By Hans HalberstadtKnight Ridder Newspapers
(KRT) Loose talk about reinstating the draft seems to be coming entirely from people who haven’t had much contact with soldiers or soldiering in many years, if ever — people who don’t have a clue who is in the Army or what they do. Today’s Army doesn’t need, doesn’t want and won’t accept America’s slackers, losers and the uneducated underclass in its ranks. They are much more trouble than they are worth.
Today’s Army is a cloistered place by design, an institution that is based on, but isolated from, America’s middle class. It is far different from the Army of the distant past, and a far better place without conscripts. In the 30 years since the draft was abolished the Army has become a professional institution designed to fight and win wars efficiently, and it is doing just fine with the people it has.
I’ve been watching the Army for nearly 40 years, since my own service as a helicopter door gunner in Vietnam, and for the last 15 years as an author writing about military communities. I
spent four months of 2002 with the Army’s soldiers — paratroopers, Green Berets, mech infantry, the front rank of the front line. They’re a perky bunch — remarkably well-educated, mostly married, mostly mature, with a bright-eyed look you don’t see too often among their slovenly civilian peers.
People in the Army today are there, with few exceptions, because they want to be. It is a challenging life in some ways, and a way of service and sacrifice, in other ways, a culture and community utterly unlike the Army of old.
The draft was good for America, but bad for the Army. The draft pulled young men together from all classes, from the highest to the lowest, and gave them a shared experience.
Black, white, brown, yellow, Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu, atheist, agnostic, right-wing John Birchers and lunatic left-wing socialists all got tossed in the same hopper, in the same platoon, in the same foxhole. They learned to get along under the tender guidance of big, usually black, sergeants who could, and would, beat the stuffing out of any recruit.
The Army of the 1950s and ’60s was a very educational place. It made better citizens of all who served, provided a link between the civilian world and the military world that is missing today.
While this experience was good for the men who shared it, the quality of the soldier during the draft era was, by comparison to those today, awful. The place was full of malcontents and malingerers, drunks and disorderlies.
Not anymore — anybody who doesn’t like soldiering today, and who doesn’t do a pretty good job of it, is out on his or her ear, and promptly. Even those who want to stay must excel to be retained, especially within the officer corps.
Bring back the draft? Not if you ask the troops. The Army will fight better with its professionals than with a bunch of amateurs. National service, though, is a great idea and should be compulsory for all — no exceptions — for women as well as men. Just keep them out of the Army, please. It is doing just fine the way it is. ___
ABOUT THE WRITER
Hans Halberstadt is the author of more than 50 books, most on modern military specialties. His newest book, “Army — the U.S. Army Today,” will be published in May. He wrote this column for the San Jose Mercury News. ___
(c) 2003, San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.).
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