The Draft and the Vietnam War: How Conscription Fueled Protests and Divided a Nation

The letter arrived on a Tuesday morning in March 1966, delivered by a nervous postal worker to the suburban home of eighteen-year-old Michael Thompson in Cleveland, Ohio. The official envelope bore the seal of Local Board 47, Selective Service System, and contained four simple words that would change his life forever: "You are hereby classified." Inside, on government letterhead, was his new designation as 1-A, available immediately for military service, along with instructions to report for induction processing within thirty days. As Michael sat at his family's kitchen table reading the notice that millions of young American men would receive during the Vietnam era, he became part of a vast governmental apparatus that would conscript nearly two million soldiers to fight in Southeast Asia while fundamentally altering American society's relationship with military service and civic obligation.

The Selective Service System that summoned Michael Thompson to war traced its origins to World War II, when the nation had embraced conscription as a necessary tool for mobilizing the massive armies required to defeat fascism. The system had been allowed to lapse after 1945, but the onset of the Cold War and the Korean conflict led to its restoration in 1948 under the Selective Service Act, which established the legal framework that would govern military conscription for the next quarter-century. The architects of this system believed they were creating a fair and efficient mechanism for distributing the burden of military service across American society, but they could not foresee how the Vietnam War would expose fundamental inequities and contradictions in their carefully constructed machinery.