The Draft, Part 2

My older brother Michael turned 18 in 1968. He had no plans to go to college, so a student deferment was not available. My father advised my brother about what to do when we went the draft board. He told Michael to make sure they knew about the pin in his leg, the result of a nasty motorcycle accident Michael had in high school. Dad recommended he affect a slight limp. My dad told him to tell the people inspecting him that he had heard the Army would pay to fix it.

All of these subterfuges had no effect, but Michael received a medical deferment just the same, due to his allergy to penicillin. I spoke to him just recently to make sure about the details, and he told me his official classification was 1-Y. He joked that with a 1-Y, it was likely our mom would be called up before he would.

 In December of 1969, the first of the draft lotteries was held, and the results would apply to men born between 1944 to 1950. Most of them would have already gone through the process, just as my brother had, but some of them would have deferments with a time limit on them, like those who were attending college. Those with low numbers would be conscripted, while those with high numbers would be spared. My brother was already effectively out of the system, so he paid no attention to the lottery. The number for his birthday was 69. Without the 1-Y, he would have been drafted and almost certainly sent to Vietnam, as was the case for many of his classmates.

I was five and a half years younger than my brother, with a birthday in late December. My time in the barrel came not when I was eighteen, when I registered, but instead when I turned twenty in 1975. Nixon was gone and Saigon had fallen, but I still might be forced to give up two years of my life to peacetime service, like Tom Lehrer and Jules Feiffer before me. Unlike my brother, I had gone to college and was still attending in 1975, but a low lottery number could render that moot. My lottery number was 310. If the Army didn’t change the rules, I had no reason to worry about the Selective Service.

The lottery’s introduced in 1969 was due to an executive order by Richard Nixon, in consultation with the armed forces. It’s doubtful this idea could have passed Congress at the time. Being seen as anti-draft was political poison in most of the country. Even so, the Army had always disliked the draft. It tended to produce very bad soldiers and the wars after World War II didn’t require the same level of manpower.

While it was young men, their friends and family who were marching in the street, the decision to kill the draft came from the military. Men in a smoke-filled room somewhere, men who had no reason to hide their contempt for the “dirty hippies” opposing the draft, effectively got rid of this system for their own reasons. Pleasing the protesters was neither here nor there to the Army, but Nixon did see the political advantage in taking an issue away from his political opponents. It was never presented as a concession to the anti-war movement. Nixon claimed he hadn’t seen the anti-war protests, that he had been watching sports on TV at the time. (Some of his publicly stated lies were just as transparent and foolish as Trump’s.) It was also made crystal clear that failing to sign up for the Selective Service was a crime and the government would still prosecute anyone who didn’t get a draft card.

The change was swift and the logic odd. Why would the government continue this bureaucracy and put the full force of the law behind it if wasn’t going to use the Selective Service to conscript young men in the army? Why did both major parties support a bureaucracy that effectively did nothing? Parties with anti-draft planks were small and had no clout, like the Libertarians or the Peace and Freedom Party. In 1976, the first presidential election that I was old enough to cast a vote, I registered Libertarian in large part because of my dislike of the draft, but also because of Nixon’s abuses of the FBI and IRS to go after his political enemies.

I voted for the Libertarian candidate Roger McBride for president in 1976. His claim to fame was as a “faithless elector” in 1972, casting his vote in the Electoral College for the Libertarian Party candidates instead of Nixon and Agnew, the ticket his group of electors had were meant to represent. 1972 was the first year the Libertarian Party had fielded candidates for president and vice-president. This is exactly the sort of pointless act of rebellion that appealed to me when I was young.

I even decided to attend a meeting of the Libertarians after the 1976 election was over. Within an hour of meeting my fellow party members, the bloom was off the romance. I was passionately against the Selective Service and COINTELPRO, and while I didn’t use drugs at the time, it was clear to me the War on Drugs was a bad idea. Others there, all of us relatively young white men, were equally passionate that not one penny of federal money should be spent to support the postal system.

I left the meeting with a very strong impression, one that has not changed in the more than forty years since. The Libertarian Party was chock full of nuts back then, and it hasn’t improved with age.

I write about the draft because it was a reality all young men faced, my brother and I included, both of us now in our sixties. Men just a few years younger than am I did not face this danger, and it has been dormant for decades, even now when the United States has been fighting wars that have lasted decades. When the draft existed, when young men were forced to give up years of their youth to be in the military or flee the country or go to jail, there was no serious political movement to abolish it. It moved forward through the decades by inertia. Your grandfather was drafted, your father was drafted, when the time came, you would be drafted. Then the draft effectively ended, though the bureaucracy to start it back up exists to this day. The inertia to maintain this new and opposite status quo is just as strong now. Neither major political party would have made abolishing the draft a plank in their platform even back in the height if the anti-war movement in the 1960s. Now, neither party would consider adding a plank to re-instate the draft. The popularity of war waxes and wanes, but the all-volunteer army is an idea that stays popular, regardless of what the government might ask those young volunteers to do.

The change was swift, implemented by executive decree and never turned into a political poker chip. It was Nixon who effectively ended the draft in his first term, but he never admitted it. He hated the anti-war movement and wouldn’t think of running in 1972 on the accomplishment removing this burden from the lives of all young men in the country. Publicly, the Selective Service was still presented as a legal obligation, punishable by jail time if any young man did not comply. But it collected those names, issued those draft cards and did nothing with them, the perfect example of a pointless bureaucracy.

We have lived with this charade for fifty years now. If I had my druthers, I’d see it shuttered, but there is no political will to do that either. It is likely kept in place waiting for a third world war, which these days would probably mean war with China, the only other true superpower. Russia is more than willing to rattle a sabre, but it fights now with political maneuvers because its military is deeply depleted by the loss of morale after Afghanistan and the generations of corruption of the country’s leadership, a corruption that continued and even grew after the Communist Party collapsed under Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

A major impetus for this blog are the recent historical fiction films like The Paper, Hidden Figures, BlacKkKlansman and On the Basis of Sex, stories about events that happened in my lifetime, stories that show young people how much different the world of their parents and grandparents was from life as it is lived now. I do not expect a movie about the end of the draft will soon grace the silver screen or even become a prestige mini-series. There was no underdog hero, there was no exciting courtroom drama. It was a backdoor deal and those who caused it would not even admit its main effect, the burden it lifted from the lives of all American young men.

I’m 63 now. If it returns, it is no concern of mine. Still, I am glad that men younger than I am have not had to endure what my dad and my brother and I did, and it is my fervent hope the unjust system never returns.