Quote:
Originally posted by Kitty_Kat
- Women have served with distinction -- mostly as nurses.
Many women are still serving. I am most definantely not a nurse yet serve in the Army.
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Kitty,
You are so right. I stated that very poorly. I should have said, "In past conflicts, women have served with distinction -- mostly as nurses." That was the intent.
I know that during the Gulf War there were many stories of both parents being sent. Why would they change it? Public opinion, I suppose, would be the only reason.
JAM, the rule during Vietnam, as I recall it, didn't have anything to do with the "last of a line," but rather the "sole surviving son" of a family that had lost other sons. (Kind of like the "reason" for the plot in "Saving Private Ryan") I suppose it had the effect of saving the family "name" in some cases, except that if the son were an only child -- or an only son in a family with daughters, the rule did not apply to him. I am an only child, for instance, and the rule did not apply to me.
As for the comment about joining ROTC to pay for college -- I think you're exactly right. That wasn't the case for us in 1965. War wasn't a possibility -- it was happening. I very vividly remember some grizzled old sergeant telling us that if we joined ROTC, we would be officers and give him orders, but if we didn't, we would get drafted anyway and he would be bossing us around -- and he hadn't finished high school. It was an effective recruitment technique. Of course we were too dumb to realize that the professional sergeants (or Chiefs in the Navy) were really the people who make the services run on the day to day level. They had the experience, the newly minted ROTC Second Johns only had a new degree and a shiny gold bar.
I'm editing here because it just occurred to me that one reason for a deferment in the early Vietnam era was being married and having a family. That was changed before the end of the "conflict." You could "play" the system if you got married during your Junior and had a child sometime during your Senior year and go directly from a student deferment to a married with a child deferment.