It may be, if the draft is reinstated as some in Congress suggest. The challenge: Would all share in the burden?
By SUSAN ASCHOFF
Published May 11, 2004
[Times files]
A blindfolded Secretary of State Henry Stinson draws the first number in the first peace-time lottery in 1940 as President Franklin D. Roosevelt, left, looks on.
Young men born March 6, 1953, were assigned the first Selective Service callup for 1973 in a drawing. By coincidence, March 7 was drawn next.
Workers are supervised as they insert numbers into capsules for the draft lottery.
Antiwar protesters ransack the offices of a draft board in Silver Spring, Md., in 1969. They were arrested at the scene.
He was a sophomore at the University of Denver when it was his turn to have the equivalent of a door-prize drawing decide his future.
He and every other guy in the dorm crowded the television at the end of the hall to watch capsules containing birth dates being drawn from a fishbowl. If the then-19-year-old's date was pulled out early, he would be drafted for Vietnam. If drawn after the 100th, he'd be safe.
"Everybody on the dorm floor was so nervous. Everybody was watching," says Richard Gonzmart, president of Columbia Restaurant Group in Tampa, the parent company of Columbia Restaurants, of that night at college in August 1971.
His roommate Jimmy Philopoulos got No. 51.
Gonzmart got 324.
The lottery was one of a series staged from 1969 through 1972, shortly before U.S. forces withdrew from Vietnam in 1973 and the draft ended.
There hasn't been a draft in the United States since.
Gonzmart was not drafted and did not enlist. Instead, he served his country 10 years later when he became one of the youngest members named to a draft board. Volunteers have been filling the more than 10,000 seats nationwide, including about 150 in the Tampa Bay area, since the system was revived in the early 1980s.
None has yet to decide a draftee's fate.
But Gonzmart, who served the maximum 20 years before retiring from the board in 2002, says it is "the most important thing I've ever done."
"People don't think it (draft boards) exists, but God help us if we're not ready."
Now 30 years after Vietnam, when thousands who opposed the war burned their notice letters or ransacked Selective Service offices or fled the country, there is again talk of a draft.
Never happen, most experts agree, particularly in an election year. Polls show 80 percent of the public opposes a draft.
Still, legislation has been introduced in both houses of Congress to reinstitute forced military or community service for young men and, this time, young women as well.
The discussion is less about soldiering, more about sharing a burden.
Sen. Chuck Hagel called for a draft as a patriotic duty and a backup for troops stretched thin in Iraq.
The draft is "a steam engine coming right down the track at us," the Nebraska Republican and Vietnam veteran said in the Washington Post.
Another member of the Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., D-Delaware, agrees with the idea of shared sacrifice but says a draft is not necessary.
"It's not something that's under consideration," said White House press secretary Scott McClellan when asked about President Bush's position.
Troop levels are adequate, says the military. And the all-volunteer force of 1.4-million met or exceeded its recruitment goals for fiscal 2003, reports the Department of Defense.
Only once during Gonzmart's 20 years on a board did a draft loom. During the Persian Gulf War, board members were called in ahead of schedule for training, Gonzmart says. Asked whether he thinks current board members have been put on alert, he says, "I guarantee you that they've been contacted."
Online magazine Salon.com reported in November that Selective Service is hastily filling vacancies on the five-person boards because of fighting in Iraq. Selective Service officials say the 16 percent vacancy rate is typical for the more than 2,000 boards and recruitment is always ongoing.
"We are told to be ready to do something at a moment's notice, but we do nothing unless Congress tells us to," says Selective Service spokesman Dan Amon.
If a draft is implemented, the system has about six months by law to get the first inductee to the military. Amon says that's insufficient time to first find and train volunteers for the boards, so the framework is already in place.
Congress would pass a bill and the president would sign it. A lottery based on birthdays would determine the order in which those registered are called. Men who are 20 would be first to go.
Another possibility is a targeted draft: In the 1980s, Congress asked Selective Service to devise a draft for health care workers that could be adapted to other specialties, such as computer and language experts.
There are an estimated 15-million men of draft age, 18 through 25, in the United States.
"I don't expect there to be a draft. A draft in a war like this one (Iraq) is going to cause problems," says Alan Gropman, a professor at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C.
Gropman, who flew two combat tours in Vietnam, says political fallout and the proficiency of today's career military favor a volunteer force over a conscripted one.
"The military is infinitely better than it was with a draft. We have a good Army. We don't have (as many) discipline problems. We don't have desertions," Gropman says.
In Vietnam, they made up 16 percent of the armed forces but accounted for more than half the battle deaths.
Working-class youths and African-Americans suffered a disproportionate share of the casualties, statistics show. Wealthier whites were often officers or found safer posts.
Others didn't go at all. More than half of draft-age men did not serve, most with legal exemptions or deferments for education or family.
Vice President Dick Cheney, then a student at Yale University, asked for and received five deferments before he turned 26 and was no longer eligible: four as a student (his college education lasted six years) and one as a new father.
Last month Cheney questioned the credentials of presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, who was decorated in Vietnam but protested the war upon his return, to serve as commander in chief.
Former President Bill Clinton, after an education deferment, says he entered the lottery in 1969 and avoided the draft by virtue of a high number: 311. Critics say he juggled registration and induction.
The lottery was introduced in 1969, removing much of the power of local boards to choose who to send. Then-President Richard Nixon dropped education and other deferments in 1971.
"The main issue now," says professor Charles Moskos, who teaches military sociology at Northwestern University, "is that the military is too small, and it is unfair to America's working-class people" to be the only ones enlisting.
Moskos wants all young men and women drafted for military, community or homeland security service. "They can guard our borders and our nuclear plants," Moskos says.
Mandatory registration is still in effect for 18-year-old males, reinstituted in 1981 after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and a Carter administration study found a lack of troop preparedness. Draft boards were filled shortly after.
Unpaid volunteers on the boards and appeals boards would hear draftees' requests for deferments, postponements or exemptions from service. For example, a board would evaluate a draftee's request for conscientious objector status to determine if his moral or religious grounds were genuine.
Without an active draft, board members typically meet once a year for four hours of refresher training. In Florida, the most recent session was in March, says Air Force Reserve Capt. Jennifer Spencer, area office manager for Selective Services Local Boards. Spencer oversees virtually all boards in Hillsborough and Pinellas counties.
There are six draft boards in Hillsborough County and six in Pinellas, their membership ideally representing a range of professions, ages and ethnicities to reflect the community.
To qualify, a member must be 18, a U.S. citizen and a resident of the area. He or she is appointed by Selective Service and approved by the president. A member cannot be a member of the military or retired military, a member of law enforcement or a felon.
"We don't want your 18-year-old (to go) before the board and it's the local judge," Spencer says. She did not provide names of persons currently serving.
The ideal, she says, is for a draftee to be heard by his peers and judged strictly on the merits of his case.
The reality is a system historically colored by bias.
"All drafts, since before the Civil War, have had loopholes to allow people to escape," says Gropman.
"When the bullets start flying, mom and dad find a way" to keep their son out.
During the Civil War, the Confederacy's draft exempted many slave owners. Draftees also could hire stand-ins or pay the government $300 (the equivalent of a worker's annual salary) not to go. By World War I, draft boards selected men who could be spared from their civilian jobs. An estimated 355,000 agricultural workers were protected from the draft in World War II, Gropman says. Of the nearly 15-million who served, 66 percent were inducted through Selective Service. Korea's "doctor draft" delivered more than 7,000 physicians and 3,700 dentists.
When roommates Gonzmart and Philopoulos faced the fishbowl, there were few options if their numbers were called.
"I almost died," Philopoulos says of his birth date pulled 51st. During classes the next day, "everyone knew." Strangers patted him on the back, he says. Professors didn't mark if his assignments were late.
Within six weeks, he got the Selective Service letter. "Greetings," it began.
"Six weeks ago you were drinking beers and wondering what girl you're going to go out with," he says, "and suddenly you have a file called MAC-V (Military Assistance Command-Vietnam).
"We were children of privilege never expecting it."
Philopoulos served six years stateside in the Army National Guard.
"It may come to a draft again," he says. "The burden that's being placed on these reservists - they can't stretch these guys out forever."
As many as 30 percent of U.S. troops in Iraq and the Middle East come from the National Guard and reserves. Some have been ordered to extend their deployments by a year. Others' retirements have been postponed. In a survey last year of enlisted troops serving across Iraq, the newspaper Stars and Stripes found up to half, most of them reservists, don't plan to re-up.
"These kids (in the Guard) now are over there one or two years and getting shot at. They're losing their houses because they can't pay the mortgage. Then the government tells them they can't leave because we can't replace you," says Philopoulos, 52, a commercial developer in Massachusetts.
A potential draft is real, says Gonzmart, 51.
"I was very scared" about the possibility of a draft during the Persian Gulf War, he says of his time on a board. "It's a tough decision to send someone to war."
- Information from "Houghton Mifflin's Reader's Companion to American History" was used in this story.
