PrimeTime: Marrying to Avoid Draft

Feb. 1 -- "We have to talk," Marc Horowitz told his fiance Sherry Blum. It was the afternoon of Aug. 26, 1965, and he had a problem that could change their lives forever.

Horowitz, like thousands of young men across America, had found out that he needed to be married by midnight that night — or risk facing the draft. By day's end, scores of them would end up Las Vegas, unexpectedly becoming husbands.

In August of 1965, 35,000 men were being called up each month to serve in what would become America's longest and most divisive war. President Lyndon Johnson, determined to defeat communism, decided to escalate U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam. To wage that war, the Pentagon needed to find more soldiers. To find more soldiers, the president had already doubled the draft call. Looking for even more eligible men to fight a war against communism, the Defense Department advised the president to change an old policy: Let them draft married men without children.

On Aug. 26, without any advance notice, President Johnson made it law. Anyone who was married before midnight that night would still be eligible for a deferment. But men who married after that would not be able to avoid or postpone serving in the military simply because they were married. So now many men faced one of the most important decisions of their lives: Should they rush to the altar, or risk fighting in Vietnam?

News of the new rule quickly spread across the country. For East Coast couples, it was too late. But for many men on the West Coast, there was still a chance they could get hitched in time.

Horowitz heard a bulletin while driving with his aunt through California's San Fernando Valley. Though he was already engaged to be married, he doubted that he and fiancée Sheryl Blum could wed by midnight.

"I said I don't know if we could get it all together," Horowitz told his aunt. "And she said, 'Are you really saying that you want a honeymoon in Vietnam?'"

The deadline looming, Horowitz and Blum set their sights on one of the few places that required no waiting period or blood test to wed: Las Vegas.