In the 1960s and early 1970s, four young men in Kansas were of age to fight in the Vietnam War.

For various reasons, they didn’t  three of them didn’t serve in the armed forces, and one fulfilled most of his commitment in the Marine Corps reserves.

Now the four are running for governor in the Kansas Republican Party primary.

Their memories of that turbulent time more than 30 years ago are somewhat foggy.

But most of them say they remember the anxiety felt by themselves and their families concerning one of most divisive wars in American history.

Dan Bloom, 53

“My Dad said, ‘I don’t give a damn what’s going on. You’re not going to Vietnam,'” Bloom recalled.

The Eudora man said his father suffered a serious head injury in combat during World War II and didn’t want his son going to war.

Bloom, who was 18 years old in 1968 as U.S. military involvement in southeast Asia was reaching its height, went to Emporia State University, where he played football.

Bloom said he partied too much at school, his grade-point average was microscopic, and he was ready to leave college and go into the military, thinking he would try to become a pilot.

This time, he said, it was his mother who stepped in, telling one of the school’s deans, “My son thinks he’s going to the military. You grab his scrawny butt and re-enroll him.”

Back in school, Bloom injured his leg on a kickoff return against Wayne State College of Nebraska. The date was Sept. 19, 1970, and shortly afterward, Bloom said he was drafted.

But when he reported for his pre-induction physical, the doctors looked at the leg and sent him home, Bloom said.

He went on to finish college, became a teacher and coach and later Eudora school superintendent. He now is a businessman and said he considered himself lucky. Of the war, he said, “That wasn’t a good deal. I have friends who went, and it was a bad deal.”

Dave Kerr, 57

Kerr, the state senate president from Hutchinson, said he received his draft notice during his fifth year at Kansas State University, where he had received two undergraduate degrees, in biology and psychology. That was in 1968 when there were about 500,000 U.S. ground troops in Vietnam.

Kerr said he went in for his physical and was excused from service because he had a curvature of the spine.

Kerr said he didn’t remember what he was feeling at the time. “I just remember it happened. You go for the interview with the doctor after you have been through the physical. You have one minute with the doctor, and he makes the decision,” he said.

Kerr said he knew he had curvature of the spine and “that was a stated reason not to take you” into the service.

But before the physical, Kerr said he had expected to go into the service and to Vietnam. “I’ve always been a supporter of our country. I didn’t necessarily think our involvement was as it should be, but I’ve always been a very loyal American.”

Kerr went on to Kansas University to earn a master’s in business administration.

Bob Knight, 61

Knight, now mayor of Wichita, had grown up in a poor family and been living on his own from the time he was 15.

He graduated from high school in 1959 and joined the Marines, partly, he said, because of the image projected by John Wayne in the movie the “Sands of Iwo Jima.”

“I saw John Wayne save western civilization in a movie and thought that was kind of cool. After about 15 minutes of boot camp, I didn’t like the Duke that much,” Knight said.

Knight said he was on active duty for six months, and then on active reserve status for 4 1/2 years.

He said there were several times when he thought he was going to be called back to active duty and possibly sent to Vietnam, but it never happened.

“I got caught in an interesting time frame,” he said.

The major escalation of U.S. troops didn’t start until 1965 as Knight’s military service ended. By the end of 1964, there were 23,300 Americans serving in Vietnam; by the end of 1965, there were 184,300. Troop strength reached its highest point in April 1969 when there were 543,000 Americans in Vietnam.

But Knight said there was no question that he would have gone if called. “That was part of the deal,” he said.

Tim Shallenburger, 48

Shallenburger is the youngest candidate in the race, and he would have been draft age in 1972 when U.S. troop involvement was rapidly coming to an end. The draft ended in 1973.

Still, Shallenburger said he remembered being a student at Pittsburg State University driving in his car and listening to the lottery numbers being picked. From 1969 through 1972, the Selective Service used a lottery to determine the order of call to induction by birth date.

Shallenburger said his birth date was in the high 200s, so he was safe from being drafted.

He said his older brother joined the Navy during the years of massive escalation of the war.

“We knew a lot of people who went. I had a stepcousin killed in Vietnam. If I had been drafted, I would have gone,” he said.

But, he said, by the time he was draft age, there was a strong sentiment by the public against the war. “When you lived in the 60s and 70s, Vietnam was an everyday event. Walter Cronkite would give you the body count every night,” he said.

Shallenburger later quit school to work as a manager at a pizza restaurant and then later a repossession man at a financial service company before working for a bank and then getting involved in politics.

The draft

Bill Tuttle, a professor of American studies at KU, said one of the many tragedies of the Vietnam War was the way men were drafted.

In the early days of the war, there were draft deferments for college students. Then the lottery kicked in. But there were still many ways to get out of the draft, which were usually employed by middle- and upper-class people, he said.

“The one thing we know about the people who fought in Vietnam is that most of them were poor and black,” Tuttle said.

Tuttle, who served in the Air Force before heavy U.S. involvement in Vietnam, said young men during the Vietnam era “had some difficult choices.”

To avoid the draft, “a lot of people lied and cheated,” many went to prison; others fled to Canada. There were hundreds of draft counseling services helping young people get out of the war. No one, he said, wanted to be the last American to die in Vietnam.

Michael Kuhn, president of the state council of Vietnam Veterans of America Inc., said he didn’t find it unusual that the candidates didn’t serve in Vietnam because the vast majority of draft-age men at the time didn’t go to war. And he said he didn’t think any less of them for not going.

‘Sense of duty’

“It just depended on your mode of life at the time,” said Kuhn, who served as a combat medic for an Army reconnaissance platoon in 1968.

He said when he was drafted, he had an opportunity to get into a reserve unit through his father’s boss, who was the unit’s company commander.

“I said ‘no.’ I was willing to go to Vietnam. My granddad was a veteran of World War I, and my dad was a veteran of World War II. I thought it was a sense of duty. I was proud to go,” he said.

By August 1972, the last of the U.S. ground troops left Vietnam. On April 30, 1975, the last 10 Marines were evacuated from the U.S. embassy in Saigon. Less than three hours later, the North Vietnamese flag was flying over the presidential palace in Saigon. More than 57,000 Americans died in the war; more than 11,000 of them were teenagers.