On December 1st, 1969, the first Vietnam draft lottery was held to determine who would be drafted to fight in the Vietnam War. Every man in the country born between 1944 through 1950 was assigned a lottery number based on their date of birth. Anyone with a lottery number from 1 to 195 was eventually called to serve. By the time of Nixon’s election, many were suspicious of the Selective Service System. As during the Civil War, it seemed that young men from upper class families were less likely to be drafted.
These were young men who were not going get a college deferment, have a political connection, or have a family doctor that could give them a medical deferment. American forces in Vietnam were 55% working-class, 25% percent poor, 20% middle-class. Many soldiers came from rural towns and farming communities. I had been living with a fear of the possibility of my going to war. There were mixed feelings in the country generally, with people talking about whether or not the U.S had been defeated.
According to the BBC, he played the lottery, as he had for more than 20 years. Files are available under licenses specified on their description page. All structured data from the file namespace is available under the Creative Commons CC0 License; all unstructured text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and the Privacy Policy. All other individual draftee files from that period were destroyed by the Selective Service System in 1978, in accordance with approved records retention schedules. Physical examination and test results, medical letters, laboratory work and other medical documentation that may have been included in these files no longer exist.
It wasn’t a big show on TV; it was just a series of numbers scrolling across the bottom of the screen while “I Love Lucy” played above. Of course I asked everyone if they saw my birth date come up, but everyone was concentrated on their own numbers and no one remembered the other dates. I had no way to find out what numbers had already been drawn, so I had to watch the whole process and hope that I wasn’t already chosen.
The winning numbers chosen by Raymond Roberts Sr were a carefully concocted combination of birthdays and wedding dates. He had used them on other lottery tickets, other days, but got nothing. Raymond Roberts Sr. chalked up his bonanza to intuition, deciding to purchase half a dozen tickets with the same numbers.
Lamour’s mother advised her to finish her shift where the teen worked as a part-time pharmacist’s assistant. With encouragement from her work colleagues, her parents soon came to take her home and celebrate the win. Then, a pharmacist at the Rexall pharmacy where the two worked told her he heard the January 7 winning ticket was sold in Sault Ste.
Players can also win secondary prizes if they match the last 2 or 3 digits of the first four-digit number drawn. Players enter Max 3D by choosing three numbers between 0 and 9 to create a three-digit number. 20 three-digit numbers are drawn each time, with the jackpot being won by players who match either of the first two numbers. Secondary prizes can be won by players whose numbers come up during draws 3 to 20. How would you have done in the 1970 Vietnam draft lottery, in a drawing held the night of December 1, 1969, and carried live over the radio and television? Find out how Vietlott VSMB born between 1944 and 1950 fared.
Whatever happened the night of the draft lottery, he wanted no part of the military. But as the drawing continued, his fears grew that the feeling might not be mutual. Specifically, since early July, Capital Lottery Company based in Hanoi has increased the value of traditional lottery prize by 5 times. For the lotto jackpot lottery, for the lot of two pairs of numbers, the highest prize is 15 times more than the value of the tickets. The draft lottery was described as a random selection, but it was not. The balls representing the 366 birthdays were poured into the bowl starting with January and each month was added in order.
Others were angry and frightened to see their son’s birth date listed among the first on the board. Still others felt enormous relief – mixed with the guilt of knowing that another family would soon be saying goodbye to its son, or cousin, or brother. A second lottery was held that same night, but rather than birth dates this one determined surnames. Eing born on September 14th isn’t of much consequence in today’s world.