Several days later, I telephoned the Baltimore office of the Maryland National Guard. President Nixon had continued the policy of President Johnson of not sending the National Guard to Vietnam, and the Guard had become known as a way to avoid going to Nam. But the lady who answered the phone was not very nice. She said many of "you kids" have called since the lottery drawing. There was a four year waiting list to get into the National Guard. If I did not go on the waiting list when I became a freshman, then I should forget it.
One of my fellow Baltimoreans, however, was a senior that December of 1969. I didn't know him, other than being from Baltimore, we had nothing in common. He went to fancy expensive private schools, including McDonogh. I went to public school. He went to Yale, and I went to Maryland. He was a senior that December, due to graduate in a few months, I was a junior. According to his wikipedia article,
He wrote in his Yale 25th reunion book "I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy. I considered the war in Vietnam already lost." In an interview, Bolton discussed his comment in the reunion book, explaining that he decided to avoid service in Vietnam because "by the time I was about to graduate in 1970, it was clear to me that opponents of the Vietnam War had made it certain we could not prevail, and that I had no great interest in going there to have Teddy Kennedy give it back to the people I might die to take it away from."
On that same December 1, 1969, Bolton, with a birthday of November 20, 1948, drew number 185, considered at the time borderline for the draft. Though Bolton supported the Vietnam War, he enlisted in the Maryland Army National Guard, but did not serve in Vietnam. But somehow, when he claims to have made the same phone call that I did, he was given a different answer, and he enlisted in the Maryland National Guard in May of 1970. The linked Wikipedia article, which states that Bolton joined the National Guard in 1974, after the last American units had withdrawn from Vietnam, is not correct. Here is what John Bolton says, in his own words:
1970: Joined National Guard to avoid "ludicrous" Vietnam War
Before graduation, I joined the Maryland National Guard, finding a position by driving from armory to armory in the Baltimore area and signing up on waiting lists until a slot opened up. I had concluded that the Vietnam War was lost, and I made the cold calculation that I wasn't going to waste time on a futile struggle. Dying for your country was one thing, but dying to gain territory that antiwar forces in Congress would simply return to the enemy seemed ludicrous to me. Looking back, I am not terribly proud of this calculation, but my World War II veteran father, who still risked his life daily for his fellow citizens as a firefighter, approved of it, and that was good enough for me.
After my disappointing phone call to the Maryland National Guard, and upon graduation from the University of Maryland, I “beat the draft” by enlisting in the United States Navy. During my four years of service, I risked my life as a crew members on reconnaissance planes — P-3’s — flying over both North and South Vietnam. In the meantime, this pompous, arrogant, chicken hawk stayed in Maryland cheering on a war he didn’t dare go near. This war mongering chicken hawk should not be Secretary of State — he is unfit to hold any office.