Are we going to reinstate the draft?

[HassleCat]

60. I was in from 1972 to 1978.

My impression was that many people do join the military because they see too many John Wayne movies. A large proportion of those people join the Marines, as you might expect. I was in the Navy, in a technical field, and only one or two people I knew were hard core patriotic types. In my field, almost everyone was there for the technical training and experience. Even the SEAL team members who sometimes travelled on our ships were not "baby killer" types, although that was their job, obviously. I joined because I knew that my specialty would not put me in front of an angry yellow man with an AK-47. If I had not done this, I would have been drafted into the Army.

Yes, many people did believe some peasant in a rice paddy was part of communist aggression, which would envelope the world unless we opposed it with military force. This was very common thinking at the time. In fact, it may be very common thinking now, but with a different slant on it. Many citizens trust their government not to send them off to kill innocent people with no provocation. As we have seen, such faith is often severely misplaced, but not everyone discovers that before they decide to join up.

Part of the problem, a large part, in fact, is that we now have a professional military. The pay and benefits are pretty good, at least for those who make it a career. In return, we expect them to shut up and kill when told to kill, and not raise moral objections about it. Our military is very close to being a mercenary force, certainly much more so than when we had a draft and the citizen-soldier concept was still alive. We did this, not the people who serve. We intentionally set out to replace the citizen-soldier with the professional soldier, fully expecting that the professional soldier would be much less inclined to object to whatever we told him or her to do. So if there are many people in the military who joined up so they could kill, that's what we wanted. If we want it to be otherwise, we could return to the draft and the concept of the citizen-soldier.