Draft Sentiments
I did get my draft notice, as I said, however when I went up in early December of ’72, when you go in the first thing they do is they take your height and your weight. My height was 6 foot 2 inches, and my weight was 127 pounds. At the end of all the stuff that they do, they said I failed and I asked, “Oh, is it because I’m colorblind?” Which I am, and they said no it’s because I’m 11 pounds underweight and therefore I didn’t meet their qualifications.
I will tell you that about three weeks later I did run a marathon. I ran, I think that was the year I ran 2:27:30 for a marathon, so though I was underweight for the army I was still actually in pretty good physical shape.
They did send me a notice after this first round that started the letter “Dear Mr. O’Callaghan, we’re sorry you didn’t meet our physical requirements…” I got a six month deferment to hopefully overcome my physical disqualification. In March of that following year, if I remember right it was March of 73, the Congress voted to stop the draft so I didn’t have to worry about it anymore.
My mom and dad weren’t really too keen on it, which in some ways for folks is surprising. My mom and dad were early teens when WW2 was going on, so they knew what could happen in a war situation but they also knew why you would be fighting a war. In this particular case, for Vietnam, they weren’t really too keen on the whole reason for being over there. The folks you were fighting for, to some degree, didn’t really seem to care. There wasn’t a lot of support, seemingly, over in Vietnam, or even in the United States by the time I was old enough for the draft.
At the time of the draft they had a lottery system where they not only pulled your birth date, but they also pulled a number one through 365 and that would determine which order you would get drafted. For example, they pulled my birth date August 28, and then the number they pulled for the corresponding rank of where I would be was 40th, which was kinda unfortunate because I have 4 sisters and of my sister’s birthday, the closest one to me was well over 100. So, as the only one eligible for the draft, I had the misfortune of getting number 40, which of course is why I ended up going for my physical and ended up failing it.
In terms of what my folks thought, as I said, they weren’t really keen on the fact that I could get drafted for this. What surprised me was more so than just the general attitude, was my mom said that she would be more than happy to buy me a plane ticket, a train ticket, a bus ticket, to Canada so that I would become a draft-dodger, which at that time a number of young men did instead of going into the military because they did not believe in what was going Buy toprol xl online on in Vietnam. A number of them fled to Canada to set up home there until such time as they could come back and not have to worry about getting drafted or prosecuted for evading the draft.