And it turns out that I didn’t have to worry about being drafted anyway. My draft number was 197 and they only\u00a0made it to 195 when the war ended and the draft was discontinued (here’s a few other draft lottery numbers that might be of interest – Bill Clinton 311, George W. Bush 327, Donald Trump 356, Bruce Springsteen 119).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n <\/p>\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/me-mary-lee-and-shannon.jpg\")
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This is a photo of\u00a0me, my wife Mary Lee and our daughter Shannon in early\u00a01973, taken very shortly after both the Vietnam War and the draft ended. Any photo of me from\u00a0that era reminds me of all the worry and stress\u00a0and those thousands of daily trips to the mailbox where\u00a0my hands were trembling for fear of what I’d find from my draft board. And then there was the guilt – some of my friends and classmates served in Vietnam and one of them, Jack Petrie, was killed in combat.\u00a0Why him and not me or one of my other friends? – the inequity of it all could be overwhelming so I tried not to think about it, often unsuccessfully.<\/p>\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/ron-draft-card-resized.jpg\")
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This is what’s left of my final draft card with the coveted 4-F on it. It spent at least a decade in my wallet so by the time I put it away for safekeeping it was half worn away and extremely fragile. To this day it’s hard for me to even look at it for the memories it brings back.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
So my point in all this is to encourage others to watch “The Vietnam War”. Doing so will likely be deeply disturbing and for me it hasn’t been easy but I feel an absolute obligation to watch it. The lessons to be learned from that war are absolutely critical for our well-being and even our survival. Our politicians lied to us back then just as they’re doing today so we need to make informed decisions and\u00a0think critically<\/em>\u00a0about their potential consequences instead of swallowing the party line and believing self-serving politicians whose primary objectives\u00a0are\u00a0to promote partisan objectives and\/or\u00a0be\u00a0reelected. I’m a life-long Democrat and progressive but even though I admired him in most ways I’ll never forgive Lyndon Johnson for his lies about the Vietnam War and his betrayal of the\u00a0American people.<\/p>\n“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n
PS – If you watch “The Vietnam War” online you have the option of choosing the “broadcast version” or the “explicit language version”. I recommend the latter.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sorry folks, there’ll be nothing about birds from me today. In my view this takes precedence.<\/p>\n
Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":51916,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[334],"tags":[103,3571,3573,3572,3574,2637,3575,3570],"class_list":["post-51913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","tag-cut-bank-montana","tag-deferments","tag-draft-card","tag-draft-lottery","tag-jack-petrie","tag-review","tag-the-greatest-generation","tag-the-vietnam-war-ken-burns"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/me-mary-lee-and-shannon.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-dvj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51913\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}