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The Vietnam War: A Film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick (Blu-ray) Available for Preorder (1 Viewer)

Richard Gallagher

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I didn't know that, Rich. Thank you very much for your service,

It was a strange time, and I hope that the documentary explains the choices that draft-eligible men were faced with.

Every male had a military service obligation of six years and had to register for the draft at the age of 18. If you were still in high school you couldn't be drafted until after graduation. If you were then going to college, you could get a student deferment for as long as you remained in college.

If you weren't going to college, you could wait to be drafted, which meant that you would almost certainly be inducted into the Army and you would spend two years on active duty. Alternatively, you could enlist in the Army for three years and hope that as a volunteer you would get better (safer) duty than a draftee. But not every draftee was sent to Vietnam. A high school buddy was drafted into the Army and spent his active duty time in Germany. Another served his Army active duty time in Korea.

You could enlist in the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, or the Coast Guard, but enlisting in those services required a four-year active duty commitment, which for an 18-year-old seemed like a very long time.

Draftees and enlistees who fulfilled their active duty obligation were transferred to the inactive reserves to complete their six-year obligation. Inactive reservists were subject to being recalled to active duty, but otherwise they had no military duties.

Some men were able to get into the National Guard, which involved just six months of active duty but 5 1/2 years of active reserve duty. Of the 2.8 million Americans who served in Vietnam only about 9,000 were with the National Guard, so it was regarded by many as the preferred way to fulfill their military obligation without having to worry about seeing combat. But as the war expanded National Guard units began filling up rapidly. There have been accusations that some politicians and athletes were given preferential treatment to get into the Guard.

Another option was to enlist in the Reserves for two years of active duty and four years of active reserve duty. Active reserve duty required attendance at weekly or monthly meetings and two weeks of active duty every year.

And of course there were ways to avoid military duty altogether. You could apply for conscientious objector status. There were deferments for certain occupations (there was no shortage of schoolteachers in those days because teachers were exempt from the draft). You could try to find a compliant doctor to write that you had heel spurs or flat feet. You could try to figure out a way to fail your pre-induction physical (I have a relative who learned how to dramatically increase his blood pressure and he failed his physical and was never drafted). Many others, of course, had real medical conditions which made them unfit for the military. Muhammad Ali refused to be inducted and was convicted of draft evasion. It's estimated that 20,000-30,000 men fled to Canada to avoid the draft.

The draft was so controversial that a lottery was instituted in 1969 and the college deferments were ended.

When I turned 18 I was sick of school and didn't want to go to college. I didn't want to be drafted, either. A Navy recruiter came to my high school and convinced me to "join the Navy and see the world." After boot camp and communications school I spent 18 months in the Philippines followed by two years on an aircraft carrier (the carrier deployed to Vietnam twice during my time aboard). I was lucky - nobody ever tried to shoot me.

.
 

B-ROLL

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I register for the draft when I turned 18 years old. I went to college, but never got called in the lottery as the war was coming to an end.

According to the Selective Service website:https://www.sss.gov/About/History-And-Records/lotter1

"Registration was resumed in July 1980 for men born in 1960 and later, and is in effect to this present time. Men are required to register within 30 days of their 18th birthday."

During the Vietnam era another option for High School students was to stay in ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) and obtain a higher rank. Whatever rank they were in ROTC when they left high school, that would be the rank they would join the service. (At least one year of ROTC was compulsory for all males at the high school district I went to until the year that I started, 1973)
 

Robert Crawford

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According to the Selective Service website:https://www.sss.gov/About/History-And-Records/lotter1

"Registration was resumed in July 1980 for men born in 1960 and later, and is in effect to this present time. Men are required to register within 30 days of their 18th birthday."

During the Vietnam era another option for High School students was to stay in ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) and obtain a higher rank. Whatever rank they were in ROTC when they left high school, that would be the rank they would join the service. (At least one year of ROTC was compulsory for all males at the high school district I went to until the year that I started, 1973)
Well, I know that after I registered within a year or two they stopped that process for a while.
 

Walter Kittel

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It's all about value which is why I'm rethinking my purchases of mediocre films on Blu-ray and concentrating with my future purchases on favorite or good-excellent films. Discs I know I'm going to watch and not just sit in one of my book shelves without ever watching it.

Well, its a sad fact of life that none of us is getting any younger. There are only so many grains of sand in that hour glass and focusing on quality entertainment, vs. things that are just 'okay' isn't a bad strategy. Of course, sometimes you need to 'clean your palette' so to speak. :) I find myself purchasing a lot less these days. Of course, there are still a lot of quality catalog films that I would love to see become available (which is a different matter.)

Back on topic, I saw the PBS preview for Ken Burns' newest series and I am eagerly looking forward to viewing the program.


- Walter.
 

Adam Lenhardt

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Ron,

PBS has sales and they're currently having one right now. You get free shipping and you might avoid sales tax being in New Jersey.

http://www.shoppbs.org/product/index.jsp?productId=12722103
Thank you for this! I almost pulled the trigger on The War, since I'd never seen it. But a quick Netflix check showed it's available to stream in HD. So I'll watch it there first.

I'd been holding off on The Civil War for a while now, though, both because of the price and because I wanted to make sure all of the problematic copies with gray blacks were out of the ecosystem. This sale combined with a 20% off + free shipping deal was just what I was waiting for. I loved the HD PBS broadcasts a couple years back but look forward to the much higher bitrate and lack of pledge drive interruptions.

I'm excited for The Vietnam War later this month too.

With regard to the draft: I had to register with the selective service to qualify for college financial aid. Carried the card around in my wallet for most of my twenties until I finally aged out.
 
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Flashgear

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The December 1, 1969 draft lottery was televised, here by CBS news with Roger Mudd...the "winner", if you can call it that, was for those born on September 14 (randomly selected from 366 birth dates, including potential leap year birth date of Feb. 29)...with young men aged 19 born on that date scheduled for selective service induction the following January...April 24 and December 30 were runners up...with only the first third or so of birth dates selected in descending order being likely to actually being drafted, barring medical or psychological disqualification or any of the dwindling legacy deferments...manpower requirements for Vietnam and S. E. Asia being reduced during Nixon's "Vietnamization" initiative going into 1970...the lottery was re-introduced and college deferments wound down in an effort to make the draft more "equitable"...



I'm also looking forward to the new Ken Burns/Lyn Novick documentary... even at 18 hours they will be hard pressed to touch upon all the complexities of the Vietnam era...it is so true that many revelations, previously unknown or top secret, continue to emerge...the Smithsonian channel recently had an amazing documentary on the secret communication channels by which the POW's in the Hanoi Hilton were in contact with the Pentagon via established code words and invisible writing in their restricted mail home via International Red Cross...and how, once solitary confinement was ended, and American POW's allowed to congregate in barracks, they were able even to build a clandestine radio...and even plan an escape to rendezvous down the Red River with Navy Seals...some pre-arranged signals to the prisoners even being sent by SR 71 spyplanes breaking the sound barrier over Hanoi...in the end, no such escape by the prisoners was attempted, as they were deemed too risky for injured and malnourished men...and instead, Nixon mounted the Special Forces Son Tay Raid in November 1970, but that's another complex story...there have also been new revelations about infighting in North Vietnam's war leadership, a 1969 gambit by Nixon to scare the Soviets out of their support for North Vietnam, and post war recon (1981) in Laos looking for POW's left behind...as with all of the excellent Ken Burns documentary series, the story that needs to be tackled is monumental, indeed...
 
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Robert Crawford

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With regard to the draft: I had to register with the selective service to qualify for college financial aid. Carried the card around in my wallet for most of my twenties until I finally aged out.
So did I and I think I still have it in one of my boxes in which I stored some personal stuff.
 

bujaki

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I was number 2 in the first lottery draft, born April 24. Another young man in the same college boarding house drew number one. Lucky house! For whatever reasons, neither he nor I served in any branch of the armed forces.
 

Douglas_H

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There was no requirement to register with Selective Service between 1975 and 1980.
Yup. I saw all of my older friends get their draft notices for 2 years and then poof, my class never got them.
I graduated in 1975.
My older Bro & my cousin were in the prime time of the lottery.
My parent's view of the war changed dramatically when that happened.
A friend of theirs went to Canada and is there to this day.
The Seattle induction center was well-known for easy 4Fs.
Cousin got out with a bad back, Bro got out with bad hearing.
 

Robert Crawford

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Just a reminder that PBS starts broadcasting this latest Ken Burns Documentary on September 17th at 8:00 E.T. There are ten episodes at a total of 18 hours.
 

Flashgear

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Not surprisingly, this new Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary series is off to a great start...establishing some of the leading figures in the larger history as well as many contributors with their valuable first person memories...on the North Vietnam side, I'm glad to see that Le Duan is already introduced as the actual strategic mind behind the NVA and VC insurgency in the South...later to be purged and discredited in a power struggle with Giap, with Ho Chi Minh in decline...It will surprise some that JFK visited Saigon as a young Congressman, along with younger brother Robert and sister Patricia, in October 1951...or that Ho Chi Minh visited Boston and NYC in 1912, working as a laborer...and was later a pastry chef at London's swanky Carleton Hotel also....and probably had his life saved in 1945 with treatment from an American OSS Medic...and the tragic circumstances behind the first two names on the Wall from July 1959...Major Dale Buis and MSgt. Chester Ovnand, killed in a hut at Bien Hoa while watching the movie 'The Tattered Dress'...attacked by six VC who had snuck up while the ARVN guards were themselves watching the movie with their backs turned... Buis and Ovnand had only arrived in country two days earlier...back in Texas, Ovnand's wife received word of his death from an AP news reporter in a phone call...asking her when she had received word of his death, which of course, she had not...

Among the best books on the earlier stages of the Vietnam war are 'Embers of War' by Fredrik Logevall, and 'A Bright Shining Lie' by Neil Sheehan...both Pulitzer Prize winning books...
 

Walter Kittel

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Fascinating first episode. While I was aware of some of the material covered in the first episode; appropriately named Deja Vu there were definitely items of which I was not aware - including JFK's presence in Saigon. I believe that some folks might avoid this series due to the belief that they've seen all there is to see on the subject; but I'd suggest that this first episode belies such claims.

The interviews with those who participated (on both sides) and survived were some of the strongest segments in the first episode and I expect that we will see those types of segments through the course of the series. I was particularly struck by the comment from one American soldier (paraphrasing) 'Some people say that war creates violent, killing machines, but I think it is only finishing school.'

- Walter.
 

Scott Merryfield

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I thought the first episode was very well done, which is to be expected since it is a Ken Burns film. I need to see if the PBS streaming app will be offering this, as I'm not sure I can catch all the episodes when they air and we do not have a DVR. There were only previews listed when I checked last night after the first airing of episode 1.

There was no requirement to register with Selective Service between 1975 and 1980.

I was part of that first group which had to register in 1980, as I had just graduated from high school and was heading to college that fall. No actual draft was ever conducted after 1980, though. I am not sure what I did with my draft card.
 

skylark68

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I saw bits and pieces of the episode last night. Seemed very interesting and I thought it was great to listen to the interviews with the North Vietnamese. Unfortunately I'll be tied up in work/class the rest of the week so I assume I'll just have to buy the series on bluray to catch it all. Same thing happened with the Civil War series.

I had an Uncle that was a crew chief on UH-1 (Huey's) during the war (around 1967-1969). He had some stories to tell that is for sure. He's passed on now but I valued my conversations with him. One story that was kind of funny (at least it was to him 40 years later) was that he saved up his money to have a new car when he got home and he sent it to his then wife to buy a fairly loaded GTO convertible. His wife bought a base model Tempest hardtop, took the car and remaining money, and left him with a "dear John" letter. He subsequently signed up for another tour.

My Dad attempted to join the Air Force around 1970 but he had a hearing disability and they refused his application. The Army came calling not too long afterwards but refused him as well once they found out he was already wearing hearing aids at the age of 19.
 

Richard Gallagher

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Among the best books on the earlier stages of the Vietnam war are 'Embers of War' by Fredrik Logevall, and 'A Bright Shining Lie' by Neil Sheehan...both Pulitzer Prize winning books...

Two other books worth mentioning:

"Valley of Death" by Ted Morgan is the definitive account of the siege at Dien Bien Phu and the events that led up to it. In retrospect it is remarkable that so many of the mistakes made by the French were repeated by the U.S.

"Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam" by Frances Fitzgerald (1972) won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize (for history), and the National Book Award.
 

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