Conscription? Armchair Heroes First!

Mack Hall


A surprising number of people – people who are never going to have to risk dying in the dust of Iraq – are proposing a return to military conscription.

Serving one’s country under arms is a noble idea. Conscription is a bad idea.

Military service to one’s nation is an honorable gift of effort and years and youth and health, and these can never be recovered. Further, although few soldiers choose to give their lives, their lives may well be ripped from them by nasty little men whose one skill is to make a Kalashnikov discharge its rounds. Our young men and women fight and sometimes die so that we can safely whine about gas prices and second-guess every squaddie making the tough decisions in combat.

When a young man or young woman takes the military oath, he places his life completely at the disposal of other people, and therefore should never be forced to do so under penalty of law.

We are told that military service is a great leveller, that the children of the rich should be forced to serve with the children of the poor so that they can all be multi-cultural or vibrant or nuanced or something together.

Well, toad-spit.

Press-gangs are British; they are not American. No one should be forced from his job, his home, his family, and his life and driven into a dangerous and highly-regimented situation so that some ideologue tapping on computer keys in an air-conditioned office can feel good about social engineering.

Conscription is an example of raw democracy gone sour; it is the idea that a majority can legally bully a minority into doing something that the majority cannot or will not do. And that’s just plain wrong. Further, that camel’s nose under the tent flap serves as a precedent for further thuggery. Perhaps a majority of The People will then vote to impound the car you’ve worked hard for and give it to someone who doesn’t have one. If the majority can take your life, then taking your car or your home or your savings will be but a trifle.

We must consider another problem. A soldier takes a personal oath of loyalty not to the country or the government or the Constitution, but to the person of the President of the United States in his capacity as war leader. Given this, consider the characters of the three people standing for President. Think about the one you find the most repulsive. Do you really want to entrust the dignity and the life of your eighteen-year-old son or daughter to the judgment of that individual?

Those who argue for conscription mean one thing, that a collection of other people should be empowered to force your son or daughter to surrender everything and be menaced into taking a forced oath to a leader who almost surely doesn’t give a lizard’s eyeball about the kid’s life.

Those who argue for conscription have no intention of taking your child’s place in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in scrubbing a ten-holer in Fort Polk, or in guarding a chain-link fence around a B52 in 20-below weather in North Dakota.

The United States has, man for man and woman for woman, the best military in the world, better-educated and better-trained than any military in history, and led by officers who love their nation and who take care of the troops. This is a military that can kick *ss and take names, and they are all volunteers. Leave ‘em alone and let ‘em do their jobs.

Conscription? Only after the last fantasy warrior in his discount-store camouflage has died on the barricades defending this nation.