Would a Draft Matter? The Nature of the Military That Fights America’s Forever Wars

Would a Draft Matter?
The Nature of the Military That Fights America’s Forever Wars
By Nan Levinson
Bizarrely enough, the spate of phone calls from recruiters began a couple of years ago. The first ones came from the Army, next the Marines, and then other branches of the military. I’m decades past enlistment age. I’ve been publicly antiwar for most of that time and come from a family that was last involved with a military when my grandfather ran out the back door to avoid Russian army recruiters at the front door and kept running until he reached America.
The calls with recruitment offers eventually died away. Someone had probably been punking me, but I remain intrigued by the messages the recruiters left, always focusing on the special “opportunities” the Army (Navy, Marines, Air Force) were ready to offer me.
What often came to mind when I listened to them was a sweltering afternoon in the Vietnam War years. A bunch of us college kids were slouching around the only fan in someone's apartment telling “funny” stories about how people we knew avoided the draft. There was the guy who stripped at his physical to reveal a Superman costume under his street clothes; there was the officer at the hearing test who shouted in frustration, "I know you're not all deaf!" There was my housemate with a low draft lottery number, which made him extremely draftable. He then substituted coffee for sleep, raising his blood pressure so successfully that the examining doctor said, "Do you know you're near death?" And there were the friends who got letters from therapists testifying to their instability. (I don’t think any of them had “bone spurs,” though.) I like to think that we recognized our luck in being able to afford college and excuses from shrinks to keep a highly unpopular war at arm's length, but I can't say for sure.
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