Last Draftees

By Keith Rogers, Robert Foust, Willie McTear and Larry Keller

Our book is about lessons learned from decades of war in U.S. history and the consequences brought on by the draft, otherwise known as conscription.  The Vietnam War (conflict) was the vehicle that brought to light not only widespread corruption associated with conscription but also our political shortcomings as a country. More importantly it shines a spotlight on abuse of power and the racial divide in the United States during the span of three U.S. presidents -- the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781647019952

Book preview

Chapter One

Conscription in America

During the second term of peace-loving president Woodrow Wilson in 1917, the United States government printed the first of four million posters of Uncle Sam. His image was the centerpiece of a campaign to recruit young men for the conflict sweeping Europe. The iconic poster featured an old white-haired Caucasian man sporting a goatee and pointing his index finger straight ahead. His eyes were focused in a fixed and determined stare beneath a star-studded white top hat.

I Want You for US Army was the message from the symbolic American figure.

This poster was displayed in store windows, post offices, and government buildings across the United States, directing its viewers to go to the nearest recruiting station. Its purpose was to drum up support for the great war—the war to end all wars—a war to make the world safe for democracy, once and for all.

According to legend, the World War I poster by artist James Montgomery Flagg had evolved from the legacy and image of a meat packer from Troy, New York, Samuel Wilson. He ultimately became a government contractor of sorts, the first of many to come. They supplied various items to the Army to include barrels of meat for soldiers during the War of 1812. They were stamped with the initials: US, a mark to identify their origin and ownership.

The draft was followed by a surge of patriotism, prompting an upswing in enlistment numbers. This raised the question: Did we really need a draft? In itself, the voluntary enlistment would easily provide the necessary manpower that the United States would contribute to the already costly war across the Atlantic Ocean.

It wasn’t long before troop ships set sail for foreign soil. These hulking, slow-moving, steel-and-wood troop transports churned across the North Atlantic in convoys full of American soldiers and their government-issued weapons, equipment, and supplies. They were the fresh bodies, the reinforcements to add to the chaos that was to become known as the First World War.

What a collage of human beings this was, thrown together by fate. Some were there to serve; others, to gain citizenship. And then there were a million draftees wondering, Why are we here? They soon found the simple and straight forward answer: to kill or be killed.

That was what war was all about.

This wasn’t the first time young American men were drafted to serve in a time of war. The first conscription in America’s history was the result of an action taken by the Confederate Congress. It approved a request from the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, and the first draft was commenced at his urging in 1862. This was in accord with Geoffrey C. Ward, in his book The Civil War, with Ric and Ken Burns.

They quoted the reflections of Sam Watkins that a soldier was simply a machine, a conscript. Or, a piece of property owned exclusively by the government, for all practical purpose.

We were sick of war, and all of our pride and valor had gone, the rebel veteran wrote.

Confederate President Jefferson Davis had a two-pronged approach to maintaining the Southern Army’s ranks. It extended enlistments until the war’s end; and it mandated that white men eighteen to thirty-six years of age serve another three years of duty.

Conscription targeted poor whites who couldn’t afford to pay for substitutes and men who owned twenty slaves or more were altogether exempt, according to Ward.

Watkins wrote: It gave us the blues. We wanted twenty Negroes, which immediately raised the howl of ‘rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.’

The following year in 1863, federal forces from the north adopted their own conscription plan to bolster the Union’s manpower. Young men from poor families were first targeted due to their poverty level; whereas, the wealthy could pay a fee—$300—to be exempt from the draft or find a substitute.

The Union Army’s conscription system was ripe for corruption. Doctors would often issue a deferment for a fee. This pay-to-not-play system was the first sign of the abuse of the Selective Service System. It would grow. Contractors would follow in the footsteps of the crooked physicians. As a result, the government would spend trillions of taxpayer dollars on faulty equipment used to kill or injure our own troops.

Sons made into slave soldiers dying because of faulty or poorly maintained equipment—that’s our future.

Riots and looting broke out in New York and several other northeastern cities. These were directly related to the issue of conscription, the draft. At the same time, the first reports of those killed-in-action at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, were starting to circulate through the hometowns in the northeast.

As stated before, if a man had enough money or influence, say as much as $300, he could avoid the draft completely by paying for a substitute to enlist on his behalf. Indiana’s Seventh Cavalry in Indianapolis was a popular choice in the day. The regiment lost 48 soldiers in battles from Mississippi to Missouri and farther west to Kansas. Another 246 soldiers died from the diseases, which they acquired during their service.

While there was some precedence of African Americans serving for the cause of the American Revolution and later in the War of 1812, a federal law from 1792 predated and barred Negroes from bearing arms for the United States Army.

Orator and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglas called for black men to seize the opportunity and enlist in Massachusetts and New York, lauding the prospect for making freed men soldiers. This came after federalist president Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation that deemed slaves as free people on the first day of 1863.

Let him get an eagle on his buttons and a musket on his shoulder and ‘Musket Balls’ in his ammo pouch. There is no power on Earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in these United States, Douglas said.

The freedmen of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment from Massachusetts joined the fight, but they suffered terrible losses. In battles fought in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, most of its officers and half of the volunteer soldiers were killed in action. A total of sixteen black soldiers received the Medal of Honor. In the Deep South, Union soldiers in the African Brigade fought a key battle against the Confederates at Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana.

On June 7, 1863, four African American regiments from Louisiana and one from Mississippi shed blood to keep Union supply lines open. It was a hard-fought battle against the rebel Texas cavalry, and ultimately, it came down to hand-to-hand combat. Both sides suffered heavy losses.

Freedman fired from behind cotton-bale barricades that were stacked to provide cover for sniper fire as they continued to protect the critical supply line for General Ulysses S. Grant’s Vicksburg Campaign. Many of the dead from these battles were laid to rest in their own backyard, a common occurrence in the Civil War era.

With the nation torn and tired of war, there wouldn’t be another draft for fifty-five years as the hardened soldiers sought new lives across the frontier that had taken sides in the civil clash. The US Cavalry was used to maintain peace as white settlers fanned out across the West thus provoking the Indian Wars. But who were they fighting against? The original, real Native Americans. This was not good for either side, nor was it the peace that was promised for future generations in the aftermath of the Civil War.

The first military draft for an undivided United States of America came as the country answered the first call to stop German aggression in France that threatened democracy and the free world. That call came in 1917, three years after the war had erupted in Europe. What sparked the inferno that became the great war was the death of Franz Ferdinand—the reigning archduke of Austria—and his wife, Sophie. They were shot to death from point-blank range on June 28, 1914, on a visit to inspect imperial troops. This politically motivated murder was committed by a nineteen-year-old Serbian, Gavrilo Princip. He and other radical nationalists had plotted the assassination when they learned of the visit. The homegrown rebel group was bent on overturning Austria-Hungary’s rule over Bosnia. The opportunity came when the archduke’s horseless carriage rounded a corner in Sarajevo, where Princip was waiting.

This sole action threw the entire European continent into an armed conflict pitting Germany and its nefarious cohorts against the free world.

Immigrants and American Indians comprised a significant portion of those who joined to fight in the war, which later became known as World War I. They saw the military as an avenue to citizenship. Nevertheless, more than a half million young men were drafted in 1917, followed by nearly 2.3 million men in 1918. In all, twenty-four million men registered for the draft. There were three registration periods. The first was on June 5, 1917, for men ages twenty-one to thirty-one; the second, on June 5, 1917, was for men who had turned twenty-one since the first registration; and the third was held on September 12, 1918, for men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five.

On April 2, 1917, President Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany. The underlying reason: the empire’s submarines continued to sink US and British ships.

The real clincher was the sinking of the British-registered ocean liner the Lusitania on May 7, 1915. The civilian passenger ship went down to the bottom of the North Atlantic in eighteen minutes. She carried with her 1,128 souls to their doom in a watery grave in the frigid North Atlantic Ocean. One hundred twenty-eight of those lost on board were American citizens. The sinking of a civilian passenger ship with the loss of American lives became a rallying cause for the United States to eventually enter the fray in Europe. The tipping point came when German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann’s notorious telegraph to his attaché in Mexico City was intercepted by British code breakers in January of 1917.

After being confirmed, it was then passed on to President Wilson, and it soon became clear that Germany was aiming to make Mexico its ally, and Mexico was responding. In return for their cooperation, the Mexican government was to receive Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona from the United States when the Germans won the war and America surrendered. Congress could not and would not stand for that. With one dissenting vote—that of Rep. Jeannette Rankin, a pacifist from Montana and the first woman elected for federal office—Congress granted Wilson’s request to declare war on Germany.

Four days later, the United States began the process of drafting, recruiting, and training troops for the arduous task of war. Then began the long line of troop ships plying toward the European theater.

On November 11, 1918, the armistice was signed. This effectively put an end to World War I. More than 116,500 American soldiers had been killed in action, and 10,000 more died from diseases or accidents not related to combat. The toll included those wounded and injured from both gunshot shrapnel and chemical warfare. This was the genesis of the United States government’s responsibility to care for veterans. Hence, the evolution of the Department of Veterans Affairs, an agency to care for the wounded and disabled veterans who served so proudly and honorably during war.

The Armistice of 1918 also led to the breakup of the five-century-old Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, releasing the empire’s domains of sovereign rule. The Europeans were quick to colonize the failed Arab domains, creating the friction and the instability that will simmer well into the future unless radical religious beliefs were nullified.

After World War I, the United States suspended the draft, exempting the requirement to register. Peace and tranquility followed but not for long. Along came World War II pitting the Allied and Axis forces. As the war progressed in Europe, the Selective Service System was reinstated in 1940 several months before Imperial Japanese Navy warplanes bombed the US fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The sneak attack took place in the US Hawaiian Islands, a territory of the United States.

Congress took only a day to declare an act of war at the urging of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The first declaration was issued against the empire of Japan on December 8, 1941, and three days later of the ruthless dictator Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany.

The World War II-era draft required men ages 18–35 to register. Men enlisted in record numbers with volunteers as young as age fifteen.

The United States had been blatantly attacked on its territorial soil and sea, surging patriotism to its pinnacle. In all, 50 million men between ages 18 and 45 registered for the draft, and many of the 10 million inducted were among the more than 405,000 US citizens who died during the war.

It was with this heavy burden through clear victories that Old Glory (nickname of the first US flag) flew atop places like Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi, and the United States took the lead in ending the global war in 1945. After several explicit warnings and a demand for Japan’s unconditional surrender, President Harry S. Truman, a World War I field artillery officer, made the decision to unleash just-tested atomic bombs.

Two Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers were dispatched to fly high over the island nation of Japan days apart, each dropping a nuclear bomb. One annihilated Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and the other leveled much of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. History had been made, and millions of lives were lost and changed forever.

This action, the first use of weaponized nuclear materials, was the impetus for the so-called Cold War, lasting from 1947 until two years after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. The end of communism was at hand in Europe. This was followed by the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, all without a shot fired in the endgame.

The genesis of the modern-day draft evolved during these early Cold War days with the Selective Service Act of June 1948. Under the new system, even during peacetime, all men ages eighteen to twenty-six were required to register for selective service for a year of active duty, followed by three years in the reserve.

The nation was going through deep postwar military budget cuts and a reduction in military personnel. So the call went out for one hundred thousand conscripts to be inducted for military service in 1948.

Why select any one at all? Maybe it was because the government wanted to keep the war office open and keep control of the manpower pool. This was also the influx of influence by the military-industrial complex on Congress. This meant big bucks for government contracts, or money for war. Government contracts. Big bucks. Where will it end?

Greed came into play. After years of peacetime, the military-industrial complex was going broke. Damn it, everybody is making money but us! they lamented. We need a war.

The Korean War was originally a United Nations’ effort designed to stop aggression by the North. Basically, it was a civil war. No outside intervention was necessary and then along came the UN.

You had to understand the United Nations. It was quite difficult; it really was. It was supposed to be a stand-alone organization designed to act as an international police force. In actuality, it was the problem.

The United States was the biggest sponsor of the UN. In other words, Americans paid most of the bills but had little say.

Right on cue, the UN had gotten involved in a civil war in the nation of Korea. They were getting pounded. They need a bailout. The United States military’s role in this action was significant for two reasons.

First, America never attacked another country, nor did it invade other countries. Sound-minded leaders recognized the different cultures, and their sovereignty was recognized by the US government. Second, and most importantly, this started a trend of purchasing used wars by the United States. Both incidents were disturbing for the future.

The Korean War start-up ensued. The draft was reinstated, and the system of selective service was humming along on its mission of ruining American lives by sending these poor and underprivileged people to fight in some nonwar.

The American economy was in high gear. The automobile industry and aeronautics companies were especially strong. How about some government contracts? Gun makers? We needed bullets, too, and on and on, it went. The military-industrial complex was on the move again.

The Korean conflict was soon followed by the Vietnam conflict. Both were wars in reality, and because of the tremendous loss of American lives—more than 33,600 in Korea and more than 58,200 in Vietnam—they were never declared as wars by an act of Congress.

Nevertheless, the Universal Military Training and Service Act of 1951 shaped the draft into its form for the United States’ upcoming military action in Vietnam. In essence, the practice of fighting wars but not declaring them has continued into the twenty-first century. For these combined conflicts, the number of inductees totaled 1.5 million for the three-year Korean War, 1950–1953. Likewise, there were 1.86 million men drafted for the Vietnam War during a nine-year span from August 1964 to February 1973. The 1951 Act lowered the draft-eligible age from nineteen to eighteen and a half, with an ensuing eight-year obligation of active and reserve duty.

With these new rules came the introduction of student deferments, a new way to get out of the draft if your folks could afford to send you to college and if you’re smart enough to stay in school.

Can you get A’s in basket weaving? How about recreational fishing, son? Dad said. Anything. Just stay out of that war.

Seven-hundred thousand draftees were sent to Vietnam to shoulder one-third of the fighting force.

Researchers estimated that among the US draftees in Vietnam, most were from working-class families, 55 percent; flanked by 25 percent from poor families, and 20 percent from the middle class. Very few came from upper-class families, but many were from rural areas and farming towns, according to the website Vietnamwar.info.

Before 1969, draft boards used a quota system to determine how many men would be conscripted. The Selective Service System had since acknowledged that because the board determined who would be drafted, there were instances when personal relationships and favoritism played a role in deciding who would be drafted over moral consequences.

Criminals were included. Join the Army or go to jail.

So that helped spark antiwar protests on campuses and cities across the nation over bureaucrats playing God with the lives of thousands of young men who went to Vietnam and came home in body bags or not all. The toll didn’t include hundreds of thousands of soldiers whose bodies were exposed to Agent Orange defoliants that shortened their lives or left them severely disabled from the oft-fatal cancer-causing dioxins.

University of Michigan historians noted that conscription caused many young American men to volunteer for the armed forces in order to have more of a choice of which division in the military they would serve.

While many soldiers did support the war, at least initially, to others, the draft seemed like a death sentence: being sent to a war and fight for a cause that they did not believe in or understand.

This in turn inspired a draft-dodging mentality among many Americans.

Some sought refuge in college or parental deferments; others intentionally failed aptitude tests or otherwise evaded; thousands fled to Canada; the politically connected sought refuge in the National Guard; and a growing number engaged in direct resistance, according to Michigan historians.

Antiwar activists viewed the draft as immoral and the only means for the government to continue the war with fresh soldiers—opening the door for black panthers, anti-war and civil rights groups, just as corrupt—kill whitey, this is whitey’s war, don’t go. What was their gain? Radical political power. Violence to stop violence. It doesn’t work.

So these were confusing times for nineteen-year-old American-born men.

The first draft lottery was held on December 1, 1969. That determined the call-up order for 1970. The second lottery was held on July 1, 1970, with 125 being the highest number for induction.

With no end in sight in 1971, Congress decided there needed to be a more level playing field in selecting who would serve for the remainder of the Vietnam conflict. It would last another four years—as long as World War II—until Saigon fell, and helicopters were pushed into the sea from departing ships to make room for last holdouts and refugees.

The deal was simple in 1971—for able-bodied guys born in 1952 who weren’t draft-card burners and opted to stay in the United States instead of taking a long-term trip like forty thousand others made to Canada. Or, you could evade the draft by claiming homosexuality or becoming a conscientious objector.

If you registered for the draft, as required by law, then you were entered in the lottery, one that you don’t want to win with a low number.

That’s right. Some bureaucrat, who you don’t know, would grab a plastic capsule containing your birth date that he selected randomly from a rotating, transparent hopper. It was sort of like playing Keno in Las Vegas, except the order in which the capsules were chosen determine the order of selection for the next round of draft call-ups.

That year, the call-up numbers reached only 95 out of a possible 366, a sign the war was winding down in Vietnam and the people who were protesting in the streets and campuses across America were winning the antiwar on the home front.

If your number wasn’t called and you maintain a 1-A draft eligible status for a year, you had completed your military obligation.

College deferments (2-S) were nixed altogether.

The Selective Service System then informed those who complied with the draft registration law and were legitimately attending college to postpone their inductions only until the end of the current semester.

A senior can be postponed until completion of the full academic year, the Selective Service System administrators said.

And there was more language to the law in the name of fairness: The changes in the new draft law…included the provision that membership on the boards was required to be as representative as possible of the racial and national origin of registrants in the area served by the board.

The nation’s final lottery drawing came on March 12, 1975, for men born in 1956. No one in the last four lotteries—1972 to 1975—was conscripted, leaving the last call-up for young men from the 1971 lottery pool.

Then on January 27, 1973, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird established the all-volunteer armed forces, eliminating the need for a draft. Aside from several hundred men inducted in the first two months of 1973, the last ten thousand drafted for the Vietnam War answered the call to duty in September 1972.

In the end, the day before Saigon fell, President Gerald R. Ford—whose son, Steven, had not registered for the draft—put an end to draft registration through a proclamation on March 29, 1975, a year after he granted amnesty for draft evaders. Ford’s proclamation held until President Jimmy Carter reinstated draft registration in 1980 for eighteen-year-old males.

Chapter Two

Calac Cousins

Philip and Alfonso Calac were a couple of Native American men from southern California. They registered for the draft on June 5, 1917, in Nevada’s Las Vegas precinct. As cousins from the Rincon Indian Reservation, they hadn’t planned on being drafted for the Army when they left their families to find work in Las Vegas.

They were single young bucks in a dusty railroad town of two thousand that had sprung up as a watering stop on the Old Spanish Trail. It was once home to a platoon of US cavalry soldiers who protected pioneers during the post-Civil War Indian wars as immigrants seeking better life, and Mother Lodes fanned out across the West.

There were about twice as many men as women. It was 1917, eight years before the first street in Las Vegas—Fremont Street—would be paved and seven years before the US government would grant citizenship to some of the fourteen thousand American Indians who answered the call.

The nation was weighing the prospects for world peace against entering the war that loomed over there in France.

Alfonso Calac (pronounced Ka-Lack) hailed from the Mission tribe near San Diego. Educated and trustworthy, the clean-shaven twenty-six-year-old found work as a blacksmith helper for the Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad Company.

Philip Calac, a lanky twenty-one-year-old with dark-brown eyes and thick black hair became a boilermaker helper at the Las Vegas railroad shop.

In less than a year, nearly one thousand five hundred Nevada men had heeded the call for the war effort that drew millions from the draft and enlistment. The numbers for Nevada greatly exceeded the quota for the sparsely populated Battle Born state of eighty-five thousand.

Many of those who joined were immigrants who saw the military as an avenue to citizenship.

It was unclear under what terms the Calacs entered the military. Records didn’t indicate if they volunteered, but Selective Service offices were told by federal authorities that if there was any doubt about an American Indian’s status, he should be considered a noncitizen.

Draft registration records showed they were selected from a background pool of Italian, Greek, Irish, and other immigrants. The list included other Native Americans, like Shoshone Joe Jackson, a farmer from Belmont in Nye County. His draft card noted that he didn’t know the month or day he was born, but it was the spring of 1888.

Alfonso, the oldest Calac, was born in 1890, according to his signed,