Vietnam War draft
It was the first time a lottery system had been used to select men for military service in the US since 1942, and established the priority of call based on the birth dates of registrants born between January 1, 1944 to December 31, 1950.
[1] The lottery of 1969 was devised to increase the numbers of military personnel available for service in the Vietnam War, while addressing inequities in the previous draft system.
The Geneva Accords of July 1954 brought an end to the conflict, with a new border drawn along the 17th parallel separating the Communist North and the French-controlled South.
South Vietnam subsequently gained independence from France and Ngô Đình Diệm became prime minister.
[3] On August 2, 1964, a U.S. Navy destroyer was attacked by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin.
Both incidents were used to justify the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, granting President Lyndon B. Johnson the authority to allocate U.S. military resources to the conflict in Vietnam.
[6][7] By the end of the decade, the anti-war movement included many veterans who had served in Vietnam as well as middle-class parents with draft-age sons.
Martin Luther King Jr. also started to support the anti-war movement, believing the war to be immoral and expressing alarm at the number of African-American soldiers that were being killed.
[12][13] After much debate within the Nixon administration and Congress, the latter decided that a gradual transition to an all-volunteer force was affordable, feasible, and would enhance the nation's security.
On November 26, 1969, Congress abolished a provision in the Military Selective Service Act of 1967 which prevented the president from modifying the selection procedure ("... the President in establishing the order of induction for registrants within the various age groups found qualified for induction shall not effect any change in the method of determining the relative order of induction for such registrants within such age groups as has been heretofore established ..."),[14] and Nixon issued an executive order prescribing a process of random selection.
[18] All men of draft age (born January 1, 1944, to December 31, 1950) who shared a birthday would be called to serve at once.
A Monte Carlo simulation found that the probability of a random order of months being this close to the 1–12 sequence expected for unsorted slips was 0.09%.
Others chose to serve in military branches like the Navy or the Coast Guard as to avoid active combat.[24]p.
It strengthened the anti-war movement,[25] and all over the United States, people decried discrimination by the draft system "against low-education, low-income, underprivileged members of society".
The 365 birthdates (for 1951) were written down, placed in capsules, and put in a drum in the order dictated by the selected calendar.
