COLUMN LEFT : Doctors’ Sons Won’t Die in the Desert : Our ‘volunteer’ army is not of the upper classes. Is it easier, then, to commit to distant wars?

Louis Inferrera, Joe Hayes, Charles As selta, Lance Jenkins . . . schoolmates from a now-distant past in a small working-class town in New Jersey, they’ve been much on my mind in recent days as we contemplate the prospect of war with Iraq. Good kids, patriotic and vibrantly physical, their young lives came to an abrupt halt in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam.

More than two decades later, no one can say for sure what it was they died for. I remember, in particular, Joe Hayes, a quiet Appalachian boy, already 6-foot-1 and 180 pounds in the sixth grade, winning a softball-throwing contest with a heave that soared and soared, seeming for a long moment as if it would never come down. Seven years later, he was gone and so, too, were the rest.

Christopher Kellogg, Lincoln Caplan II, Rupert Simpson, Mark Kelman . . . classmates from a somewhat more recent past, they, too, have been on my mind. Fellow students at Harvard College in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, they’ve flourished. Some are now well-known, others quietly prosperous, but all of them--and myself--had the good fortune of being thousands of miles away from the carnage then occurring in Vietnam. It is said, perhaps with a bit of exaggeration, that only one Harvard draftee died in Vietnam. Yet before I entered Harvard, two classmates from my public high-school homeroom of 30 had already perished.

It is now well-established that death in Vietnam was linked to class; to take but one example, a study of high-school seniors in Wisconsin showed that the children of poor families had a casualty rate twice that of their better-off classmates. Yet as long as there was a draft, there was at least the possibility--however remote--that the children of the privileged might find themselves facing hostile fire. And it was that possibility that gave the anti-war movement, especially on the campuses, some of its power.

Now, as the nation confronts fateful decisions in its escalating conflict with Iraq, we have no conscript army. Not surprisingly, the offspring of the rich and the powerful are overwhelmingly absent from among the “volunteer” forces. Present, though, are large numbers of minority and working-class youths; of the 1,800,000 enlisted troops in the military in 1988, 22% were black (compared to 12% for the population as a whole) and only 7% had completed even a year of college (compared to more than one-third of all young people). These are the people who would bear the brunt of any shooting war.

Would our nation’s leaders be so willing to risk war if our Army was--like those of most of our European allies--a conscript one, brought together by a draft that touches rich and poor alike? Imagine, for example, that the children of physicians and corporate executives were as likely as the children of factory workers and farmers to face death in the Saudi Arabian desert.

Imagine, in short, that this was a war that would demand truly collective sacrifice, risking the lives of youths not only from Kankakee and Texas A&M;, but also from Scarsdale and Stanford. Perhaps those who shape policy and public opinion would have a rather different view of the U.S.-Iraqi conflict if this were the case.

Iraq, it is said, poses a grave threat to the geopolitical interests of the West, and so it may be. Yet where, one might ask, are our now-wealthy Western allies? After all, they are far more dependent on Middle Eastern oil than we and their geographical proximity to the region is much greater. But, words and gestures aside, they have shown no serious willingness to put the lives of their young on the line.

Indeed, the unpalatable reality of the situation--often lost amid exultation at the unexpected solidarity of the response of the international community to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait--is that no Western nation is volunteering to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the young American men and women who may soon find themselves in a brutal desert war.

Though Iraq is not a world power, neither is it Panama or Grenada. A full-scale war would be costly indeed. Not all Americans would be asked to pay the price for such a confrontation, for it is the Joe Hayeses and the Louis Inferreras of today who would do most of the bleeding and dying. Out of respect for their memory and for our collective future, let us think--and think hard--before we act.