Desertion, yes. If you’d taken the Queen’s shilling and deserted, that’s an offence.
But, since Canada did not have conscription, there was no Canadian offence of refusing to turn up for mandatory military service. Someone who left the US to avoid the draft, but never was admitted to the US armed forces, wasn’t deserting because he’d never been a member of the military. Therefore not committing an offence that had a Canadian equivalent, so no extradition.
Bill Clinton’s stepfather co-owned the auto dealership with his brother and one other guy, according to the Wikipedia entry. I had previously read that his stepfather ran the parts or maybe the service section of the dealership. Apparently the three owners split up the running of the dealership so that they each ran their own section. Having grown up on a farm, I can tell you that a 400-acre farm isn’t a large one. It’s just barely big enough to make a living off of. Clinton’s stepfather was also a gambler, an alcoholic, and a wife beater. This meant that the Clinton family barely scraped by, despite his mother’s income as a nurse and his stepfather’s income as a co-owner of a car dealership and then as a farmer. Clinton’s mother and stepfather at one point got divorced and then soon got married again. If his stepfather hadn’t been such a screw-up, the income they made would have been sufficient to have made them solidly middle class.
Ok - it all makes sense now.
It’s interesting how different things can mean in different parts of the country, and how different the economics are. In the northeast, were I have lived my whole life, someone who owned, or part owned a car dealership and then was able to buy a 400 acre farm is usually far from poor, perhaps not even middle class.
Well, I’m ending the hijack now - I think this thread thread is about draft dodging or something of the sort. Please accept my apologies everyone.
Desertion is not the same as draft-dodging. I don’t know if deserters were extradited, but they certainly could have been.
I got a 2S deferment for 8 years through college and grad school by which time I was nearly 26 and they were not drafting 26 year olds (although I was eligible until 35). My first job teaching math was considered essential.
I remember listening to Clinton’s autobiography audiobook once, and “white trash” pretty much describes it- from wife beating, pill addictions, perpetually drunk, threatening his step-father with a gun (IIRC) or people dying early in auto accidents (I’m guessing alcohol involved) my reaction to his early years was the same “what a bunch of hillbillies!” Clinton grossly underrated his own talents, giving speeches standing in for the governor at campaign rallies while still in college, making it to Harvard and making Rhodes Scholar.
Bush - he was shot down during the war and there’s newsreel footage of him being rescued at sea… oh, wait, that’s GHW Bush, WWII. The big controversy, if you recall, was that GW Bush somehow managed to miss much of his final flying time with the National Guard, while transferring to a different state to work on his father’s friend’s political campaign; there’s some debate whether he did in fact show up to the Guard for the required times while there, and what happened when he got back home. Of course, all records were destroyed in a fire it seems, and the authoritative CO was dead.
During the 2004 campaign, the rich supporters of Bush trashed Kerry, who actually served in the front lines and actually go shot at quite a lot. Meanwhile, the Kerry campaign did not press the Bush side about the shortcomings of his service record - but much of the discussion at the time was that strings were possibly pulled to get GW in a position where he was unlikely to end up in Vietnam any time soon, and also the discussion was that Air National Guard was a pretty safe bet for staying away from actual combat.
It is fascinating to think, though, that the people who have gotten us into the most recent wars - Bush and Cheney - both took pains to avoid serving in combat, while Kerry volunteered. (Of course, there were also claims that he did it in anticipation of a future political career)
I worked with a fellow who “moved to Canada” to avoid the draft, and couldn’t go home for quite a while. He mentioned that a lot of the officer cadet corps in his school went into ROTC and quite a few of them did not come back from Vietnam. Not sure if that was snark or truth.
And to confuse things even more, there were those letters or whatever other documents ( the Killian documents ) that turned up in 2004, purporting to be from Bush’s CO with clear statements about what a lousy Guardsman he was, etc… Somebody faxed these to CBS, where Dan Rather got them and ran them on 60 Minutes. They were almost immediately thereafter shown to be a clear and obvious hoax, but Rather bit the bait and came out of the scandal looking like a doofus. He resigned as CBS news anchor a year or so later.
He was a young man, he wanted to have fun. What more fun can there be than flying £million aircraft at the government’s expense - it’s like the best fairground ride ever. Presumably, he could have done any ground, admin job he wanted but of course he went for the thrills.
Do you really think he ever got any further in his thinking than that?
Yeah, because the documents used Proportional Spacing–so they must have been created by MS Word or some other package. Except that the IBM Executive typewriter had PS & was in use back then. (I used one.)
Back to the main topic. Rather than “draft-dodging system” the topic should be Selective Service. Yes, there were some Conscientious Objectors–serious pacifists, usually due to religious convictions. But many young men of my generation had been raised to revere their fathers’ fight against fascism but did not see the war in Southeast Asia as the same kind of struggle. Some protested & took things to court–others quietly kept their student deferments in order. (Switching schools usually meant they kept flunking out.) Of course, others let themselves be drafted or proudly joined. One guy I knew joined the Navy because he didn’t want to slog through the jungle; then a guy came to talk about the Seals. Hey, he was young.
It takes all kinds–but some of us did & do look down on the Chicken Hawks–those who supported that war but avoided serving. Or who avoided service but later started unnecessary wars, wrapping themselves in the flag. (And cutting VA funding.)
The Wikipedia article on Champagne Units is a bit snide. Nowadays, Reserves & Nat Guard units are often sent overseas; this was quite rare back then & the units were quite selective. This quotation from Colin Powell seems genuine:
(Of course, back in the Civil War you could just pay somebody to march off to war in your place.)
And it has been proven pretty conclusively that it IBM Executive typewriter couldn’t have produced the documents.
md2000 writes:
> Clinton grossly underrated his own talents, giving speeches standing in for the
> governor at campaign rallies while still in college, making it to Harvard and making
> Rhodes Scholar.
For what it’s worth, Clinton was never at Harvard. He did his undergraduate work at Georgetown and his law degree at Yale. Between them he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.
Hah… my dad managed to avoid seeing combat through a combination of a student deferment to see him through his last semester or two of college, and doing some sort of enlistment into the USAF during that period with delayed intake, so that when the Army came calling in 1969, he was able to say “Nope… I’m already in the Air Force.” before he actually shipped out to basic training.
I had a 2S for undergrad, and was just under the wire for getting it before it was discontinued. I was a college freshman in 1970. To this day, I’m not sure I was really supposed to have one - I waited until I got a draft number, which turned out to be 22. By that time, the 2S had been discontinued, but I called up my draft board, explained that I had already been in school when they were still being issued, and I got one. Followed quickly by a cancellation of the physical I had been told to show up for as soon as I got the low number. Yeah, I got told “Ya know, this will mean you’re eligible until you’re 35”. I couldn’t see them taking guys over 30 even if they HAD been deferred unless the country was actually being invaded by the Soviet army, and anyway, the draft ended shortly thereafter, which was expected by that point.
Wait, what? Military Police don’t deploy? Sorry but MPs have a very specific combat role. They are certainly needed and often deployed.
And to say Gore avoided combat by going to Viet Nam is odd to say the least.
Black servicemen suffered 12.5% of the combat deaths in Viet Nam at a time when black males made up 13.5% of the population eligible for combat. Draftees accounted for about 30% of casualties. 75% of those serving in Viet Nam and 70% of the deaths were of volunteers. So if that anecdote is true some of them may have died but it was not the way you make it sound.
As for the National Guard you may noting it is far from the refuge to get out it deployment now. The fundamental mission has not changed. The guard is there to get called up for combat. However the president has to declare a state of emergency for there to be large scale call ups. That state of emergency would also allow for stop loss. Johnson was unwilling to do that for political reasons and Nixon certainly wouldn’t while stating he was trying to get out of Viet Nam.
I don’t want to drag the thread off topic (again!), but this cite puts the number much higher, at least in 1965.
It’s pretty hard to argue with actual numbers: Vietnam War Casualties (1955-1975)
I’ll assume that is true for 1965 which was before the hardest fighting and most casualties. My numbers are for the entire conflict.
Percentages between different cites are slightly off because some count only combat deaths and others count all deaths. I don’t think the percentages are that far off though.
Taking the entire population, Wiki says blacks comprised - not only males - about 11% of the whole population in 1970. Sumits up somewheres …
True. Although of course that does not account for who is eligible to be drafted or who could be in a combat role. That limits it to males in a certain age range. The cites I have seen say that black Americans made up 13.5% of the males in the draftable age range. I’m no census taker or statistician so I’m only going by what I can find.
The clincher on the fake Bush service documents wasn’t proportional spacing, but the fact that the dates - like “17th” - the “th” was superscripted. Ignoring that an ordinary office in one of hundreds of military bases was unlikely to have a top-end typewriter that could do proportional spacing, almost nothing commercially available did date superscripts, and it’s unlikely that even if one did, the typical typist would use that feature. however, Word did do so, and oddly enough, the typing was precisely spaced the same as Word’s elementary serif font.
The fakery was glaringly obvious to anyone who knew anything about typing and office equipment from pre-word-processor days. It must have been done to be a joke, or faked by someone equally ignorant of technology. It’s astounding anyone fell for it.
Moderator Note
Let’s refrain from political jabs in General Questions. No warning issued, but don’t do this again.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator