Profile Highlight
My name is Tim Hawthorne; I am not a person who served in the Vietnam War. I am coming from a perspective of what is was like a kid growing up during Vietnam. I had an older brother who was at draft age, and luckily for him as we look back in hindsight. He didn’t get drafted because they called the draft off. My father was what we call a hard hat Nixon supporter. In those days, growing up in the 60’s usually what the father’s political philosophies were, most part what the 1960s housewives would follow. That was what was best for the family that’s what she believed. As my brother became draft eligible, we had a political split in our house. My mother became very anti war, where my father growing up in WW2, in which he skipped classes so he could get drafted, and join the military and fight in WW2. He wanted to fight for his country so badly that he was sacrificing school, and he was getting ready to go into war. His feeling was serve your country. My mother, she developed a different feeling, the presidential election in 1972 was against Richard Nixon and George McGovern, two polar opposites of how the Vietnam War should be fought. And my mother voted for McGovern, and that created a lot of tension in the house because of the difference in political ideas at that time
- How did your mom expose her antiwar attitude?
She didn’t get tear gas lobbed at her, but she became the ideal, I don’t want to say hippie, but she wore beads, she got her hair different, she was very outspoken about her anti-war feelings. That was a total 180 in our house. For a lot of people in the United States, the Vietnam War was something you heard about in the new, something you head about from neighbors, you heard some tragedies and stuff but for a lot of people it was business as usual.
- How was your brother drafted?
Like I was talking, there used to be a thing toward the end of the Vietnam War, which was like a lottery. They would have birth dates put into a lottery thing, and someone would reach out and pull a number and if that birthday was first pulled that would become number one. If your birthday was on that date you were drafted number one. My brother, Pat, who’s nine years older was just out of high school and he got the draft number 52. Which in those days if your number was under 100 you were pretty much going to be called to serve in Vietnam. And so that threw a lot of anxiety in our house growing up. I can remember my mom crying because all the young men in those days were looking to see what their draft number was going to be. Because toward the end of the Vietnam War, the consciousness was this thing is not what we all wanted, this is not what the American society is looking forward to. Like I said, I’m just a little kid and I’m seeing the trauma my mother was going through of having to watch her son go off to Vietnam, she watched that with a number of neighborhood kids do that.
I want to say that my brother knew right away that he had the number 52, March 12 was number 52. And, after that they started scrambling around, there was other options. You could serve in the reserve there was an Air National Guard here in the valley in Van Nuys. My father knew some guys there, and he was really getting ready to sign a six-year commitment to the reserve. The reserve is where you would serve 2-3 weeks during the year and some weekends, training and being ready. If you were called to active duty they would use the reserves. Very similar to what they did in Iraq and Afghanistan, they called a lot of reserves to active duty to serve.
- What was the reaction of people who got drafted?
I mean those guys, were seeing what was happening in the war. Those guys they had friends who were coming back from the war.
- Which year was this?
Pat was in 1971, was when they gave him his number and they called off the draft in 1972. They only pulled the low draft numbers before 1972. I don’t know any of his friends who wanted to serve in the war. And that’s kind of the whole thing too, lot of the people who ended up serving in the war, like my father had friends from the Air National Guard so he had the ability to get my brother, to do that instead of going to Vietnam. Lot of the guys who ended up going didn’t have the “ins” to get out, or didn’t have student deferment. Guys who went to college you had a student deferment you deferred you didn’t have to go serve in the war. Lot of the guys who ended up serving in the war, there was a racial thing. There were a lot of black, African American young men fighting that war because they didn’t have the means or the ways of avoiding it.