In 1969 I had a student deferment since I was a full time student at Madison. My lucky number was 212, while my brother’s number was in the 30’s. He enlisted after college, but never went overseas. I waited to see how high the numbers would go at my county draft board for a couple of years. The last number to come up was ~160, then a slightly lower number the next year, so I dropped the deferment and sweated it out for a year. I lucked out. I had thought about an extended stay in Canada if drafted, but I never had to make that tough decision. My father AND my mother had both been Marines during WWII, so I knew that decision would not have gone over very well. 

     I had even been in ROTC for the first couple years in college, but I gave that up for a couple of reasons. I had wanted to be in NASA, and an Air Force pilot seemed my best shot, but I KO’d the pilot aptitude test. The other factor was one of our monthly meetings with the CO. I had always thought a reasonable man would consider war, at best, a necessary evil (or at worst, like the Vietnam war, a very stupid idea, done very badly). There was an officer in one of the military science classes I had taken that seemed to share this opinion. However, the CO started talking about how cool and exciting it was to go out on a mission and drop one’s load of bombs. Everyone around seemed to be, at least on the surface from the expression on the faces, buying this story. Well, he was sure dropping a "load" on us. At that point, I knew AF ROTC was not a good option for me, because all I could think was, "Major, you are one sick f**k!". End of story.