The Draft

Technology Incorporated had offered me full time employment as soon as I graduated so I started working a 40+ hour week immediately. Both TI and NASA wanted to retain my services so they collaborated on an application for a critical skill deferment from the draft for me.

Meanwhile, the Viet Nam killing machine was grinding up people.

Just a little frightened and filled with my innate responsibility to provide for my wife and daughter, I looked at my alternatives. If I enlisted or got drafted and sent my entire pay to Kathy, she would not be able to live in a reasonable manner on that pay which was around $125/mo.

I wanted to fly airplanes! So I checked the flight programs for the Air Force and Navy. The Air Force seemed to have the better program so I applied. The recruiter was quite pleased to get a Rice graduate and he hustled me through the process. There were several written tests which I passed with flying colors (always been good at tests).

One of the tests was to look at a map and then look at a photograph taken of the same area at an oblique angle and to pick out landmarks. Probably to see if a candidate could distinguish between a military base and a grade school or hospital.

The second phase of the application process was to take a flight physical - they clearly did not want to waste time on a candidate who could not meet the physical requirements to fly. For this test I had to go to Lackland AFB in San Antonio. The hooker for this exam in my case was the height weight chart. Having been on the high weight side of this chart all my life, I was challenged to get my height up (really hard) or my weight down (clearly darn near impossible).

I took this physical in August in connection with a one week visit to the TI office in San Antonio.

The first part of the test was to sit on a table with my back to the wall. The corpsman measured my height. I figured this may be a different version of the height-weight chart so I scrunched my buns together and sat as tall as I could - 39 7/8”. The corpsman laughed and said that i had barely made it. I asked for clarification and he explained that at 40” I would be disqualified as too tall to sit in the cockpit. I had darn near screwed myself.

The only other thing notable about the exam was that after the dilation drops were put into our eyes and before the actual eye exam, we were marched to the mess hall for lunch in the bright August sun. We marched in a line with one hand over our eyes and one hand on the shoulder of the chap in front of us.

I passed the physical and a few days later received a letter from the Air Force noting that I would begin my training the first week of January, 1970. The letter also noted that in order to secure this appointment, I had to enlist in the Air Force Reserve before the end of October, 1969.

I was pretty pumped up about flying jets. And I had the immaturity to ignore the risks concomitant with military flying. I was checking out the T-37 (guppie) and the gorgeous T-38 - the two trainers I would end up flying.

So on the Monday in October before the Friday when I would have to enlist in the Air Force Reserve to lock in my flight school appointment, my deferment to work at NASA arrived.

This may seem like a Godsend, but I was conflicted. I really wanted to fly jets. But when Kathy and I talked about it, it was clear that I could better serve my family (and maybe my country also) by working at NASA and avoiding the significant risks associated with serving as a combat pilot.

At this time the ‘Hanoi Hilton’, the prison camp for captured, shot down aviations, was filling up - notably, John McCain, future senator and presidential candidate, was there. Viet Nam continued to have significant effects on the country for years. Incredible lies and deceit on the part of the government reduced confidence in our elected officials.

The difficulty of getting a deferment to go to grad school ended up filling the grad schools with Chinese and Indian students. The joke around Rice was that in the engineering grad school, English was the second language.

There was tremendous polarization in the country between the pro-war and anti-war people. The war had significant political influence. As I am writing this we are watching Viet Nam by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. This miniseries really exposes the conflict and the duplicity that was rampant in this era.

A few weeks after I decided to take the deferment, the Congress established the draft lottery to help even out the exposure to the draft. The potential 366 birthdays were randomly selected each year and assigned a number from 1 to 366. The selective service would then set the numbers to be in the draft, for example - 1-120. People with low numbers were highly likely top be chosen and those with high numbers, unlikely. My number was 343.