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Friday, May 30, 2008
Volunteer or draftee? What’s the difference?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Whenever the conversation turns to the toll taken by our twin wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — the more than 4,000 dead, the tens of thousands with post-traumatic stress syndrome, the many thousands with permanent brain injuries — someone always points out that, well, they volunteered for it.
I’ve never understood that. If those soldiers and Marines had been drafted, would their sacrifice be any greater? Is the death of an enlistee somehow less tragic than that of a draftee, as in Vietnam? Do their loved ones grieve any less?
The real difference is political. As long as we can tell ourselves that they volunteered for this, we can worry less about them. And we all know what would happen if we suddenly had to turn to a draft to fill out the ranks in Iraq and Afghanistan: The war would be over, or at least the part of it occurring in Iraq. And you do have to question the morality of a war that we sustain only as long as most of our kids are protected against having to fight in it.
In effect, we are doing just what we did in the early years of Vietnam with college draft deferments, before we acknowledged the immorality of the practice. We are protecting our elite, college-bound students from serving, while their less-educated peers with from less affluent backgrounds bear the brunt of the fighting and dying.
Explain to me how that is right.
