No, College Draft-Dodgers Didn’t Cost Us Vietnam
I agree with most of Steve Cuozzo’s column that everyone should have served and fulfilled their obligation to this great country (“Artful dodgers,” PostScript, March 12).
One point where I totally disagree, however, is his statement that if all served we might’ve won the war in six months. That takes away from all who served with honor and bravery in Vietnam.
The politicians should never have gotten us into a war they weren’t committed to win. Bruce Colline Toms River, NJ
Cuozzo is repeating a myth of the Vietnam war that going to college kept you from military service.
The draft took in men aged 18 to 26. Most men graduated from college at age 21 or 22 and then went right into the draft. Every year during the war thousands of college graduates were drafted.
The pilots held as POW’s in North Vietnam in horrific conditions were almost all college graduates.
So were the infantry officers, who suffered very high casualty rates in Vietnam.
College grads served at every level of the military during the conflict. But there was one way to avoid the draft: Become a teacher. Maybe the influx of all those real draft dodgers is one reason the American education system became such a mess. Tom Molloy South Portland, Maine A “no-exceptions Viet- nam-era draft would have been . . . better than the long, bloody stalemate that cost 58,209 American lives without preventing the fall of South Vietnam” is a sentiment I disagree with.
There are always men who won’t fight, but I remind you: We were winning the war military before we pulled out, thanks to the 2.5 million men and women who served their country honorably.
These courageous soldiers didn’t hide out in Great Britain on a Rhodes scholarship — like Bill Clinton. Instead of honoring their service, on Jan. 21, 1977, President Jimmy Carter fulfilled a campaign promise, granting amnesty to the hundreds of thousands of men who had evaded the draft by fleeing the country, faking injuries or failing to register.
Shamefully, the millions who served were not thanked but treated badly. Ed Moffitt Brooklyn