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During that pivotal year, while UM professors organized the first Vietnam teach-in and Students for a Democratic Society launched the campus antiwar movement, the U.S. military presence in the defense of South Vietnam, with 184,000 troops stationed there by the end of 1965.
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In October, at a campaign appearance in Ohio, Johnson promised that “we are not about to send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” But in the months after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Johnson rapidly increased the U.S. Lyndon Johnson ran as the “peace” candidate in his 1964 campaign against conservative Barry Goldwater, who wanted to escalate the military offensive against North Vietnam and the Viet Cong guerillas. According to Christian Appy in Working-Class War, “most of the Americans who fought in Vietnam were powerless, working-class teenagers sent to fight an undeclared war by presidents for whom they were not even eligible to vote.”
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Of the 2.5 million enlisted men who served during Vietnam, 80 percent came from poor or working-class families, and the same ratio only had a high school education. Kennedy, who began the escalation of the American military presence in Vietnam, also defended the peacetime draft and the Selective Service in 1962 statement, stating that “I cannot think of any branch of our government in the last two decades where there have been so few complaints about inequity.” One year later, the Pentagon acknowledged the usefulness of conscription, because one-third of enlisted soldiers and two-fifths of officers “would not have entered the service if not for the draft as a motivator.” The Selective Service also authorized deferments for men who planned to study for careers labeled as “vital” to national security interests, such as physics and engineering, which exacerbated the racial and socioeconomic inequalities of the Vietnam-era draft. As part of their Cold War mission, many state universities required ROTC training by male students, although campus protests caused administrators to begin repealing mandatory ROTC in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Between 1954-1964, from the end of the Korean War until the escalation in Vietnam, the “peacetime” draft inducted more than 1.4 million American men, an average of more than 120,000 per year. During the Korean War, the Selective Service began the policy of granting deferments to college students with an academic ranking in the top half of their class. Legal authority for a peacetime draft came from the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, signed by President Franklin Roosevelt in order to mobilize American civilian-soldiers in anticipation of entry into World War II. Almost every American was either eligible to go to war or knew someone who was.Ĭonscription during the 1960s took place under the legal authority of the peacetime draft, because the United States never formally declared war on North Vietnam. Although the Selective Service’s deferment system meant that men of lower socioeconomic standing were most likely to be sent to the front lines, no one was completely safe from the draft. Ironically, as the draft continued to fuel the war effort, it also intensified the antiwar cause. Antiwar activists viewed the draft as immoral and the only means for the government to continue the war with fresh soldiers. Some sought refuge in college or parental deferments others intentionally failed aptitude tests or otherwise evaded thousands fled to Canada the politically connected sought refuge in the National Guard and a growing number engaged in direct resistance. While many soldiers did support the war, at least initially, to others the draft seemed like a death sentence: being sent to a war and fight for a cause that they did not believe in. Although only 25 percent of the military force in the combat zones were draftees, the system of conscription caused many young American men to volunteer for the armed forces in order to have more of a choice of which division in the military they would serve. military drafted 2.2 million American men out of an eligible pool of 27 million. During the Vietnam War era, between 19, the U.S. The military draft brought the war to the American home front. In November 1965, draftees are leacing Ann Arbor, MI to be processed and sent to basic training camps. The November 1965 draft call was the largest since the Korean War.