I was a senior at UCLA during the first draft lottery, getting my bachelor’s in 1970. Throughout high school and college, I was opposed to the Vietnam War, feeling that we had no right to be involved in a civil war. I got married in the summer of 1969, and was accepted to UCLA Law School to start in the fall of 1970. At that time, there were no more marriage deferments and no more grad school deferments. I looked into going to law school in Canada, but, fortunately for me, the numbers stopped for that year a few numbers from mine. It was a nail biting year, since the common wisdom was that the first 1/3 of numbers would definitely go, the last 1/3 of numbers would definitely not go, and the middle third was up in the air. To this day I wonder what I would have done if my number came up.
