For the young Americans who are being called up to fight in Vietnam this is one of the most unpopular wars in American history. At least it appears to evoke no sort of enthusiasm.
While attempts to escape the call-up or draft have been made on a small scale in all wars the extent and deviousness of the present draft-dodging is unparalleled and it is today socially acceptable as it never was in the past.
There is no reason to believe that American youth is any less patriotic today than in the past. According to nation-wide surveys undertaken recently by both the magazine ╥News Week╙ and the ╥Wall Street Journal╙ the real cause seems to be a signal lack of personal involvement in the cause for which the US is fighting in Vietnam.
Many young men have no objection to being called up into the services but they do strongly resent being sent off to die, for they are not quite sure what good reason, in the jungles and swamps of distant Vietnam. One university teacher says that during the Cuban missile crisis several students volunteered for military duty but that none had done so for Vietnam.
Some of the illegal methods employed include the purchase of forged documents. The Federal Bureau of Investigation recently unearthed two draft-dodging organisations in New York and Cleveland, Ohio. Thirty-eight men were arrested who had paid $5000 for forged Air Force Reserve and National Guard papers that removed them from the draft. Then there are the draft-card burners who are presumed to be even more concerned to demonstrate their own, and to encourage their fellows╒, political opposition to US involvement in the Vietnam war than personally to evade the draft.
A small number of young men attempt to deceive their draft medical board into grading them unfit for service. Some represent themselves as homosexuals ╤ ╥Wear lace panties and worry no more╙ ╤ ╥News Week╙; or drug addicts ╤ by pricking their arms to simulate hypodermic injections; or tuberculosis sufferers ╤ drops of ink on cigarettes are said to produce temporary patches on the lung.
