Suppose They Had A War

This was a rallying cry of the "anti-war crowd" back in the sixties as young people advocated for draft-dodging or moving to Canada, any action to prevent being sent to the jungles of Vietnamh to fight a war that many felt was unneccessary and wrong. There was a draft then and many young men were willing to sacrifice their privileges as American citizens and risk a lifetime of living on foreign soil or in prison to avoid serving in the armed services.

That all supposedly ended after the American troops were withdrawn from Vietnam as we bowed to the inevitable and that nation was reunited, albeit not under the type of rule which our government had desired. When the men who had served arrived home, war-weary, suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome and the effects of Agent Orange, as well as the overwhelming sense of guilt for the things that they were required to do there, the last thing any young man wanted was to serve in the United States military. This was a dire situation and the military leaders, in an attempt to counteract this reluctance, decided to institute an "all-volunteer army", touting the training and educational benefits of a military career. This worked and created a "peace-time military" that was sufficient to allow the United States to marshall a large enough force for the peace-keepers in Southeastern Europe and even, in the Gulf War, to push Saddam Hussein back from Kuwaiti territory.

Iraq has proven to be more of a challenge. We invaded with insufficient numbers of men, due to the neccessity of maintaining troops on the ground in Afghanistan, even with the activation of the National Guard. Rather than being the triumphal entry which the Bush administration led us to expect, it has turned into a drawn-out conflict wherein, despite the destruction of cities and the killing of many Iraqi men and inumerable women, children, and other non-combatants, the resistance continues to be unvanquished.

On the home front, as information about the falsity of the reasons given for the war trickle out to the people, as more news comes out about the lack of proper armament for the valiant National Guardsmen, and as the men in the field continue to be �retained" beyond the periods of their enlistment, we find that recruiting for new soldiers is becoming a futile endeavor. Though the American public are still not allowed to see the arrival home of the coffins of the fallen men, we do see the films of those who are maimed, some so imbued with the military philosophy that despite the loss of limb or eye, that they still aspire to go back to the fray. Guardsmen come home to find that their jobs are long gone from factory out-sourcing and down-sizing, their homes foreclosed, and their marriages �on the rocks�. This is not the kind of future to inspire young men to want to participate.

Congressman Charlie Rangel has once again offered a bill which would reinstate the draft, but it is not expected to gain acceptance. American parents. no matter of what political persuasion, are not at all eager to allow their sons and daughters to be taken away, made to suffer and to inflict pain, deprivations, dismemberment, and death, and then to be returned to an uncertain future with mental and physical handicaps which will plague them forever. Enlistment bonuses have been increased to no avail until, recently, there have been investigations begun regarding recruiting tactics which border on fraud as the quotas are falling short and the strength of our military is waning.

And so it appears that, in the absence of a draft or a return to the medieval practice of �shanghai-ing� to impress men into the military, we will have the answer to that old question, �Suppose we had a war and nobody came?"

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