Tony Catanese (81) avoids fighting in the Vietnam War, saving his life.

00:02 Grandma and grandpa were married and living in Fort Benning, Georgia, where he was going through officer candidate school to meet an obligation that he had because he had an ROTC scholarship at college. And Uncle Mike was born, but I hadn't even been conceived yet. And the war in Vietnam was escalating. They were just starting to send american troops. And that was back in the day where shortly after Grandpa was scheduled to go, they instituted the draft. And some of the crazy stuff that was happening around the time with the draft was it was based on your birthday and it was a random lottery and people would have draft viewing parties because they announced it on national television. Your name, if your birthday got called really early, people were somewhere in tears because they were pretty much going to be sent to a jungle on the other side of the world to fight. And if their birthday called late, they were ecstatic because there was a really good chance they wouldn't get drafted. So it was a pretty crazy time. So Grandpa was in officer candidate school and he got his orders that he was. He and another person in his unit were going to command a south vietnamese troop into combat into North Vietnam, which was the communist country that the US was helping fight. And they told him that his life expectancy once he got in Vietnam was going to be 90 days. So they told grandpa this. So Grandma made plans to move with Uncle Mike because he wasn't even a year old, that they were going to move back to Michigan to be with their family. And they were assuming Grandpa would never come back. Luckily, on his third physical, two days before he was supposed to fly out to Vietnam, they discovered he had a thyroid gland condition, which meant he couldn't be in the jungles and couldn't serve combat. And another guy in his unit replaced him. My dad learned that two weeks into him being in Vietnam, he was captured as a POW.

02:26 Prisoner of war.

02:27 Prisoner of war. And my dad lost track of what happened to him because my dad served. His military commitment got out, and Grandpa was since started working. He was on a business trip to Kansas City and he picked up a newspaper at the airport before they went in for their meetings, when he had flown in that morning and there was a picture of the guy who took his place on the front page of the Kansas City newspaper getting rolled off a military plane in a wheelchair. And he had just returned from being a pow for five years and he just happened to be from Kansas City, and Grandpa just happened to be in Kansas City that day. And he never really went there for work other than that trip.