The Draft.

This is not a history of the American Selective Service system, known as “the draft” in my day, but it is a reflection on what I know about it. And an argument that the draft can be a tool to stop war and promote democracy. I note that I was not drafted, served in the Peace Corps, and was old enough not to be subject to the draft when the lottery arrived.

WW II

The Wallowa County Chieftain published front page pictures of the men going off to training every week during WW II, and then published photos and accounts of individuals who were reposted, promoted, or had become heroes or casualties. There was no distinction between volunteers and draftees. Being drafted could be an honor. Professional athletes Joe Dimagio and Ted Williams were drafted or volunteered. Many sitting congressmen resigned or took leaves to serve.

During the War, women worked in factories, and civilians in Wallowa County rotated on watch for enemy planes and balloons—a Japanese balloon with a bomb landed in Oregon; a training plane landed on the golf course in Enterprise. Most of the men came back, settled in on farms and in town, or went off to college on the GI Bill.

Historian Alvin Josephy, who covered the Pacific with typewriter and recorder as a Marine Corps journalist, said that WW II did not unite the country; the GI Bill did that. That Bill paid for college education and provided farm and business loans. My hunch is that tracing local records will find several houses and farms that benefited from the GI Bill here in Wallowa County,

I would argue that it was all of a piece, that the War and the GI Bill created the post-war world. That President Roosevelt had prepared the nation for that War, in part with his lend-lease assistance to England. And then the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor ignited America’s broad support of the War. Yes, there were conscientious objectors, and yes, there was disgruntlement by veterans immediately after the War, and the GI Bill was passed largely because of fear of a reprise of the “Bonus Army” experience after WW I. That “army” of thousands of veterans occupied Washington D.C. for months, demanding bonuses which had been promised them during the War.

The GI Bill did help heal the nation, but I’d argue that it was the drafted and volunteer Army and Navy and Marine Corps men –and a few women—from across the country, and across ethnic and religious lines that began creating a new middle class in America. The Bill sealed the deal for many, creating a large new mass of college educated men and putting them in houses in Levittown and Enterprise. Italian Catholics and Irish Protestants, Greek-Americans and Anglo Americans all made up this new, mostly white, middle class.

Black veterans and Native Americans were mostly excluded from the new middle class by red-lining real estate laws and old prejudices. Nevertheless, I think the homogenizing of the country in war helped prepare us eventually for Civil Rights and Native American cultural emergence a few decades later. War veterans knew that bombs and bullets did not discriminate on the basis of color or church affiliation. And, post-War, veterans dominated Congress and GI Bill veterans became prominent in education and business. Most of my male (and white) teachers were veterans who were the first in their families to attend college.

Korea

The draft and the GI Bill continued through the Korean War, and baseballer Ted Williams flew combat missions, but that seems a war that the country never viewed as existentially as it had WW II, and one that the public was happy to be rid of. I remember watching the POWs come home in Oceanside, California, which is right next to Marine Corps Camp Pendleton. We watched the news carefully for neighbor Jimmie Egan’s father to come home, but he did not, and then we all put Korea in our rearview mirror. I have talked with Korean War veterans who felt “forgotten.”

Vietnam

I came of draft age in 1960, before Vietnam was a placename on American minds. By the time I turned 26, in 1968, I had successfully used draft deferments in college, grad school, and as a Peace Corps Volunteer to not get drafted. But, at 26, I was on the Peace Corps staff in Turkey and Volunteers were being drafted out of the field.

I believe the Vietnam War ended because of the draft, and the policy of the time that rotated soldiers into the country for one 12-month tour. And the institution of the “draft lottery.” The military churned through millions of men, sometimes having as many as a half million in country. But gradually, because of that one-year tour policy, they ran out of the volunteers and the easily drafted poor people and, frankly, African Americans and Mexican Americans who were in larger numbers not in college or the Peace Corps, and they began drafting the sons of White doctors and lawyers. As white men were drafted out of college and the Peace Corps, professional parents objected, and draft refusal became a badge of honor.

It took some time and the very curious institution of a draft lottery, but the War did end for Americans after less than a decade. Ask any man who turned 18 between December of 1969 and July of 1973, and they can tell you exactly where they were and what they were doing on lottery day. It was a crap shoot with ping pong balls with dates drawn and displayed on national TV. If your number was low, and you were drafted, Vietnam was almost a certainty, and casualty a high probability. Men went to jail for burning draft cards, and some went to Canada to escape the draft. Those who made it through the lottery with high numbers remember those saving numbers today. Vietnam vets were heckled when they came home, and often hid or distanced themselves from their involvement.

The Vietnam draft experience did not foster an extension of the middle class or a flurry of patriotism. The feeling in the country was that we had been lied to rather than courted and prepared with reason and passion for a just and necessary war. But the draft, including the four years of lottery, did help bring that war do a close.

Post-Vietnam

Subsequent wars have been fought with an all-volunteer military. There have been long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Veterans have not been significantly noticed, rewarded, or part of the political power structure. Our current president escaped Vietnam with a bogus foot condition, and has paid no political price. The military, which everyone says is still the best in the world, continues with ad campaigns and signing bonuses to keep people in the service. It grows with huge budgets and purchases of massive amounts of very technical weapon systems. It’s become part of the scramble for profit and wealth

But mothers and fathers still worry about their sons—and daughters now—who choose to join the military and put themselves into war. And many draftees would have found reason to escape in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran wars.

Finally, I believe that a democracy is run best when the total population is involved in its risks and rewards. I know that I did not serve in the military, but I did serve as a Peace Corps Volunteer. There is plenty of public work to do in this country and across the world. Volunteerism, in the Peace Corps or AmeriCorps or under some other umbrella, might be an alternative, but the draft would ensure that we all serve, that we all have a stake in the wars we choose to fight, that we all share in this country’s risks and rewards.

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