The Vietnam Draft Lottery
Nov 10 2022
I am from north of the border.
I was too young to go to war.
And it may very well have been over
by then.
In Vietnam, they call it The American War.
Which brings to mind
The War of Northern Aggression,
the name the slave states preferred;
so it seems it's always the other
who was the aggressor
is in the wrong,
should bear the burden of blame.
It's all history now
but still worth reflecting on.
Because, but for the accident of birth
— the where, the when,
how the numbers come up —
I would have been a part of it.
March 26
was 170.
Pretty much halfway;
so an even chance
of escaping the draft,
but good odds
of getting caught.
In the end, of course, I never faced dying
in a tropical swamp
in a pointless cause
in a bad war.
But that doesn't change
how blindly fate falls;
not when March 25
was 343,
March 27, 268
and neither was called.
While 170
made the cut.
According to Einstein
God does not play dice.
In life, though
everything is luck —
there
in a draft lottery
and random draw,
and there
in the accident of birth
and all the contingencies that led to it.
Such a fine line
between death and survival —
the other side of midnight;
not born in Vietnam
or 1950.
Perhaps a good war
would have been different.
But in history
good wars
— if there even are such things —
are few and far between.
Terri Gross recently interviewed Steven Spielberg, and — in discussing his WW 2 movie Saving Private Ryan — the subject of Spielberg's draft number came up.
I'd forgotten all about the Vietnam draft lottery, and never knew you could easily look up your own number. So I did, and it led to this poem.
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