This is a rather personal and idiosyncratic history of my own experiences with the draft, but includes some facts of general interest that are rather little known. Lots more below.
Born at the beginning of 1951, I was in the second of the Vietnam era lotteries. Before the lottery was instituted there was a window of vulnerability from 18 to 26 and the oldest taken first. There were a wide range of deferments, and one could have a fair chance of avoiding the draft if one were able to maintain student status for long enough - one of a variety of ways the better off avoided service.
I had been raised in the Church of the Bretheren, which is an offshoot of the Anabaptist movement, like the Amish and Mennonites and has a pacifist tradition. By the time I came of draft age I had been attending Quaker meetings for several years and believed myself a pacifist. So when the time came, I applied for conscientious objector status. A friend and I also started a volunteer draft counseling office helping other young men our own age understand the legalities of the draft.
My application for C/O status was denied, I appealed and was denied again. I can't remember all the steps anymore, but there were a couple layers of appeal and I failed them all. I think that was pretty much routine for my draft board - too many people were applying for C/O status, so they just denied them all as a matter of course.
Anyway, when the second lottery was held, I was one of the losers, with a number that guaranteed I'd be taken. I continued to maintain that I should be assigned C/O status. In due course a date was set for me to report to induction. One of the interesting quirks of the legal process in those days, was that you had to have "exhausted your administrative remedies" if you were going to have any chance of a successful defense in court. The courts had held that, in this case, that meant you had to report to the induction center, go through the entire process right up to the moment when you took the oath that made you part of the armed forces, then refuse to do so. Then when prosecuted for refusing induction, one's defense would be that the draft board had erred in refusing C/O status.
So, on a morning in April of 1971, I boarded a bus with about 20 others from Santa Barbara to go to the LA induction center. I won't go through the whole process of what happened there, though it makes a rather interesting story. There are two parts of it though that I think are illuminating:
- Once I made it known that I intended to refuse induction, I was treated with extreme, almost exagerated courtesy. It was clear that the military had had cases thrown out because they had treated people abusively and the word had come down not to make that mistake again. There was an elaborately choreographed procedure and I was given multiple opportunities to change my mind. At the end I was simply allowed to leave and stepped out onto the sidewalk expecting I would soon hear from the federal government to prosecute me for refusing induction. I never did.
- The other really interesting data point, is that out of about 20 who went down that day, 4 others refused - 25% total.
A couple of years earlier, outright resisters were few and far between and were tried in relatively high profile trials. But I believe that by the time I refused, the number who were refusing was so large that the government gave up on prosecuting us all. And I am fairly certain that, over the following months, the percentage refusing got even larger.
It is my firm belief that the reason the Nixon administration decided to end the draft about 18 months later was simply this: They didn't want the public to ever know how many were refusing, or that people were refusing and getting away with it. As the current mess in Iraq shows, an all volunteer military will not work for a large and sustained war - especially if it is unpopular. The powers of the military industrial complex were desperately afraid of the kind of citizen movement that we represented. If young men ever got the idea they could refuse induction and get away with it, the ability to prosecute wars of aggression against serious opposition would disappear.