re: #270 marjoriemoon

What’s a selective draft?

The Vietnam draft was selective — there was the birthday lottery and they only needed about 1/4 to 1/3 of any given year; but then anybody in college got an exemption, or people who could pull strings to get in the National Guard instead, or if you hurried up and got married, then hurried to have a baby, and you were only at risk for a few years… Dick Cheney got 5 exemptions for example.

In WWII, the draft was every able-bodied male, 18-34. All of them. Physicists or aircraft designers would work stateside, but everybody served. Did you ever see “A League of Their Own”? The reason there was women’s baseball is because all the Dodgers and Yankees and Red Sox were off to war. Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable were bomber pilots.