 Welcome to Think Tech Hawaii and I Never Got Quiet. This is a half hour program that explores the Hawaiian connection with the Vietnam War. I'm your host, Mick Kraft. Our program last week attempted to identify some of the issues and lessons learned from the Vietnam War. Our panel arrived at least at least one issue where there seemed to be consensus and that was the draft. All felt that every able bodied individual should serve the nation in some capacity for a period of their lives. Female and female. When one thinks of the countries with high standards of living, most lists would include the countries of Scandinavia and Switzerland. Curiously, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Switzerland all have compulsory military service for all able bodied men. Women too may join and serve similar terms of service. The military in those countries serve a purpose other than just defense. It is a place for young people to learn self-discipline and how to work with others. During the Vietnam War, the Army and sometimes the Marine Corps used draftees in their respective services. A lot of statistics have been bandied about over the years. Some have been misleading or been outright lies. Today we are going to discuss some of those statistics and reasons for resurrecting the draft or some form of national service. Our guest today is our founder and CEO, Jay Fidel. Jay worked as a law specialist and military judge in the 14th and 3rd Coast Guard districts, which were Hawaii and New York during the Vietnam War. Welcome, Jay. Hi, Rick. Nice to be here with you. Yeah. We got a lot to go over because I'm looking at the statistics when I was preparing for this and of the military personnel that were on active duty during the time of the war, which is around August of 64 through May of 75, there was something on the order of about 9 million plus of GIs. Curiously, the number of draftees didn't even represent a third of a total. And it has been said that the preponderance of the casualties during the Vietnam War were from the draftees and also from lesser lower class people or folks who are economically depressed. Statistics show otherwise that it was a great deal different that the draftees did not have the highest number of casualties, nor were the casualties focused on ethnic groups other than column white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. It seemed as though the most number of casualties came from the enlistees and also from the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant group. So to dispel those myths, the thing is that we're talking about the draft and what it did as far as the military. A lot of folks in professional military kind of balked at the idea of having a drafty army or a citizen army. They felt that they were more of a hindrance than they were of a professional nature. What did it do to us? I mean I'm looking at what the country did after World War II, after Korea and then after Vietnam and thinking what kind of a nation or a culture did we have that we developed. I mean we had a lot of draftees out of World War II, something on the order of about 66% of the military was drafted. What did it do to the country? We had a great thing going in the 50s, I think. Yeah, we did. I mean you remember all those stories about small town, USA, backwater small town. Every man, Jack, is down there enlisting. They want to go right now, they want to participate in this national effort and World War II. And I think we were operating on this kind of patriotism, this kind of duty to country, it was kind of a sort of simple approach, it's my duty I have to go, it's my way of seeing the world, it's my way of learning things I would never otherwise learn. And it's okay because we're fighting a moral war and we're going to win. And I think we did. We did fight a moral war and we did win, maybe that's an overstatement, there's some people disagree about some parts of it, but we did win. In Korea it was less clear, we didn't win, we got stuck, we got, what's the word, we got tied up in it and we couldn't win and we gave up. And then there was a period of no wars between say Korea and Vietnam. And I think the shadow of World War II was still playing out, people still felt a sense of patriotism, they still felt it, they should enlist, they had an obligation and if they were drafted they should go. Vietnam was not a straight line, it was not linear, it changed while it was organic and it changed and it's winning and losing, capability changed, it declined you saw in the movie. In the Burns series you saw that in the beginning we were very hearty about it, we were confident about it and we were winning in the beginning, in fact, but as time went on we started losing and I think you could do crosshairs on the chart as we started losing and however many draftees got killed, the level of confidence or dissatisfaction, so if you're losing dissatisfaction goes up and over time during the course of that war, which was geez seven or eight years anyway, you probably know the number better than I do, the number of years that we were inactively engaged in Vietnam starting in the early 60s maybe. Well if you go from Tonkin Gulf through the last trips it left in 73, so that was 64 to 73, so nine years. Nine years, and during that period the animal changed, all of a sudden people were not confident, we weren't winning and they were not happy about going into the meat grinder and getting killed and I think people, you could see a national change, it wasn't only Kent State, it wasn't only the parades and the protests and I'm going to go to Canada kind of mentality, it was that they changed in their respect for the government, their willingness to enlist or go voluntarily as draftees and in the end it was really fragmented. One of our guests pointed out as far as having a goal, we didn't have a Hitler to fight in Vietnam, we didn't have, I can remember Johnson sitting or standing at the podium saying we're here to protect the freedom of the peoples of South Vietnam and we had a corrupt government in Saigon that we were protecting, we were throwing all of these resources in there and yet all of the information that came out publicly from the Department of Defense and from the government said, hey we're doing a great job of winning, Westmoreland turns around and says, we're winning, send me 250,000 more troops. How is it, there was some kind of a conflict there or it wasn't... Well they were lying to us. Yeah, they were lying to us, we know that now. We found out, I mean thank goodness to the press, I suppose thank goodness because they found out and they shared that with us and at first nobody believed them but after a while we started to hear it so often that we realized this was dead end. We weren't going to win, that it wasn't a moral war and that people were getting killed for no good reason, that the brass and the White House were taking us in the wrong direction, you could get very unhappy with that. And I think that's, you know it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you have a military force out there that's really discouraged, doesn't believe in the war. If you have a population back home that believes in it even less, you're not going to have a winning force. They're not likely to win, they don't care. In fact they care not to be there. Well in comparison with Vietnam and World War II, World War II required the entire resources of the nation, gas rationing, all kinds of food rationing, coupon books, things of this nature. We didn't have that in Vietnam. It was the guns and butter routine that we had that the politicians kept saying well we can fight this war, we can still have a good economy. There was a lie to that because what did Nixon do after he got in in 1971, we put on the price controls nationwide because inflation was just going out of sight. But what I'm looking at is in 73 we stopped the draft because of the public pushback on the idea that government had really lied to us. Now I don't want my little Johnny to go into that kind of... That move, that event of stopping the draft, I met the guy by the way, the lawyer, whose duty, I think I told you, whose duty it was to take the draft apart, to unravel it all. I told him gee, I don't know if you're proud of that or what but it was not really a good move. I mean arguably if he hadn't done that, if they hadn't told him to do that, if they hadn't unraveled the draft, it would have continued. Maybe it would have been tuned, it would have been made more reasonable and maybe our wars would have been made smarter and more reasonable. Instead, you know, we had a bad war, not a very smart war. Everybody was up in arms and politically it was an attractive thing to do. It was... General Ford was during his administration after Nixon and the whole thing is the country was demanding it and they gave in to that politically and the problem is that's a one-way decision. You can't reverse. Do you think, Vic, that you can reverse that decision, you can go back and do a draft now? The mechanism is still there. The National is trying to recall what the act was called in 1940. It has not been... Selective Service Act. The Selective Service Act, I believe, but it has not been shelved. It's there. People, lawyers, judges, whatever, who are a part of the Selective Service Committee within their communities. It's there ready to go at a moment's notice. My concern is... Don't say a moment. Well, that's the... I know. I mean, we're sitting here allegedly in the crosshairs of a young man in Pyongyang, but how long does it take to train somebody? Stop to think about the draft. The long lead time item in the military is one soldier, and it takes at least 18 years to get them to the point where they can go and be trained to go into either a high-tech position or even just be a fire stick carrier. Well, the military is very high-tech now, and you can't pull a draftee off out of his civilian community and make him a high-tech soldier right away. You have to train him and all that stuff. And I suppose you could make the argument is that the draft is no longer practical, that you can't have an army or a military of largely draftees because they won't be able to get trained fast enough and so forth. But I would differ from that. I would too, because I go back to my experience with the Swiss. I was on the Swiss F5 program and got to learn an awful lot about their National Guard system and how they function. After you get through your A-levels or high school on the equivalent, you've got to show up in front of your draft board and get your number. Because you're going to go in, you're going to get basic training, and you're going to learn how to carry a rifle, how to fire it, all the field work and whatever, and take your uniforms after you're through with your 16 or 18 months out in the field or whatever. You take it all home with you, including your weapon. Now you stop to think about the crime rate in Switzerland. It's one of the lowest in the world, knowing that there's an automatic weapon on the other side of the door. That kind of is a prevention method there. But the other side is that the Swiss have this national sense. They belong to Switzerland, even though they maybe speak French or from a French section, the Italian or the German, they have this sense of national unity. And it's been going on for hundreds of years. So how do we kind of instill that in this society that we're going to get pushed back? Never happened. I don't think it would ever happen. Politically, it would be deadly. It was deadly when Gerald Ford took it apart, because people had a terrible experience in Vietnam. They didn't believe that in that war. We lost that war. They believed that the government had been lying to them. They had the different relationship with the government. At the end of it, then they had at the beginning of it, and they had no confidence in the government in any way. And they thought, I'm going to die for no reason. Why do I put my baggy pants on and go die on a swamp for no reason? I'm not doing that. And their mothers and fathers and friends and uncles and aunts fell the same way. So once it came apart, it's not very hard to put it back again. And we do now have a functioning volunteer army and all the other services who are very well trained. And politically, it's a different animal as a draft army. But there it is. There we have it. Maybe in some ways, they're crack troops. But in other ways, they don't really represent the country. And I feel that one of the things in our lifetimes is that at the beginning of it, when you and I became aware, so to say, the country was us and we were the country. We were bonded at the hip with the country. We were patriotic. We felt comfortable in the country, believed in the country. Mothers told us this is the best place in the world to live. It's the best place in the world to be born. And I took that through Vietnam, I felt that way. But what happened since as a result, I believe, of Vietnam is that later generations don't feel that way and aren't going to feel that way. They're not going to feel that our war is a moral or intelligent. They're not going to feel that they should go or want to go, that they have an obligation, a patriotic obligation to go. And they'll be resistant at every level. Let's talk about that after the break. Let's take a break for a couple of minutes here and we'll be right back. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. The host of Voice of the Veteran, seen here live every Thursday afternoon at 1 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. As a fellow veteran and veterans advocate with over 23 years experience serving veterans, active duty and family members, I hope to educate everyone on benefits and accessibility services by inviting professionals in the field to appear on the show. In addition, I hope to plan on inviting guest veterans to talk about their concerns and possibly offer solutions. As we navigate and work together through issues, we can all benefit. Please join me every Thursday at 1 p.m. for the Voice of the Veteran. Aloha. Welcome back. We're discussing the possibility of resurrecting universal service in some capacity. With our guest today, Jay Craddell. Jay Craddell. Yeah, I know your name. So I have a question for you. Sure, Jay. How do you feel about this? How do you feel about the possibility of resurrecting the draft? Can we? Should we? Would we succeed if we tried? Our guest last week, one of our guests on the panel, said it's going to require a huge culture change. I bring into question, I put it before my grandson. I said, how would you feel about it? Your government is going to demand of you 18 months, two years, whatever period of time for you to serve the country in some capacity, not necessarily in the military but peace corps, vissera, whatever, and then he said, oh no, it's not for me. I was kind of, okay, well, you're enjoying the benefits of the society that we have worked for and those of us who have put on a uniform and fought and defended, even though in the case of Vietnam, I didn't see Hanoi bombing Los Angeles, but it was still, that was what we felt was not a terror but a threat to our country. I put my life on the line and now here's this youngster who, oh no, it's not for me. I have my plans and this is what I'm going to do and oh no, I just could not, I could not do that. So what if it's a law? Would you be breaking the law? Oh yeah. I wouldn't do it. Wow. But we've had, since 73, what, two generations, three generations, or two, however you measure a generation, we don't, some say 10 years, some say 20, whatever. But I look at this and I said, well, you know, it's kind of like, well, what the hell did I do? Why, why should I bother doing something for you? Why should I put my life on the line for you? Why should anybody put their lives on the line for these people? At the time, at the time it was appropriate. At the time you felt the way you felt, the country felt the way you felt, the government was a different animal in those days, public opinion was in a different place in those days, and it all fit. And remember too that a lot of people who were threatened with the draft or who got drafted, they found other ways, other ways to avoid the draft, to serve in some other capacity or to leave for Canada, or in the case of Donald Trump to have a spur, a bone spur, he had like five medical deferment, that poor guy, and he didn't serve a day in his life. But a lot of people who managed to get out of it, it was a different time is what I'm saying. All these wars were a different time. And now what we have is we've been excused the subsequent generations from any obligation. There's no obligation at all. You just pay your taxes, that's all you've got to do, and don't be a felon. We don't like felons, although that's kind of mixed up a little because sometimes you can be a felon and get away with it, as we see in white collar crime. But mostly you don't have any obligation to participate in the government. The government is out there, it's almost like an adverse party, and it will take care of you no matter what. You have a sense of entitlement. That's the generation we have created now, two or three generations later. And the problem is, the ultimate question here is, is that sustainable on a national level? Can we have a country that doesn't care about the country? Answer, no. Robert Heinlein wrote about it many years ago in those books for Lazarus Long. Any society that doesn't follow any kind of, have any sense of duty, loyalty, or honor is doomed. And so you can't do anything for it, get the hell out. And it seems as though we've lost that sense of honor and duty, but I think it's also partially because of the government that we've had. People distrust the government. Why should we have a draft when our government can't be trusted? They've given us an application. It's a fair question, isn't it? Yeah, well, I mean, here's another, here's a good question for you right now. I just got into problems with the business of calling the mother of the slain soldier who was ambushed in Niger. I didn't hear anything in the press asking, what the heck are we doing in Niger? So where's the accountability the government is going on and doing things without public notice of this thing? I'll bet you you walk up to somebody on the street right now and ask them where Niger is and they wouldn't be able to tell you. Meanwhile, our men are dying in Niger. For what purpose? And we don't know why they're there. We have no idea why they're there. And let me go slightly off that and say, have you noticed that we're doing a lot more in Afghanistan? Have you noticed that we're doing a lot more in Syria? Wasn't this president as a candidate saying he wanted to get out of all this and fold up our efforts overseas and bring it back home and be nationalistic and chauvinistic right here at home? Now we find these things are happening subcelentio. We have more troops, more action in Afghanistan. We have more things going on in Syria. And for that matter, Iraq, there's all this action. And nobody is telling us what's going on, what the strategy is. Niger is just the top of the iceberg. There's a lot going on that he's commanding. And what strikes me is really amazing is he gets into this silly feud with a grieving widow and I say to myself, presumptively, he's always going to distract us from the reality, from the truth. And this is just another example of that. The feud with the widow is a distraction, Vic. He's distracting us from the fact that it all happened in Niger. What's going on here? Well, and there are other places in the world where things are happening that we don't know about. And I ran into that quite by accident when I was up at Tripler getting treatment for something. And I looked at the medical officer. And of course, in the Army, on the right shoulder, you wear the unit that you were in in combat. And I couldn't recognize the unit that this doctor was in. And I said, where'd you get that? And he said, well, I can't tell you. Really? And I said, you received the authority to wear a unit insignia on your right shoulder in combat, but you can't tell me where. And I'm just going through my mind thinking, wait a minute, how many other instances of like this? Having participated in one of those myself, you weren't there. But it's sort of what is it that our government is getting into that we don't know about? And we are depending, because this is a Republican-formed government, we're expecting our representatives to have the oversight and monitor this thing and manage it properly. And yet, when we had the problem with Syria, with the gas, what, was it two years ago? And I wrote an article about it, and I got pushed back on it. Because I said, basically, going into Syria and doing something, why are we there? What are our goals? What is it that the American interests are in Syria? Why are we there? And we don't have people asking that question. And this is one of the things that the panel brought out. And everybody in our vet group last night, we were talking to the same. There's no engagement, no involvement, either by people in the politics of what's going on. And perhaps maybe that is a result of getting rid of the draft in 1973. I no longer have skin in the game, because little Johnny is not going to go into the armed forces or anything else to do with government service. So I don't know. I mean, how do you balance this? Well, it's not balanced now, that's for sure. I mean, if he didn't want to tell us about what he's doing in these various places and putting more troops in and getting involved in clandestine operations, then at least tell us that. Tell us we don't have a need to know. Tell us he's got it under control. But he's not even saying that. It just pops up like this with the feud with the widow. And I think it's consistent, as you say, with the notion that we no longer have confidence in the government. We wrote it off. We wrote off what it is doing. This is very troubling. And as I mentioned, it's kind of not sustainable. How you come back from that, I don't know. And furthermore, where it goes, I don't know, because you have a volunteer army that is involved in clandestine operations. You have the CIA, which is running right close to them, very parallel, doing all kinds of clandestine things. You have things like the Patriot Act, which were established after 9-11. And you have an intelligence community that doesn't tell us what they do or know, what their plans are. And you have a president who's retributive to anybody who speaks against him. All of this sounds like the steps on the way to a dictatorship with an army that maybe worked for him, but I'm not sure they worked for me or you. So I think we're really in a kind of dangerous situation right now. And I don't think the draft is going to come back. But that reason also. Jay, thanks very much for being with us. I wish we had more time. In closing, what I'd like to do is say something here as far as how do I feel about the draft? But I kind of like to go and quote Robert Heinlein again. Robert Heinlein wrote Starship Trooper, which turned into a movie, a very popular movie. He was accused of being a militarist and something of a fascist. But he basically said, I also think there are prices too high to pay to save the United States. Conscription is one of them. Conscription is slavery. And I don't think that any people or nation has a right to save itself at a price of slavery for anyone, no matter what the name is called. We have had the drafts for 20 years now. This was in 1961. I think this is shameful. If a country can't save itself through the volunteer service of its own free people, then I say, let the damn thing go down the drain. Well, I may agree with some of what Robert Heinlein said. If he were alive today, I would remind him that warfare is a high-tech thing, and it happens very rapidly. During the Cold War, you had 24 minutes in which to respond. Because ICBMs aren't controllable. Once you shoot them, they're gone. How do you prepare for that kind of thing in 24 minutes? And so I think of it, what's the defense plan if you have no body of people that are going to defend the country? Next week, we will have Jim Borsma on our program. We're going to discuss his experiences, both during and after his tour in Vietnam. He's written a book called Loveless in Nom, which is kind of a comedy. It's a novel, and it promised to be a lively show. We would love to have some feedback. If you have some comments, please send an email to 808VietnamVets at gmail.com. I would like to thank the staff here at Think Tech Hawaii for all their support and their assistance. Truly without them, this program would not be possible. Please come back again next week for another issue of It Never Got Quiet. Mahalo.