In 1949, my dad, age five, was playing a game of marbles with some neighborhood kids when someone's favorite marble rolled into the sewer. Being the youngest and smallest, he was elected to crawl in after it. He found it, and as he was emerging, the manhole cover somehow slipped or fell or was dragged over his hand, slicing his ring finger clean off at the first knuckle. Things couldn't be reattached in 1949 like they can now, so that was that.
It worked out in Dad's favor--when he became old enough to draft in 1962, he was deemed unfit for military service. But his best friend and bandmate, Ray, had all of his digits and was eligible for the draft, and on Ray's 18th birthday, he got completely trashed and begged my dad to cut his finger off with a kitchen knife. Dad refused, and Ray was drafted and shipped off to Vietnam soon after, despite his effort to convince the draft board he was gay by bleaching his hair.
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I don't read news. The bulk of my knowledge of current events is gathered from links people send me and from Q13 Fox News at 10, and only because it's on after American Idol or The Swan or some other brainless, jaw-droppingly immoral train-wreck television show. I've never voted. I've never met a Republican or a soldier. I don't know anyone who's been to Iraq, much less anyone who was killed there. My friends are also largely uninformed--maybe they read the odd news article that they've been linked to, but it's almost always a piece about a four-eared kitten or Michael Jackson or which bands are going to play at which outdoor music festival. If it's about the government or the war, there's a chance that we'll discuss it for a few minutes, whereupon we may say, "Dude, that's fucked up," and then we're back on to what color we're totally going to dye our hair next.
But we sure do sit up straight when the news might get us killed. Which is why an article that I accidentally read on vancouver.indymedia.org hit me like a garbage truck dropped off the Empire State Building. In January 2004, Adam Stutz had posted a call to arms to inform the nation about a potential military draft--compulsory military service--although I didn't stumble over it until March. "Pending legislation in the House and Senate (twin bills S 89 and HR 163) would time the program so the draft could begin as early as Spring 2005," wrote Stutz, "conveniently just after the 2004 presidential election! But the administration is quietly trying to get these bills passed NOW, so our action is needed immediately."
The bills, submitted on January 7, 2003, by Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-SC) and Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) respectively, are intended "to provide for the common defense by requiring that all young persons in the United States, including women, perform a period of military service or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, and for other purposes." Rangel, a black rep from Harlem, is coming at the issue from a decidedly leftist position. "Increasingly, we will be a nation in which the poor fight our wars while the affluent stay at home," Rangel says. He thinks a draft will "correct the disparity among those who serve." Rangel told the New York Times, "[T]he Congress that voted overwhelmingly to allow the use of force in Iraq includes only one member who has a child in the enlisted ranks of the military.. If those calling for war knew that their children were likely to be required to serve, there would be more caution and a greater willingness to work with the international community in dealing with Iraq." To date, Rangel's bill has garnered 13 sponsors (including Washington State Congressman Jim McDermott), while Hollings' has none.
Although neither bill has passed yet, the Selective Service System (SSS) recently received an extra $28 million from the Bush administration for its 2004 budget, and the Pentagon has kicked off a low-key campaign to fill the 10,000-plus open positions on the nation's draft boards. (Granted, these posts are required by law to be filled, but haven't been for decades.) The SSS is scheduled to report to the president on March 31, 2005, on the readiness of the draft system, and the system could be up and running as early as June 15, 2005. The draft proposal includes both women and college students this time, and the Smart Border Declaration signed between the U.S. and Canada in 2001, requiring a "pre-clearance agreement" of people entering and departing each country, would hypothetically prevent today's draft-dodgers from fleeing to Canada.
Oh, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer recently reported on some riveting new details. After filing a Freedom of Information Act request, the P-I obtained a copy of SSS acting director Lewis Brodsky's proposal to the Pentagon, submitted on February 11, 2003, just before the U.S. invaded Iraq. In addition to making women and students eligible for the draft, the proposal required that all draft-aged Americans report to the government on their "critical skills," so that niche specialties could be filled. It also seeks to extend the age bracket to 34 years, up from 26.
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After flipping out over the indymedia.org piece back in March, I posted an excerpt from it in an online forum, and got minimal response from my e-friends. The people who responded did so only to snicker because they were over 26, so a potential draft wasn't their problem. Then, last week, I posted a chunk from the P-I's article about the updated draft proposal, and my friends came absolutely fucking unglued.
Homosexuality still seems like the handiest escape hatch. One friend announced that, if push came to shove, he would "happily turn gay" to avoid a "bullshit draft." "Zero to cocksucker in 30 seconds," he wrote. Another friend said that she was going to begin researching established lesbians to pose as her girlfriend, assuming that the government would research her brand-new girlfriend's background as well. One girl was sure that she wouldn't be drafted as long as she stayed in law school, then realized that she would probably be targeted, in fact, because she's fluent in several languages. A good friend was disappointed to hear that his poor vision wasn't going to get him passed over, and considered trying to prove that his ex would be an unfit guardian for their children. Another declared that he just plain wouldn't register, like he didn't when he turned 18, because, like, fuck those guys. My best friend told me that if the draft was reinstated, we would be pooling our savings and hauling off to Mexico posthaste.
But the standard response was that it wouldn't happen. It would be political suicide on Bush's part, people insisted, and the protest rallies would rival Vietnam. Things would have to escalate to dramatic proportions to necessitate a draft, and we're turning Iraq over at the end of June anyhow, before the election, so why worry? But the U.S. attacked Iraq after millions protested. And if Bush lands the office again, he won't have any more elections to lose. Or steal. So the draft could certainly come back. All of this seems stupidly clear.
My boyfriend, meanwhile, calmly rebuffs every hysterical word out of my mouth. He'd already known about the draft proposal for months when I found out, and he's been contradicting me with arguments he's picked up from streaming Air America Radio, the brand-new (and faltering) liberal radio network that features Al Franken. "It'll never happen," Sean says--"reinstating the draft would be an act of Congress and they'll never approve it. And even if they might, I have nothing to worry about because there's no way Bush is going to get reelected. The president's approval ratings are lower now than Clinton's ever were, and an incumbent has never been reelected with such low marks. And those torture photos coming out of Iraq have sealed Bush's fate. And they're not going to draft women until they run out of men, and that's never going to happen. So why do I care?" He doesn't.
Seeing as the draft revival is Bush's brainchild, and as Bush's war is making it seem more and more likely every day, the obvious solution would be to vote for John Kerry. But wait, then there's another rumor. Even if Kerry is elected, he may need to utilize the Selective Service System. Kerry not only voted for the war--he's also been running around the country promising to increase the number of American troops in Iraq by at least 40,000 if he's elected. As the Bloomberg news service reported: "The added troops would help 'relieve over-extended' National Guard and reservists in Iraq and Afghanistan, Kerry spokesman David Wade said. Half of the additional 40,000 troops would be used as military police and for civil affairs, tasks now mainly carried out by reservists; the other 20,000 would be combat troops. The U.S. now has about 138,000 troops in Iraq."
Every other news story about Iraq mentions how thin the armed forces are stretched, and how the Pentagon can't go on calling up reservists indefinitely. So where is Kerry going to get all those additional troops without a draft?
Kerry will fix what Bush royally screwed up in Iraq, my boyfriend promises me, and he'll do it without a draft. He assures me that Kerry will plead with the UN to help us, and that his first item of business will be to apologize to every country that Bush has alienated. Sean insists that Kerry will save us. He wears Kerry T-shirts; he put big blue Kerry signs in our windows.
When I try to counter my boyfriend's Kerry arguments, I'm invariably met with, "Well, shyeah, you've been talking to Naderites." When I get frustrated and confused and say that America is a stupid game and I want to quit playing and let's immigrate to England while we can, he says things like, "But it's our country. We need to fix it, not let assholes drive us away." The difference could be that he was raised on military bases while I was raised by nine-fingered hippies, but we both hate the same things about the government and the war. Sean isn't worried about a draft because he isn't worried that Bush will be around in a year, and he's convinced that the man who opposes Bush is the opposite of Bush. But I'm suspicious of Kerry and his military medals. And I worry about Bush cheating again, and I worry about the Bible belt. After growing up in Seattle, it's easy to imagine that the whole country hates Bush, seeing as everyone here does, but the rest of the country just can't be trusted. I know that there are places where Kerry is seen as some pro-abortion/anti-God/anti-family/taking-orders-from-shadowy-foreign-governments/flip-flopping commie liberal who is bound and determined to let homosexuals get married in children's classrooms.
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If the draft does come back, what then? There's a dearth of escape routes this time--after voting for Kerry and crossing your fingers, the most viable options to avoid getting drafted are converting to homosexuality, marrying a foreigner and fleeing the country, or begging a friend to chop your finger off. But a switch to sucking cock or eating pussy, as the case may be, could be a waste of time, as those who are drafted aren't necessarily being sent to their bloody limbless deaths. If the war continues, there will be plenty of non-killing-people jobs made available, and many will likely be within the U.S. The "niche specialties" mentioned in the SSS's proposal would pertain by and large to tech people, linguists, folks with broadcasting skills, et cetera. Of course, there's nothing in the proposal that says that only people with niche skills would be drafted, but provided that you have a military-desired skill, a job in, say, translating radio transmissions might be a step up from what you're doing now.
But for those who oppose the draft, it's the principle that they're incensed and terrified by--the gut-wrenching irony of being forced to invade yet another country (Iran? Syria?) under the pretense of teaching its people about democracy. I'm also profoundly upset by the idea of being instructed in the art of killing humans, and of spending part of my young adulthood doing something other than what I want, even if the odds of being killed are relatively remote. And, for right now, the odds of being drafted at all do seem relatively remote. The current American death toll in Iraq is around 800 after a year of fighting. During WWII, 400,000 Americans were killed of the 16 million who served. In Vietnam, the death toll was 58,000 out of the 2.5 million. (Of the total servicemen for both wars, about 66% were draftees.)
But let's not kid ourselves: The catastrophe unfolding in Iraq could be spectacularly worse a year from now--tensions could explode even further, the death rate of American troops could skyrocket, Bush could get reelected. Shit, a year from now we could be fighting on American soil. But, again, being drafted and sent off to war isn't quite the death sentence all my friends seem to think it is (not for Americans, anyway). In a bloody war that the U.S. ultimately lost, my dad's friend Ray came home alive. Maybe you will, too.
