Since it has come up a few times today.Who’d have guessed it, but the Vietnam War draft could become a political issue again given the pattern of evasive answers by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
The New York billionaire, who was a genuine student-athlete in his youth, came away with a medical deferment in 1968 owed to bone spurs in both heels, according to his latest explanation. But in seeking to downplay that exemption as “minor” and “short-term,” Trump’s campaign raises more questions than it answers as to how he sidestepped military service during the war.
This is not a new controversy for the wealthy New Yorker. But this weekend, Trump made himself more of a target with his attacks on Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a Navy veteran who spent years as a POW in Hanoi. And much as Trump insists that the decisive factor was his high number in the December 1969 draft lottery, the real question is how he stayed out of the draft for the nearly 18 months before.
Like politics itself, timing was everything in that crucial period of 1968 and 1969, when the Army was running out of volunteer replacements and more and more draftees were needed to man infantry units in Vietnam. Draftees represented an ever larger percentage of those Americans killed in action in 1968 and 1969, and college graduates, born like Trump in 1946 and 1947, became a target for draft boards across the country.
Donald Trump gestures at a press briefing where he introduced people whose families were victims of illegal immigrants on July 10, 2015 at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, California, where some shared their stories of the loss of a loved one. The US business magnate Trump, who is running for President in the 2016 presidential elections, angered members of the Latino community with recent comments but says he will win the Latino vote. AFP PHOTO / FREDERIC J. BROWN (Photo credit should read FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images)
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KEVIN ROBILLARD
Having enjoyed four years of student deferments, the name of the game for many was to find a new way to stay out of the war. National Guard slots were coveted as a safer alternative to Vietnam. Others married, had children or found jobs like teaching that might keep the draft board at bay.
Most important, when the new-styled lottery was announced in 1969, it changed the rules so a young man’s birth year meant less in the order of the draft. Everything now rested instead on what day he was born. A high number for that day became the “home free” ticket for those 1946-1947 babies who had avoided being drafted until then.
In this same period, Bill Clinton famously posed as a future ROTC officer candidate at the University of Arkansas, until his high number came in and he was off the hook. George W. Bush and Dan Quayle opted not to wait and found places in their states’ National Guard.
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http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/donald-trump-evades-specifics-on-his-draft-deferment-120330.html'Bout the only thing I'm going to bother posting about Hairpiece.
