I was talking to a student about the draft in Japan during the war and how her grandfather had tried to enlist but was too short. Later on, of course, the Japanese military wasn’t very picky anymore and he got sent an akagami (lit. “Red paper) from the Imperial Army informing him that his time to fight had come.

He was still only 16 or 17 at the time and Americans were now at Japan’s doorstep. No longer too small to die for his country, he was trained how to unpin a grenade and lie down before an advancing tank to literally stop it in his tracks. Imagine that.

For some reason, that got me thinking about the Selective Service. I remember having to register at the age of 18 and for the next five years the potential to be drafted always hung over my head like an ominous cloud. Every time the US attacked or bombed another country—and we did it a lot during Reagan and Bush’s administrations, I always wondered if my own time to fight had come. It had only been a decade or so earlier that boys were being drafted to fight in Vietnam.

Fortunately for me and the soldiers who volunteer, the US military figured out that it was better in the long run to just pay service members more and improve the benefits package for veterans than to conscript unwilling citizens to do your bidding.

Out of curiosity, I went to the Selective Service’s website where I found a tool to look up your draft number. After some 30 years, I was still in the system. With a few clicks of the mouse, I printed out my Selective Service card. It would have come in handy when I tried to renew my license ten years ago and didn’t have a third piece of ID, such as my Social Security card, on me.