Artful dodgers
When baby boomers used college as an excuse to avoid the Vietnam War, it widened the divide in America
W HO hates the baby boomers? Both younger generations — the Xers and the millennials — who blame those born from 19461964 for all the nation’s ills, from crumbling bridges to income inequality to the “luxury voyeurism” of “Downton Abbey” and the “Real Housewives” franchise.
Now 41-year-old author Bruce Cannon Gibney is telling us how he really feels with his new book, “A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America.” It will surely be the bible for slackers whiling away their time on Snapchat and strategizing how to avoid paying off student loans.
The book reads as a blanket indictment of America’s real and imagined failings of the past 50 years. It downplays that global economic and geopolitical tsunamis have swamped every land on earth and points instead to a kind of genetic fecklessness and selfishness uniquely common to all boomers. But a chapter on the Vietnam War has one — but only one — very sound foot on the ground. It accu- rately recounts that the manner in which the 1960s military draft was conducted was catastrophic. It gave a relatively easy out to 15.4 million mostly middle-class, draft-eligible young men between 1964 and 1973, compared with 1.8 million mostly working-class and poor men who were called to duty.
The cruel divide between those helpless to avoid the draft and those who could widened the gulf between America’s haves and havenots.
It instilled permanent, free-floating liberal guilt among mostly white, college-educated young men who legally avoided being called to arms — and who knew that the bloody burden among those conscripted largely fell to poorer Americans both black and white.
Gibney admits it was all perfectly legal, but scolds, “The fact that a system permits exploitation does not mean a person must engage in it.”
But had Gibney been alive at the time, he’d grasp why legal draftavoidance was neither sociopathic nor treasonous.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, a “Greatest Generation” warrior who fought in World War II, didn’t merely “permit” draft-loophole exploitation. He tacitly promoted it, perhaps out of fear that Americans would mutiny over a truly universal call-up. Draft avoidance was a snap even for a working-class guy like me who worked in a supermarket and scraped through college on a state scholarship.
There were several ways out, including dubious, minor “medical” conditions. But the easiest out was simply going to college. Undergraduate enrollment kept you safe from the draft until you earned a degree. Many crafty students took just enough courses to stay in school but stave off getting a diploma for years on end.
Even graduate students were deferred until February 1968 — and those who were already in their second or later year of graduate school as of October 1967 got to keep their free ride.
Threading the loopholes didn’t make us feckless, selfish, unpatriotic bums. Legally avoiding the draft was a rational, morally defensible rebuke to the government’s hypocritical way of making war.
A war truly essential to national security should spare no one from duty except those hobbled by serious medical or psychiatric problems. So, despite LBJ’s claims to the contrary, he didn’t regard the war to be as “vital to American interests” as he insisted it was. And if the war
wasn’t necessary, why give up campus pleasures like sex and football parties for possibly killing or being killed half a world away?
But, even if our Vietnam engagement was militarily justified, it was socially and culturally disastrous to make it optional for millions of ablebodied youths.
It’s crucial to grasp this going forward. Although President Trump has not suggested bringing back the draft, some defense experts and even a few politicians have done so. The nation most to fear is North Korea, which has threatened to reach US cities with its missiles.
It’s worth recalling that in the Korean War of 1950-53, our last major conflict before Vietnam, college deferments were granted — but only until the end of the semester during which a man was called up.
Our goal in Korea wasn’t dissimilar from Vietnam — to keep a northern, Communist state from overrunning a pro-Western southern state. Although that was achieved in Korea, it might have been another story had President Harry Truman undercut morale by allowing indefinitely extended deferments.
For all our great and wonderful diversity, America is — or should be — one country. Citizens, despite differences on a million issues, should feel that we’re all in this together.
But a sense of shared purpose is tossed to the wind when there’s a perception of escape for the privileged. Among Vietnam’s legal draft “dodgers” were Trump, who stayed out of harm’s way thanks to “bone spurs” in his feet, and Bill Clinton, who used a marathon manipulation of deferments until the fighting ended.
A no-exceptions Vietnam-era draft would have avoided, or diminished, the class-and-race divide that haunts us today. I’ve long believed it would have produced either of two possible results: We’d have whipped the enemy within six months — or quit just as soon after deciding that sending lots of “privileged” youths to their deaths was too high a price.
Either outcome would have been better than the long, bloody stalemate that cost 58,209 American lives without preventing the fall of South Vietnam.
Either would have brought the “two Americas” together rather than turn them against one another — a spiral of mutual alienation that’s accelerated ever since.