There are so many good, juicy reasons to disrespect Bolton, but I'm not sure enlisting in the Guard, by itself, is really one of them.
During the 2004 presidential campaign, a friend forwarded to me this blurb from American Progress (although it was picked up and widely re-circulated on the internet):
MILITARY – THE DEFERMENT OF THE HAWKS: In the September 2004 Vanity Fair, which hit newsstand shelves yesterday, respected journalist David Halberstam examines the discrepancy between the administration's hawks and their personal military records. "To the new superhawks, an America engaged in a worthy war of self-defense and a new imperial America engaged in a war that is a significant miscalculation of policy are the same thing." Halberstam adds, "Their new poster boy is the vice president himself, a man of great certitude, not just about Vietnam but about Iraq as well – his confidence and certitude hardly born of a life experience." Instead of going to war, "Richard Cheney received five – yes, five – deferments, a record that would make most men modest about speaking out on Vietnam and related subjects." And he's not even the Bush administration's deferment king: That (dis)honor goes to "that singular American patriot, Attorney General John Ashcroft, who got seven. Yes, seven."
I like Halberstam, and I certainly enjoy an occasional bit of Bush/Cheney bashing as much as the next man-jack, but I think the whole "five--yes, five!" bit is a bit thick. (I saw him going through it on C-SPAN during a tie-in promotional speaking engagement at about the same time, too.)
If you look at it that way, I had three--yes, three!--deferments myself during the Vietnam war, all without doing anything ingenious or disreputable.
First my Selective Service classification was 2-S (a student deferment). Then I was reclassified 1-S (also a student deferment, but for some reason not exactly the same; I never understood why). Then student deferments were done away with and I was 1-A. (Years later, I found my draft card listing me as 1-A. "Uh-oh," I joked to a friend, "I wonder what it was I burned?")
Then, somewhere in the gap between the Tet Offensive and the fall of Saigon, I was reclassified one last time: 1-H (high enough lottery number), and that was that.
It's quite a memory, for anyone Of A Certain Age: You remember where you were when you heard that Kennedy was shot, or that King was shot, or that another Kennedy was shot, or that Armstrong landed on the moon, or that John Lennon was shot. And you men sure as hell remember where you were when you heard what your draft lottery number was--sitting at the dinner table at home, or in your dorm room, or in a car pulled off at the side of the road, listening to the radio as they pulled up three hundred sixty-five markers, one at a time like calling bingo, each one with a date of the year on it. The sooner your birth date was picked, the lower your lottery number and the more likely you'd be called to report for induction. By the time I was 19, the number of inductions had dropped almost by half for each of the last two or three years. My lottery number, to my great relief, was one fifty-something, and they didn't reach above the nineties that year.
So, strictly speaking, like many people my age, I didn't "dodge" the draft; I submitted myself to it, and when I wasn't inducted I didn't enlist. A better metaphor is to say I stood still and the draft swerved around me. Claiming a legal deferment instead of enlisting is no more "draft dodging" than taking the mortgage deduction on your 1040 form is "tax evasion."
I can't say my lack of desire to serve was based on a carefully worked-out and principled critique of the war, or of war in general. Today, I'm a good deal smarter than I was then, and I'm pretty much anti-war, although not completely so across the board. I can still imagine a war worth waging--although I admit I don't see any around at the moment. But I am definitely anti-illegal war, though, and anti-wars-that-they-have-to-lie-to-us-to-be-able-to-start, and anti-wars-fought-by-the-poor, and anti-wars-ginned-up-so-corporations-can-make-a-profit. Yeah, I'm against those.
On the subject of "dodging" the draft: If you don't want people to have legal ways of getting out of military service, don't create legal ways for them to get out of military service. If they avoided service legally, and you still don't like it, then your problem is with the law, not the person.
And--here's where the trouble lives--a law that's administered unequally, depending on how wealthy and connected you are, is a law worth having a problem with. Marriage was at least theoretically available as an out whether you were rich or poor, but going to college certainly wasn't. And jumping to the head of the line for National Guard enrollment most definitely wasn't (even for those who jumped to the head of the line and then actually completed their National Guard service).
Halberstam was right about one thing: If you weren't inducted and you didn't enlist--if you didn't serve--you probably ought to show a little humility on the subject. You're still a citizen, so your opinion about war and peace, what's worth living for and what's worth dying for, is still important. You do need to maintain a certain amount of humbleness on the subject but, allowing for that, you have no less right or responsibility to speak out than the vet or the soldier standing beside you.
My objection is not to people who had deferments available and used them--especially in a war like Vietnam had obviously become--it's to people who are dishonest and self-righteous about it years later, when they've become much too comfortable placing other people's necks on the line, not their own. Certainly in the case of Cheney and Bush, I'm not aware that either avoided service because of moral objections to the war. Bush was, in fact, energetically pro-war--as long as he didn't have to go near it himself.
My objection is that, for people like Cheney and Bush--and now I think we can throw Bolton back into the mix, too--the distinction is very clear: Declaring war is great fun, but actually serving in war is for chumps. And the Bush/Cheney World is divided into two groups:
them and their friends--you know, their families, business connections, high-dollar supporters, and the people on Karl Rove's speed-dialer
and everyone else--you know, the chumps
Halberstam made a gesture in this direction, when he talked about "a record that would make most men modest about speaking out on Vietnam and related subjects," but if that's his point, he's buried it.
For me, the best moment of "Fahrenheit 9/11" may have been when Michael Moore parked himself on the sidewalk outside the Capitol and invited members of Congress to have their own children enlist in the military to serve in Iraq. They ran from him like he was a leper.
Many people avoided the draft in those days, but I think most have the integrity to admit now that we're not terribly comfortable with everything that entails--even if we'd do nothing different if we could do it over. Other people avoided the draft, but also avoided learning the lesson. That's the distinction that needs to be remembered when the term "chickenhawk" flies, and that's the kind of admission I'd like to hear, even once, from Bush, or Cheney, or the rest.
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