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War Talk, Then Action: Stop The Draft Before It Stops You!

By VVAW

On the wings of patriotic and political nonsense, draft registration has flown back in the nation's laws. Congress, which in the current budget is grudgingly providing somewhere around $6 million for research into Agent Orange and its effects on Vietnam vets, has no serious problem in approving more than twice that amount to begin the process to create some more vets. Despite all the pious professions by the President and by Congressmen about how "registration is not the draft," the bottom line is clear: registration has no purpose except to bring the draft closer. And the draft has no purpose but to send another generation marching into the U.S. war machine to get chewed up and then spit out onto the battlefield.

After post offices all over the country have been clogged with 19 and 20 year olds filling out forms, then, according to the provisions of the new law, U.S. jails will be filled with the hundreds of thousands who refuse to register, who can't find the postoffice, or who just don't know that's what they're supposed to do. Some estimates say that the prison population could triple if the government invokes the 5 years in prison provision for not registering, though it is also clear that the government is going to have a hard time proving that any individual in fact "knew" that he should rush off to sign on the dotted line.

Registration and the rebirth of Selective Service Boards will be a mess. There will be a possible 5 years in jail for failure to register or even for not keeping the government informed when you move. Even the advocates or registration admit that at best registration will only speed up the draft by a week at most. And the "message" of "national determination" that Carter says he wants to send to the USSR is constantly overshadowed by the U.S. military's blundering.

Registration of American youth serves only one purpose: that's to bring back the draft. It has no other function to matter what pious words politicians use to bury the truth.

And, at the bottom line, the draft exists only to force people to fight and die for a system in which they do not have a stake, or whose goals are not theirs; a draft is needed when people are not willing to fight because the war is one in which they don't believe.

In the late 1930's and early 1940's, as Hitler's troops trampled through Europe and the U.S. had not yet joined the war, Americans fled to Canada, not to escape the draft but to enlist in the Canadian forces which were already at was with Nazi Germany. It was a war that needed to be fought, and people were volunteering to fight it. It was a just war and people responded.

But for those of us who fought the war in Vietnam, we saw something different. There was no way we were fighting to "save freedom and democracy" as we were often told, since we saw the lords of South Vietnam as the ruthless, puppet serious of dictators, devoted only to saving their skins and amassing fortunes before they got the hell out. We weren't even fighting to "stop the spread of atheistic communism," something else we were often told.

Over a period of time, however, we did learn what we were fighting for: oil off the coast of Vietnam that U.S. oil companies had an eye on; tin in the Vietnamese hills; a large supply of cheap labor — as cheap as Korea or Hong King; a potential market for U.S. goods; and a last-ditch attempt by the U.S. government to stop the spread of victorious liberation struggles by peoples around the world. Corporations picked the targets; the U.S. government loaded the guns — and then sent us off to do all the dirty work!

There is no reason to go off again to die or get wounded for these same rich scum so that they can make a few more nickels — or billions of dollars, for that matter. We spend our lives already working for them, slaving away in their unsafe plants while they yell about our poor "productivity." We owe them nothing. And we sure as hell do not owe them our sons to fight another of their profit-making wars.