Draft Lottery
- What was your first connection to the war, and did your parents ever try to talk to you or your brothers about it?
My parents never really explained, they never sat us down and talked about it. My first incident of really feeling the tragedy of the Vietnam War was when I was in sixth grade, and I had a friend named Bill and I went to his house to play afterwards. And I had no idea who Bill was, his Mom was home, we were doing things in his house. He took me into his parents’ room, and he opened the closet, and there was his father’s uniform. And he was in the Air Force and he was shot down and never found and that was like “wow”. My friend, that was the first real tangible sense of how scary. I was scared; this kid’s dad is not there for him. As a little kid you process it differently. But seeing the uniform, which was still in perfect condition from the cleaners and he had his hat on top of the mantle. Bill never saw his father, really was very young when his father was killed.
- Were the issues of the war discussed in your school?
Any curriculum or any discussion about the war. That was not part of any curriculum. Of course this was in elementary school, what they did in higher education was definitely discuss the war. On college campuses they absolutely talked about it, because they were upside down. But no, you know that was the weird thing about that war, a lot of stuff in society went on as normal. Little kids went to school, little kids did their homework, little kids played their games, moms and dads were moms and dads. And your attachment to the war was what was seen on TV at night and what was seen in the paper. After that I mean a lot of society moved on as if there was no war going on at all. It was a crazy place.
- How was the Vietnam War different from other wars?
Well there was a difference because WW2 we had been attacked and we were fighting to preserve our country. Vietnam War, I mean if you didn’t have someone fighting in the Vietnam War it was life as usual. People went to work, you heard about the war, and I’ll get into that later about the news and how the media covered the war. But I can remember reading or talking to our next door neighbor who served in the war and he was on leave in Hawaii and he had just spent a 6 month tour on ground in Vietnam and they went to Hawaii on leave and they were just amazed at how everything was normal. I mean here you got these terrible things happening in the Vietnam War but not too far away from this land that no one really knew anything about, life for many in the United States was normal. When WW2 was going on, the whole country was consumed and dedicated to that war effort. Vietnam War was a totally different struggle, there was huge protests and riots so you didn’t have a country unified for one purpose, in the Vietnam era.