My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 1, #22, January, 1996

DRAFT DODGER

You've probably noticed that, now that we've finally gotten a peace agreement, such as it is, in Bosnia, and America is sending troops over there, all the old questions about Clinton and the military are resurfacing. (You may have also noticed the curious Republican duality about the military--spend a fortune we do not have on it, but never, never risk actually using it--but that's a different column.)

It doesn't seem to bother you in Britain all that much when your politicians send troops out to fight, even if they have had no personal military experience. But then again, you may never have seriously questioned Margaret Thatcher's masculinity.

That is, I'm afraid, a question about Bill Clinton (bimbos or no). Not because he avoided the draft, but because he avoids your eyes when he talks about it. This is a man who is clearly uncomfortable and embarrassed about his actions. We all see our actions through the story we tell ourselves about who we are, and in his mind, I suspect, this is a choice that doesn't fit his story.

I may understand his discomfort better than he does. I'm older than he is, though not by much, went through the shocks of the sixties like he did, and married a man who, as a conscientious objector, used all the loopholes of the system to avoid service. Many of our friends were doing the same thing. We all believed we were right: the war was stupid policy, based on false premises, and was needlessly sacrificing far too many lives.

But the only ones of us who were truly comfortable with our decisions were the ones who did alternative service--our friend Dave who was a medic in Vietnam, our friend Roy who did his service as an orderly in a psychiatric hospital.

I want to take you back for a moment to the time of the Cuban missile crisis. On our campus, for about a week, the guys were walking around, grim-lipped and determined. The girls were just scared. We watched the guys shed their boyhoods and take on the scary (but exhilarating) responsibilities of men. They might not like doing it, but if their country required it of them, there was simply no question: they would go and fight. And maybe die.

I repeat. THERE WAS NO QUESTION.

That's the background all of us draft-dodgers and war protesters came out of. No matter how deeply we believed that this war was wrong, no matter how much we knew about it, all of this was the thinnest of overlays over a lifetime of conditioning to duty, honor, service. And Bill Clinton, as a Southern boy, would have got a double dose of this, because Southerners have always had a special attachment to the military.

And then again, we always kind of wondered, did we REALLY do it because of moral conviction? Or because we were cowards?

The other reason for our guilt is the dirty little secret we never talk about in America--class and race.

My husband had the luxury of getting his draft deferment while he got his Ph.D. because he came from Chicago, where there were lots of other available bodies for cannon fodder. There were all the poor black kids in the ghetto, and the patriotic working class white boys. The draft board could meet its quota without having to deal with a smartass middle-class Jewish boy who made it clear he would fight them in court every step of the way.

Congress voted us into the war, but Congress didn't believe in it enough to send its own kids to fight it (with honorable exceptions like Senator Gore's kid, Al, who refused to trade on his father's power). Harvard and Yale supported the war, but damn few members of Harvard's and Yale's graduating classes died in it.

The war was fought by those who had no real future anyway, by kids whose best hopes were to get unionized factory jobs. And those that came home whole did not come home to a G.I. bill designed to thank them for their service and move them into the middle class, like the G.I.'s of World War II. They came home to be called babykillers, by the same snotnose kids who were rich enough or smart enough to opt out.

Guilt we can live with. Shame is a hell of a lot harder.

Clinton is our first therapeutic president, the man who understands our pain and wants to heal us and bring us together. Maybe the best thing he could do to heal this continuing raw gaping wound in our national psyche is to admit that he's ashamed. Of himself. Of those of us who did just what he did.

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