Question/Problem 4: How and why did the Vietnam War divide Americans?

The following excerpt describes how men could be drafted into the armed forces during the war:

Nothing occupied the minds of young people more during the Vietnam era than did the draft. If a 19-year-old was about to be drafted, he found himself unable to get a job. He could not borrow money or do many of the things adults can do. College students, high school graduates, and dropouts found ways to avoid the draft. Not everyone avoided it, however, or even tried. A small town in rural upper Michigan had 11 boys in a high school graduating class who all joined the military in the same year. Every one of these boys was killed later in Vietnam.

Draft boards, made up of local people, could determine how many local men were sent off. For example, Texas had 7 percent of the U.S. population and 4 percent of those in the military. Michigan had 4 percent of the population but 7 percent of those in the armed forces.

U.S. troop strength in Vietnam reached its peak in the spring of 1969. One year later, draft laws were changed. A national lottery system was created. The federal government said a lottery would make the draft more fair. Officials hoped it might stem the tide of young men who dodged the draft. The government also believed that making the draft less controversial would decrease opposition to the war.

Here is how the new system worked: All potential draftees were assigned a number drawn by chance. That number was based on their date of birth. For example, all 19-year-olds with a birthday of January 4 could be in the 193rd group to be called up that year. Those men with birthdates matched to numbers 250 through 365 did not have to worry much about being called. This did not make the draft more fair; some people could still receive deferments. But it made the draft *appear* to be fair.

In the following excerpt from 1967, a professor of religion at Stanford University explains why he will aid young men to avoid being drafted:

I teach. I spend my professional life with American youth of draft age. And while I will not use the classroom for such purposes, I will make clear that from now on my concerns about Vietnam will be explicitly focused on counseling, aiding and abetting all students who declare that out of moral conviction they will not fight in Vietnam.

I will 'counsel, aid and abet' such students to find whatever level of moral protest is consonant with their consciences, and when for them this means refusing service in the armed forces, I will support them in that stand. In doing so, I am committing a Federal offense, for the Military Selective Service Act of 1967 specifically states that anyone who 'knowingly counsels, aids or abets another to refuse or evade registration or service in the armed forces' opens himself to the same penalties as are visited upon the one he so counsels, aids and abets, namely up to five years in jail or up to $10,000 in fines, or both.

I will continue to do this until I am arrested. As long as I am not arrested, I will do it with increasing intensity, for I am no longer willing that 18- or 19-year old boys should pay with their lives for the initially bumbling but now deliberate folly of our national leaders. Nor am I willing to support them in action that may lead them to jail, from a safe preserve of legal inviolability for myself. I must run the same risks as they, and therefore I break the law on their behalf, so that if they are arrested, I too must be arrested.