PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon, as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.

Do you remember where you were when…

• Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon?
• President John F. Kennedy was felled by bullets in Dallas?
• When terrorists slammed planes into the Twin Towers in New York?
• When the draft lottery started 50 years ago – and affected so many young men in and around 1970?

Part of the reason the draft lottery came to mind related to a story I read in one of my most recent editions of The Atlantic. It recounted the draft lottery in these words:

“Festooned with mustard-yellow drapes and a dangling American flag, the room resembled a grange hall on bingo night. At center stage sat a wide vase containing oblong, plastic lotto balls, and over that vessel stood Representative Alexander Pirnie of New York.

“As his hand dug into the vase he averted his eyes, like a game-show contestant pulling prizes from a mystery bag. Almost as many U.S. television viewers as had seen the Apollo 11 moon landing a few months earlier were watching him now.

“Inside each capsule was a small sheet, to be pulled out like the slip from a fortune cookie. But these small strips did not predict the future; they changed it. Each paper’s inscription scheduled the assignment of what scientists would call a “treatment condition”—an intervention that, from that day onward, would alter the life outcomes its subjects experienced, just as a pill randomly allocated in a pharmaceutical trial might alter a participant’s health.

“Pirnie would not have thought of his role in these terms, but on December 1, 1969, he was serving as a lab assistant in one of the most significant randomized experiments in history: The Vietnam Selective Service Lotteries.

“’The lotteries’ not only changed how the Selective Service chose men for the conflict in Vietnam, they also marked a turning point in the history of science. By assigning military induction via an arbitrary factor uncorrelated with personal traits, the lotteries amounted to an experiment.”

However, all of the studies cannot overcome a basic and foreboding fact: By the sheer act of the drawing of a birthdate number, thousands of citizens died in a far enough and purposeless war where those who took the nation to war had no idea why, nor how to end the carnage.

I was subject to the draft lottery when it mattered in a huge way because of the existence of the basic fact cited above: It was a lottery to enable the fight in the ride paddies of Vietnam.

All of this remains a difficult memory for me. Not because I went there to fight.  But because many of my friends did and came away changed because of the experience, both because of the terrible toll of war, as well as the aftermath when many who risked their lives in a far off place were not welcomed back to the U.S.

Plus, one of my friends with whom I grew up in Portland shared with me a draft number that meant he would be drafted. He allowed himself to be drafted and went to Vietnam. While he survived that experience as a medic in the field, he came home to contract cancer and eventually succumb to agent-orange exposure.

For my part, I am not hesitant to admit that, when the draft occurred, I took initiative to avoid the “regular army obligation.” I chose the Army Reserve..

On the day of the draft lottery, I sat around in my dorm room at college listening to the radio because, back in that day, there was not a way to listen on-line or do much of anything else via technology.

When numbers were drawn, those numbers corresponded to a birth date. My birth date was – and, of course, still is – November 2. It was drawn as #32, so I knew for sure that I would be drafted. Estimates were that the military would have to draft 150 birth dates to reach personnel quotas.

My best friend in college, by the way, was #332, so, obviously, it was his turn to buy drinks that night.

The next day I went down to the U.S. Army Reserve recruiting station, fearing that I would be in a long line of guys around the block trying to do what I was trying to do, which was to avoid Vietnam.

I was the only one there.

So, I signed up immediately for what was a six-year hitch – eight weeks of basic training, eight weeks of advanced training, then six years of being a weekend warrior, along with two weeks of summer camp.

Better, I thought, than being shot at or shooting someone in Vietnam.

The rest is history. I survived the six years intact.

And, I also believe that, in comparison to my friends who went to Vietnam – or other friends who served in Desert Storm, in Iraq and in Afghanistan – I do not deserve the “veteran status” they have earned.

The draft lottery wanted me to go to Vietnam.  I didn’t.