Last draftee who served in Vietnam retires

By Jeffry Scott
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

cwogreen He was a kid who didn’t want to be a soldier.  There was a war in Vietnam and a peace movement in America.

But then he got the government's letter. So he quit his job at a furniture store, quit thinking about college and found himself on a cold December morning in 1970 standing in front of a post office in Sumter, S.C., listening to a soldier read names off a clip board until he heard his: “Clyde Green!”

With that, the 20-year-old kid climbed on the bus with the rest of the recruits and headed to a U.S. Army base where he’d get his hair shorn to stubble, a uniform, shots, a bunk in a barracks and quick indoctrination into the military.

“I didn’t want to join the Army,” Clyde Green said last week. “The Army came and got me.”

When he retires as a chief warrant officer in a ceremony Thursday morning at Ft. McPherson — after 39 years, 9 months and 15 days of continuous active duty – he will be, by the best accounting, the last U.S. Army draftee who fought in Vietnam.

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James A. Restucci is the author of this blog. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Internal License.

One Response to Last draftee who served in Vietnam retires

  1. EagleWatch says:

    Welcome home Chief, and thank you for your service!