Sadly, by the time my high school years ended with the first half of 1980, a combination of events, including the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the second oil shock of that decade, and the rise of Moral Majority politics, pushed President Jimmy Carter and the misguided US Congress to call for the start-up of Selective Service Registration for America's male teens.
I was not raised in a wealthy family, and many of my cousins and my older brother would enter the military to earn a few bucks over the next decades. I, however, never pursued that route with any seriousness or sense of national pride or mission. In my Kansas hometown, that indifference was true of almost my entire graduating class. We were a cynical lot, and most of us simply sat back and recoiled at the disasters our elders had faced with Vietnam and other events of the 1960s. In the late 1900s, we often turned up our noses at the thought of reinvigorating our nation's military industrial complex by offering to actively join it. [4]
My Teenage Thought Experiment
Without much in the way of financial means for college, however, I certainly did have to take some time during my senior year in high school to consider entering military service. That meant I had to decide whether it was important to be ready to come to America's aid if the hot war in Afghanistan (or elsewhere) came to affect our lives at home.
In a meditation state one evening, I pondered what kind of military I would like to have and be a part of. I asked myself, "What kind of military men would I like to have on my team if were called into action as a draftee or as a volunteer?"
In my simple thought experiment, I concluded that if I were to become a leader in the military, I would be as egalitarian as possible and encourage my men to think and to speak up on important issues. I would not want to head a group of non-thinking beings who would simply march off to another unjust war in blind obedience to their leaders' decisions. That had clearly been the case when US troops and CIA agents overthrew regimes in Latin America, Iran, and Southeast Asia in the preceding two to three decades.
I would not want any of my men ever to be involved in My Lai Massacres or in invading countries in the midst of a civil war, as had occurred with American ventures in Southeast Asia and Angola.
In my experiment, I also concluded that I would not want or allow troops to do constitutionally illegal things, as some CIA agents and DOD-assigned forces had done earlier, in the Cold War. There would be no backing of dictators or CIA thugs against the masses--simply because in the short term it might be beneficial. Nor would my men be involved in selling drugs and making private gains through war, as many had done in "Nam or Laos.
I thought, too, that, because I had been raised in the ethical code of the Catholic Church, a war would have to be just before my men and I could agree to be involved in it. Before we consented to participate in a war, or to kill any "enemies" in an ongoing war, we would have to sit down and discuss the legitimacy of doing so.
After reading these words, you would be right to expect that the criteria or standards I was setting in my Thought Experiment led me in time to end it with the damning cry, "My dream seems so UNREALISTIC!"
Most everyone would claim that it is not possible to run a military in the way I wanted to--with democracy, justice, and rationality leading the way. Moreover, even if it were possible to run an army that way, the existing power structure could not allow it. Its very nature is to find error on the side of justice and democracy, rather than in the use of violent force.
Therefore, after thinking all of this through, I had determined by the time I left my Kansas high school that I would not join the military--even though other family members would do so in the following decades.
Moreover, by the time I was 18, I had made one other decision. If I was not going to be able to stop my country's military-industrial regime from doing horrible things--like invading other countries, supporting dictators, etc.--by being part of the system, I was also committed "not to sign on the line" come January 1981. That month was the deadline for my age group in the US to sign up for Selective Service. "In 1980, Congress [had] reinstituted draft registration for men 18 to 25 years old. If there were to be a crisis, registered men would be inducted as determined by age and a random lottery." [5]
During my last spring in high school in 1980, I discussed the topic of selective service registration with only one person, a Quaker friend of mine who I knew had also thought all this through. My Quaker friend had also played football in high school, and he too had determined not to make the mistake many young men made: namely, to believe that joining ROTC or the military is just another way, maybe a notch above playing football, to support your local community on Planet Earth.
That same autumn, when I went off to college, I was relieved to find that I was not alone in my decision to not support the proposed system of selective service registration. Dozens of young men on that very small Bethel College campus (in Kansas) had made similar decisions not to sign any selective service document that would put America into the same cultural, spiritual, and social mess it had experienced during the Vietnam War and in Super Power overreaches in the early post-WWII era. In fact, in March of 1981, a major conference of the non-registration and anti-draft movement was held on the Bethel campus.
Within a year or so, the US government would take three of my college mates to court for failure to register. I could feel for each of them. One of them, like me, eventually registered under duress. Another pleaded guilty on religious grounds and did community service in lieu of a sentence (as the local Kansas judge was supportive). A third peer beat the system, as he based his rationale for non-registration on the same philosophical ground that had guided my own decision to not register throughout 1980. [7] In a sense, the act of non-registration is an activity of speech and resistance against a larger system, which has for too long dominated America's hearts and minds.
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