There were no empty seats on the plane to Saigon. If you did not take your seat, someone had to. But protecting yourself you placed someone else in danger.
That is morally wrong.
Not everybody who dodged the draft was avoiding danger. Some people were avoiding putting someone else in danger, as in, they weren’t going to go kill somebody for what they didn’t believe was a sufficient reason.
The path not taken is of course unknowable. By avoiding military service in Vietnam, someone else was sent. That unknown other person was put in danger. Further, to continue along your line of reasoning, if I avoided going to Vietnam, some other less-humane person might have gone.
That other person might have done horrible things.
But of course such reasoning depends on endless time-traveling butterflies whose wings might have cause huge storms in some alternate timeline.
In our reality, we can be fairly sure that if I dodged the draft, someone else had to take my place.
I have always been totally opposed to conscription, the idea that people can be forced to fight and die for a cause not of their own choosing is morally indefensible so I firmly believe that people who avoided the draft by any means did absolutely nothing wrong
the idea that by avoiding the draft they put another person in danger is utterly ridiculous, they did not put the other person in danger, the government who drafted them did
The other person would not have been in danger had not someone else claimed to have had bone spurs.
I interpreted @Saintly_Loser as meaning that after Clinton’s various deferments ended, his birthdate lottery number was high purely by good luck.
So as an older person with a high umber, he didn’t need to do anything else more nefarious / dishonorable / etc. to extend his ineligibility. As a practical matter he was never going to be called unless WWIII came along. And in fact, much as @Hari_Seldon reports about himself, Clinton didn’t either.
I don not believe there was any way to change one’s lottery number. Being born on, e.g. Jan 20th as Clinton was got the number it did. No way to fake the number or the birthday. If there was to be favoritism or skullduggery or whatever it would have to have come via another avenue.
So the only moral position for a person unwilling to kill other humans would be to go through training, get on the plane, and once there refuse to shoot/bomb/whatever?
I kind of doubt that you ought to accept that one, as I doubt most of the soldiers in that person’s troop would accept it.
Your position, basically, seems to be that one must always be willing to kill other people, because one mustn’t endanger other people. That makes no sense to me.
I cannot agree with this position and I am also a veteran, the son of a veteran and great-nephew of a WWII Bronze Star winner I just discovered this week.
When the lion share of those drafted were poor kids and especially poor black kids, hard to say it was morally wrong to find a way out when it seemed like all the rich white college kids were getting out of it.
It is not inherently wrong. I suppose it may arguably be wrong under certain circumstances (putting aside a debate about the justification for conscription). But it is not always morally wrong.
That gives a huge pass to government to go to war for unjust and immoral reasons and to demand active participation (active as in actually killing people) from the populace.
It says that it is always immoral to refuse conscription, because someone else will be conscripted to make up the numbers, no matter how unjust the cause. I’m not going to Godwinize the thread (well, I guess I just did), but you can see where this leads.
It also, if one extends it a bit, says it’s morally wrong to not volunteer if one is physically fit for service, because, after all, if one doesn’t volunteer, someone else would have to be conscripted to fill the spot.
And if everyone had refused, the United States would have been unable to wage that unjust and pointless war.
Correct.
And there’s a real debate to be had about the justice of educational deferments, but, under the law at the time, Clinton was entitled to the deferments he received.
A few years back, my wife and I were making a road trip for Thanksgiving. The local freeway is famous for its binary traffic dynamics: either 80+mph or hard on the brakes.
We suddenly switched from the former (80mph) to the latter (hard on the brakes). As a long time motorcycle rider, my eyes instinctively went to my rear view mirror as my car slowed to a stop.
The car behind me wasn’t slowing at all. I yelled for my wife to brace herself, cranked the steering wheel hard left, and gunned the accelerator pedal.
My car had no balls, so we didn’t get off the road, but we got enough of an angle, and far enough out of our lane that we got smacked into the median instead of sandwiched into the car in front of us.
I don’t think the car in front of us was damaged at all.
Had I been totally successful in getting my car off the road, then somebody could have called me a selfish bastard for sacrificing the person in the car in front of me in the name of my wife’s and my safety.
I would understand their point, academically, but I wouldn’t agree with it.
I similarly understand yours but don’t agree with it. The next person drafted may not have been in exactly the same position as me, but would likely have had some level of decision to make for themselves.
But to a larger point already made: in the case of my motor vehicle collision, the fault lay solely with the teen driver who was texting instead of looking.
In the case of a war like Vietnam … IMHO … the fault lay at the feet of those who got us into, and kept us in, that war.
One thing that some tend to do is to treat all wars the same. I’m fond of saying that not every war was WWII.
When I became eligible for Selective Service, my father insisted that I register. My politics coming into shape, I suppose, I refused. I told my father that “when a Russian barged through my door carrying a Kalashnikov, that I would fight.” Otherwise, I felt that my life would be blithely and unceremoniously pissed away to secure the wealth of others.
This is a fascinating and hugely complicated topic, but I abhor the fact that the excruciatingly few are sent to fight wars, the benefits (read: profits) of which overwhelmingly inure to the very few.
And they’re clearly not the same few.
The draft is an inherently complex issue, but … as a general proposition … if a war is important enough to send poor kids to die in … then it seems axiomatic that it’s important enough to send some % of everybody’s kids to die in.
And that’s not how it works.
This could actually be expanded into a broader counter-argument to the idea that all those called up to serve in Vietnam had a blanket duty to serve. Weren’t a lot of draft resisters involved in the anti-Vietnam movement? Those who did so were probably did their country a lot more good by staying at home than by accepting to be drafted and then going to war and deciding what to do next once there. Taken as a whole, the masses of people who ended up protesting the war and shifting public opinion (whether or not the individual activist was himself a potential draftee) were instrumental in getting the government to pull people out of Vietnam and thus would have saved a lot of lives in the long run, no?
Absolutely.
And to keep going on this train of thought, if a nation can’t wage a war without conscription, should it be waging that war? Clearly the people of the nation aren’t willing to fight it.
That might be worth a different thread. There were two reasons I moved to Canada in 1968, although I was long past being draft worthy. First was general disgust with the war, but the other was that I felt very uncomfortable with having to participate in the draft by deciding who passed and who failed calculus.
Now this is morality at its best.
Right. Refuse to shoot anyone, you’ll either get killed or court martialed. And then you’ll be replaced by someone else. So obviously the only moral thing to do is go to the unjust war and kill people. 
It can be argued that by the time most people realized the obscenity of that war, we were already neck deep in it and thousands had died. By far the prevalent notion in that era was that you went if you were called. It’s what your father and uncles had done, and you assumed that the government knew what they were doing. It didn’t become apparent to me what a bloody disaster and gigantic lie it all was until many years later.
This is the largest point. Back when one could credibly believe the government was logically sound and morally just, then part of being a good citizen is doing your conscription if asked.
And if /when those prerequisites are gone, part of your moral duty as a citizen is instead to push back against the evil the government proposes to do.
A lot of things have changed in the USA since 1960.
Right ballpark but not exactly.
We backed into conscription in Viet Nam because we’d always used the idea of a small peacetime force augmented by conscription when needed. It was the opposite of military adventurism: avoid the large standing army with all of its lobbying power.
What was said at the time was in effect “we can conscript X thousand soldiers and it will cost $Y, or we can increase the pay and benefits across the board to attract X thousand additional soldiers and it will cost us $5Y”
The public was never directly asked which they prefered, but Congress figured 5Y was a tough sell. Plus it would take more time. So conscript they did.
There is a reason all the fighting since 2001 has been paid for by incremental debt outside the normal DoD budget, not by tax increases or even via the normal DoD budget process.
Two random thoughts for this interesting thread.
-
Distrust of government foreign policy decision making surged during the Vietnam War because, after those responsible for involving us realized that they had made an error, they decided to lie to the public about those judgments as well as the ongoing process of the war itself.
-
I’ve always wondered if there was any correlation between the growing unpopularity of the war and the implementation of the draft lottery. There may have been loopholes (looking at you, Napoleon Boneyspurs) but deferments were generally hard to come by IIRC and young men in college were suddenly faced with some terrifyingly low numbers come lotto day. That included sons of some of the country’s wealthiest and most powerful fathers.