Thomas leaves college and loses his student deferment

Thomas Birdsey’s departure from college turns the Vietnam draft from a distant lottery into an immediate threat. His withdrawal jeopardizes the student deferment that had kept him from active duty; reclassified 1-A, he is ordered for a preinduction physical, only to fail its psychiatric examination. The episode brings academic trouble, family pressure, and the machinery of wartime selection into a single, unstable sequence, while exposing how little control either brother has over what comes next.

The lottery and the precarious reprieve

In 1969, the draft lottery made each birthday a number with potentially life-changing consequences. A dormitory collection and a tapped keg accompanied the drawing: Fat Ass reached into a drum 366 times, accounting for leap year, to determine whose birthdays would put them nearer to active duty and whose would offer protection from the Vietnam War. The ceremony produced celebration and dread side by side, and the students drank heavily as the results came in.

Leo drew number 266, which left him comparatively safe. Dominick, born at 12:03 a.m. on January 1, drew 305 and felt even more secure. Thomas, born six minutes earlier, at 11:57 p.m. on December 31, drew 100. His academic probation made the number more alarming: he was in the group most likely to be called if his 2-S student deferment ceased to protect him. The brothers’ births, separated by only six minutes but divided between different days and even different years, had placed them on different sides of the lottery’s immediate danger.

Dominick’s relief was therefore inseparable from guilt. Thomas later told him that things always went Dominick’s way, and Dominick silently registered the difference in their birthdays. The draft lottery did not simply sort the students into safer and less safe categories; it sharpened the brothers’ awareness of their unequal exposure to a war they could neither control nor regard as uncomplicated. In the surrounding account, the contrast with the previous generation’s World War II is pointed: this war, amid mounting deaths and the public horror of My Lai, did not offer the same clear moral divisions Dominick associated with his father’s generation.

Academic withdrawal and the loss of deferment

The lottery’s reprieve depended on Thomas remaining in school and keeping his grades adequate. Dominick urged him to preserve that protection, arguing that a deferment could buy three years and that the war might be over by then. He asked whether Thomas had been studying, attending class, and maintaining his grades. Thomas did not answer those questions directly. Instead, he returned to familiar complaints: his dormitory was too hot, concentration was impossible, and his teachers were setting trick questions because they had singled him out personally.

During midyear exams, Thomas withdrew from school. He packed and left campus without telling Dominick, returning to Three Rivers. When Thomas called, Dominick responded with alarm and anger, asking why he had withdrawn and telling him, in effect, that enlistment would expose him to the danger the deferment had been keeping at a distance. The call made the change concrete: this was no longer a hypothetical risk tied to a low lottery number but a decision that had removed Thomas’s immediate academic shelter.

The withdrawal also sat within a deteriorating family situation. Ray thought Thomas should be looking for work rather than wasting time and regarded the Army as a way to make him more disciplined. Ma, by contrast, told Dominick that she believed something was wrong with Thomas beyond ordinary nerves. Thomas refused to see a doctor, and Ma felt unable to make him go; she hoped chiefly that he would stay out of Ray’s way. Her concern and Ray’s insistence on toughness framed Thomas’s difficulties in sharply different terms, while Ma urged Dominick to remain at school and not take on the burden at home.

Reclassification and the preinduction 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 drove him there. The reclassification translated Thomas’s departure from college into immediate institutional scrutiny: the exemption associated with student status was gone, and military service was no longer only a possibility attached to a lottery number.

Ray later described Thomas as mostly quiet during the drive, fidgety, and needing to use the toilet three times. He said Thomas had spoken fewer than ten words, yet judged that he had acted within the normal range. Ray reassured him that many men remained in the United States or were stationed in Germany or the Philippines rather than going to Vietnam. He also presented service as potentially corrective: the military, he promised, would change Thomas for the better, toughen him, and give him something to feel proud about. The reassurance did not remove the threat; it recast that threat as a remedy for what Ray saw as Thomas’s lack of discipline.

The psychiatric failure and its consequence

Thomas passed the examination’s vision, hearing, and coordination tests. His heart rate and blood pressure were fine, and he was neither color-blind nor flat-footed. The obstacle was specifically psychiatric: he failed that examination. The distinction matters because the physical assessment did not identify a general bodily unfitness. Instead, the examination registered a serious concern in the same domain Ma had already feared and Thomas had resisted having addressed.

Ray drove Thomas home after the failure. The episode thus ends not with induction or a return to school, but with the expected route to military service interrupted by the psychiatric result. It does not resolve Thomas’s condition or restore the lost student deferment. Rather, it leaves the brothers and their family facing a changed situation: Thomas has left college, his 2-S status has become 1-A, and the examination has formally raised the question of his mental fitness. The lottery’s original separation between the brother who felt saved and the brother who felt doomed has given way to a more uncertain outcome, shaped by both institutional classification and a crisis the family has not yet learned how to address.