BACKDRAFT

Charlie Rangel is once again proposing military conscription. He does it every decade or so, just to get the point across that none of the pro-war bigwigs has ever heard a shot fired in anger, and none of their kids are currently on the firing line. I certainly don't mind keeping that salient point before the public eye. But the logic behind it is weaker than it looks, for those who actually have had some experience with the draft.

I was a draft counsellor during the Vietnam War. Which meant my colleagues and I had to know more about the Selective Service system than the people who administered it--they could (and often did) just make things up as they went along, but we had to be able to cite chapter and verse in the applicable regulations and laws. So we can talk from highly knowledgeable personal experience. We know that the draft was never the great social leveller that Rangel's enthusiasts envision.

The Vietnam War draft worked with a manpower pool considerably larger than they really needed, most of the time. That was the point of the infamous "lottery"--a number was assigned to each birthdate, and the people whose numbers were above a certain limit never had to deal with the draft at all. The number was usually well below or just above 200, out of a possible 366. Got that? One-third of the potential pool never heard from the SS at all.

What about the other two-thirds? Well, half of them failed the physical exam. That's not news. In fact, ever since people first started keeping these statistics (World War I, to be exact) half of everybody has failed the physical. How do you fail the physical? Not, generally, by walking into the examining station, being carefully checked out, and being found to be physically, mentally, psychologically, or morally unfit for service. The enlistment/induction physical has been cursory at best--anybody with the usual number of limbs and no visible deformities is likely to pass, unless--

Unless he presents documentation from a physician that he has some kind of serious but not immediately visible medical problem. Like having one of anything the normal human being made to standard specifications is supposed to have two of. Or a history of asthma. Or a history of mental disease or disorder. Ulcers. The list set forth in Army Regulation 40-501, Chapter 2, (www.army.mil/usapa/epubs/index.html.) goes on for 32 pages. Most of the conditions listed there are not immediately visible to the naked eye of an examining physician in a hurry. I won't even go into the numberless stories of young men with problems that were (or anyway should have been) visible to the naked eye, who passed the infamous induction physical anyway.

And how does one get documentation from a physician? Think about it. First, you have to have a doctor, or at least be able to see one regularly, as needed. And then the doctor in question needs to have the time and the inclination to actually write up comprehensible and relevant documentation. None of this is much use to a young man from an urban or rural ghetto, whose only source of medical care is the emergency room of an overcrowded, understaffed hospital, from a doctor whose idea of medical documentation is to scrawl across a prescription pad, "Sick--no work." In short, what we are accustomed to thinking of as the fairest and most democratic draft exemption is in fact available almost entirely to the middle and upper classes.

Never mind the less common exemptions and deferments, such as family hardship, conscientious objection, or academic. Academic deferments were mostly eliminated in the last phase of the Vietnam draft, and family hardship and CO never accounted for more than 10% of all deferments and exemptions anyway.

The fate of our current Commander in Chief tells us all we need to know about the usual lot of draftees with family connections--if they actually do have to submit to some sort of military service, they can manage to perform it close to home (or, as in W's case, close to one's girlfriend's home,) on a convenient part-time schedule, in a completely safe venue.

Which is pretty much the way the system works in countries that still have "universal" military service--if the sons and daughters of people with clout have to perform it at all, they get the safe, cushy jobs.

None of this should surprise us. The military establishment is anything but a class leveller. In fact, it is the only American institution in which class-mixing (called "fraternization") is actually a court-martial offense. The line between officers and enlisted personnel is not quite the same as it was a century ago, when officers had to purchase their positions. Now they just have to have a college degree. But the result is the same (and arguably costs roughly the same amount of money, controlling for inflation.)

The only area in which the United States Army has succeeded in overcoming social barriers is race. The US Army is the most integrated institution in America. But the draft had nothing to do with that. The integration first occurred back when we had a draft, but if anything it has improved with the advent of the all-volunteer army. It happened because the brass decided it was going to happen, and made sure it did. That's one of the advantages of effective top-down organization.

The rewards of military service, for those who have served, are far from race-neutral, much less class-neutral. The World War II/Korean War GI Bill, which moved a whole generation of working-class youth into the middle class by providing home mortgages, higher education, and health care, is long gone. This generation of veterans gets a lot less, and if they started out poor, they may still not be able to afford college without going into serious debt.

So from the point of view of forcing the middle class to take a personal interest in whatever foreign adventures our leaders may decide to undertake, the draft is less than a panacea.

In fact, it may serve to encourage the hawks in their adventurism. My grandfather, a career soldier, always told his kids, "Never pick up a gun if you don't intend to use it, never point it if you don't intend to shoot, and never shoot if you don't intend to kill." The draft puts a loaded gun into the hands of leaders who may not be any smarter or wiser than George W. Bush. Give it a thought, folks.