All the evidence shows Trump played the deferment system for better than a year until that safe number was secured. | AP Photo Opinion Trump's Vietnam draft past sheds light on 'sacrifice' debate

When Donald Trump talks about his “sacrifices,” I think of Richard from Trump’s own Queens, New York, who was killed in my infantry company in Vietnam in 1969.

As the medic, I had to go out and get him in a tough stretch of fighting in which several others were killed. And his death has always haunted me because it was so very quick and he was so very new — having come only a month before.


Military records tell me now that Richard was 21 and would have been drafted in the same period when Trump, then 23, was enjoying a friendly medical deferment in Queens because of bone spurs in his feet. The New York billionaire has always insisted that he was prepared to serve if he had not gotten a high number in the draft lottery in December 1969. But all the evidence shows Trump played the deferment system for better than a year until that safe number was secured.

In truth, there were no clear-cut, moral answers for young men faced with the Vietnam draft in the 1960s. But one thing was certain: If you didn’t go, someone else like a Richard would effectively take your place.

It was never so openly transactional as the Civil War, when a future American president, Grover Cleveland, paid a Polish immigrant seaman to take his place in the ranks. But the end result was not so different. Time and again, working-class, high school graduates were sucked into the fighting, while the wealthy and more educated found a way to stay out.

This history is relevant again now for two reasons.

First it adds valuable context to Trump’s escalating feud with the Muslim father of a young Army captain killed in Iraq. When the father, Khizr Khan, spoke at the Democratic National Convention, he clearly touched a nerve when he asked rhetorically what Trump had sacrificed in his own life. The fierceness of Trump’s response has since embarrassed top Republicans. And it suggests Trump feels more vulnerable to Khan’s criticism because of his Vietnam past.

Second, Democrats, like Republicans, can learn from this experience. The national conventions this summer were filled with talk of doing more for working-class voters. But in many respects, the inequities of the Vietnam draft were a harbinger of the much larger divide now between an educated elite in this country and those workers left behind in the more high-tech and globalized economy.

Former President Bill Clinton — husband to Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee and former secretary of state — famously avoided the Vietnam draft by gaming the National Guard in Arkansas. He won election on a populist platform but surrounded himself with fellow baby boomers who were more likely to have studied at Oxford like himself than to have fought in Vietnam. And pressed by Republican business interests, Clinton went on to embrace a set of trade agreements that had big consequences for many working-class voters.

“Vietnam represents a class transition,” Kevin Phillips, the conservative political analyst and historian, told The Wall Street Journal at the time. “It began with the elites who were sure they could pull it out. It ended with a younger version of the McGeorge Bundys and Robert McNamaras walking away from it."

The one constant has been that the Richards of the world get caught in the middle.