So, what have you been listening to lately?

[uwe]

Kick-ass, but lamentably short-lived mid-70ies 'supergroup' of sorts made up of Uriah Heep, Humble Pie/Colosseum & East of Wings luminaries. Dominant keyboards the way I like'm!  Byron is less operatic than with Heep and Clempson extremely tasteful.



High marks for Geoff Britton kicking (not hitting!) the huge gong at the end of the first song (03:27). (That said, he did run a kickboxing/karate training school in London in the late 70ies/early 80ies so he was perhaps just training to stay agile and in shape.)

[Basvarken]

Jonny Lang live in Montreux back in 1999.
Man, was he on fire back then (the entire band was excellent by the way)

[Dave W]

[uwe]

Dave is just scared of being drafted again.

By the way, why weren't you? Too young?

[Dave W]

If my number had come up, maybe my congenital heart valve defect would have been discovered much sooner.

[uwe]

So you were actually in the age group. Lucky you. Not sure about the detection thing, you also might have made the return trip in a black body bag from Vietnam. Or have kids with Agent Orange defects. Be careful what you wish for.

Who else here could have been potentially drafted?

My elder brother (born 1951, I was born nine years later) died of CHVD last year. He put that operation off so long (the birth defect was only detected with him when he was a senior citizen already) saying he wouldn't survive it until when he finally had to he sure enough didn't, just didn't wake up from coma and then his organs dropped out one by one. Self-fulfilling prophecy, the idiot. I miss him. And not just because of some cultural items that left forever imprints with his kid brother back in the early 70ies ...

[westen44]

https://www.usatoday.com/vietnam-war/draft-picker/

I could have potentially been drafted, but never was.  There were people who were drafted, people who never got drafted, and people who got drafted but went to Canada.  I had a distant relative I only met once who got drafted and ended up dying in Vietnam.  A first cousin was drafted, but came back from Vietnam fine.  That is the extent of my first-hand knowledge. 

[uwe]

I never knew it was based on a lottery, my goodness, how arbitrary!

[westen44]

I never knew it was based on a lottery, my goodness, how arbitrary!

Believe me, the people eligible for the draft and watching live TV to see what numbers would be drawn also thought the lottery was arbitrary.  The whole thing reminds me somewhat of Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery." 

[uwe]

In hindsight, a most unfortunate, good-for-nothing war, based on a wild mix of good intentions, Western arrogance + naïveté as well as frankly horrendously bad reconnaissance of the political and historical situation both in North and South Vietnam (not that all three haven't happened again and again in wars many years later!). The French obviously gave you the wrong manual to read.

Uncle Ho, an educated and soft-spoken man, was an early admirer of George Washington and the American Constitution, something must have gone wrong badly along the way.



And if you're cynical, you can console yourself with the realization that the US military learned a lot from the Vietnam conflict and that all that gained know-how and experience laid the seeds for the US still having unrivaled superiority for swift ad hoc large-scale military intervention anywhere on this planet. But it came at a very high price of American and Vietnamese lives.

[westen44]

No one disputes the fact that the war was a tragic mistake.  It isn't even debatable. 

[uwe]

There haven't been a lot of "good wars" since if you ask me. WW II was unparalleled in the easy (and not debatable) division between good and bad, especially in the European theater. Wars like that don't happen often though.

[morrow]

I was certainly in the age group , and thankfully lived in Canada. I know a fair number of Americans that moved here to avoid it. Many still live here.

[Dave W]

The lottery didn't come along until 1969. By then, the war had already become very unpopular. Before then, a lot depended on your local draft board.

Sorry to hear about your brother, Uwe. I may eventually have to face the same decision, but so far, so good.

[uwe]

Danke. Well, don't wait too long, Dave! The surgeons told us that the unrepaired defect had done huge damage to all of his heart in more recent years. While he received two new pig valves and numerous bypasses, the organ as such was in pitiful shape. They were shaken by the sight of it.

Pig valves ... That raises a question, what do Jews or Muslims do?