Ain’t No Fortunate Son

by Gabriel Conroy

About a week ago, Joseph Epstein wrote a defense of the military draft at The Atlantic online.  In that article, he rehashed the points generally raised in favor of the draft.  But those points are not as strong as he thinks they are and they fail to address some critical objections to the draft.

We are probably all familiar with the arguments Epstein uses to argue for the draft.  He says the draft would make policymakers more careful about committing soldiers abroad.  He suggests that a truly universal draft would foster a sense of shared sacrifice among Americans, improve the military, and function as a social mixer, bringing together rich and poor, educated and uneducated, Gentile and Jew (and atheist?),* black and white, and so forth.

The “truly universal” in my previous sentence does a lot of work, and Epstein doesn’t utter the phrase.  But it is the necessary component of what he advocates (“[a] truly American military, inclusive of all social classes….”).  He presumably would not have approved of the “substitute” system of the Civil War, through which a draftee of means could hire a “substitute” in order to avoid service.  He is critical of deferments during the Vietnam era, stating they made Vietnam “the first of our wars to be fought almost exclusively by an American underclass and, in part because of this, at no time did it have anything like the full support of the American people.”

His arguments don’t convince me.  Let’s take what I believe to be his strongest point, namely, the egalitarian potential of compelling people from different backgrounds to work with each other.  I can’t dismiss that point altogether.  My only ready anecdatum runs in support of what Epstein says.  The father of a friend of mine was drafted to serve in Vietnam.  He says he entered the military a conservative racist and came out a pro-civil rights liberal.  (I’m paraphrasing my friend’s own paraphrasing of what his father said.  Take the dose of salt you deem appropriate.)  I can’t deny that a “truly universal” draft might very well foster a sense of mutual understanding via interaction.  And my own leveling instinct takes a certain pleasure in seeing some people (other people, not me, of course!) being knocked down a few pegs and compelled to work with their supposed inferiors.

But still, I’m skeptical.  If one person becomes more broad-minded by working with a diverse group of people, I can imagine another type of person for whom familiarity fosters a hyper-tribalism of the sort that says, “I’ve worked with those people and believe you me, you don’t want to know them.”  Okay, there will always be incorrigibles among us and maybe most people—maybe even most incorrigibles—really do soften their own bigotries by working with others.

I’m also skeptical because a “truly universal” draft is a fantasy, even when there is little likelihood of escaping service altogether.  If it’s not hiring substitutes or winning deferments, it can be having connections to get you into the National Coast Guard Reserve, it can be having the social capital, intelligence, or skills to get the type of job that keeps you more out of danger.  What about conscientious objector status?  Well, if we are to have a draft, I’d want there to be C.O. provisions, and I’d want access to those provisions to be expansive ones.  But then the draft is not truly universal (and C.O. status, as I understand, is hard to secure anyway, and someone with legal representation—read:  social capital and real capital, or being born into a religious tradition that disavows violence—would have a much better shot at it).

But as I said, that was Epstein’s strongest point and I can’t dismiss it altogether.  It reminds me of a very thoughtful comment ScarletNumbers made a while back in response to one of my posts on neoliberalism:  “I would still rather have a Fortunate Son serve in an ‘easy’ position in the military as a draftee, rather not be in the military at all” (asterisk omitted).  Even in an unfair system, some service for all is fairer than some people getting off free.  And ScarletNumbers might have also added that in modern warfare, the “‘easy’ position” is not always safe or easy.  (My uncle was “only” a mechanic in the military in World War II, and he had very disturbing memories of what he saw and underwent, especially during the Battle of the Bulge.)  And at any rate, because non-combat positions outnumber actual “combat” positions, there is a strong likelihood that any given draftee would have the supposedly “easy” position.

But that last point—non-combat positions outnumbering actual combat positions—feeds into my critique of what I take to be Epstein’s weaker point, the notion that a truly universal draft would convince our policymakers to be more careful before committing soldiers to action.  Because non-combat positions, which are supposedly “safer,” outnumber combat positions and because (I suspect) “only” a small percentage of people in actual combat positions suffer debilitating physical wounds, a policymaker might very well believe the odds are pretty good in favor his or her loved ones in the military, coming out okay.

I suppose that because we’ve never had a truly universal draft, I don’t really have a basis of comparison for Eptstein’s claim that policymakers would be more careful with their use of the military.  But I will point out that Truman committed US soldiers to Korea pretty quickly even though there was a draft.  The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which occurred during a time when the draft was in force and which empowered President Johnson to wage the Vietnam War, passed the Senate with only two dissents, fewer dissents than the authorization to invade Iraq in 1991 and 2002.

And then there’s World War II.  I admit, it lends support to Epstein’s point.  That is so not only because of the sense of shared sacrifice Americans supposedly felt during the war, but also because before Pearl Harbor there was fairly strong, albeit eroding, opposition to entering the conflict, and FDR had a hard time convincing the US to go to war.  Maybe what opposition there was to entry owed something to the fact that the draft had already been implemented in 1940?  Even so, the “Good War” was, I hope, exceptional, an  noted by the tendency to call it “good,” as if wars by definition are presumptively bad.  If a similar conflict arises, or if, as in a hypothetical commenter Roger once offered, the Mongols are surrounding the city gates, I’ll be prepared to reopen the debate, at least as it applies to that conflict.**

But that debate will have to account for one objection that Epstein—who says that “[a]rguments against the draft…are mostly technical”—declines to address.  Compulsory military service meets my common-sense definition (but apparently, not the Supreme Court’s definition) of “involuntary servitude.”  It requires a person to put his life on hold for a time—I believe the standard term of service was two years during the Cold War Era draft—and while in service, that person can be ordered to put his life in danger.  And I believe involuntary servitude is wrong, unless it is the punishment for a crime for which someone has been duly convicted.  And even without the Thirteenth Amendment, I’d still believe it would be wrong.

True, the draft is not chattel slavery.  But it is compulsory service, and if someone who would otherwise not choose to serve is compelled to serve or to face harsh consequences for not serving, then his service is involuntary.

The chief argument against my “involuntary servitude” point is to draw an analogy to jury duty or to the United States’ history of militia service.  And while I don’t fully sign on to Vikram Bath’s argument against analogies, I’ll point out the differences between military conscription and jury and militia service.  For most people called to jury duty, the process lasts only one day unless they are empanelled.  For most people who are empanelled, the duty lasts only about a week.  For only a small number, the duty may last months.  And only in very rare, Grisham-style, circumstances is a juror’s life ever in danger.  (Am I wrong?  I admit I don’t have a cite, but I do ask for the proof.)

Militia duty, when it’s not just an opportunity for homosocial male conviviality, is regular training for the possibility that the local community, or perhaps the country, might be invaded or imminently threatened in some way.  I’m not in principle opposed to militia duty defined that way.  But even then, I’d want the threat to be imminent.  And if the Mongols*** truly are at the city’s gates, I’d want to be sure that a tribute to pay them to go away is not a possibility before I’d admit to the state’s authority to compel my or anyone else’s service.  Whether in the moment I’d have the courage of my convictions to refuse to serve—or more likely, given my less-than-draftable age of 41, to help others refuse to serve—is another issue.

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*Yes, I’m aware that Jewishness is as much an ethnicity as it is a creed, but Epstein’s example—a sergeant berating his Christian soldiers to go to Church and his “Hebrew” soldiers to honor the Sabbath—focuses on the creedal aspect of Jewishness.

**For the record, I believe Roger was arguing against compulsory service, stating that his hypothetical situation rarely arises.

***It probably needs to be said that I mean no offense to Mongolians or people with Mongolian roots.  I also realize the “Mongol horde” was not what European and Chinese myth has made it out to be and according to one interpretation, seems to have fit in a pattern of China’s relationship with its neighbors to its North.  See Thomas J. Barfield’s The Perilous Frontier:  Nomadic Empires and China, 221 B.C. to A.D. 1757.  (1989)

[Picture: Draft card, via Wikipedia.]