Selective Service System

The Selective Service System brings the Vietnam-era draft into the lives of Dominick Birdsey and Thomas Birdsey not as an abstraction but as a numbered chance of being called to active duty. Its lottery separates the twins by only six minutes of birth time and by a dramatic difference in their draft numbers, while Thomas’s later reclassification and failed psychiatric examination make the system’s reach more than a single evening’s suspense.

The lottery and its rules

On December 1, 1969, Dominick, Leo Blood, and other men in their dorm watched the first U.S. draft lottery since 1942. A Selective Service official drew birth dates from a revolving drum; the sequence assigned numbers that shaped the likelihood of receiving a call to war. The account says the Selective Service estimated that men whose birthdays fell among roughly the first 120 drawn would be called.

The lottery drew all 366 birth dates, including the leap-year date. The dorm’s gathering turned the procedure into a shared spectacle: some men celebrated, others drank to their fear, and the event ended with both groups drunk. The System’s impersonal sorting mechanism made each man’s prospects legible through a number, even as the consequences behind that number remained uncertain.

The twins’ unequal numbers

Leo drew 266 and was described as safe from the draft. Dominick, born at 12:03 a.m. on January 1, drew 305, a still safer position. Thomas, born six minutes earlier at 11:57 p.m. on December 31, drew 100, placing him among the men considered most likely to be called once his student deferment ended.

The contrast sharpened the twins’ sense of their separate fates. Dominick went to bed relieved but guilty, feeling at once saved and doomed; Thomas later told him that things had always gone Dominick’s way. Their birthdays fell on different days and in different years, and the lottery converted that small chronological difference into a consequential divide. Thomas’s exposure was not immediate, however: his 2-S student deferment remained a condition of his temporary protection.

Reclassification and examination

In February, the Selective Service Board notified Thomas that he had been reclassified from 2-S to 1-A. In early March, he was ordered to New Haven for a preinduction physical, and Ray Birdsey drove him there. Ray reported that Thomas was mostly quiet and fidgety during the trip, stopping to use the toilet three times; Ray nevertheless characterized his behavior as within the normal range and reassured him that military service might toughen him and give him something to feel proud of.

Thomas passed the vision, hearing, and coordination tests, and his heart rate and blood pressure were normal. He failed the psychiatric examination. The narrative does not specify what administrative outcome followed that failure, but it marks a decisive limit to Ray’s expectation that military service would simply correct what he regarded as Thomas’s lack of discipline.

Family and historical significance

The draft system enters a family already divided over what the twins should do after high school. Ray opposed paying for two college educations, questioned the politics and conduct he associated with colleges, and argued that the young men should work, join the Navy, or take jobs at Electric Boat. He distinguished enlisted service, which he understood as chosen, from the danger faced by draftees sent to Vietnam. For him, the military could also serve as a means of discipline; for the twins, the lottery made the threat of service contingent on birth date and classification.

The novel places that personal uncertainty against a broader atmosphere of war. Dominick recalls the contrast between the moral clarity Ray associated with his own wartime service and the doubts surrounding the Vietnam conflict. The Selective Service System gives that historical unease a domestic form: a public mechanism of random selection becomes a source of sibling comparison, guilt, and fear, while Thomas’s psychiatric examination reveals how an individual’s circumstances could interrupt the apparent arithmetic of the draft.