"After being so high up on the list"? Why do you think the draft at that point in the Nation's history was referred to as a lottery? In a lottery, selections are based on on those numbers generated by random number table.

And LLC, I echo DC's exhortation, but I'll add my own. Your vituperation against things you don't understand is your desperate need to reduce everything to simplicity, to avoid facing and having to deal with the variables and nuances that are characteristic of people and institutions, dilemmas and choices. Complexity is something that you assiduously avoid. You seek the false comfort of sophistry that gives you shelter against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that sometimes accompany human existence.

Today Vietnam is well on its way to being an entrepreneurial and capitalistic country that offers economic, education, and in time, political choices to the Vietnamese, and with which the US is its largest trading partner. Without the War, none of this would have taken place. Vietnam would have become an entrenched member of the Communist bloc, would have continued its encroachments into Laos (joining forces with the Communist Pathet Lao)and into Cambodia (which it did resulting in the reign of Pol Pot), and threatened such in Thailand and Burma (now called Myanamar).

As a further result of the War, both China and the Soviet Union realized that the US would continue its efforts to contain the spread of Communism. Thus, the Soviet Union is gone and both it and China are continuing down the entrepreneurial road while China's Communism is but a shell of what it was under Mao.

You might try picking up a weapon and standing a post for something!