So many 'survivors' seemed, initially, strange to me

Reminiscing over the holidays, about our move here 13 years ago (Mort immigrated on 16 December, our house closed on the 19th, etc) in 1996. I'd been 'in Virginia' on my own for three months. One of the first things that hit my 'cultural awareness' was the number of men I'd met at Datatel who were about my age, and Vietnam vets. I kept thinking....wow, so many folks lived through that. It took me a while to wise up to the facts. Of course the men I met who served in Vietnam were 'survivors' ! But my context, having left the US to live in Canada permanently in 1969, was either the number of fellows I knew personally who had died in Vietnam (5 from my graduating h/s class of only 70, was one statistic)...and then the large number of deserters and draft-dodgers I met in Montreal, Toronto, etc. When I started working as an in-course advisor at University of Toronto in early 1970, I kept being amazed by the number of young male undergraduates who easily contemplated dropping out for a while, or changing majors, etc with so much aplomb. It took me so long to adjust to the fact that that generation of guys didn't have to make the hard choices about war, life, etc.