Imagine Watching Your Birthday Being Pulled From a Glass Jar

When you turn 18 today, you have plenty to worry about. Finishing high school. Finding a job. Figuring out college. Maybe wondering what you’re going to do with the rest of your life. If you’re a young man, you’re also required to register with Selective Service. For most people, it’s probably something they do and rarely think about again.

But I’ve been thinking about how incredibly different that milestone must have felt for young men coming of age during the Vietnam era. I knew about the draft lottery, of course. I’d read about it before. But there’s a difference between knowing something happened and stopping to think about what it must have actually felt like to live through it. The draft ended in 1973, and my father wasn’t quite old enough. I don’t remember him nor my grandparents ever mentioning it—and I’ve asked them all countless questions over the years, probably to their annoyance.

On December 1, 1969, the first draft lottery was held. There were 365 blue plastic capsules placed into a large glass container. Inside each was a day of the year. As the capsules were drawn, each birthday was assigned a number that established the order in which eligible men could be called for induction in 1970. And it was televised. Just imagine that for a minute. You’re 19 or 20 years old, sitting in a college dorm or at home with your family, watching television. Maybe you’re surrounded by other young men your age. Everybody has a birthday they’re listening for.

One by one, someone reaches into that container, pulls out a capsule and reads another date. And you’re waiting.

Watching the actual footage is what really got to me. There’s nothing particularly dramatic about what you’re seeing. That’s almost what makes it more unsettling. It’s just people standing around a container, drawing capsules and reading dates. But every one of those dates represented real people sitting somewhere listening, worrying about what may happen. Then I started thinking about their families, and the torment they must have gone through. They still had to work, pay bills, live life, all while existing under a looming dark cloud that could rain all hell down on their lives at any time. This went on for years. The uncertainty of it all must have been mentally crippling for many people. It sounds dramatic, yes, but it’s true. We can never fully understand that era unless we lived through it… If you have, I would love to hear what you have to say in the comments.

Imagine being a mother or father watching the same broadcast, waiting to hear your son’s birthday. Imagine the relief when numbers climbed higher without hearing it. Then imagine hearing his birthday early in the drawing. A low number didn’t mean a young man was automatically going to Vietnam. The lottery determined the order in which registrants would be processed for possible induction, and there were still classifications, examinations, deferments and other circumstances that could affect what happened next.

But suddenly something that had probably been hanging over your family for years became much more immediate. That is the part I don’t think I fully appreciated before. It wasn’t simply the possibility of military service. It was the uncertainty.What plans do you make when you don’t know whether you’re going to be called?Do you start college? Do you take a job? Do you get married? Do you make plans for next year?

And what was it like for the parents who had already watched years of news reports coming back from Vietnam, knowing their own son might soon be involved? The lottery itself was actually introduced as part of an effort to make the system more predictable and reduce some of that uncertainty. Selective Service says reforms around this period narrowed a man’s primary period of vulnerability and used birth dates to establish the order in which men would be called.

But knowing when you were most vulnerable didn’t necessarily make the experience easy. For some young men, that little number offered enormous relief. For others, it must have felt like a clock had suddenly started ticking. That’s why I find the original footage so interesting. We can read the dates and numbers more than half a century later as historical information. In fact, you can still look at the complete 1970 lottery table today and see exactly where every birthday fell.

But the young men watching that broadcast weren’t looking at history. They were looking at their future.And somewhere else, their parents were watching too. I think that’s one of the things I enjoy most about going back and looking at original footage like this. It takes something I’ve heard about my entire life and makes me stop looking at it as an event in a history book. For the people sitting in front of those televisions, it wasn’t history yet. It was just their life.

If you’ve lived through this in any way, we’d all love to hear what you have to say. You can do so in the comments section. 🙂