Vietnam Draft Statistics

A comprehensive analysis of the draft’s impact during the Vietnam War can be found in the 1978 book, Chance and Circumstance, by Lawrence M. Baskir and William A. Strauss.

The study notes that in the pre-lottery, pre-volunteer army years. the social inequities of the draft were stark. At the end of World War II, Blacks constituted 12% of all combat troops. This had grown to 31% by the start of the Vietnam War. The book notes that due to a concerted effort by the Defense Department to reduce the minorities’ share of the fighting, this figure was reduced for all the services to under 9% by 1970.

I had met with one of the book’s authors, Larry Baskir, in 1974, when I was asked to testify in the Hearings on Military Surveillance, held by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights. At the time, Baskir was the Committee’s General Counsel under its Chairman, Sen. Sam Ervin of North Carolina. Baskir later served as Chief Executive Officer and General Counsel of President Gerald Ford’s Presidential Clemency Board, set up to help deal with the question of what to do with the many young Americans who had broken the law by evading the military draft.

The analysis in Figure 1 in Baskir’s book details the effect of the draft on those who came of draft age in that period.