On August 26, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed Executive Order 11241, which terminated the marriage deferment.  President Johnson’s executive order made it so that childless men who were married after August 26, 1965 would be considered the same as single men when selecting and ordering registrants to report for induction.

Fifty-nine years ago today, LBJ was already running out of young, single men to send to Vietnam.  He had escalated, or “Americanized,” the war in the first six months of 1965.  Working class boys were being drafted fast and furiously, but not those who were married or in college.  They were 2-S; deferred from the draft until age twenty or graduation from college.  Until that day in August, 1965, married men were exempt.  When LBJ made his announcement that day, ending the deferment for married men, many thousands of young people flocked to Las Vegas, Nevada, the only state that did not require the three-day waiting period or blood tests.  They stood in line for hours at every wedding chapel in the city until midnight when they would not make the cut.  At that point in the war, 35k men were being drafted each month! 

Before August 26, 1965, those eligible registrants who were married and did not have children would be selected third, after the supply of delinquents, volunteers, and single non-volunteers had been exhausted as a local board filled its quota.  It was only nine months later when those with children were no longer able to be deferred without proof of paternity.  That is how fast the war was both expanding and losing soldiers. The executive order decreed:

Executive Order No. 11241, of August 26, 1965, changing the Selective Service Regulations, is now as follows:

1. Delinquents who have attained the age of nineteen years in the order of their dates of birth with the oldest being selected first.

2. Volunteers who have not attained the age of twenty-six years and in the sequence in which they have volunteered for induction.

3. Non-volunteers who who have attained the age of nineteen years and have not attained the age of twenty-six years and who (A) do not have a wife with whom they maintain a bona fide family relationship in their homes in the order of their dates of birth, with the oldest being selected first; or (B) have a wife with whom they married after August 26, 1965, and with whom they maintain a bona fide family relationship in their homes in the order of their dates of birth with the oldest being selected first.

4. Non-volunteers who have attained the age of nineteen years and have not attained the age of twenty-six years and who have a wife whom they married on or before August 26, 1965, and with whom they maintain a bona fide family relationship in their homes, in the order of their dates of birth, with the oldest being selected first.

5. Non-volunteers who have attained the age of twenty-six years in the order of their dates of birth, with the youngest being selected first.

6. Non-volunteers who have attained the age of eighteen years and six months and who have not attained the age of nineteen years in the order of their dates of birth, with the oldest being selected first.

By 1967, graduate students were no longer granted deferments.  Then the lottery system was put in place.  Every date of the year was a date to be randomly drawn from…from what?  A big cylinder full of every date of the year?  All nineteen year-old men without a deferment were, if their birthdate was drawn, drafted immediately.  Their number was up.  For the families of nineteen year-old men, it was like waiting for a probable death sentence.  By the end of the war, which was lost to the communists, fifty-thousand young men had been killed in Vietnam.  For what?

The world has learned nothing from the horrors of the Vietnam war.  Consider the lives lost in Ukraine and Russia since Russia was provoked into invading Ukraine in 2022.  The number of lives lost on both sides is in the hundreds of thousands.  To what end?  Is it any wonder that Ukrainian parents are spending thousands of dollars to get their surviving sons out of the country?  That war is just a vast killing field on both sides, just like the war in Vietnam.  Countless Vietnam draft dodgers fled to Canada.

The draft in America ended on January 27, 1973 after twenty-five years of uninterrupted conscription.  We have had an all-volunteer military since then.  The House has passed the proposed Defense Authorization Act of 2025 which again automatically registers all males between the ages of 18 and 26 for the draft.  The Democrats wanted to include women.  It seems our overlords are expecting another senseless war.  The Senate, however, has not yet passed the bill. May wiser heads prevail.

Johnson’s executive order of 1965 justifiably pitted the working classes against the privileged, college student class and initially, married men.  The anti-war protests of the 1960s were far more about the unfairness of the draft than the war itself which was far away.  Once the draft ended in 1973, the anti-war protests ended.  Traitors like John Kerry, who served only four months in Vietnam, and then accused American service members of all manner of crimes, will be forever known for his backstabbing and his stolen valor.  What is it about these men who claim to have fought for their country when they have not?  Kerry, Blumenthal, and of course, perhaps the worst offender, Tim Walz.  How on earth do these liars end up in Congress or as a governor?  Because the American voters do not do their homework.  Walz, like LBJ, will revel in sending our young men to war.  Electing Harris and Walz guarantees there will be a WWIII.  They are LBJ’s warmongering redux, slaves to the military/industrial complex because that is how they line their pockets.

Image: Public domain.