For Bachelors Only

A young Californian named Scott Thompson was facing Army induction in just two weeks; yet he seemed peculiarly elated when he phoned a U.C.L.A. coed. "Hey," he shouted, "did you see the papers? Do you want to get married?" The girl did not, no matter what the papers said. So Thompson--unless he could find someone else in a hurry--was doomed to enter the Army. But some 340,000 other men of draft age--whose girls had once said yes--were suddenly free to stay home. A presidential order last week exempted all married men from induction, giving them a stable civilian status for the first time since 1948.

The reason for the action was a simple problem of high supply and low demand. For several years, the draftable pool of men aged 19 to 25 had been too large for the military's needs. Some 1,700,000 young men were classified 1-A. On the average, no more than 100,000 of them were actually drafted each year. Yet the pool, fed by new 19-year-olds in ever-increasing numbers, will brim to overflowing in the next few years as the babies of the big population years become 1-A men. Even now, the average draftee's age is a relatively elderly 23. Hundreds of thousands of young men have found themselves forced to stall off permanent career decisions, sometimes drifting aimlessly into the ranks of the unemployed because they didn't know when the Army would call.

Lieut. General Lewis B. Hershey, granddaddy of the nation's selective service system (he helped lay the groundwork in 1936, became director in 1941), was aware of--and worried about--the problem. Early this year he put staff members to work, and they recommended that married men would be an easily identifiable group to excuse from service without seriously hurting U.S. military manpower needs.

The President, who had recently wondered why married men had to go into the Army, put a White House staffer on the project to help out. From Hershey's recommendations came last week's Executive Order No. 11119--making the draft solely for bachelors. Hopefully, it would lower the average age of inductees, give them a better idea of when they would be called.

Despite eager young swains like Scott Thompson, there was no obvious rush to get married. This surprised no one at Selective Service. One official pointed out that married men have always been "traditionally" called after unmarried men anyway, and that many draftees-to-be had long ago compared the Army to matrimony and decided, "Better a two-year stretch than a lifetime sentence."

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