Veterans View Draft Issue With Sympathy, Not Anger

The military draft--it hung forebodingly over the young men of the 1960s, and it shadows them yet today, those graying fathers of the 1990s.

“Maybe the person who didn’t go to Vietnam was smarter than I was. People who didn’t go were thinking people, and they knew it was a no-win situation”--Jim MacLeod, a Kentucky businessman and military veteran of 12 years.

“Most anybody who had a brain tried to get out of the war. If Clinton didn’t at least try to get out, and I mean within the system, I wouldn’t consider voting for him.”--Steve Dawson, a Minnesota furniture marketer who was medically deferred from service.

“I go back to that time and think, I sure as hell didn’t want to go. You had to be a complete idiot.

“And”--a pause--”you know, some of those guys came back goofy. Who didn’t go to the doctor and get a note? They just threw mine away.”--Steven J. Echer of Wichita, Kan., a pickup truck salesman who served in the Army.

Flashback: Vietnam. Ah, those were the days, eh, boys? The crunch of mortars, the whack-crack of helicopters, the dry metallic mouth, the slippery red clay of the monsoons, the smell of mold and sweat and fear and clothes dried over smoky wood fires, the lonely nights and the lonely letters, the dread and the calendars that marked the days.

Sometimes we Marines would liberate a crate of warm beer. That was the fuel, and a road atlas of the U.S.A. was the launch pad for flights of imagination back to the world . We’d daydream over the soggy, mildewed map. Someone would point to a hometown in the Midwest where a cheerleader with long shampooed hair was sure to be waiting. Another would describe the night delights of Manhattan, which waited for no one.

For reasons I no longer know, I daydreamed during that monsoon of 1967 about eastern Wyoming, a place I’d never seen, the great wide-open Western terminus of the all-American prairie. The thought of workaday Americans I never knew sustained me.

Allow me a bias, please. Some of America’s best men and women served and were served up in that war. I’m proud of my two tours in Southeast Asia. In any evenly balanced debate, Vietnam veteran vs. all comers, I would probably side with the veteran, semper fi and all that.

But the nobility of the veteran aside, many of those I slogged through Vietnam with understood that some of the best and smartest of our generation were not there with us. Working from memory, you understand, I cannot recall a single expression back then about the stay-at-home guys except envy. You’ll recall that 1967 was the “summer of love.” Which sounded plenty good to us. Why didn’t we think of it?

Until Dan Quayle and Bill Clinton, it was hardly worth the argument anymore.

But now the voices of the righteous fill the airwaves and the news columns. If you finagled your way out of active duty during the Vietnam War, they thunder, you let your country down. You are thus flawed.

I wonder. Just as I wondered then.

What I wonder about most is what happened to those who looked for and found ways out. And those who protested. The “hell no, I won’t go” guys. You could hardly shut them up back then. What about the guys who were more afraid than inspired by that war?

There were millions of these men. Where are they now in this 1992 debate? What have the years done to them? What do they think of Bill Clinton and the arguments he revives for the Vietnam generation?

To find a couple of these non-combat veterans, I thought again of this prairie of eastern Wyoming.

Don Riske traveled the United States in 1966 as a banjo player with the feel-good choral group Sing Out-66, delivering pep rallies to audiences on military bases and elsewhere. That earned him a national interest deferment from the draft. He later quit the music group and came home to Wyoming. He joined the National Guard to stay out of the war and wore a wig to Guard meetings to hide his long hair. Today he is a prominent lawyer in Cheyenne, and he looks just like our fathers did back then.

He says: “I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to stop a slug. I didn’t want to be shot. It was a selfish decision for Bill Clinton, but it was for all of us. If you or I or Bill Clinton were 18 in 1942, there would have been no doubt. We would have gone to fight for our country. But what they were asking us to do in 1967 wasn’t the same.

“I don’t think any less of Bill Clinton for the decision he made. I am a little disappointed with the way he has handled it in the campaign. He misjudged how candor would have been appreciated by someone like me. . . . But he may be doing as well as he can with it.

“The real questions raised by this are: Does it show a character defect to have avoided the war? Is he qualified to be commander in chief? To the first I say, no. To the second, I think the role is more of a political role than a role requiring you have to have strapped on boots and grunted around. Because of his war experiences, I think Bush puts too much into his role as commander in chief. There can be too much macho connected with the armed forces. You see it with the 60-year-old guys at the bar, that’s all they talk about.”

Phil White signed up for a third year of ROTC at the University of Wyoming but washed out in the early 1960s because of a weak left eye. This later gave him a medical deferment. He became a campus agitator against the war. Today his gray beard and hair over his collar hint vaguely at his activist past. He is a former journalist who practices law in the college community of Laramie, Wyo.

He says: “The No. 1 thought in every man’s life back then was: What’s going to happen to me with this draft?

“I thought Clinton’s letter that he wrote back then explaining his position against the war was noble. It took a stand. There were easier ways out, if that is what he wanted. I think more of him for what he did. He wasn’t a robot; he was thinking about the issue. And that wasn’t easy to do in the context of the times.

“I think it makes him more qualified to be President. Maybe he won’t send off 50,000 kids to be killed for no purpose.”