Tuesday, May 17, 2016
The Draft
Going back to a few weeks ago, we looked at the Vietnam war. The thing that really caught my eye was the draft during that time period. Something that surprised me about the draft was that, once you were drafted you were basically thrown into the war with little to no training, being inexperienced soldiers was not necessarily a good thing if you wanted to win a war quickly and efficiently (something that is valuable to the US). The men who were drafted were only drafted for a year, usually by the time they were considered experienced, their year was up. Another thing that was shocking to me is the lengths people would go to avoid the drafts and how it was reasonably unfair to the middle and lower classes. Before anything else you needed to be declared Physically fit by a doctor before you could even think about going to war, this is where we see money coming into the draft, where poorer people just had to have something wrong with them to be excluded the richer people could just pay to have the doctor "find" something wrong with them. Another exception was if you were in college you could avoid being drafted, but the problem is during this time it was generally the richer people were the only ones able to afford college. In 1969, they did, however, reform the draft to make it fairer. They began using a lottery system that assigned certain numbers to dates and if the number associated with your birthdate was called you were drafted. The draft was also used to influence people's behavior. In colleges, if you were doing poorly or if there was a disciplinary issue, some chancellors would threaten to report students to the draft.
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This is probably the only post I've seen dealing with the topic of the draft. The ways individuals avoided the draft also greatly surprised me. Putting yourself through physical pain to avoid the risk of death seems logical on paper but I can't imagine actually going through with it.
ReplyDeleteDo you agree with the concept of the draft? I know it is a very difficult subject because while we are dealing with the safety and protection of our country and its values and core beliefs, many forget that we are also dealing with something so sacred as a human life. I liked how you said about how they are thrown into combat with little or no training, because that perfectly outlines the reason I found the whole idea really upsetting. These boys, sons, fathers, husbands, and brothers were being used as human chess pieces in a game that they were not prepared to fight, a game that they did not even truly understand the rules of. This post really helped me to understand why I find the draft so damn devastating in regards to the disregard of human life.
ReplyDeleteI like that you included your own opinion at the beginning of the post, and then went on to summarize the ideas that made you have that opinion. This is a really important topic because it does bring into question the effectiveness of the draft. By drafting people who do not actually want to go to war, it is not only unfair because it is forcing people to put their lives in danger when they might not want to, but it is corrupt because, as you said, it gives the rich a much higher advantage in being able to get out of the draft and it promotes this kind of behavior.
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