The Vietnam Draft and Lt. McChesney

Welcome to 2015, everyone. In three days Nita and I will celebrate our 43^rd wedding anniversary. 
 

The Vietnam War was raging when I proposed to Nita late in 1971 with the expectation that I would soon be drafted or would enlist in the army, with the hope of going to officer candidate school. My draft lottery number was 88, and I had ridden a bus packed with likely draftees from Longview to Shreveport, LA, where I easily passed the draft physical.

Happily, my draft lottery number had been passed by while I was still enjoying the last semester of my college student draft deferment. The draft board didn‘t swing back until January of the next year to pick up those whose student deferments had expired. That meant I needed to quickly make a decision to join or be drafted, or the draft board would make the decision for me. The choices were to be drafted for two years and certainly go to Vietnam as a private, or enlist for four years, hopefully graduate OCS, and probably go to Vietnam as a Second-Lieutenant.

A third, never considered option, a classic “deus ex machina,” that is, a god who resolves the plot, intervened. In late December, with mounting opposition to our involvement in Vietnam, President Nixon announced that he was ending the draft on December 31st. I had sidestepped one of the biggest decisions of my life.

At the time Nita and I rejoiced. We married and using all $800 of our combined savings, took a long camping trip around the US, sleeping in the back of our old pick-up truck under a homemade plywood camper top. In the fall, I returned to college, finished my degree and started my career as a public school educator.

After the tragic ending to the Vietnam War, I began to regret my lack of military service. It took a while, but I came to understand that the other young men who served during the Vietnam War era took my place. In a real way, I let others carry my load, something that doesn’t sit well with me now.

Moreover, my interest in military history has not faded away, and now I’m writing novels about soldiers in our Civil War. Every time I’m at the keyboard I wish that I had personal experience as a soldier to draw upon, even if the war in my novels happened 150 years ago. I know many good writers of military fiction are not veterans, but I can’t help but believe that experience counts, that my war stories would be in some way better if I had served in the army when I was young.

That New Year Confession made, I’m posting a period photograph of Lt. Robert McChesney, a handsome young man from Lexington who is considered the second Confederate officer to be killed during the Civil War. He was shot while on a scout on June 29, 1861 in what is now West Virginia.

I looked on the internet this morning and found that the best research (done in 1889) asserts that 4,626 Confederate officers died during the Civil War, 3,332 of them from battle wounds and 1,294 from disease. That nearly 3:1 battle to disease death ratio is reversed for enlisted soldiers, reflecting that while officers may have had warmer clothes and ate better, they also led from the front in battle, and were singled out as targets by enemy marksmen.

I know genealogy of someone else’s family gets real boring real fast, but the unfortunate Lt. McChesney was the nephew of my great-great grandmother Annie McChesney McBride (who is Elizabeth McBee, one of my favorite characters in Tangled Honor).

McChesney served in Company H, 14^th Virginia Cavalry, a company whose members came from Lexington and was the same company in which the real James McBride (my uncle who inspired Sgt. James McBee in my novel) served

In Tangled Honor, Brother James is in the hospital because he fell from his horse. In real life, Uncle James survived the war, and died several years later from injuries received when his horse threw him. I’ve always thought horses are large, dangerous, cantankerous beasts best left alone. Turns out I’ve been right about that.