Why Donald Trump wasn’t in Vietnam
Candidate’s deferment under scrutiny after his criticism of soldier’s parents
In 1968, at the age of 22, Donald Trump seemed the picture of health.
He stood 6 feet 2 inches with an athletic build; had played football, tennis and squash; and was taking up golf. His medical history was unblemished, aside from a routine appendectomy when he was 10.
But after he graduated from college in spring1968, making him eligible to be drafted and sent to Vietnam, he received a diagnosis that would change his path: bone spurs in his heels.
The diagnosis resulted in a coveted 1-Y medical deferment that fall, exempting him from military service as the United States was undertaking huge troop deployments to Southeast Asia, inducting about 300,000 men into the military that year.
The deferment was one of five Trump received during Vietnam. The others were for education.
His experience during the era is drawing new scrutiny after the Muslim American parents of a soldier who was killed in Iraq publicly questioned whether Trump had ever sacrificed for his country. In an emotional speech at the Democratic National Convention last week, the soldier’s father, Khizr Khan, directly addressed Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, saying, “You have sacrificed nothing and no one.”
Trump’s public statements about his draft experience sometimes conflict with his Selective Service records, and he is often hazy in recalling details. In an interview with the New York Times last month, Trump said the bone spurs had been “temporary” — a “minor” malady that had not had a meaningful impact on him. He said he had visited a doctor who provided him a letter for draft officials, who granted him the medical exemption. He could not remember the doctor’s name.
“I had a doctor that gave me a letter — a very strong letter on the heels,” Trump said in the interview.
Asked to provide the Times with a copy of the letter, which he had obtained after his fourth student de- ferment, Trump said he would have to look for it. A spokeswoman later did not respond to repeated requests for copies of it.
The Selective Service records that remain in the National Archives — many have been discarded — do not specify what medical condition exempted Trump from military service. The medical deferment meant Trump, who had just completed the undergraduate real estate program at the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania, could follow his father into the development business, which he was eager to do.
The story of Trump’s draft record has been reviewed by other publications, starting in 2011, when the Smoking Gun published his Selective Service documents. But a Times examination of his history, including interviews with Trump and experts on the era, revealed new details.
For many years, Trump, 70, has also asserted that it was “ultimately” the luck of a high draft lottery number — rather than the medical deferment — that kept him out of the war.
But his Selective Service records, obtained from the National Archives, suggest otherwise. Trump had been medically exempted for more than a year when the draft lottery began in December 1969, well before he received what he has described as his “phenomenal” draft number. Because of his medical exemption, his lottery number would have been irrelevant, said Richard Flahavan, a spokesman for the Selective Service System, who has worked for the agency for three decades.
“He was already classified and determined not to be subject to the draft under the conditions in place at the time,” Flahavan said.
Trump has acknowledged feeling somewhat “guilty” for not serving in Vietnam and has stressed that if he had been called, he would have gone.
Since Khan publicly addressed him in the Democratic convention speech last week, Trump has been pressed about his sacrifice, including by George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week on Sunday.
“I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures.”