other reason.

On the night of the lottery, he and his dorm mates in Boulder gathered around the TV. Their conversation was spattered with phrases like “involuntary servitude” and “cannon fodder.” When the drawing was concluded, they gathered up their fake IDs to buy liquor, ending the evening in such rowdy high spirits that it took the campus police to quell their beery bombast.

Starkebaum, having pulled No. 154, felt justified in celebrating. Draft calls had been dropping, and some officials had predicted that in 1970 the highest number called would be 120. The Colorado sophomore had been thinking about dropping out of school, and now he thought maybe he could shuck the draft too.

An engineering major, Starkebaum started ditching more classes and hanging out with the Vietnam veterans who were enrolling at the university on the GI bill. The veterans were hard to miss, grouped together in the student union or under the trees with their long hair, earrings and jungle fatigues. The fact that they often were rolling joints and puffing away usually drew an interested crowd.

No single conversation turned Starkebaum around, although he particularly remembers the vet who cried as he told about shooting a Vietnamese boy suspected of throwing a grenade at American soldiers. What the U.S. was doing in Vietnam, the veterans said, had nothing to do with winning hearts and minds away from communism. The war was mainly just a death trap for poorly trained grunts. That message, Starkebaum said, “radicalized a lot of kids, me included.”

By the spring of 1970, Nixon had expanded the war into Cambodia, provoking widespread student rallies and strikes. Some time after the Kent State shootings in May, Starkebaum was among the thousands of University of Colorado students who massed on campus for a daylong rally to debate tactics.

How could they force university leaders to take a stand against the war? Should they hold a massive strike? Should they blockade the administration building? Dozens of votes were held, and hours were wasted. How do you count hands among 10,000 people sitting on the grass?

The university was not shut down--far from it. Ignoring a student recommendation that the faculty cancel classes and exams to show solidarity against the war, many professors handed out Fs when students did not show up. Except for physics, Starkebaum was skipping classes, preferring to spend his time demonstrating and making protest signs. Over the summer, the university informed him that it was kicking him out. By summer’s end, his draft notice arrived.

His mother was emotionally wrecked at the prospect of his going to war; his father felt pure disgust toward him for losing his deferment. His thoughts turning to Canada, Starkebaum went to see his minister in Gunnison, his hometown of 3,000 in western Colorado. But the pastor was unsympathetic and told him he could not help.

With a month to go before his date at the induction center, Starkebaum decided, let’s get this over with. He found the Army recruiting center and signed up. If the government really wants me, he thought, it might be surprised at what it’s going to get.

By the end of his basic training in Ft. Lewis, Wash., his decision to enlist paid off. He was assigned to the military police, not the infantry, where casualties were highest. Arriving in Vietnam in February of 1971, he spent the next 11 months in the country, stationed for the most part far from the combat zone. He entertained thoughts of subversive activity, but the worst he ever did was refuse an order to retype a police blotter, which brought a $75 fine.

By this time he was counting the days until he would be shipped home. The Army never did get its 75 bucks.

When he got back to Colorado in 1973, he returned to school for his degree. He slipped easily into the incongruous world of the vets he’d met before joining the Army. He wore his fatigues to campus, grew his hair again and favored a boonie hat with a peace symbol and the words “Southeast Asia war games” embroidered on it. He manned an office for Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

“People really didn’t know what to make of me or most of the people I hung around with. They thought we were kind of weird. I guess we were in some ways,” he said recently. “We wore our hearts on our sleeves, and that put people off. People didn’t want reminders of the war.

“I was not particularly offended,” said Starkebaum, now a Denver engineer specializing in hazardous waste removal. “But it was kind of lonely.”

Was Studying, Married and Working Full Time

When the lottery caught Edmund Rodriguez, he was studying graphic arts at Los Angeles Trade Technical College during the day and working full time as a printer at night. He got married, was making good money and paid little attention to the war.

At the time it seemed that the war would end soon, so getting his lottery number--137--didn’t much worry him. Nonetheless, as a precaution he started the paperwork to enter the Army Reserves. That option was foreclosed when his draft notice arrived.

In Rodriguez’s community, serving in the armed forces was an honored tradition. Latinos answered the call to combat in Vietnam in unprecedented numbers and paid a heavy price: One in two Latinos who went to Vietnam served in a combat unit, 1 in 3 were wounded in action, 1 in 5 were killed in action.

Rodriguez’s father had fought in Europe and the Aleutian Islands during World War II. He had uncles and older cousins who were veterans. “Our country, right or wrong” had been ingrained from an early age, so at Wilson High in El Sereno, he had been a proud member of the junior ROTC and thought he might volunteer for the service later.

But when he received his “Greetings” letter from the Selective Service, Rodriguez flirted with unpatriotic thoughts. He could flee to Canada, but he didn’t like cold weather. He could go to Mexico, but the assimilated grandson of immigrants couldn’t speak Spanish. Largely apolitical, he lacked the ideological drive to pursue other avenues of escape, such as applying for conscientious objector status or going to prison.

Like the anguished character in novelist Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” who spurns a chance to flee, Rodriguez wound up in Vietnam because, he said, “going seemed easier than trying to get out.”

“I never questioned authority,” Rodriguez, a purchasing agent for a printing supply company, said one evening recently. “For somebody to go up against the system, I thought that took courage. I didn’t think I would have . . . the guts to do something like that.”

He served 10 months and two weeks as a combat medic, based at Phu Bai, near the DMZ. A soft-spoken man, he does not talk easily about that time. Asked what was the worst thing that happened over there, he pauses, then says, “Oh gosh, just being there. It was worse than you could ever have imagined.”

When he came home, he was torn between wanting to forget and wanting to remember and understand. He had nightmares, was jumpy at noises and lost his patience with customers whose urgent demands always paled in comparison to the crises he witnessed on the battlefields of Vietnam.

Years later, whenever he encountered young men persuaded by glossy recruitment posters to enter the military, he would gently suggest they find something better to do. When the Persian Gulf War raised the specter of the draft, he was ready to buy his then-19-year-old son a one-way ticket to another country.

He still doesn’t get too worked up over politics. But one day in 1983, he read a newspaper article about an opening on the local Selective Service Board. He applied for the position in the same Wilshire Boulevard building where he had been inducted more than a decade earlier.

“I am a card-carrying member of the Selective Service Board,” he says now in a satisfied tone that hints at private ironies.

At first he was impelled largely by a desire to keep young Latinos and other minorities from shouldering the brunt of the draft in the event of another war. Luckily, all he has had to do for the last 17 years is run through an annual drill with other board members, practicing the questions they would ask potential soldiers if the United States ever revved up the draft again.

“It wasn’t for God, country and apple pie” that he volunteered for the board, Rodriguez said. “I had a selfish motive. I wanted to see how that whole mechanism worked from the inside, because it changed my life forever.”

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* DRAFT LINEUP

Lottery arranged birth dates in order of selection for duty. A18