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A Ledger of Names, Mine Among Them, Tell Our Vietnam Stories A Reporter Receives Selective Service Paperwork for Himself and 29 Others from Independence

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Above image credit: (Illustration: Frank Myles)
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11 minute read

All 30 of the boys listed on the Vietnam-era Selective Service ledger were born in the spring of 1948, during America’s most prolific era of mass procreation, the end of World War II.

At 18 years old, the thing first and foremost on our minds was to find a way to commit the same act that begat us. And the second thing on some of our minds was to avoid being drafted to fight and possibly die in Vietnam.

We all lived in or near Independence, Missouri. We couldn’t vote, and we couldn’t drink, legally at least, for another three years. Except just across the state line, where we would stumble around on the sticky dance floor at One Block West, one of the crowded, sweaty clubs in Kansas City, Kansas, that served “three-two” beer.

This ledger, and others like it, are the only remaining documents that chronicle how the Jackson County Selective Service Board No. 48 affected our lives and others during the height of the Vietnam War. Everything else has been destroyed.

It was sent to me by the National Archives in St. Louis as part of my research for this story, timed for the release of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s upcoming documentary, “The Vietnam War,” which will air this month on KCPT and other PBS affiliates around the country.

But that’s not the only reason I asked for the records. Of the 26 million draft-age boys and men during the Vietnam era, the majority, 16 million, were never called and never volunteered.

Thanks at least in part to student deferments, I was one of them.

But given my atrocious scholastic record early in college (my first semester grade point average was .285 – that is not a typo) and the fact that I passed the armed services physical, it always seemed strange that I wasn’t called up. Why? Was it a bureaucratic SNAFU or just plain luck?

I never considered enlisting. I was and remain personally opposed to the war, but that’s been the perfect refuge. This veneer of moral opposition allowed me to ignore all the residual issues, including how I would have reacted under fire.

The ledger, however, forced me to take another, deeper look at my 18-year-old self.


McGraw sits down with Vietnam veteran John Musgrave at their alma mater, Van Horn High School, in Independence, Missouri, to talk about the war, the draft and choices made.


But when the documents arrived, they contained an added bonus. I didn’t just get my record; there were also the records of those 29 other boys on the same ledger sheet, many of whom had been classmates at Van Horn High School.

In fact, the last name on the list was John David Musgrave, a Marine Corps enlistee who plays a pivotal role in Burns’ upcoming film.

All these additional names offered a great opportunity to focus in on a tiny slice of Vietnam history. How did my classmates fair under the much maligned Selective Service System? Who went, who didn’t, and why?

Guilt, Heroism and Anger

The first name on the ledger is Robert Ben (R.B.) Kramer, one of the coolest guys in my graduating class of 1966.

He was a standout athlete and musically talented. Sergeant-at-arms of the literary society, student council, president of the Latin Club, lettered in basketball, football and track, spring music festival, concert choir.

High School photo for Robert Kramer

Robert Ben (R.B.) Kramer

You get the picture.

The son of a preacher, Kramer paid his own way through college and never protested the war. “It was not a bad war, just an exercise in futility,” he told me recently. He never vilified the draft board. “It was the law of the land,” he said.

The ledger tells the rest.

Right after graduation, in June of 1966, Kramer was classified 1-A (available for service). After he entered college that fall he was reclassified 2-S (student deferment). That was about the time U.S. troop strength in Vietnam surged to about 385,000.

But because he wasn’t carrying enough college credits, he was reclassified 1-A just before Christmas in 1968, a few months after the Paris peace talks began. “I pretty much spent my sophomore year playing bridge,” he said.

He was called in for a physical on March 3, 1969. “It was an all-day affair. I had this two-page letter about an orthopedic issue in my neck, but I saw all these guys around me with medical records and X-rays under their arms. I was convinced I was going to Vietnam.”

In the end, a potentially debilitating neck problem convinced the doctors to classify him 1-Y (available for service, but only in the event of a declared war, which Vietnam wasn’t). Sudden trauma to his neck, they said, could have left him partially paralyzed.

Three years later, he was designated 4-F (unqualified for any military service).

A few months after failing his physical, Kramer and his musical group, The North Door Singers, spent 60 days touring the Far East for the USO, including a performance at the U.S. Army Hospital at Camp Zama, just outside Tokyo, where they performed for wounded American soldiers.

“I saw the aftermath,” he said.

Even though he was legitimately deferred, Kramer, like many others who never went, carries around some guilt even now, as he approaches his 70th birthday.

“I was always an athlete,” he said. His neck issue never stopped him from playing sports. Later in life he water skied and played more football but never suffered any ill effects. “My feeling at the time was that I should have participated, and now I feel really guilty, like I got out of something.”

Perhaps one reason Kramer and I — and many others — feel that way is because of men like John Musgrave.

His is the last name on the ledger, No. 30, another Van Horn classmate. Thespian Society, a member of the proud Falcons’ high school band, speech contests, spring play, spring musical, fall play.

high school photo for John Musgrave

John Musgrave

Musgrave didn’t worry much about the draft board because he enlisted in the Marine Corps just after his 17th birthday.

In fact, he volunteered for duty in Vietnam — the one thing many of us were at least passively avoiding — and is credited with three Purple Hearts.

Kramer and Musgrave went through grade school, Boy Scouts and high school together, and Kramer and others remember that Musgrave was always fascinated with the military.

“I remember Johnny used to take the bus downtown and go to these used bookstores where he’d search for diaries of soldiers and officers who had served in combat.”

Musgrave’s father was a World War II pilot, and his uncles had also served in the military. Most of the adult men he knew around Independence were veterans, including his scoutmasters, and he figured it was his turn.

After boot camp, he was sent to Camp Pendleton in California and left for Vietnam in January 1967 as part of Delta Company, 1st Battalion, 9th Marines, which sustained the highest casualty rate in Marine Corps history in Vietnam, earning it the nickname “The Walking Dead.”

He spent 11 months and 17 days in Vietnam, some of it in Con Thien — a Marine combat base near the demilitarized zone where, according to a recent story in The New York Times, “The Marines … were the human equivalent of a tripwire, there to block North Vietnamese ground incursions.”

Musgrave was wounded by shrapnel and later shot multiple times in the chest and jaw during an ambush.

Even after all that, he was so gung-ho that he was mightily pissed at the Marine Corps for medically discharging him on March 25, 1969.

Not long after that, he showed up at a Waid’s restaurant where Kramer and his friends were hanging around late at night. “Johnny limps in and sits down and starts talking about his experiences,” Kramer said.

“He had partial use of his arm, which he had to lift up onto the table. He was shot up in the legs and had other wounds. He was a physical mess, literally. But he was angry that the Marines had kicked him out. This was the only war we had at the time, and he was upset.”

Like many others who went, however, Musgrave eventually turned against the war. He became an activist and eloquent speaker and wrote poetry about his experiences.

Filmmaker Burns was so enamored of him that he told Vanity Fair in a recent article about the documentary that he “had a recurring thought that, if some evil genie took away all our interviews but one, the one we would keep would be John Musgrave, and we’d make a different film and call it ‘The Education of John Musgrave.’”

Part of Musgrave’s education was his realization that the Selective Service system was a farce.

“It was rigged against the working class and the poor,” he wrote in the survey we sent him and the other 29 listed on the ledger. “For every year a college deferment was granted, a member of these two groups was drafted in a student’s place.

“… Many of my buddies who were killed had joined the Corps because they knew they were going to be drafted.”

History proves him right, of course.

Use our sidebar at the bottom of this story to find what your draft number would have been, and read how the selective service system protected those who could afford college.

According to the 1978 book “Chance and Circumstance: The Draft, The War and the Vietnam Generation,” of the 2.6 million American troops who served in Vietnam, about three-quarters came from working-class and low-income families.

For example, three of the last four U.S. presidents, some of whom grew up privileged, were exempted from the Vietnam-era draft.

Donald Trump got medical and student deferments, George W. Bush joined the Reserves and Bill Clinton promised to join the the Reserve Officer Training Program, then backed out. But that action allowed him to delay the process until he got a high lottery number — 311.

Stories Untold

Of the 30 boys listed on the ledger from Independence, exactly half served during the Vietnam era. That’s considerably more than the 32 percent of eligible men nationwide who ended up serving.

Of the 30, eleven enlisted, and four were inducted.

None died in Vietnam. But 10 have died since the war, three of them veterans.

Only five of the remaining 20 returned surveys sent to them by KCPT/Flatland asking about their experiences with the draft board and Vietnam.

Terry Lee Sullivan, listed on the ledger as 4-F (not qualified for service) was somehow allowed to enlist in the Marine Corps just the same. He was not interested in being interviewed but said in the survey that he suffered health issues as a result of his service.

Another, Mattison Myers, said he tried to enlist in the hope that he would be allowed to pick a duty station that was not in Vietnam. But the Army turned him down, he said, because he was a married father.

Just weeks later, he said, the old, discredited draft system was scrapped, and a lottery-based draft was instituted in an effort to restore randomness and accountability.

Every day of the year was represented by a number on a slip of paper. Capsules containing the numbers were drawn from a jar.

The men who had birthdays drawn early would be the first to go.

Myers’ May 6 birthday was the 155th draw, and he said he was quickly drafted. No excuses, no pre-existing rules on family income and no choice of duty stations. After training, he was set to go to Vietnam when a buddy may have saved his life.

The guy jumped out of a truck and landed on Myers’ foot. Myers was in a cast for months, missed being shipped to Vietnam and ended up stationed in Germany. “That made my mom happy,” Myers said.

One other man on the list, James Gary Wiggins, agreed to discuss his experience over the phone, and it is a weird one.

Wiggins was inducted into the Army in October 1967, he said, largely because his brother-in-law, a sailor, was killed during his duty on a Swift Boat. Wiggins said the sailor’s grieving father couldn’t understand why his son died but that “me and my buddy Tony didn’t have to go.”

According to family lore, Wiggins said, “He (the father) went to the draft board and told them about us. “We had both graduated from trade school and were not in college.”

Wiggins doesn’t know for sure whether that was the reason he and his buddy were drafted when they were, but they both were called. Wiggins was a combat engineer in Vietnam and suffers today from several agent orange-related illnesses. His buddy Tony served near the DMZ in South Korea.

In the end, most of the 20 men listed between Kramer and Musgrave who are still alive either couldn’t be found or weren’t interested in talking, so their stories can’t be told.

But mine can.

SNAFU or Luck?

Independence, Missouri, in the 1960s was a place where patriotism was proudly displayed. Thousands of World War II veterans had settled there in tight-knit little neighborhoods of brand-new houses that went for about $12,000.

Harry Truman, who fought in France near the end of World War I and who ended World War II by being the first and so far the only president to drop an A-bomb, was still greeting townsfolk during his daily walks around his home near the town square.

It seemed like every man in town had served in the war, and the ones who didn’t never mentioned it.

Even years later in 2008, when Barack Obama’s patriotism was questioned during the presidential campaign, he came to Independence to give a campaign speech aimed at reclaiming it.

Like many of the fathers in Independence at the time, my father had enlisted in WWII. He spent the war in Europe, where he was the first sergeant of the 689th Army Ordnance Company, whose job was to keep the ammo moving.

He was an unequivocal patriot, a hawk on the matter of what he called “Veetnam” and, at least for a while, an ardent believer in the Cold War slogan that there was a “red (Communist) under every bed.”

He was the center of attention during assemblies on graduation day at my grade school, where he would stand on the auditorium stage and pass out copies of the Declaration of Independence (after which the city was named).

I don’t remember thinking about the war or the draft much, until I got mail from the Selective Service Board. Then I’d deal with it and move on.

I never burned my draft card or ran off to Canada, although I thought about joining the National Guard to avoid the draft. And I briefly toyed with visiting a local doctor who, all of us knew, would write you a medical deferment.

But despite my convenient opposition to it, I never protested the war either.

high school photo for Mike McGraw

Mike McGraw

Just after high school I started taking classes at the University of Missouri Kansas City.

While R.B. Kramer was playing bridge, I spent my first semester playing pool in the student union. The “pouch,” they called it, because, after all, we were the Kangaroos.

Given the hours I spent there, you’d think I’d be a better pool player.

By September 1966, student deferments nationwide had grown by 900 percent. Mine came through in October.

I had signed up for a light load of easy courses. Apparently oblivious to the fact that my student deferment could just as easily be taken away, I ended the semester by withdrawing from one course and failing three others. I earned a “D” in freshman English.

College grades were referred to at the time as “A, B, C, D, and ’Nam.” I had just gotten three ’Nams. My first semester grade point average was 0.285.

The folks at the draft board were apparently pretty plugged in because on November 18, less than a month after getting a student deferment, I was declared 1-A — ready to go.

More than 6,000 U.S. soldiers had been killed that year alone, and all of a sudden, school seemed like something I should get serious about. The next semester I carried 18.5 hours, earning C’s and B’s, bringing my GPA to 1.557 — hardly a scholar.

By February 1967, I was on academic probation, and that same month I was called in for a physical and passed. It seems, they should have put my ass on a bus to basic training right then and there.

But they didn’t.

I guess I appealed — on what basis I can’t imagine — and I was reclassified 2-S the following March.

Three months later, I was back on academic probation. I gradually pushed up my GPA, got a continuation of my student deferment in November 1967 and was finally deemed to be in academic good standing in January 1968.

A year later I was reclassified 1-A, then 2-S, then 1-A again in November.

I got married the following December for love — we’re still married today — not to avoid the draft. That same month the first draft lotteries were held. My number was 340. I would never go.

I had worried for a time that my father, despite his being a hawk on Vietnam, may have intervened on my behalf with someone he knew, but there’s no evidence whatsoever of that.

In fact an archivist in St. Louis, where my records are housed, reviewed my deferments at my request. “You were deferred for study multiple times. I am not sure if there was a certain GPA you had to maintain to avoid being drafted, but you have legitimate deferments.

“I don’t want to make any assumptions, but it appears that school and luck kept you out of the military.”

In their book “Chance and Circumstance,” about the Vietnam-era draft, authors Lawrence Baskir (he joined the Reserves) and William Strauss (student deferments and a high lottery number) wax eloquently on the whole guilt thing among those who never served.

“On the part of those who were spared, there is residual guilt, often so deeply buried that it surfaces only in unnaturally vehement denials that there is anything to feel guilty about.”

There were certainly millions of men and boys who avoided service because they were deeply, morally opposed to the war — some of whom felt so strongly about it they were willing to go to prison.

But whatever we felt about the war, there can be little question among those who never served that the system that was deferring us was biased toward the privileged and, at times, downright corrupt.

The numbers tell it all.

Of the 26.8 million men who came of age during the Vietnam era, 11 million were drafted or enlisted, more than 58,000 died in service (based on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial website) and 153,000 more were wounded, including my classmate John Musgrave.

Many of the remaining 16 million of us emerged with a little latent, whiny guilt.

— This story is part of Flatland and KCPT’s local engagement and reporting around the broadcast of a new, 18-hour documentary series “The Vietnam War” from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick coming this September. The Vietnam War affected the lives of numerous Kansas Citians including veterans, civilians, activists and refugees. We hope you’ll share your own story and perspectives on the war and its impact with us here.

— Mike McGraw is the Special Projects Reporter for Flatland. Find him at mmcgraw@kcpt.org and follow his stories @Flatlandkc. Ryan Hennessy provided research for this story.

The Selective Service System: A System Rigged Against the Poor

When the 4,200 draft boards had to fill quotas, a young man without an excuse was going into the military, and possibly Vietnam.

“It (the selective service system) was rigged against the working-class and poor for every year a college deferment was granted a member of those two groups would be drafted in (the) student’s place,” said Vietnam veteran John Musgrave.

Musgrave and researchers ever since have found that the design of the selective service system during Vietnam was flawed. At the time, the average family income was $8,274. The poor and less educated couldn’t afford college like their affluent peers. Consequently, families with lower incomes watched their sons go to war instead of college.

High school dropouts had a 70 percent chance of being drafted, according to the book, “Chance and Circumstance, the Draft, the War, and the Vietnam Generation.”

In 1967, African Americans made up only 12 percent of the country’s population at the time but 16 percent of inductees, according to the book, “The African American Experience in Vietnam.”

By late 1969, numerous student deferments and other problems had left the old selective service system discredited in the minds of millions of Americans.

A new random system — a lottery — replaced it in December. It was an attempt to level the playing field. In 1969, 195 numbers were called, and in 1970, 125 numbers were called.

[Click on the links above and triangulate your birth month with day to find your draft number for those years.]  

The last induction took place July 1, 1973, and since then the military has relied on a volunteer army. The Vietnam war ended April 30, 1975.

— R.H.

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