August 5, 1971, will be a day I will never forget, even with my half a brain. that was the day my future (including whether I might actually get to have one) was decided by the luck of a ball roll not much different than that in a game of bingo. It was my draft day. I was an 18-year-old kid living in Rockville, Maryland. that day, as all other days, I was working at People's Drug Store in Congressional Plaza, a shopping center on Rockville Pike. I worked behind the food counter, creating certainly unhealthy but quick and filling meals for shoppers and my regulars, the people who worked for other businesses in Congressional Plaza. On that morning, all of the regulars at the food counter knew it was my draft day and commiserated with me as they watched me squirm in anticipation of what my draft number would be. the rumor was that the government would be drafting and sending to Vietnam anyone my age whose birthday was among the first 150 dates selected that day. So when my good friend JD Douglass, working back in the pharmacy, where they had a radio tuned to the draft, came onto the P.A. system saying "Scott! August 6! number three!" I felt like I'd been kicked in the balls.

knowing JD's impish sense of humor, I probably should have realized he was only going for the cheap shock, like the guy who jumps up in the dark and yells BOO! But that didn't occur to me, so I spent the next six hours or so certain that I would soon be a casualty in a little country across the Pacific Ocean that most Americans couldn't find on a map.

I had been a military brat, the son of a Navy officer, having grown up on military bases ... elementary school in Morocco and Cuba, high school in Japan, and my conversations with the enlisted men I played basketball with at the base gym in Japan made being drafted and sent to Vietnam sound like a death sentence. So those hours of believing that was in my immediate future (Thanks, JD) were pretty gloomy.

That we were sending troops off to fight and die in Vietnam was ridiculous anyway. It went against everything we were about as a country. Our presence there had begun as supporting France, a longtime US ally. France had declared Indochina (spanning Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam) as its colony nearly a century earlier and squashed every revolutionary movement, largely to protect its ownership access to the region's natural resources (rubber, tin, tungsten). That is the kind of blatant imperialism our country professes to oppose, yet we did not. In 1946 Vietnam declared its independence from France, precipitating a war between France and a communist national group called the Viet Minh. In 1954, the French were defeated and President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave the speech that introduced the "Domino Theory", a simplistic concept that would guide much of our foreign policy from then on. That same year, the Geneva Accords established a ceasefire in Indochina and divided Vietnam into North and South Vietnam with a demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating the militaries of the communist nationalists to the north and French forces and supporters to the south. A decade later, the American people were fed the convenient fiction of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, in which U.S. vessels were carrying out covert amphibious operations (ostensibly in international waters but suspiciously close to North Vietnamese waters, prompting North Vietnamese torpedo boats to attack a U.S. destroyer. Our government told Americans that the North Vietnamese had made a second attack on U.S. vessels two days later, something that later proved to be untrue. This was the lie that led Congress to authorize President Johnson to send troops into Vietnam and initiate a massive, sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam, launching us into the most unpopular war in the country's history, resulting in the deaths of nearly 60,000 Americans. By 1971, the year of my draft day, nearly 160,000 troops were deployed in Vietnam. As it turned out, I would not be joining them. Several hours after my friend JD had told me my draft number was #3, I wandered back to the pharmacy in that People's Drug Store and said to JD something about what a bummer that news had been.

His response: "What are you talking about?"

"About me drawing Number Three."

"Oh, I was just kidding. I don't think August 6 has been drawn yet."

If I hadn't been so relieved, I might have punched him in the face.