On Wednesday, February 2, 1972, they held a drawing. The grand prize: a chance at an all-expense paid trip to Vietnam courtesy of Uncle Sam. I was eighteen, and although the draft seemed to be winding down, the annual draft lottery broadcast continued to pull in big Nielsen ratings.

Get a low number, anything between 1-99, and you’d probably get drafted and maybe even sent to ‘Nam. But no matter what number I got, I wasn’t going. It was Canada or bust. My mom and I had discussed it at length, and she backed me all the way, said she’d even give me the money I needed to go. Just in case, though, I had started working at the local Jewish temple as a youth counselor, so I could possibly build a case as a conscientious objector. I don’t know how conscientious I was, but I was definitely an objector.

Eddie and Doug, my two best friends since junior high, came over to watch the lottery show with me. The three of us sat on the living room floor in front of the Zenith console, munching on cookies my grandmother had baked for the occasion. She and my mom sat on the couch behind us. The show began, and we watched as our futures slowly scrolled by on the screen, one birth date at a time. The details of how each of us reacted as our birth days appeared have faded, but I will never forget two things: the nervous silence in the room and my lottery number: 299.

In fact, all my friends got good numbers (Eddie, 287; Doug, 188), and nobody I knew was drafted. Although it turned out to be the last year of the lottery, the Vietnam War still loomed large in our lives, and 1972 turned out to be one of those pivotal, transition years for the country—and me.

In 1972 I was attending a small, community college where I majored in psychology but was considering switching to poli-sci, maybe even going into politics.  I was active in the local peace movement and working on George McGovern’s presidential campaign, canvassing door-to-door and preaching about the evils of Richard Nixon and his “secret plan” to end the war.  George and us “peaceniks” took a real beating that year.  It was a couple of decades before I voted again. 

The war and its troubling legacy re-entered my life in 2000, when I became an editor at a publishing company specializing in military history. And, while some of the books I worked on dealt with WWII and Korea, the majority have been military memoirs written by the men who fought in the very war I protested; a war that took more than 50,000 lives and maimed a million bodies.  A war I hated to my core.  

These days I spend a lot of time talking to and reading the stories of those who fought in combat and returned forever changed. While several have told me that they thought the way we fought the war was wrong, the majority say they believed they were doing the right thing when they went to Vietnam and, more amazingly to me, that they were grateful for the experience.

Their stories, and the personal friendships that have resulted from working with the authors, have led me to re-examine some of my long-held beliefs about the war and what it means to be a soldier and serve one’s country in that way. Of all the memoirs I have edited in the last five years, no two have prompted that personal reevaluation more than those of Samuel Brantley and Ernie Brace.

Sam Brantley’s childhood dream was to become a jet pilot.  That’s why, after graduating from college, he joined the Marines. Arriving in Vietnam in early 1968, he was assigned to fly A-4 Skyhawks, small yet lethal one-seat jet aircraft that wreaked havoc on the enemy while providing protective cover for the GIs below. The battle had always seemed distant to him, dropping bombs from hundreds of feet above the trees and rice paddies. But during the spring of the 1968 Tet Offensive, North Vietnam’s largest full-scale, coordinated attack to date, Sam’s war changed.

Unlike other branches of the military, the Marine Corps required its pilots to take a turn on the ground, with the frontline troops, serving as Forward Air Controllers (FAC) responsible for calling in air support against the enemy. Overnight, Sam went from a hotshot, wisecracking top-gun pilot to a jungle-humping grunt, fighting for his life in one harrowing firefight after another.

One day during an otherwise routine patrol, Sam and his M-16 rifle took up position on a small hill overlooking a village. He was providing cover for his buddies searching the village for Viet Cong. Suddenly, a little girl appeared and started walking towards the GIs. Here is how he describes what happened next in his book, Zero Dark Thirty.

"There were grenades attached to her easily seen from my position but unseen by the group. She drew closer. I knew the damned grenades were going to blow any second and transport my compadres and the child to oblivion. What to do? Shoot the child to keep her away from my compadres? Take her out without pain? Should I holler to alert them? That would compromise my position and likely draw immediate fire. Might possibly be the last thing I ever do. Damn! … I was out of everything except action. Make a move; do it now!"

Sam decided to shoot the girl, but he couldn’t do it.  So he shot near her to turn her away. The Marines hit the ground, the grenades detonated, and the little girl evaporated.

After returning from Vietnam, Sam’s life stalled and eventually crashed. He had trouble finding work and became severely depressed. He finally landed a job as an air traffic controller but had to resign after developing serious vision problems he believes were a result of posttraumatic stress. Memories of the war, the little girl, the deaths he witnessed and caused, took a heavy toll until one summer night he found himself in the middle of the Mojave Desert with the business end of an M-14 rifle pressed against his eye, his thumb on the trigger.

But something stopped him, a disembodied voice that told him it was time to take responsibility for his actions.  He put the gun down and sat frozen in thought until sunrise, at which point he decided that suicide wasn’t the right thing to do. He packed up his few belongings and walked out of the desert, eventually hitching a ride to Palmdale with a yuppie couple in a new Mercedes.

Today Sam lives with his long-time girlfriend in the woods of northern Wisconsin where he earns a good living as a computer tech and is, as he says, “just living a normal life.”

Sam’s story made me question my own ability to cope with something so deeply morally challenging, so traumatic.  Could I have chosen between the life of a six-year-old child and the lives of my friends?  And, had I been able to make that choice, could I have survived its consequences  to lead a “normal” life?  Would I have pulled that trigger in the Mojave?