History HW - For 15 points, create a set of Priestley style notes based upon 30-3 attached

A

As Americans’ doubts about the war grew, thousands of men attempted to find ways around the draft, which one man characterized as a “very manipulatable system.” Some men sought out sympathetic doctors to grant medical exemptions, while others changed residences in order to stand before a more lenient draft board. Some Americans even joined the National Guard or Coast Guard, which often secured a deferment from service in Vietnam.

One of the most common ways to avoid the draft was to receive a college deferment, by which a young man enrolled in a university could put off his military service. Because university students during the 1960s tended to be white and financially well-off, many of the men who fought in Vietnam were lower-class whites or minorities who were less privi- leged economically. With almost 80 percent of American soldiers com- ing from lower economic levels, Vietnam was a working-class war.

AFRICAN AMERICANS IN VIETNAM African Americans served in dispropor- tionate numbers as ground combat troops. During the first several years of the war, blacks accounted for more than 20 percent of American combat deaths despite rep- resenting only about 10 percent of the U.S. population. The Defense Department took steps to correct that imbalance by instituting a draft lottery system in 1969.

Martin Luther King, Jr., had refrained from speaking out against the war for fear that it would divert attention from the civil rights movement. But he could not maintain that stance for long. In 1967 he lashed out against what he called the “cruel irony” of American blacks dying for a country that still treated them as second-class citizens.

A PERSONAL VOICE DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. “ We were taking the young black men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. . . . We have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools.”

—quoted in America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History

Racial tension ran high in many platoons, and in some cases, the hostility led to violence. The racism that gripped many military units was yet another factor that led to low troop morale in Vietnam.

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A Life magazine cover shows new draft inductees arriving for training at Fort Knox, Kentucky.

Vocabulary deferment: the act or instance of delaying

MAIN IDEAMAIN IDEA

A Synthesizing

Why did King call African Americans’ fighting in Vietnam an “irony”?

Despite racial tensions, black and white soldiers fought side by side in Vietnam.

U.S. Military Personnel in Vietnam*

Source: Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1985; Encyclopedia Americana

Tr oo

ps (

in th

ou sa

nd s)

*Year-end figures

600

500

400

300

200

100

0

536,000

1963 19721964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971

SKILLBUILDER Interpreting Graphs What years signaled a rapid increase in the deployment of U.S. troops?

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