Reading Greg Jaffe’s Aug. 21 front-page article, “Glimpses of War,” left me more convinced that eliminating the draft was a grave mistake. This change created a deplorable disconnect between the American public and those Americans who choose to volunteer, for whatever reason, to put themselves in harm’s way in the service of their country.
In 1962, when I was a 18 years old, I enlisted in the Marine Corps not out of a sense of patriotism or anything remotely idealistic. I wanted to get out of my parents’ house, plus I thought it would be cool to be a Marine. But there was also the draft, unfair at best, which guaranteed that a broad swath of American families had “skin” in the game. This feeling that we are in it together, reluctantly or voluntarily, ended in 1973.
So when I read that then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates was lamenting that the American public treats our two seemingly never-ending wars as an “ abstraction” and as something “that does not affect them personally,” I think: If you have nothing invested in something, do you care what happens to those who do?
James G. Giza, Baltimore
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Greg Jaffe’s article seemed critical of the fact that most Americans have trouble relating to the experiences of our returning servicemen and women. I submit that the post-Vietnam Pentagon would have it no other way.
Less than 1 percent of our citizens serve, of their own volition, in our armed services. The rest of us are not required to perform any type of national service, nor permitted to see the carnage of war, nor even asked to pay for the wars while our volunteers fight them. As a result, the generals, the defense industry, and the politicians have a free hand in deciding when, where and for how long those volunteers will fight, without having to fear the huge cross-cultural protests that eventually forced an end to the Vietnam debacle.
The creation and compartmentalization of a “warrior class” and the sanitizing of war for the wider American public are no accident, but they are harmful to a participatory democracy.
Gary Peters, Washington
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