Note: this is a two-part post. In the first, I depict a personal crisis from the Vietnam War protest era. In the second, I reflect on the source of moral courage.
1
In my Connecticut high school sophomore year, our English teacher, Dr. Haller, consented to student demands for a class discussion. The preceding Sunday, President Nixon had announced American planes were bombing North Vietnamese supply routes in neutral Cambodia. Dr. Haller proposed we begin by holding a preliminary vote on whether the U.S. should be in Vietnam at all. The result was a foregone conclusion: Among students, the war was immensely unpopular.
Before my family’s immigration from England, I’d constructed model planes and warships, organized armies of tiny plastic soldiers and little model tanks on the dining room table, and devoured everything I could find to read about the two world wars. But even then, I’d known that a miniature plastic army or a book read while lying on my bed wasn’t war.
War was more like the multi-part BBC documentary on the Great War of 1914-18 that Mum and Dad let me stay up to watch. The herky-jerky black-and-white footage heightened its terrors. How had those men, ordered to attack across no man’s land, found the courage to hoist themselves from the relative safety of a trench into a hail of bullets? I’d have known those bullets were aimed at me. My grandfather on my mother’s side had fought in that war, and family lore had it that he’d been standing and talking to a man when the man’s head was sheared off by a shell.
Later, when I was thirteen and hospitalized in London, a 27-year-old Polish patient told me how Poland’s Home Guard had risen up in Warsaw against the Germans as the Russians advanced, only for the Russians to wait on the far side of the Vistula River while the Germans massacred the Poles. I told him I couldn’t imagine having the courage those Poles had shown. I would have been terrified less of being killed than being seriously wounded. I had a good idea of what a serious wound could do. Achilles tendon surgery when I was seven had confined me to bed for months on end, and I’d discovered first-hand that you really could lose your sight.
In addition, I couldn’t see myself shooting to kill. Daydreaming through a pretend battle, I put an enemy soldier in my gun’s sight. I saw the man’s face and his expression. There were all kinds of people, therefore all kinds of soldiers, but my imagination always seemed to pick out the ones with sad faces or gentle smiles, combatants as reluctant as me. How could I pull the trigger?
Dr. Haller called out, “Those in favor?”
Despite my fears, and not because of them, I rejected pacifism. My reading had persuaded me that living under Nazism would have been worse than fighting it. Day by day, life would have been filled with danger for myself, my family and friends, all of us living in constant terror of a misinterpreted gesture, an unfortunate choice of words, a show of sympathy. I felt communism constituted the same threat, and I’d written a paper in social studies arguing for the containment theory in light of Chamberlain at Munich. Did I think harsh, oppressive communism could come to the United States or England? The protestors argued the Vietnamese were distant strangers to us, as we were to them. But history showed that local causes can go global. Austro-Hungary’s dispute with Serbia had led to the Great War. We couldn’t afford to abandon the fight only to find the enemy on the doorstep.
Bombing Cambodia was a violation of neutrality that even I thought was wrong, but I believed Chamberlain-like passivity would be even worse.
The class was quiet, waiting to see if anyone would dare cast a vote condoning war.
What if I spoke up for my convictions? Knowing I’d be exempt from military service when I came of age at eighteen, my classmates would think to themselves, “Easy for him to say.” (Girls were also exempt, but that was somehow different.) Of course, they wouldn’t say it aloud for fear of hurting the feelings of their disabled classmate. Still, didn’t I at least have the moral courage to take a public stance?
I raised my hand.
During the even deeper silence that followed, the girl next to me tittered and whispered, “You’re the only one.” I felt my face grow hot.
The class stayed silent, undoubtedly waiting for me to justify myself. But I’d need to explain that during the years before we left England, the nightly news had been dominated by Britain’s efforts to help defend Malaysia (in southeast Asia, like Vietnam) against a communist Indonesian incursion. No one here had even heard about that war. If I started there, I’d get so bogged down that I’d never get to growing up in a country of bombed and rebuilt cities after Chamberlain’s Munich. In the charged atmosphere, I’d become confused and incoherent.
Dr. Haller called out, “And those against?”
2
Not all people who have physical courage also have moral courage, and vice-versa. Those who have both are remarkable. That said, physical violence for violence’s sake perverts the notion of physical courage, while moral courage can shift into holier-than-thou intransigeance. The lesson I eventually took away from that long-ago class debate was not to let doubts about one’s physical courage undercut a moral position.
Within two years of that vote, I changed my mind. Although North Vietnam had a self-proclaimed communist government, the war’s origins went back to French colonization. We weren’t so much fighting communism as backing one side in a civil war.
Since the Vietnam era, the United States has intervened militarily in countries that are equally obscure to many Americans: Lebanon, Bosnia, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and most recently Iran. Some of these interventions provoked serious protests, but nothing like the intensity of the public outcry that dominated the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some say the difference is explained by the vivid, devastating television coverage of the Vietnam War. But what if, instead, it was the end of the draft?
I want to lay out an argument for conscription, not to advocate for it, but in order to suggest why we the people have been unable to exercise sufficient influence over our government. For examples of how the draft drove Vietnam War protests, see this 1968 Time article.
With a draft in place, foreign wars would cease being distant events because nearly every American would have a personal stake, either as a member of the military or as a relative or close friend. For most of us, military actions abroad are causes for concern, but from such a distance this concern can feel self-indulgent: We get to feel good about ourselves for taking social issues seriously without incurring a cost. Meanwhile, in our country’s name, people in faraway places are killed, maimed, made homeless and hungry.
It can feel as if we are all hypocrites. But it’s hard to connect idealist thinking with effective action when our lives aren’t directly touched. Without a draft, they might not be until we reach the conclusion of Martin Niemöller’s characterization of the Nazi tactic of picking off targets one by one: “Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
I can’t find data on each socioeconomic and regional group’s representation in the armed services. It does appear that Southern families with military traditions participate disproportionately. By contrast, here in New York City, I rarely encounter someone with military experience. Whatever the actual numbers, it’s safe to say that today’s enlistees do not represent a cross-section of America.
The need for resistance to authoritarian-like rule could not be greater, and a true citizens military could function as a check. President Trump might have been less eager to deploy the Marines in Los Angeles. He has issued an executive order implying that he might send American troops into Latin American countries to root out drug cartels. Would a citizens army smoothly cooperate with encroachments on the territory of sovereign nations? Tariffs are disrupting global trade, which might well lead to conflicts among nations and calls for military intervention. How many such interventions would a citizens army tolerate?
In reality, nationwide conscription wouldn’t stop all interventions. For example, while our occupation of Afghanistan is today widely seen as a terrible mistake, at the time it was popular, fueled by nationwide anger over the destruction of the World Trade Center and the assaults on the Pentagon.
In today’s re-airing of the “gilded age,” we need our representatives in the House and Senate, corporate and media executives, law firm partners and university administrators to lead the way. Instead, many abdicate responsibility in favor of their own interests. I admire recent protests and other actions I’ve read about in Los Angeles, Miami, Nebraska here in New York City and elsewhere. However, for the most part, we lack the personal stakes that would drive us to the sustained, loud, passionate, frantic agitation that drove Lyndon Johnson to leave office in 1968 and the military to reform itself through the 1970s.
How maddening to endure cheerful ads for cosmetics and injury lawyers while masked men are snatching people off the streets and dispatching them to faraway countries on the Department of State’s travel advisory list. In the absence of widespread membership in the military, how does the country return to something closer to a stable truth north?
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