BRING BACK THE DRAFT -- BUT MAKE IT EQUITABLE
by Eugene Linden
There is one sure-fire way to bring an eerily disengaged American public into the debate about whether to invade Iraq: bring back the draft. In 1971, even though I opposed the Vietnam War and received an honorable discharge from the Navy by reason of conscientious objection, I still supported the draft. When I went to Vietnam shortly afterward as a journalist, one lesson my reporting on fragging and the demoralization was that it the U.S. was to have a draft army, we needed an equitable draft (I'll get back to that in a minute). Today, as we prepare for war with Iraq, we need the draft more than ever.
We need the draft because a democratically conscripted army acts as a restraint on the impetuous use of force. People think long and hard about the merits of military action if they or their children are the ones who are going to have to kill or be killed. That's true of family members of today's professional army of course, but those directly affected are now a much smaller subset of America. Launching a war is perhaps the most important decision a democracy can make, and it ought to be the result of a national consensus with risk and sacrifice shared equally.
My encounter with the military was of my own making since I voluntarily had joined NROTC after turning down an offered appointment to West Point. Although I ended up opposing the Vietnam war, I always respected the military. In my conscientious objection statement I argued that I would willingly defend my family and country, but not kill people overseas because of the untested logic of some arcane geopolitical theory (the domino theory -- remember that?). I was prepared to go to jail if I lost my case, but it never came to that. Instead I went to Vietnam as a journalist where I had the opportunity to see first hand what happens to an army when a draft is not equitable and the army's conscripted members don't understand what they are fighting for.
Demoralized soldiers began to turn on their officers and sergeants. Even as U.S. involvement wound down, fraggings (the word used to describe attempts to kill superior officers), became near epidemic in the rear echelons far away from the dangers of the front. Fraggings were complicated, sometimes involving racial tensions and drugs, but the skewed demographics of the draft set the stage for many of these attacks.
During World War II, the draft fairly equitably scooped up everybody with a pulse. An oil-field roughneck might be fighting next to a teacher or a musician. This meant that when tensions rose with the noncoms and officers, there was usually someone in the platoon who could act as a voice of reason before things got out of hand. By the time Vietnam rolled around, the more educated young men became pretty good at gaming the system. If you couldn't get out of military service altogether (Bill Clinton, high number in the draft lottery), chances are you could find a haven in the reserves (George W. etc), or at least avoid the units that did the fighting. This left the line units manned by the least articulate soldiers who were most prone to act on their frustrations. Moreover, the soldiers were as alienated from the sergeants as they were from the officers. Time and again, when I spoke to soldiers who'd witnessed attacks or attempted to kill their superiors, they told me, "nobody said, 'don't do it.'"
The inequitable draft skewed the debate about the war at home as well. Once you avoided Vietnam, your Vietnam problem was over, at least as a life and death matter. A politician who got his kid into the reserves might still support the war while insulating his family from the risks.
For me, one lesson of Vietnam was that an equitable draft would have much spurred debate about the merits of that war much more quickly. The corrupt rulers of Vietnam would have fallen sooner to be sure, but at the cost of fewer Vietnamese and American lives. For the military, however, the lesson of Vietnam was to switch to a professional army, thereby reducing the potential for both internal dissent and demoralization, as well as the incentives that would engage ordinary citizens in the debate about where and when the U.S. should go to war. This trend has reached an extreme as the U.S. prepares to invade Iraq. The possibility of war has inspired debate in Europe, the middle East and Asia, but Americans seems eerily disengaged from the looming prospect of conflict. An equitable draft would make sure we all paid attention.
