The evening the first lottery was held, a large number of male students and their girlfriends waited for the results outside the the offfice of the school newspaper, the ‘Technician’, next to Syme Hall. As the results came in over the Technician’s Teletype (it was 1969), the paper’s staff would tape up the Teletype pages in their windows. Students in the front row, by the windows, would shout out the latest posting of birthdates with their lottery numbers and students could be heard to shout for joy or groan with dismay. Several of the girlfriends could be heard screaming and sobbing, several of the boys were also sobbing.
My lottery number was 242 and since New Jersey draft boards had plans to only draft up to 195 that year, this was good news for me (hopefully). If I was born a day earlier, my lottery number would have been 4, a day later, 16. I called my Mother that evening to thank her for delivering me on the "right" day!
I had hoped that we, as a country, would have learned from the terrible price we paid for Vietnam, to choose our wars much more carefully in the future, but we have seen that has not been the case.