The difficulty of getting a deferment to go to grad school e

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 Novice. 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.