I'm posting this for any of our correspondents who may be too young to know what actually went on w/r/t the military draft during the 60's.
First, you need to picture Woodstock. You know, those hundreds of thousands of revelers, celebrating their music, their culture, MJ, sexual freedom, and all that. Now look closer at just the males. They were virtually all draft dodgers. Almost every single one. I personally didn't go to Woodstock because I was in the Army, stationed in RVN. (I have no regrets on that front).
Now picture the anti-war demonstrations of the same era. Those demonstrations included a few "John Kerry types" who had served for a few years, then decided to hitch their boat to the anti-war movement, mainly to access the drugs and ***** that was so abundant therein. But all the rest of them were draft dodgers - college students who were availing themselves of the "2S" deferment (you couldn't be drafted as long as you were a college student in good standing).
The fact is that just about everyone whose family was "middle class" was able to avoid of the Armed Forces one way or another, except for the occasional outlier who actually WANTED to serve, and those kids came mainly from the South. Some managed to get into the National Guard or Reserves where there was very little chance of being required to go to Vietnam. There was a period when even though you went to college, you were still subject to the draft when you graduated (before the Draft Lottery), and most of those young men figured out a way to go in as officers, thus minimizing the chances that they would ever be shot at.
Some of "us" wonder why, when so many Americans of the Boomer generation were drafted or enlisted to avoid the draft, so few politicians seem to have served. And this is why: if their parents were reasonably well off, military service could be avoided one way or another - with a physical issue, joining a cushy reserve unit, or simply delaying draft eligibility until it was very unlikely that you would be drafted.
So now we come to Donald "Bone Spurs" Trump, who avoided the draft because of a physical defect. If he had not avoided the draft because of bone spurs, it would have been something else. People in his economic stratum DID NOT SERVE unless they chose to serve. If you want to think of him as a "draft dodger," go right ahead and do it, but remember that dodging the draft at that time was something that everyone at his economic level did. One of the reasons why so many working-class men resented the draft at the time was that there were so many deferments that anyone with means could simply avoid it, and that ain't fair. That is why when the subject comes up today, "we" all say something to the effect that if there is ever a draft again, there must be NO DEFERMENTS.
In a television interview yesterday, JDV was asked to justify their criticism of Governor Walz, given Donald Trump's record of avoiding the draft. What he came up with was that Trump never lied about his draft-related choices, and Walz has lied about several important particulars of his military service.
Vance could have said, "Essentially nobody in Trump's peer group served during Vietnam unless they wanted to. There was nothing shameful or exceptional about how Trump and his family dealt with it."
But one must assume that the audience is stupid and ill-informed, so you must speak in simple generalities.
