Draft Dodging

To Shale. It’s not a loaded question. It’s a hypothetical question that no matter how remote or unlikely it seems, still deserves an answer that no one apparently wants to give. You even highlighted the essence of it in your reply and then went on a bout Viet Nam that I had already said was not an example of what I was talking about. As for your 4 years in the Air Force, I say thank you for your service.

To FM. You’re still ignoring the question too. I don’t disagree that the actual need for a draft is probably very remote. So what? It's less remote that the country would need men and women for defense than local towns needing to conscript police and firemen. What you say is an abridgement of personal liberty, I say is an obligation (at least within the framework of my hypothetical question.)

I font feel it is an obligation, or at the very least, not one government needs to enforce. I am against big government, and that includes government mandating you go onto the mlitary or jailtime. On principle, I cannot support it.

Impact wrote:I'm against the whole idea of a draft, being appalled at someone who'd rather dodge non-volunteered combat is something straight out of an episode of All In the Family. Not everyone is a soldier, or has what it takes to be one. Recruit a bunch of spiritually unwilling civilians, who won't receive proper training before being thrown out into artillery fire, and what do you have? A weak army. An army is only as good as its weakest soldier.

I'm offended by the idea of a draft actually and would dodge if I was ever picked. Make use of the army that's volunteered and properly trained.

Shale wrote:

It is a loaded question and someone else made a point about defending our homeland. There has been no draft callup since the Vietnam war, which was an UNNECESSARY, ill conceived war and had nothing to do with defending our freedom or homeland. There were no Viet Cong in Central Park.

AND, as Richard Belzer pointed out in an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street, the Vietnam war was NEVER actually DECLARED a war, they called it a police sanction. And they told the troops that there was no war, they were just going over to Vietnam for training, TRAINING, training for what? Their government bold face LIED to them to lure them into a massacre under false pretenses, why shouldn't people be offended by the draft, and the government for that matter, since then? Then you have the pesky little issue of Chemical Orange, they do that to the troops they DRAFTED, who they told would never be a war, who were mostly made up of 19 year olds fresh out of high school, with no idea what was going on. THAT is what came out of the last draft and anybody from that time who saw combat is still paying for it in post traumatic stress, to say nothing of the way they were treated once they returned home. They were called killers, because they did something the government FORCED them to do. So why wasn't the government specifically pointed out as the real killers since it was their orders that sent the boys over there in the first place to kill the Vietnamese?

Well it is illegal to dodge the draft, so if someone gets caught then I guess they have to own up to the legal consequences of it all. But IMO, I'm not at all disturbed by an average Joe who would be so mortified by being randomly picked to fight that he'd flee (but I have to wonder how easy it would be today to dodge a draft. Some people make it sound so easy to just run to Canada in such an instance. I would think that as soon as someone's lottery was picked, all of their personal information would be legally marked in a way that would make dodging virtually impossible.)

I heard the Bush administration was close to reinstating the draft for the Iraq War, due to low military enrollment.

To answer the OP:
I don't like the idea of a draft and if someone is so against the idea of serving that they feel they have to leave, then so be it...but I don't know how I feel about them popping back up once the war is over and the coast is clear. No I don't think draft dodgers should be forever banished from the U.S., but I don't think they should be darting off to Canada or Sweden just for the sake of laying low either. What I mean is that if they're gonna go there to avoid complying with the U.S. law (that says that they have to fight and serve), then they should consider that HOME indefinitely.

I can't be mad at anybody that resists being killed or maimed in some BS war. If they are crafty enough to dodge being drafted then more power to them. By the time the war is over and they try and return, chances are there will be a new administration in power that won't care that they ran, so it wouldn't be an issue.