Pardon: How Broad A Blanket?

"We are making heroes out of deserters. " So says Lieut. Commander Michael Christian, a Norfolk-based former Viet Nam prisoner of war, who vows that he is ready to resign from the Navy in protest. "The price of honor seems pretty cheap this year." Air Force Colonel George Day, another former Viet Nam P.O. W. now stationed in Florida, is ready to pack up his war medals, including the Medal of Honor, and ship them all back to Washington.

"Our fight for a universal unconditional amnesty will continue," vows Mike Powers, a spokesman for the American Deserters Committee in Sweden. His group will send a representative to a conference of U.S. draft resisters, military deserters and sympathizers to be held in Toronto, Canada, to coincide with the Inauguration of Jimmy Carter.

Coming from diametrically opposed viewpoints, these clashing voices illustrate the dilemma facing President-elect Carter as he prepares to carry out his campaign pledge to grant some kind of pardon to young Americans who evaded or abandoned service in the Viet Nam War. So far, these rising emotions are based only on what the pro-and anti-pardon groups think Carter will do. He expects to make his decision this week, but does not plan to reveal it until he takes office.

When he does, Carter probably will discover that even a "trust me" President probably cannot successfully reconcile the views of those who believe that anyone who failed to serve when called committed a treasonable act with those who feel that draft evasion was a lonely decision of a high moral order. Even the general outline of his plan, which he sketched during the campaign, was criticized as "too little and too late" by some of the exiled Americans who might be affected, and denounced as too lenient by various veterans' groups.

What Carter promised was a blanket pardon "for those who violated Selective Service laws." This presumably would include all those civilians who fled the country to avoid the draft, simply failed to register or refused to submit to induction. As for those who deserted after induction or enlistment, Carter said each case "should be handled on an individual basis in accordance with our nation's system of military justice." That seemed to imply that military officials, hardly lenient in such matters, would have to process all of these desertion cases and try to decide what was in each person's mind, some four or more years ago, that caused him to desert.

This general approach also seems to contradict Carter's frequently expressed concern for the underprivileged in society. As he has noted, the draft evaders are overwhelmingly white and middleclass. A report prepared for President Ford in 1975 placed 87% of them in this category. The deserters are largely poor and disproportionately black--more than 50% low-income and 20% black. In general, the more affluent, better-educated war resisters found the means to avoid service by evading the draft; the underprivileged submitted, turning against the war later, if at all, by deserting.

The President-elect has said nothing at all about all those servicemen who received less than honorable discharges for acts of protest short of desertion, but related to their reluctance to wage the war. Some, for example, failed to carry out orders, became chronic malingerers or were insubordinate to superiors. No one knows just how many cases there are, since many of these discharges were made, often capriciously, for a wide array of reasons to get rid of unwanted soldiers. Some of the war-resister groups insist there were about 700,000 veterans with less-than-honorable discharges and that all should have those records cleansed. Yet among them are many --very likely a majority--whose discharges were based on bad conduct, even criminal acts, totally unrelated to any philosophical objection to the war.

One of the biggest problems for the Carter advisers has been how to sort out all the widely varying estimates of the number of people in the affected categories. The commission set up by Ford in 1974 to carry out a more modest and generally unsuccessful amnesty program wrestled with the same numbers game.

About 106,000 were considered eligible for the Ford program, but only 20% even applied to take advantage of it. For most, the Ford plan called for some compensatory time spent in menial work in public service institutions. Of the 8,450 offenders who entered these work programs, more than half failed to complete their assigned service and thus theoretically could still be prosecuted as criminals. The figures with which Carter is working include:

DRAFT EVADERS. About 10,000 individuals were under indictment for draft evasion when the Ford program began. The Justice Department reviewed the cases and dismissed slightly more than half of them (5,500) for legal or other reasons. Of the remaining 4,500 only some 700 were granted clemency after applying for it. About 1,300 cases were prosecuted, resulting mainly in short sentences or probation (which is why many of those required to work for months in menial jobs consider the Ford clemency program unfair). That leaves about 2,500 civilians still under indictment. Most of them are in Canada.

DESERTERS. There were 10,115 deserters at large when the Ford program opened. (Interestingly, the Ford commission reported that less than one-tenth of 1 % of those who sought review deserted when their units were actually under fire). More than half (5,555) applied for and received undesirable discharges. They had the option of getting them changed to special "clemency" discharges if they completed their alternate work service. Many did not perform such work, since the distinction between the two types of discharges did not seem to them to be worth the effort. Another 660 deserters serving in military prisons were released. This leaves 4,560 deserters still at large, about half of them outside the U.S.

DISCHARGES WITH STIGMA. The Ford commission placed the number of servicemen given less-than-honorable discharges solely for desertion or absence from their posts at 83,135. Of these, only 13,589 asked that their cases be reviewed; all but about 1,000 were given clemency discharges. To many of the antiwar veterans, that discharge carries a stigma they still want erased by a blanket amnesty. Lack of an honorable discharge often bars ex-servicemen from jobs, and generally deprives them of military pensions, Government medical aid and educational benefits.

After studying all the numbers and complexities for several weeks, the Carter pardon team, headed by Houston Lawyer David H. Berg, has made its recommendations to Charles Kirbo, the President-elect's key transition adviser.

He presented them in writing to Carter last week. Kirbo says he does not know what the final shape of the Carter program will be, but he doubted that a blanket pardon would be extended to deserters. The probability seemed to be that Carter would pardon all the civilian draft evaders, including those already convicted of the crime, but find some means of dealing with the military cases--both deserters and holders of punitive discharges--on an individual review basis.

Among the roughly 4,500 draft evaders and deserters living in exile, mostly in Canada or Sweden, such a program would be received with mixed reactions.

Nothing short of a full amnesty, implying an official willingness to forget the acts of all war resisters, will satisfy those relatively few exiles who have taken up the lingering war issue as an almost professional crusade. Among other, less ardent exiles, reaction to the Carter program could be shaped to some extent by their current circumstances.

In Sweden, now home to only about 300 American war resisters--down from 800 at the peak in 1970-71--many of the holdouts are in or approaching their 30s and deeply involved in new occupations and growing families. For them, no pardon program has much practical consequence. Few desire to return. "I consider Sweden home," says David Hoyt, 31, a draft evader from Boston now teaching English in public schools and working as an interpreter.

"I probably could earn more money in the U.S., but money isn't the main consideration. Sweden's a good place for my two children to grow up."

What many of the exiles, particularly those in Canada--now the home of at least 3,500 war resisters, by Washington's reckoning--would like most as a practical matter is the right to get passports to visit friends and relatives in the U.S. This is also true of the unknown numbers who have actually become citizens of another country.

But what the exiles want really has little relevance to the larger issues involved. On the practical level, some are concerned that the precedent set in handling the pardon problem could have an impact on the nation's ability to recruit the disciplined armed forces that might be needed in a future war--although it is hard to see how the troubling circumstances of the Viet Nam involvement could ever be duplicated. The overriding challenge for Carter is less tangible but perhaps more important: to find a solution that most reasonable Americans can agree is basically fair. That will not be an easy task given the depth of the quagmire of injustices created by the war.

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