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Today's - but not yesterday's - super patriot, entered Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York in the fall of 1967. He was active as a columnist for the student newspaper The Circle as well as a member of the football team which meant he suffered no great physical handicap which would exempt him from military service.
In the bloodiest days of the Vietnam war we find Bill O'Reilly and Bill Clinton as college students in England.
O'Reilly spent his junior year, 1969-1970 at the University of London. The previous year, 1968, Bill Clinton had entered Oxford. So in the heat of the Vietnam war and its greatest battles, we find Bill O'Reilly and Bill Clinton as college students in England. In these years, U.S. troops in Vietnam topped the half million mark and American combat deaths now totaled thirty-three thousand, a sum greater than the Korean War. And in 1969, Life magazine shocked America with portrait photos of all 242 Americans killed in Vietnam in just one single week.
Then, in the fall of 1970, he returned to Marist College from England, rejoined the football team and graduated in 1971 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history. In that year, 1971, American deaths in Vietnam passed the forty-five thousand marker.
Additionally, at the time of O'Reilly's graduation, a draft extension bill was passed along with what was then known as the Mansfield Amendment which set a national policy of withdrawing troops from Vietnam 9 months after the bill's enactment (wording was later softened to the "earliest practical date"). It was the first time in modern US history that Congress had urged an end to a war in which the country was actively involved.
Yet after graduation, and with the conscription law and the draft lottery in full force, O'Reilly would never be inducted. Instead, he was off to Florida where he took a job teaching at a high school. Two years later, in 1973, he was back in college at Boston University for a master's degree in broadcast journalism. By that time he finished at Boston U., the draft and the war were history. And neither would ever play any part in the life of one of America's most vocal defenders of patriotic ways and values.
Despite O'Reilly's historical amnesia, Vietnam and the draft really did happen....
http://www.oreilly-sucks.com/oreillyvietnam.htm
And O'Reilly, if he can't pontificate, is not O'Reilly.