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U. S. conscription procedure during the Vietnam War

The 1969 draft lotteries were two lotteries conducted by the Selective Service System of the United States on December 1 1969, to determine the order of conscription to military service in the Vietnam War in 1970. 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.

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. US involvement in Vietnam began in 1946 with support for France during the French Indo China war. 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. U. S. interest in Vietnam increased through the early 1960s, with the U. S. sending military advisors to Vietnam in 1961 On August 2, 1964, two U. S. ships were attacked by two North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin; a similar event was reported to have occurred two days later but was never confirmed officially. Both occurrences 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. Johnson deployed 190,000 military personnel to Vietnam in 1965 and approximately 400,000 the following year. These deployments increased the demand for US military personnel, and led ultimately to the first Vietnam draft. Anti war movements emerged in the U. S. throughout the 1960s, many amongst college students and civil rights groups. 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. College students were entitled to a deferment (2 S status) but were subject to the draft if they dropped out, stopped making "normal progress" in community college (i. e., started a fifth semester before transferring to a four year college) or graduated. By 1967, the number of U. S. military personnel in Vietnam was around 500,000. The war was costing the U. S. $25 billion a year, and many of the young men drafted were being sent to fight in a war which they opposed. 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. Many critics at the time saw President Richard Nixon as a liar: on taking office Nixon pledged to begin withdrawing U. S. troops from Vietnam, but after ten months no withdrawals had taken place. Later, Nixon claimed to have been watching sports as the anti war demonstration took place outside the White House. 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 "), and Nixon issued an executive order prescribing a process of random selection.

In principle, the function of the first draft was to select dates within a calendar year at random, with men whose birthdays matched those dates being drafted according to the sequence the dates were selected. The 366 days of the year (including February 29) were printed on slips of paper. These pieces of paper were then each placed in opaque plastic capsules, which were then mixed in a shoebox and then placed into a deep glass jar. The next numbers drawn corresponded to April 24, December 30, February 14, October 18, and so forth. All men of draft age (born January 1, 1944, to December 31, 1950) who shared a birthday would be called to serve at once. The first 195 birthdays drawn were later called to serve in the order they were drawn; the last of these was September 24. On December 1, 1969, a second lottery, identical in process to the first, was held with the 26 letters of the alphabet. The first letter drawn was "J", which was assigned number 1. An eligible man with initials "JJJ" would have been first within the shared birthdate, followed by "JGJ", "JDJ", and "JXJ"; anyone with initials "VVV" would have been last. The outcome of the draft process was the subject of controversy. As with any truly random process, the results of the draft were not evenly distributed and appeared to cluster together, and it happened that November and December births, or numbers 306 to 366, were assigned mainly to lower draft order numbers representing earlier calls to serve. This led to complaints that the lottery was not truly random as the legislation required. Only five days in December—December 2, 12, 15, 17, and 19—were higher than the last call number of 195. Had the days been evenly distributed, 14 days in December would have been expected to remain uncalled. From January to December, the rank of the average draft pick numbers were 5, 4, 1, 3, 2, 6, 8, 9, 10, 7, 11, and 12. 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%. An analysis of the procedure suggested that "The capsules were put in a box month by month, January through December, and subsequent mixing efforts were insufficient to overcome this sequencing". p. 51 Many men were unable to join the National Guard even though they had passed their physicals, because many state National Guards had long waiting lists to enlist. and all over the United States, people decried discrimination by the draft system "against low education, low income, underprivileged members of society". The lottery procedure was improved the next year although public discontent continued to grow. For the draft lottery held on July 1, 1970 (which covered 1951 birthdates for use during 1971, and is sometimes called the 1971 draft), scientists at the National Bureau of Standards prepared 78 random permutations of the numbers 1 to 366 using random numbers selected from published tables. Draft lotteries were conducted again from 1971 to 1975 (for 1952 to 1956 births). The birth year of 1952 was the last draftees, with the assigned number 95 being the last number drafted, which represented those born on July 20, 1952. The draft numbers issued from 1972 to 1975 were not used to call any men into service as the last draft call was on December 7, and authority to induct expired July 1, 1973.