"The Technicality Generation" Interesting POV from Vietnam Vet (Army, AFR)

[macjr82]

By Larry Pressler

THE problems faced by Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut’s attorney general, over his depiction of his military service are indicative of a broader disease in our society. The issues of integrity in business and politics that plague us today — the way elites are no longer trusted — are rooted in the dishonesty that surrounded the Vietnam-era draft.



The Vietnam War drove members of my generation in different directions. Some served because they believed in the war, others didn’t believe in the war and protested, but when drafted felt an obligation to go. Others were simply drafted. Some refused service out of principle, others out of fear, and still others because they felt that taking the time to go to Vietnam would slow their careers.
Many of those who didn’t serve were helped by an inherently unfair draft. I don’t fault anyone for taking advantage of the law. Where I do find fault is among those who say they were avoiding the draft because they were idealistically opposed to the war — when, in fact, they mostly didn’t want to make the sacrifice. The problem is that for every person who won a deferment or a spot in a special National Guard unit, someone poorer or less educated, and usually African-American, had to serve.
Thus, many in my generation knew they were using a broken (but legal) system to shirk their duty. They cloaked themselves in idealism but deep down had to know they were engaging in a charade. (I, too, was against the Vietnam war and felt that people should protest, but not dodge their draft responsibility.)
This intellectual justification continues to this day, only now these men are among our country’s leaders.
I had a unique opportunity to observe the best and brightest of my generation — first as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford in 1964 and then when I attended Harvard Law School after serving in Vietnam. Among both sets of my classmates were some who used elaborate steps to avoid the draft. (At school, I recall articles circulating that explained how to fail Army physicals.)
In private conversations with my classmates, I was told over and over that they didn’t want to serve in the military because it would hold up their careers. To the outside world, though, many would proclaim they weren’t going because they were opposed to the war and we should end all wars. Eventually they began to believe their “idealism” was superior to that of those who did serve. They said that it was courageous to resist the draft — something that would have been true if they had actually become conscientious objectors and gone to prison.
Too many in my generation did a deeply insidious thing. And they got away with it. Big time. Poorer people went to war. The men who didn’t were able to get their head start to power.
Now that flawed thinking has been carried forward. Many of these men who evaded service but claimed idealism lead our elite institutions. The concept of using legal technicalities to evade responsibility has been carried over to playing with derivatives, or to short-changing shareholders. Once my generation got in the habit of saying one thing and believing another, it couldn’t stop.
Bizarre outcomes abound. Many of those who avoided the war became advocates of a muscular foreign policy. When I was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I would be invited to meetings in the Pentagon or the White House to discuss troop deployments. In those meetings, I encountered far too many Democrats and Republicans who did not serve in the war when they had a chance, and who overcompensated for their unease by sending others into harm’s way.
In the coming days, I imagine we will learn more details of Mr. Blumenthal’s sad story. What we know, though, more generally, is much more troubling. Too many members of my generation learned to believe that they could work within the law to evade basic responsibilities, cloaking their actions in idealism. It’s a way of thinking that scars us to this day.
Larry Pressler, a former Republican senator from South Dakota, served in the Army in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968.

[macjr82]

And a follow-up interview about the op-ed piece on NPR Talk of the Nation, text and audio

Vietnam Vet Says Draft Dodgers Disingenuous : NPR

[Submariner]

Perhaps.

I was born too late for VN, when I got onto my first boat most of the men who were already onboard had been draft dodgers of a sort themselves. They had stayed in college to defer it and then when they graduated they enlisted into the navy and volunteered for subs [correctly thinking it would guarantee they were never in the infantry].

I never have registered for the draft, and I never had to face the situation that draftee-selectees had to face. From the stories I heard while living underwater with those guys, I did get the idea that guys tried a wide variety of scams.

I knew a sailor once who had put himself on a refined sugar diet, nothing but refined sugar and rum for a month; in his attempt to make himself diabetic.

[Crew Chief]

Born in 1955, I missed the Viet Nam draft by one year, so it's almost a moot point for me. I considered my self somewhat of a radical in the early '70s. But, as the rather obedient son of a career Navy officer, I can't say that I was very determined or even thought out my positions as well as I should have. I remember sitting in the living room, watching the war on TV and thinking "I'll go to Canada if I'm ever drafted!" Well, deep down, I'd have to admit that I'd probably have run straight down to a USN or USAF recruiter had I gotten a draft notice.

To this day, I realize just how lucky I've been. I entered the USAF in '74 and retired in '97. Even while in, the closest I got to any kind of action was being stationed at Kwang ju, Korea when the two U.S. Army officers were killed at Panmunjom in '76. Our little "Hooterville" outpost got a detachment of KC-135s that were pretty well self-sufficient, so we never really even broke a sweat. So I have to admit to some guilt when I listen to my fellow service personnel that had it a LOT tougher than I ever did...