re: #94 Shiplord Kirel: From behind wingnut lines

I wasn’t drafted but I may as well have been. I volunteered because my birthday came up #4 in the draft lottery and I thought I might get a better deal if I volunteered. One of the odd things about the birthday lottery was that almost all the people in a basic training platoon would have one of about 3 birthdays.

One of those things about being an old geezer from a *certain* generation is that you don’t forget a number of now-irrelevant things, like your draft-lottery number. Mine was 52, which, I found out afterwards, would have put me right on the line of drafted/not-drafted had I not been fortunate enough to graduate college the year after the SS Act expired….

The other thing I’ve never forgotten is that the one time I had to physically appear at the SS office, it was in the Federal Building on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood: and the view outside the draft office’s picture window was a panorama of the neatly-arranged gravestones in the Veterans’ Cemetery across the street. Never figured out if the irony was intentional….