Question: How many in National Guard Served/Died in Vietnam? (Vanity)

[Mr Ducklips]

Since John Effen Kerry equates Vietnam National Guard service to draft-dodging: Can knowledgable Freepers come up with the total number of Guardsmen who served, and those who died for their country, in Vietnam?

[Bluntpoint]

My brother "volunteered" for the guard in order not to get drafted by the regular army.

We would be better off not to spin this in a Hannity fashion.

We need to fight spin with the truth and not with more spin.

[Mr Ducklips]

Thanks for the links, fellas (forgive the assumption if incorrect).

[StonyBurk]

the question is moot. the rules were changed After Vietnam
to force an increased involvement of weekend warriors.I
do not know the answer to your question--but the rules
have been changed to maintain the system despite Congressional aversion to the military draft.

[Pest]

You're correct. I checked it out. He says he enlisted because he had a very good chance of being drafted and he would have rather been an officer.

[meenie]

While everybody is beating the drums on Kerry, I can also remember Rumsfeld stating at one of his press conferences that draftees were inferior to regular army and we didn't want them. A hell of a lot of draftees made the supreme sacrifice in WW II and Korea. In fact, in both wars, the draft was used as a means to even out the number of incoming trainees and enlistment was discouraged except for the marines and navy.

[Britton J Wingfield]

I agree that a volunteer military is the way to go. I know the guys in my unit are there because they want to be, and that counts for a lot.

Plenty of draftees have been outstanding soldiers, but that doesn't make it the right solution for today's military, or acceptable to a free society.

[SAMWolf]

The 1960's began with a partial mobilization of the National Guard as part of the U.S. response to the Soviet Union's building of the Berlin Wall. Although none left the United States, nearly 45,000 Army Guardsmen spent a year in Active Federal Service.

As the decade progressed, President Lyndon Johnson made the fateful political decision not to mobilize the Reserves to fight the Vietnam War, but to rely on the draft instead. But when the bombshell of the Viet Cong Tet Offensive struck in 1968, 34 Army National Guard units found themselves alerted for active duty, eight of which served in South Vietnam.

Some National Guard units that remained in the U.S. still found themselves on the front lines. As urban riots and then anti-war demonstrations swept parts of the country in the late 1960s, the Guard, in its role as a state militia, was called upon increasingly for riot control duties.

[DefCon]

My 6 years was from April of 1971 to April of 1977.
My unit met 1 weekend per month and 2 weeks every summer.
My unit was never activated for any reason.
Not a flood, a riot, a tornado, an earthquake...
... nada, zip, nothing.
We had some damn clean M-16's and duece and a halfs, though...

[DefCon]

We had a draft back then, remember?
I remember it really, really well.
I just can't figure out your point.
- - -
Just that it was a whole different world then, thats all.

[SAMWolf]

I got called up for 3 weeks for Flood Duty in Illinois when I was in the Guard.

[DefCon]

Man, we would have hated that.
We would have had to wash our trucks again.

[SAMWolf]

LOL! We'd all pitch in and take ours to the local "Do it yourself" car wash. :-)