Right before Trump graduated from college in 1968, he had an unblemished medical record, except for one hiccup in the form of an appendectomy at the age of 10, reports The New York Times.
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The year of his graduation, 22-year-old Trump was as healthy as any robust 6-feet-2-inch-tall young man his age. Trump had been medically exempted for more than a year when the draft lottery began in December 1969, well before he received what he has described as his “phenomenal” draft number.
Trump’s public statements about his draft experience sometimes conflict with his Selective Service records, and he is often hazy in recalling details.
He has never denied that he benefited from five draft deferments that saved him before from the conflagration in Southeast Asia, four to allow him to continue his studies and one thanks to a doctor’s note saying he had a spur on a heel bone. The remaining were for his education.
The matter of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s military service (or lack thereof) has surfaced twice so far in this election cycle, first in July 2015 when Trump maligned Sen.
“For all practical purposes, once you got the 1-Y, you were free and clear of vulnerability for the draft, even in the case of the lottery”, Richard Flahavan, a spokesman for the Selective Service System, the USA military conscription agency, told the paper.
It surely also doesn’t help that in a 1997 radio interview with shock-jock Howard Stern, somehow Mr Trump managed to suggest that avoiding getting sexually transmitted diseases had been his “personal Vietnam”.
Trump’s deferment from military service has been scrutinized recently following, the speech given by Khizr Khan, a father of a fallen Muslim-American soldier, at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia last week.
Of the bone spurs themselves, Trump said, “Over a period of time, it healed up”.
“This was much easier”, Trump said, holding up the decoration.
“He was already classified and determined not to be subject to the draft under the conditions in place at the time”, Mr. Flahavan said.
When asked why he sought to avoid the draft, Trump said “it was a very long time ago”, and he was a college student.
Trump likened his history to that of Vice President Joe Biden and other prominent politicians, who also received several deferments. “But The New York Times is just absolutely a disaster”.
With his schooling behind him, there would have been little to prevent someone in Trump’s situation from being drafted, if not for the diagnosis of his bone spurs.
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On 17 February 1972, Trump was reclassified 4-F (not qualified for military service), presumably due to the abolishment of the 1-Y classification the previous year.
