re: #51 sagehen

My brothers just missed the Vietnam draft (born 1956; bad number). But in the several years before that, when we worried they might get called, my dad and some of the other doctors he worked with got their own little conspiracy going… nobody who any of them cared about was going to be drafted. They just wouldn’t allow it. If college deferments stopped working, if medical paperwork couldn’t be faked up, they were prepared to puncture eardrums, slice Achilles’ tendons, take a sledgehammer to elbows.

My husband’s 2 closest friends were drafted: one was in Vietnam in a non-combat role, the other served in Germany. My husband-to-be (met him in 1980) was classified 1y because he had a mild case of cerebral palsy.