My birthday is November 6, 1947, so I was in the 1969 draft lottery and pulled number 76. In the summer of ’68, with a year left to run on my student deferment, I made a "dry run" to Toronto just to see if it would be possible to get over the border, find a place to live, and get some sort of job. There was some hassle at the border but I was eventually admitted. It was simple to find a room in Toronto, and I was quickly befriended by some locals and introduced to a small handful of American emigres who were all there for the same reason. So I returned to my senior year at Purdue pretty confident that if push came to shove, Canada was a workable option. When the lottery showed that I would be holding number 76, it seemed pretty obvious that it was an option I would need to exercise.
In those days, both my shoulders easily dislocated and I had a thick stack of emergency room forms and charts proving this to be the case. Once I graduated from Purdue, I was called for my first draft physical at the AFEES station in Indianapolis, where everyone was extremely straight-laced and seriously in the business of conscripting fodder for the Viet Nam effort. At the very end of a long and anxiety-provoking day, I finally got to speak directly to an Army doctor, who looked at my ER records and, with obvious reluctance, declared me 1-Y — a one-year reprieve on medical grounds.
I therefore went on for my first year of grad school at Wisconsin, and sure enough, one year later, I was called back for a second draft physical, this time reporting to the AFEES station in Milwaukee. Several dozen protestors were at the bus terminal in Madison wishing everyone well, and several dozen more greeted us as we disembarked in Milwaukee. Once inside the Milwaukee AFEES station, the mood was convivial and relaxed and almost all the military personnel sported facial hair and an attitude of "relax, we don’t draft many people out of here." In Milwaukee, I saw the Army MD first (not last), he took one look at the pile of ER records, asked what the hell I was even doing there, and declared me 4-F, permanently unfit for military duty on grounds of medical disability. I spent the rest of the day drinking beer and eating bratwurst and celebrating my good fortune.
And that was the end of my story with the draft!