New Orleans The Vietnam War forged my future every bit as much as it did for soldiers on both sides of the rice patties, not because I was risking death, but I because I was seeking to understand the course of my life. I was forced to decide where I really stood on questions of people versus privilege for students in schools avoiding the draft, on war and peace, on whether I wanted to work for justice and equality or find a safer political path. Were these just arguments and discussions in college dorms or where the real decisions had to be made to live your politics and leave the shelter of the school with the risks that entailed. In the late 60’s before the draft lottery, leaving school meant being drafted going to war or going to jail. Leaving the country never seemed an option to me then. I was too American, too Boy Scout, student council, and the football and track teams.
After the April mobilization at the United Nations and the march on the Pentagon, I left school to organize against the draft after a weekend’s training thanks to the Boston Draft Resistance Center. Opinions in the South where I went to high school heavily favored the war in 1968. I may not have had a clue of what to do and how to go about it, but for some crazy reason I thought I needed to be true to myself, to be part of the solution, not the problem. I was drafted and knew enough in my personal resistance to refuse to do deep knee bends while holding a dogeared letter from Ochsner Hospital in New Orleans saying that I urgently needed knee surgery after ligament and cartilage tears in the fifth game of the season. It wasn’t my first on last physical, courtesy of the Selective Service’s local draft board until I made it to 26 and finally a 4-F. By that time I had passed my personal Rubicon from war resistance to welfare rights to having completed my first five years at ACORN.
My point is that the war was personal. Young men, like me, made life or death decisions about their futures, way before their brains merged in the anger and passion of youth. Organizing against the draft was a part of a protest, and Vietnam ended mandatory military conscription, even if registration continued.
Forever wars and this latest Trump-Hegseth-Netanyahu Iran attack, where the president can claim, as Obama and others did before him, that he didn’t need authorization from Congress because no soldiers were at risk in air war with missiles flying. Of course, there’s mass conscription in Israel. Of course, as we already know, American soldiers are dying and planes are being shot down, even if the numbers are small. To maintain the fiction that war doesn’t affect our homeland, the US has ordered evacuations of citizens from 14 Gulf countries, even as no fly zones make it hard to leave with Iranian missiles and drones being fired in response.
Are all of these military adventures possible because we don’t have as much skin, literally, in the game? The US has armed forces aplenty. I have them in our family, but they live on a track separate now from mainstream American, its people and politics. You can live many places, coast to coast, and not ever realize that we have an army. They are volunteers, who are as on-demand for war, like DoorDash is for delivery, while too many may have opinions about these wars but are oblivious about the services and what Hegseth, the cowboy running the Pentagon, calls the war fighters.
It almost hurts me to say that we need a draft again. I can’t go there, but we need a mandatory service requirement that brings this all to every home and forces the kind of choices I faced decades ago. The military would still be an option that any young man or woman might choose, but they would have to choose something in service to the country that amounted to shared and equal sacrifice. Work at national parks, hospitals, VA centers, or wherever. Prepare a fire trail or help harvest a crop. Do something that embeds that service is not just somewhere that folks go who need a job and can’t afford tuition.
Until the price of war is personal again, people like Trump and many others will spit out platitudes about the death of young men and women as acceptable and exceptional without bothering to even explain the whys and wherefores or ask for approval before they put the country and its people at risk. Somehow, we have to bring this home, if we want to ever stop forever wars.