Quote:
Originally Posted by Pio1980
Volunteer or draftee?
You don't seem to be the jarhead type
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During WWII draftees went into all branches of the service...I could not find any information as to the numbers who ended up in the Marine Corps.
During the Vietnam War about 42,000 of the approximately 450,000 Marines who were actually stationed in Vietnam during the war were draftees, 14,844 Marines never made it back home.
When I lost my student deferment in late 1968, I decided to take some control over my likely service and enlisted in the Marine Corps. I figured, perhaps wrongly, that my chances of survival should I end up in country were better in a mostly volunteer branch. A friend who was in the Corps told me that the Marine Corps processed enlistees and administered the oath way faster than the Navy or Air Force, and since my deferment was already gone my best chance of avoiding being drafted into the Army was with the Marine Corps. During the process, I found out I was in the next month's draft call, so I'm glad I did it that way. I scored really high on a battery of tests when I wandered into a Chicago recruiting office, and they asked me how soon I might want to take the oath. They swore me in that day.
When I enlisted, 10% of the draft call went into the Marine Corps. I remember seeing it happen when I was at the Chicago Induction Center for just one day for a pre-induction physical. There were hundreds of us in this enormous hall at various stages of the induction process, and there was a huge long line of guys who were at the last steps in the process. Some official went to the front of the line and walked down the line counting out inductees by 10's. So it went "1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-MARINE CORPS!" A typical reaction was..."WTF!!!!!!!" All the number 10's went over to a different area of the hall to do their Department of the Navy/Marine Corp paperwork.
My Marine Corps service was as a radio operator (actually a radio telegrapher) in the Air Wing. I never set foot in Vietnam. I spent most of my time sitting in rooms sending and receiving encrypted code messages in groups of letters that meant nothing to me. I have no Vietnam Service Medal. I'm what is considered to be a "Vietnam Era Vet." So the whole thing worked out pretty good for me.
One of the things I vividly remember from Marine Basic Training was when our platoon commander DI said to us, the first evening we were together as a platoon..."There are only six of you assholes who didn’t ask to be here." My impression was that if anybody was ever cut a smidgen of slack in Marine Corps basic, it was the draftees. They beat the hell out of all of us, but the draftees didn’t get as much of that part of Basic training as the rest of us.