Getting Tough

Uncle Sam really wants you

After repeated warnings failed to convince more than 500,000 young men to register for a possible draft (7.5 million complied), the Government decided to prosecute some of the holdouts. The first indictment was handed up last week, and it was immediately clear that the Government had picked a target who could fight back. Benjamin Sasway, 21, of Vista, Calif., a political-science major at Humboldt State University, forcefully argued the anti-draft-registration position at a series of press conferences. Said he: "Conscription deprives people, most fundamentally, of the freedom of moral choice--the very essence of all other freedoms."

Sasway is not a conscientious objector; he believes in "just wars" (World War II, for example, but not Viet Nam). "A volunteer Army," he says, "is the only kind of military force compatible with a country philosophically rooted in freedom and equal justice." As the first American indicted for draft-registration evasion since the Viet Nam era, he faces up to five years in jail and $10,000 in fines. -

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