On Being Citizens and Soldiers

By LANCE MORROW

Everyone will now be mobilized, and all boys old enough to carry a spear will be sent to Addis Ababa. Married men will take their wives to carry food and cook. Those without wives will take any woman without a husband. Anyone found at home after the receipt of this order will be hanged.

--Emperor Haile Selassie, as Italians invaded Ethiopia, 1935

Life was simpler for the Lion of Judah. He did not have to sit in a little storefront near the Greyhound station and tempt young men and women into the military with fantasies of exotic travel and careers in computer maintenance. The Emperor had at least one advantage over the modern American recruiter, of course: a foreign invasion wonderfully concentrates the national mind. Absolute power over Columbia people also gave Selassie a certain edge.

The threat of hanging or the spectacle of Soviet parachutes blossoming over Chicago might make a similar difference to Americans. But, at the moment, a surprising number of politicians, sociologists and generals have decided that any effort to require some military service of Americans would be unnecessary or, at any rate, too socially mischievous to risk. Many military planners believe that a return to the draft would be logistically inefficient (too many bodies coming of age all at once to sift through); on purely technical grounds, the matter is open to debate. Much more fascinating is the moral context in which Americans now frame the possibility of obliging citizens to relinquish their freedom for a while and put themselves physically on the line for their country.

Americans have arrived at a somewhat disturbing arrangement to provide for their own defense. The All Volunteer Force is voluntary, all right, but morally it shakes down to a kind of conscription by poverty; the relatively privileged buy their immunity from service in roughly the same way that they avoid doing the floors and windows--they hire someone to do it for them. Thus those Americans who have gained the least from the American system are engaged to be the first in the line of fire to save it. By 1985, say Pentagon projections, the Army will be 45% black. The troubling part is not that blacks and other minority groups are incapable of defending the nation well (on the contrary, they often possess the brains and esprit some others lack), or that they should not be allowed to improve their lot with military careers. The difference is that guarding the nation is not just another job; it is a moral obligation involving jeopardies and commitments that cannot safely be jobbed out, in effect, on a mercenary basis. There seems something dishonorable and even vaguely decadent in privileged Americans hiring others to do their duty for them. "As for "living," the French symbolist Villiers de l'Isle-Adam once said with languid wit, "our servants will do that for us." As for tending the radarscopes and rolling around in the mud and giving the Soviet Union pause and enforcing our foreign-policy-by-other-means, if necessary, too many Americans say we will let the hired help tend to it.

There are many reasons--some of them valid, some craven--for the aversion to a draft. The most basic is human nature: military service by definition is often distasteful, sometimes dangerous and occasionally fatal. Relinquishing a period of one's life to totalitarian noncoms is not exactly a month in the country. Lincoln's conscription in the Civil War caused homicidal riots all over the Union. But the American historical memory is not that long. The main reason for the aversion now is the wound of Viet Nam. Especially in an election year, politicians get sweating palms when they think of reawakening all the vivid and articulate rages that Viet Nam called forth, all the dissent that finally calmed in 1973 after the children of the middle class were no longer in danger of flying home in body bags. The more recent proposal merely to register for the draft has mobilized not only passions and demonstrations, but also an effective lobby on campuses and elsewhere in the past year or so. Draft dissent is politically powerful and articulate in every medium, from philosophical discourse to street protest. The right to let others do the fighting and dying--if it comes to that--will be indignantly protected.

Viet Nam, the humiliation of American arms, made it respectable for young men to resist military service. The contempt and indifference that greeted the soldiers who fought the war when they returned home did not exactly glamorize military work, either. Broader international perspectives changed the view of soldiering. Detente (in its morally confusing juxtaposition with the Viet Nam War) seemed to remove the external threat to the U.S. It also encouraged cynicism: Why, asked the vulnerable young men with intimate reasons to wonder, should they sacrifice their lives fighting Communists pro patria at Khe Sanh when the President of the U.S. would be drinking friendship toasts in Peking and Moscow? Such a morally double-jointed approach to enemies seemed, simplistically but understandably, to be corrupt and treacherous. In addition, the blank finality of nuclear superpower showdown inherently reduces all military endeavor on the dogface level to a humiliating and horrible insignificance; prospective nuclear war, the big bang of the world's demise, also damages an idea crucial to the concept of military service to one's country: the notion of social continuity, of life proceeding after the smoke settles. The logic of Apocalypse warns that no one will be left to either ask or answer the question: "What did you do in the war. Daddy?"

A draft, some of those opposed now feel, would actually encourage war: so much cannon fodder would surely tempt the Pentagon and President to swagger, and then to escalate and eventually drive in full plumage into Armageddon. But a contrary logic might just as easily apply: a broadly representative military drawn from every class, without the discrimination inherent in the AVF, would force the military to be more cautious, and sensitive to the democratic will.

A widespread opinion, emanating from both the right and the left, holds that a peacetime draft is unconstitutional. Says the American Civil Liberties Union: "It is difficult to conceive of any activity of Government which imposes more total--indeed totalitarian--controls on its citizens than a military draft." The courts will test the question, if they ever get the chance. But American attitudes toward the draft raise questions that extend well beyond legalism, and even constitutionality

What is an American citizen's duty to his country and his countrymen? Obedience to the law; taxes; anything else? If the draft is inadvisable on military grounds, or even unconstitutional, is there some other form of national service that Americans might return to their country? The controversy about the draft raises, at least indirectly, the deepest issues of American citizenship: What does it amount to? What do Americans think is worth defending in their nation? Do Americans any longer believe there is anything around which they would unite, anything that would bring them together to fight? Those vulnerable to the draft now repeat: "I am not going to fight for Exxon. I would fight if there were an attack on the country, but I won't die for some Middle Eastern oilfields."

Viet Nam and Watergate greatly undermined the authority of American institutions. They encouraged people to pick and choose the parts they would play, the wars they would fight. At the least, they handsomely legitimized a refusal to participate at all. This moral individualism, an old and admirable American trait, has often been balanced in the past by a sense of duty to country. That sense has chipped and faded. The U.S. has become an appallingly Balkanized, self-contradicting collection of tribes. Lacking an external threat that the majority regard as real, Americans have gone from an us-against-them frame of mind to an us-against-us mentality. American pluralism has become an incoherence of individualisms. The nation's social vision amounts to little more than an individual passion to be comfortable and secure. If sacrifices are required, it is a painful question whether any Americans are willing to give up some of their privilege for the common good; they will certainly never do so if they think that they are sacrificing even the slightest bit more than other Americans; in a period of scarcity, the nation will become even more litigious and niggling in its collection of grievances.

"In the absence of a total nuclear confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union," University of Alabama Sociologist Jon Huer has written in his book The Dead End, "it is the social character of their citizens that must determine the outcome, of their relations." The social character of Americans has atrophied like a limb that has spent too long in a cast. Citizens degenerate into mere consumers; they wall themselves ever more anxiously into the small fortresses of their individual privacy: the American dream itself (individual prosperity and security and liberty) has always been potentially antisocial in its logic. If all society is a tension between the rights of the individual and the needs of the collective, Americans have used their immense endowment of natural wealth to buy the individual out of his social responsibilities. Now they can no longer afford the price; to go on behaving as if they could (consuming such profligate stores of oil, for example) amounts almost to a national death wish.

It will require quite a transformation for Americans to rediscover in peacetime the things they have in the past known only fleetingly in war: whatever it is they have in common, and think is worth having.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.