IT was a stunned-rabbit moment. Frozen in fear, furious with the government and scared of the future.
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A voice on the radio played with birth dates like a game of bingo at the local RSL.
It was call-up time; the lottery used to determine who would become a "Nasho"; a male conscripted into the armed forces to do "National Service".
The roll of the dice. The last for some.
The droll voice would quietly do a roll call on each birthday and like a rabbit you wanted to bolt.
His voice dawdled past my birthday. I felt like I just dodged a bullet.
More than 60,000 young Australians were called up for National Service between 1964 and 1972 until it was axed by Gough Whitlam. Almost 20,000 of those called up were shipped off to Vietnam, and some didn't come back.
Conscription has divided Australians during most of our major overseas conflicts. The country was split asunder during World War I, as prime minister Billy Hughes fought public opinion and the courts over conscription.
Young men, press ganged into risking their lives far away, in a war they knew nothing of.
His voice dawdled past my birthday. I felt like I just dodged a bullet.
Palmer United Party senator- elect and former soldier Jacquie Lambie wants to bring it back.
The former soldier said so on national television last week, to a chorus of ridicule.
Half the world still has conscription, and when you think of Israel versus the rest of the Middle East you can understand why.
The list is diverse and many: Mexico, Denmark, Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia, Angola, Mozambique, Russia., Norway, Somalia, Thailand, Switzerland, Finland, Austria, Philippines, Greece, Turkey, Mali, Ukraine, Egypt, Iran, and on it goes.
If you strip away the uniform and the hysteria from "National Service", as opposed to conscription, it isn't half so bad.
It could give those of our idle, frustrated youth a half decent start; a year's compulsory service in a job, at least partially but certainly not fully funded by government.
In places like Northern Tasmania where teenage unemployment is a huge problem, a form of national service would be infinitely better than an indefinite life on Newstart or an indefinite life of crime.
How would this work? If they wanted a year in the armed services, which in a way is on offer already, that would be fine but not compulsory.
Service in an overseas conflict in this scheme would be voluntary or even forbidden.
They could opt for other pursuits in civilian life, but they would have to complete a year. If they got a meaningful job in the meantime, well and good.
In the past, employment schemes were often exploited by a few bad apples, who would hire someone for say, six months and take the government subsidy and when six months was up they would ditch the worker and take on a new one. Cheap labour.
The government could partially fund a nasho service by redirecting the small fortune spent on employment related schemes (more than $11 billion a year) and in return get some of it back with income tax generated by the employer's input.
Public funding would come from both Canberra and the states and territories.
In March there were more than 130,000 teenagers looking for full and part-time work across Australia.
They need not be cannon fodder, but rather a compulsory deployment that gave them a chance, and skilled them up with an employment history to put on the CV.
This might be a Jacquie Lambie thought bubble, from a novice yet to master the art of political correctness, but it has potential.
Former US president Bill Clinton created a green army in America as a way of marshalling Uncle Sam's idle youth, and you wouldn't say Bill was crazy.
