1964 - Escalation

After the assassination of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem in November 1963, the political situation in the country grew increasingly perilous. South Vietnamese civilians did not support a U.S.-backed provisional military junta, and the South Vietnamese military was proving unreliable against the Viet Cong and other North Vietnamese forces, who did not fight conventionally and were entrenched in the jungles and countryside villages. On August 2, 1964, the destroyer U.S.S. Maddox was fired upon by North Vietnamese torpedo boats.while conducting surveillance. On August 4, 1964, another incident (now known to never have actually occurred) took place, involving the Maddox and the U.S.S. Turner Joy.

A resolution was quickly introduced in Congress which allowed the president to "take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression" as well as to "take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty..." The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on August 10, 1964. 

Public Law 88-360 of July 7, 1964 amended section 6(o) of the Universal Military Training and Service Act as amended, which exempted from being drafted (unless he volunteered for induction) the sole surviving son of a family where one or more of his siblings had been killed in action, died in military service, or died as a result of military service to include the father. 

1. Delinquents who have attained the age of nineteen years in the order of their dates of birth with the oldest being selected first.
2. Volunteers who have not attained the age of twenty-six years and in the sequence in which they have volunteered for induction.
3. Nonvolunteers who have attained the age of nineteen years and have not attained the age of twenty-six years and who do not have a wife with whom they maintain a bona fide family relationship in their homes, in the order of their dates of birth with the oldest being selected first.
4. Nonvolunteers who have attained the age of nineteen years and have not attained the age of twenty-six years and who have a wife with whom they maintain a bona fide family relationship in their homes, in the order of their dates of birth with the oldest being selected first.
5. Nonvolunteers who have attained the age of twenty-six years in the order of their dates of birth, with the youngest being selected first.
6. Nonvolunteers who have attained the age of eighteen years and six months and who have not attained the age of nineteen years, in the order of their dates of birth with the oldest being selected first.