Essay: Back Home, Yet Closer to War Than Ever

LEXINGTON, Ky. (March 21) -- The knot in my stomach tightened with each step. My heart beat faster and faster. It was as if a ghost were nearby. A ghost reminding me how it once took fear to motivate us to stop the loss of so many young lives.

I was taking a long walk through the suburbs of Lexington, Ky., where I grew up, on my visit home last week. I had made this trip many times before, but usually running, biking or riding in a car. You see so much more when you slow down.

I passed my old elementary school, Clays Mill, and the Little League field where I hit the only home run of my life. A few blocks later, I turned toward the Southland Shopping Center, where my buddies and I spent many idle hours, sipping cherry Cokes and annoying local merchants.

I walked past the barbershop, about the only store still there from those days. That's when my blood pressure began rising.

At first I wasn't sure what was happening. Then I looked at the building across the street. It houses a picture frame shop now. In 1970, it was something altogether different. The post office was on the top floor. The Selective Service was in the basement, at the rear.

That's where I signed up for the draft, 40 years ago next month, a few days before I turned 18.

And I'm not talking mock draft. This was the real thing. The military draft. If your number came up, your number could be up.

We hadn't been too worried about getting our draft cards only a few months earlier. All my close friends and I were planning to go to college. We would receive student deferments. Surely, this thing in Vietnam would be done by the time we graduated.

But in 1969, Richard Nixon signed a bill reinstituting the lottery system for the first time since World War II. For those of us of draft age, our chances of an all-expense paid trip to Saigon largely would be determined by a random drawing based on our birthdays.

On Dec. 1, 1969, 366 capsules representing each day of the year, Leap Years included, were plucked from a glass jar, one at a time. Men born on the days with the lowest corresponding numbers would be the first inducted into the Army.

My birthday, May 3, was No. 40 that year. They took everyone from 195 and below. But only men born from 1944 to 1950 were eligible that year. I was born in 1952. Still, it was enough to give me quite a scare.

Many students felt the same way, now that it was clear this battle wasn't just going to be fought mainly by the poor and under-educated. Campuses ignited in protest.

On May 4, 1970, the day after I turned 18, four students were shot and killed by National Guardsmen during a demonstration at Kent State University. The next day, I watched the ROTC Armory burn to the ground at the University of Kentucky, in my hometown. More experienced state troopers diffused the violence there, however. They kept their weapons holstered, content to let the students chant, "Hell, no, we won't go!"

The nation's attitude continued to shift against the war and Nixon proposed ending the draft altogether. But he also phased out many deferments for the time being. And that was bad news for me as Aug. 5, 1971, approached. That was the day they would draw the numbers for men born in 1952.

I was a full-time student as well as a full-time journalist by then. Didn't matter. I was married. That deferment was gone, too.

It was too late to join the ROTC as a student named Bill Clinton did. (He dropped out after he got No. 312 in the 1969 lottery.) I didn't have a cyst on my butt to get me excused from service as a young man named Rush Limbaugh had. (Insert your own joke here.) And I hadn't been charged with littering as Arlo Guthrie was.

I had no protection whatsoever.

So I didn't know what I was going to do if I got a low number. I only know this: I don't believe in violence. I've never even been in a fight. I certainly wasn't going to war to defend a corrupt government in a place that seemed a million miles away.

Canada was certainly an option, as it was for thousands of young Americans then.

My memory of that day isn't clear, but I suspect my heart was throbbing even faster than it was last week.

I know I heard the news on the radio. No. 177. Men born on May 3, 1952, were assigned No. 177. The year before, only men born in 1951 with the number 125 or lower were called up. My year, they stopped at 95.

They held another lottery in 1972, but the draft ended before any of those men were taken.

And the war that should never have been fought was soon lost. Too many brave young men -- much braver than I was, I suppose -- died for no reason that I can understand.

Four decades later, we're repeating this mistake in faraway lands.

I thought about that as I continued walking. I was more than a mile past that building when I realized the knot in my stomach was gone.

Maybe it's way past time that we were all scared like that again.