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Commentary - Dec 18, 2004 - Printable Version
- The Year I Won the Lottery
by Mark Faulk
When it comes to contests, sweepstakes, raffles, lotteries, or any type of contest that ends in winning a prize, I'm the unluckiest person in the Free World (uh, that would be America for you cynics in the audience). Sure, I've won a "free small drink" at McDonalds a time or two, and I once smoked the competition in a game of Bingo at my daughter's elementary school, but when it comes to the high stakes contests, I'm a Loser (pronounced "loser with a capital 'L'"). In fact, in my forty-something years of hard living, I've only won "the Big Prize" once. This is the story of the day I won the Lottery. The date was March 20, 1974. I remember that I was in the church parking lot across from Classen High School, where we often met at lunch to..... pray. Okay, we weren't praying, dammit, we were in a VW Van, uh....meditating, and listening to the "Doobie Brothers". Someone turned the radio to the news station, and the mood suddenly became somber and an uneasy silence filled the air. Every one of us knew that this was the big day, and we were anxious as we waited for the announcer to name a "winner". This was serious business, and I felt a tension unlike anything I had ever experienced before. I listened as if in a daze as they announced the winning number.
Then, just like that, I knew that my fortunes had changed forever. "February 28th". I WAS THE WINNER! Or, in this case, I was the loser. You see, this was no ordinary lottery, and there would be no giant checks presented by Ed McMahon to the "lucky winner". This lottery was to pick the poor souls who could potentially be drafted to go to Vietnam, to fight in a war that we all knew by then was wrong. My birthday, February 28, was pick number 001. I won the lottery. My friends turned as one in my direction, but nothing was said. It was my lucky day.
It didn't matter to any of us that the "real" war had mostly wound down the year before, we had been deceived enough times by the Nixon Administration that not one of us actually believed that we were safe from the fates that had befallen those only a year or two older than we were, the 58,000 deaths, the 155,000 others wounded, the rampant drug addiction and psychological problems, and finally, the unwelcome reception that many of them received upon their return to the United States. The U.S. death count in 1974 was a "mere" 178, down from 16,592 at the peak of the war in 1968....but none of that was on my mind as I heard my birthdate announced. "001- February 28th".
In my mind, I knew that men, no, boys, my age were still being called in to take their physicals....just in case they were needed. In my mind, I was thinking about the lies that had been fed to us from day one of the Vietnam War, hell, even before the war, when the Johnson Administration used a fictitious attack (the second "Gulf of Tonkin" incident, an attack on American ships that never happened) to gain support for sending troops into Vietnam.
In my mind, I was already plotting my escape.....I would move to Canada.....no wait, I would stay and fight it, apply for Conscientious Objector status. I had never passed up a just fight in my entire life. In fact, I never passed up a questionable fight in my life. What the hell, I never passed up a fight in my entire life. But in the back of my mind, there was the lingering fear. Would I end up in the jungles of Vietnam, locked in mortal combat with an unseen and anonymous foe? Would I, who as a child, had cried when I had to put our sick puppies to sleep, be asked to kill other human beings at close range, complete strangers who had never done a thing to harm me, my family, or my country? The thought was foreign to me, and I decided then and there that I wouldn't (correction: I couldn't) take another life, period.
A couple of years earlier my father, a WW2 Army of Occupation Veteran who was an English and Creative Writing Professor at a small college in western Oklahoma at the time, had spoken out against the war in Vietnam, saying that he would rather have his son go to jail than to fight in a war that he didn't believe in. I was "his son", and there was no question that I didn't believe in this war. My father had put his job on the line to speak out on my behalf (he wasn't fired, he just "wasn't rehired" for the following year). I couldn't back down, not after years of crying out against social injustice, against prejudice, against poverty, and yes, against the Vietnam War.
I filed for Conscientious Objector, submitting a letter explaining that it was, in fact, a sin to kill another human being, and reminding the board of a fairly well-known quote from the Bible that read "Thou shalt not kill". (In my naivety, I didn't know that the American Standard Bible had just been updated to the "New" American Standard Bible, and that the Word of God had been changed from "Thou shalt not kill" to "You shall not murder", and that the King James version would make the same "correction" a few years later.) I would go in front of the draft board, and instead of them asking me why I didn't believe in killing other human beings, I would indict them for their beliefs. I would say, "You should be the ones justifying your actions, not me. The question isn't "why do I believe that it's wrong to kill?", it's "how can you believe that it's morally right to kill?"
As it turned out, no more American boys were sent to Vietnam, the draft wasn't continued into 1974, and my number wasn't called. I didn't appear in front of the draft board to argue my case, I didn't get to fight the battle for morality, and I never delivered my stinging indictment of the entire military system. Instead, unlike 58,000 of my generation (and thousands more who never fully recovered from their wounds, both physical and psychological), I finished high school in peace, started my own business, got married, and raised three children, all of whom I fully expect to change the world for the better. I was spared not by the luck of the draw, but by virtue of being born a year too late.
As for the Vietnam War, I truly believed that we had learned our lesson, and I spent the next twenty-some years content with the knowledge that it was (almost) worth the loss of lives, the turmoil that it brought to an entire generation, and the suffering that it brought to a bitterly divided country, just to gain that knowledge, and that we were somehow wiser for the experience. Surely, we would never again wage a war for the wrong reasons, or even worse, for reasons cut out of whole cloth. We would never again rush to judgement. We would never forget.
"Although the world's imperfection may call forth the acts of war, righteousness cannot obscure the agony and pain those acts bring to a single child. The Vietnamese War is an event of historic moment, summoning the power and concern of many nations. But it is also the vacant moment of amazed fear as a mother and child watch death by fire fall from the improbable machine sent by a country they barely comprehend. It is the sudden terror of the official or hamlet militiaman absorbed in the work of his village as he realizes the assassin is taking his life. It is the refugees wandering homeless from villages now obliterated, leaving behind only those who did not live to flee. It is the young men, Vietnamese and American, who in an instant sense the night of death destroying yesterday's promise of family and land and home.
It is a country where hundreds of thousands fight, but millions more are the innocent, bewildered victims of passions and beliefs they barely understand. To them peace is not an abstract term describing one of those infrequent intervals when men are not killing each other. It is a day without terror and the fall of bombs. It is a family and the familiar life of their village. It is food and a school and life itself."
~Robert F. Kennedy, 1967
"Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind...War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today."
~John F. Kennedy, 1963
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