Would Donald Trump have been an officer if he were drafted?

Draftees all became enlisted men. Qualified men who would otherwise be drafted might volunteer as officers before being conscripted, though, either in the regular component or in the National Guard or Reserves. This would mean spending more time in uniform than the two years a draftee would have to serve. George W. Bush, for instance, spent two years of full-time duty learning to be a fighter pilot and two more as a Air National Guard officer.

Thanks. Then can we suppose lengthy training in the CONUS was used, by some with connections or in a capacity requiring long training, to bide time and delay entering the combat zone? The heel spur Trump supposedly had interests me in that it prevented any involvement with the military service, even a desk position.

"Where's your will to be weird?" - Jim Morrison

Most draftees during the Vietnam War did not go to Vietnam. Most of those who went had non-combat jobs. Flying a 1950's vintage high-performance jet at low levels was more dangerous than anything other than direct combat. Most positions requiring unusually long training also require that the trainee commit to spending more time in uniform, with the expectation of deployment. Bush, for instance, cold have been activated and sent to South East Asia and apparently did volunteer to go, but was turned down.

On the other hand, an enlisted seaman or airman would have next to no chance of being assigned to a combat position. Mind you, trying to get safe jobs didn't always work. John Kerry, for instance, says he deliberately chose to be a Naval officer in coastal patrol boats because he thought there was no chance of fighting. They then changed the rules on him, and he got out at his earliest opportunity.

As for Trump's medical exemption, all positions in the armed services have a minimum standard given that even a administrative clerk could find himself at sea or in a front line unit. If they just want non-deployable office workers, they just hire civilians.

Volunteers have to meet the same medical and physical standards as draftees, so if Trump had a disqualifying condition, he wouldn't have been able to serve no matter how much he wanted to do so.

As for "connections" and wealth - connections didn't get one out of serving, information did. there were so many ways of getting exempted that anyone who really didn't want to go who knew of them didn't have to go. By the height of the war, universities were nexuses of information on how to avoid the draft. Getting into university in the late sixties was fairly easy as well. Academic standards were achievable by most students and just about any middle income family could afford to send their child to university. Costs then were much lower, than today even taking inflation into account.

Outside universities, comprehensive information was harder for most people to find, this being decades before the internet. That's probably the main reason why men from less affluent backgrounds got drafted proportionately more than men from middle or upper income families.

As for Trump's medical exemption, all positions in the armed services have a minimum standard given that even a administrative clerk could find himself at sea or in a front line unit. If they just want non-deployable office workers, they just hire civilians.


But you also have to remember that back then, the military, especially the enlisted, wasn't paid squat. Even factoring in housing and feeding it was probably cheaper to use draftees.

That's true, though overhead costs (training, accommodation, rations, uniforming, etc.) and the need to replace those troops every year and a half would likely eat up any savings on wages as such. While the US armed services of the sixties did make more use of uniformed personnel than they do now, DoD still had tens of thousands of civilian employees back then.