In the early 1960's, the US became involved in what was till then a mainly French War in Vietnam. The Vietnam War escalated from there. First the U.S. sent advisors, and after that, support troops. The U.S. escalated its efforts after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. This incident involved the torpedoing of American destroyers in international waters. Then large number of young Americans were shipped off to a country where it seemed the US really had no place or real objective. Each day, many Americans were killed by the North Vietnamese, the Viet Cong.
To keep the war effort going and to keep enough active men on the front, the US reintroduced the draft. It was run by a local draft board which had jurisdiction over three or four towns. The board had to designate a certain number of draftees per area based on population. Draftees were then picked through a lottery. You could become exempt from the lottery by a government-issued deferment. If you were in college or performing a valuable function for the country in fields such as farming or medicine, you were exempt. If you were deferred because of college status, it was required that you keep a C or better grade in all your major subjects or you were no longer considered a college student. You were now vulnerable to the draft board. My father, James Coyne, was part of this. He was 20 years old and enrolled as a sophomore at St. Anselm's College when the lottery was started. His story follows.
Chris Coyne
I think a significant part of the history of my life was the Vietnam War. This little Indonesian-French thing that started many years before escalated into something the Americans got involved with back in '63,'64 as advisors. And by '65 to '67 we got into it heavy. We were now putting people there and getting people killed. I was fortunate enough at that time to have a 2S deferment. Other people had deferments: farmers had deferments, doctors had deferments. It was a pretty strange thing. Certain people were deferred and certain people had to go to war. That's the way it was.
As the war chewed up people, they needed more people, so they instituted something called the lottery. The lottery was basically...take 365 days, cut them into little pieces of paper and stick them in a big bowl and pull them out. As the day came out it related to your birthday, and that was your draft number. They did it once to start off the whole system. They had advertised on TV and radio for weeks that the lottery was coming and you were going to find out where you were.
So the lottery came. As I remember, it was a Wednesday night and there were about a hundred of us in a room with two TV's. And then a special bulletin. They started drawing numbers. If you got a low number, a one, a two, a 10 or a 50, next stop, Vietnam. We still had our 2S deferments because we were college students. If you were just a regular schmuck out there, say if you were working in a gas station,if you pulled a one or a two, next morning you were gone. I got 124. My draft board went to 126. Each draft board was different. That night as those numbers were drawn...to a lot of people it was life or death.
Good friend of mine, Mike Madison, got a two. He went down and signed up for the National Guard the next morning, because the Guard hadn't gone to Nam yet. Out of the hundred kids that were in this room watching this TV show, about a third of them got low numbers. There were people in this room, guys, men, crying, because the day they got out of school they were going to Vietnam. I felt fairly comfortable: I had 124. The lottery came and went.
Unfortunate was the awful pressure it put on colleges. They made a rule that if you got below a C in any of your major courses, you were no longer a college student and your number went right to the draft board. So there was additional pressure on performing in school. The same guys you would hang around with on a daily basis, were disappearing left, right, and forward. People were disappearing into the Army, into the Marines.
Phil Gallagher was a junior when I was a freshman and he showed me a lot of good things. Just a good friend, hot shit kinda guy...drove a '67 Chevelle, 386, and drove it like a bastard. He got drafted. His grades dropped below a hook in his major, and he got drafted. Well there goes Phil. A few other people I knew died, and they've been dead now almost 25 years, and dead is a long time. Phil Gallagher today could be running a major corporation, he was that bright. He was a renegade. Now he's dead.
My draft board went to 126.
Jim Coyne
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