Winning the Lottery

In 1969, I won the lottery but it wasn’t a prize anyone would want to win. In the first draft lottery conducted in this country since World War II, 366 numbers were drawn, one for each day of the year. The number coinciding with your birthday became your lottery number. While I wasn’t first my number thirty-eight was good enough to get me drafted in the first round.

I was in my first semester of graduate school and had lost my student deferment after earning my bachelor’s degree the previous term. My first wife Gail and I were in our fifth month of marriage when I got my orders to report for a physical examination in Shreveport, Louisiana. It was the one and only physical I’ve ever taken that I was hoping to fail. I didn’t and less than two months later I was standing with a group of several hundred young men being sworn into the U.S. Army as a draftee.

Shortly after lowering our arms we were informed that we were now the property of the U.S. Army and expected to follow orders, like them or not. Within the hour I was on a bus loaded with draftees on our way to Fort Polk, Louisiana.

Louisiana has a large black population and I was the only white person on the bus, except for the driver. Because I had a college degree and not because I was white, I was told by an unfriendly sergeant that I was the squad leader for the busload of men.

“Wilder, you’re responsible for getting these men to Fort Polk. If you stop for a potty break and one of those boys wants to take a crap, you go with him into the shitter. Every last person that gets on the bus better damn well get off of it at Fort Polk or I guarantee it’ll be your ass and not theirs.”

Yes, we all made it to Fort Polk but not because of my exemplary leadership abilities. I was the oldest and most out of shape person on the bus and realized there was little I could do if someone decided to go AWOL. It was well after dark when we unloaded and we got little sleep that night, spending most of it being poked, prodded, injected and questioned. It was my first day in the Army and I felt more like an unwilling participant in a waking nightmare than a lottery winner.

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