No winners in lottery to send men to war
It was the American nation’s first military draft lottery since the Second World War.
Fifty years ago, on the evening of December 1, US TV station CBS broadcast a live feed from Washington’s Selective Service HQ.
Perched on a plain library stool was a glass container holding 366 blue plastic lottery “capsules” – inside each was a birth date that would be read aloud and assigned its lottery number, starting with 001.
New York Congressman, Alexander Pirnie, was asked to pull out the first capsule.
It contained the birth date September 14. All men born on that date from 1944 to 1950 were to be drafted.
That lottery was one of four held between 1969 and 1973 targeting 850,000 American men aged 19 to 26.
And it marks more than half a century since the start of America’s involvement in what was to become its longest and most hated war – Vietnam.
Fifteen years earlier, at a conference in Geneva, world powers had agreed to divide Vietnam with the communists, led by Ho Chi Minh, controlling the north, and the anti-communist government led by Ngo Dinh Diem in the south.
Into this arena on November 8, 1960, came US president John F. Kennedy with Lyndon B. Johnson as his vice president.
Just over a month later, southern revolutionaries, backed by the communists in the North, formed what came to be known as the Viet Cong.
Little more than three years later the political landscape was to change radically again, with the murders of president Diem and his brother Ngo Kinh Nhu during a coup by dissident generals.
Three weeks later, on November 22 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated.
With Johnson sworn in as president, the US was hurtled towards head-on war.
But the deciding moment came in 1964, when a resolution was issued that gave Johnson the power to halt the spread of communism – effectively pitching America into full-scale involvement in the Vietnam conflict.
It was followed by a bombing campaign of North Vietnamese targets that would last more than two years, while US combat troops were deployed to fight the Viet Cong on the ground.
In March, 1968, President
Johnson announced he would not run for re-election – but his successor, Richard Nixon, didn’t fare much better.
Despite promising to end the war, four years later it still raged on.
The slaughter finally ended in April, 1975, with the North Vietnamese invasion of the South.
But by then almost 60,000 US servicemen had lost their lives, along with 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers, 1.1 million Viet Cong and two million civilians.