THE NEW DEMANDS OF THE DRAFT

For almost a whole generation of young Americans, the draft has been something for someone else to worry about. It provided the muscle for the U.S. in two World Wars and the Korean conflict, but in recent years its call has been gentle and muted. An average of hardly more than 100,000 men a year were called, only a small percentage of the total eligible to serve. Deferments, for school or for skill, were easy to get. American youngsters regarded the draft as either a remote threat or, at worst, a necessary chore that might produce a rewarding tour of duty overseas (where some 46% of all U.S. soldiers are now stationed) or enable them to acquire a skill that would later be useful in civilian life.

The escalation of the war in Viet Nam--and the likelihood that it will rise higher--has changed all that. Somewhat abruptly, the draft has become the most urgent problem in the lives of practically every American male between 18 and 26. With the manpower needs of the armed forces steadily increasing and the prospect of future calls running well above 30,000 a month, some thousands will soon be called to serve who might previously have postponed or entirely escaped military service. Across the U.S., young men are once more watching their local mailboxes anxiously for the nation's most unpopular piece of unsolicited mail, that elongated postcard with the blank space after "class" filled in "l-A."

What makes the message so chilling is that its receiver has a pretty good chance of ending up where the fighting is. For the first time since the Korean conflict, which most of the present generation knows only through TV documentaries or current history courses, a draftee may find himself in real danger of his life. At the beginning of 1965, when the U.S. had only 23,300 men in Viet Nam, less than 1% were draftees; today, draftees make up 20% of the nearly 200,000 men in Viet Nam, and the proportion is likely to go higher with rising troop commitments. The new inductee thus has a better than one-in-five chance of reaching the battlefield.

The Affluent Generation

The new demands of the draft have produced both apprehension and opposition among the nation's young men. For the first time, the draft is touching in a major way the post-World War II generation--the most affluent, the best-educated, the most articulate and rebellious group of potential draftees in U.S. history. In pre-World War II days, when the nation was still suffering the aftereffects of the Depression, there were fewer young men in college than now, fewer with jobs so good that it was a great sacrifice to leave them for the service. Today, many draftees are either giving up well-paying jobs or delaying the start of careers after college. They not only debate the notion of military service in terms of high principle but question its harsh infringement on what they have been told is their right to a good life.

The reaction to today's draft is also different from any previous one because of the nature of the war in Viet Nam. No martial spirit is evident; there is no easily visible enemy. The most extreme--and untypical--example of opposition to the draft is the Vietnik, who burns his draft card, defies the courts and generally makes a nuisance of himself. But even the average draftee who does not oppose the war in Viet Nam does not completely understand it, and is moved by no strong motivation to join it. "If students, for example, could feel the peril, more of them would be willing to go," says Dr. Edmond Hallberg, dean of students at California State College at Los Angeles. "Today they are more interested in the future of man, in the abstract, than in the national interest."

In an all-out war, when practically everyone serves, practically no one has cause to complain of inequity. A large part of the present reaction to the draft is that Viet Nam is a limited war that has not yet demanded the full strength of the U.S., and therefore requires only a certain number of the nation's eligible men. Today's draftee may feel not only the normal dismay at going into the service but resentment at having been singled out while others in roughly similar situations escape. With better reason than usual, he may ask; Why me? "The way things are now," said one Manhattan inductee, "half go and half luck out."

Many of the complaints come from those who have been particularly fortunate in lucking out: college students. The nation's campuses have long proved a sanctuary from the draft, which allows students in good standing a 2-S deferment. Now that sanctuary is threatened. Many draft boards, rushing to fill their larger quotas, have run through the available supply of eligible, nondeferred single men and practically exhausted the store of married men without children. The result is that the college manpower pool must be tapped. Already many boards, particularly in California where junior colleges flourish, have begun reclassifying college students.

As of last week, college students in general will no longer be automatically deferable; they will be called when necessary to fulfill draft quotas. To decide which students to take, Lieut. General Lewis B. Hershey, 72, the onetime Indiana farm boy who has run the draft for 25 years, has reinstituted the qualification test used during the Korean War. Hershey believes that only the best students should be spared, will demand either a good score on the 100-question College Qualification Test or a reasonably high rank in class to ensure a student of deferment. The new rules, while not necessarily making the draft more democratic, at least force students to work harder to maintain their deferments.

The Impossibility of Fairness

The charges of unfairness against the draft are widespread--and to a certain extent they are true. Says General Hershey: "I wouldn't argue with a guy who says we're being unfair when he's being taken." Hershey insists that the draft works about as well as it can under the circumstances, but that it was not meant to treat everyone equally. The Selective Service System is just that: selective. It was designed to provide an orderly flow of manpower for the armed services while seeing to it that the nation retains at home people who are considered necessary for its welfare. Since in normal times only about half of all those who reach 26--the present practical upper limit of the draft--will ever don a uniform, the draft obviously has to excuse as many as it calls.

In cold fact, the law states that every man between 18 1/2 and 36 is eligible for military service, although few above 26 are called to serve. Eligible men are therefore 1-A until they are otherwise classified. General Hershey and his Washington assistants lay down overall guidelines for deferment, but the disposition of each individual case is the responsibility of the local draft board, a group of from three to five unpaid citizens who usually meet once or twice a month to decide the fate of the young men within their jurisdiction. This allocation of responsibility to the nation's 4,050 local boards is at once Hershey's proper pride and the source of most charges of inequity.

Hershey believes that local people know best the problems of their own areas and people, and can make the fairest judgment about who should be deferred and who should not. But the very fact that local boards are allowed a wide measure of discretion arid are made up of individuals of varying standards and prejudices gives rise to the chief charges of unfairness--what one board snatches, another will defer. In farm areas, a board may defer a farm boy for occupational reasons more readily than a classics student studying abroad. One board may believe that part-time students should be taken before married men and another the exact opposite. Of two registrants in almost identical circumstances, one may be taken by his board while his buddy is deferred by another. Draft officials deny, however, the frequent charge that the system is "undemocratic" because it calls some while deferring others. "It's anything but undemocratic," says Clifford Gates, chairman of the Bergen County (NJ.) draft board, "because the system recognizes that all the registrants are individuals with their own peculiar problems and their own peculiar needs. What would be undemocratic would be to draft everyone regardless of his individual circumstances."

The Rich & the Poor

The draft board's hardest job, of course, is deciding whom to defer among the 17,970,000 Americans between 18 and 36. Some 5,500,000 are removed from the draft's purview by being already in service or having already served their time. Of the remaining 12 million registrants, some 83% are deferred. Of these, 2,000,000 are students, 3,000,000 are heads of families (who fall into category 3-A), and 200,000 have "essential" jobs in industry or farming (2A and 2-C). Aliens, clergymen and divinity students are also deferred automatically. The most remarkable fact about deferrals is that by far the largest number--fully 4,600,000--have been rejected by the Army for physical or mental deficiencies. Slightly more than half of them have been classified 4-F, or unfit to serve under any circumstances, and the rest have been put into a relatively new category called 1-Y. This includes men of limited fitness (eyesight 20/70 in one eye and 20/40 in the other, for instance) who might be called for limited duty in case of a declared war or a national emergency.

The enormous number of rejects, as many critics have pointed out, is a sad commentary on the physical and mental state of much of American youth. About half of those who are turned down failed to score high enough on the Army's mental test. When it comes to physical standards, the situation is equally bleak. Most physical rejectees are turned down because of diseases or defects of the bones or the limbs (15.7%), followed by those rejected for psychiatric disorders (12.2%), for diseases of the circulatory system (10.1%), and for eye diseases and defects (9.7%). The rest are turned down for failing in one or more of the 20 general medical areas for which the Army tests inductees, ranging from chronic alcoholism to being too tall (over 78 in.) or too short (under 60 in.). Many draftees talk about tricks to win 4-F status, including staying awake for 48 hours before the physical exam, eating tons of sugar the night before to produce the symptoms of diabetes, and smoking cigarettes dipped in blue ink to cause blotches on the lung. But few actually have the nerve to try such tricks, and fewer still are able to fool the Army's sharp-eyed doctors.

A major criticism of the draft is that it tends to pass over the very poor and the very well educated, the first because they often cannot pass the Army's mental test and the second because they tend to stay in school almost indefinitely. The burden tends to fall on the average Joe who just made it through high school; two out of every three of them end up in the service v. one out of three college graduates and one out of two boys who did not earn a high-school diploma. Almost by definition, the average draftee is a series of underprivileged negatives: he is not in school, he is not employed in a critical occupation and he is supporting nobody. In short, he is expendable.

For these reasons, the Negro is drafted in numbers out of proportion to his place in the population. Recent Army statistics showed that 16.3% of those drafted over a recent twelve-month period were nonwhite, as against only 11.9% of the total population; the Negro percentage of the fighting force in Viet Nam is about the same. Still, the Negro, often economically and socially deprived at home, frequently finds the modern Army a haven; his re-enlistment rate is 49.3% compared with 18.5% for whites. "That uniform gives prestige and status to a guy who's been 100 years on the back burner," says Jack Moskowitz, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for civil rights and industrial relations.

There are several ways to postpone or avoid being drafted, though some of them involve other types of military service. The most pleasant way for married men is simply to sire a little deferment. A man may also join the Reserve or National Guard, but he must serve on active duty for four to six months, attend meetings for the rest of his six-year obligation, and be ready for active duty if his unit is called up during an emergency; besides, many National Guard and most Reserve units already have full quotas. Then there is the Peace Corps, but that only delays the inevitable, since a man is immediately subject to the draft once he returns home. The new draft pressure has produced heavier-than-usual applications for R.O.T.C. and officer training, which usually require a longer time in service but at least give a man officer status.

The Crisis to Come

In the utilization of the nation's manpower for best advantage, it is almost inevitable that the best educated should get the breaks. The son of the middle or upper class is more apt to be in college or able to pay his way to graduate school. Once graduated, he is more likely to land a job that is "essential"; some 10.7% of college grads acquire occupational deferments--more than 25 times the rate of the next highest category, those with "some college." Before the buildup in Viet Nam, almost any student in any respectable institution automatically got his 2-S deferment, and draft boards were generally willing to extend the deferment for the increasing number who decided to go on to graduate school. Under the new rules, the draft boards will now decide whether each student is more important to the national welfare as a student or as a soldier. Most administrators expect a crisis to come this summer, when many "to-the-end-of-the-term" deferments will run out and be closely reviewed by draft boards. "I foresee losing quite a few students by September," says Byron H. Atkinson, dean of students at U.C.L.A. Says Tennessee State Director Arnold Malone: "We're going to have to put the screws on the students. We will either make good students or good soldiers out of them."

The draft certainly has enough inequities for everyone, but it is about the best method available for filling the nation's present manpower needs, which include troop commitments around the world as well as in Viet Nam. The only reasonable alternative is universal military service, which might take practically every youth for about a year and use him for various military and nonmilitary tasks, including learning skills, serving in the Peace Corps or joining work camps. The trouble with U.M.T. is that it would be far too expensive and inefficient, would produce more young men (about 2,000,000 a year) than anyone could possibly use--and would still force officials to make a choice between who would fight and who would merely train.

Going into the Army is not the ideal of many, but it is no longer what it used to be even as recently as the Korean War. Military training, equipment, facilities and officers have all become far more sophisticated than ever before. The loudmouthed drill sergeant has largely disappeared, and the Army has worked hard to give a sense of personal dignity to its soldiers. For those with limited schooling, there are countless opportunities to learn valuable skills; for those with college degrees, there is something to be learned from sharing in the experience of their generation. The ambiguous nature of the war in Viet Nam--and the war's peril to life and limb--requires a higher duty quotient than usual of those who are called to serve. Still, ever since the city-states of ancient Greece first summoned their youth to arms, young men have responded to--and frequently found satisfaction in--what General Hershey calls "the privilege and obligation of free men" to serve as soldiers. A nation that offers its youth as many opportunities as the U.S. does can hardly expect less.

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