http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6308111/site/newsweek/Bobby Muller was a Marine lieutenant leading an assault in Vietnam when a bullet severed his spine in April 1969. He spent almost a year recovering in a Veterans Hospital in the Bronx, where the woes of other battlefield casualties echoed his own and led him to dedicate his life to what he calls “war-related work.”
Muller cofounded Vietnam Veterans Against the War with John Kerry and is now president of Vietnam Veterans of America. He has been in a wheelchair for the last 35 years, but that hasn’t slowed him down. Indeed, it’s made him more determined to share his experience. He is currently touring college campuses to educate young people about the lessons of war in Vietnam and Iraq.
What he’s finding is growing concern about the prospect of a draft. Nobody wants a draft, he tells students. “But we’re not talking about something that is an option if the security situation we face as a nation requires it,” he says. The Pentagon is already straining to fill the ranks with call-ups of hundreds of reservists who believed they had fulfilled their military service. These are people with settled lives who have families to support; a third of them have failed to report for duty.
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George W. Bush says he opposes the draft, but he supports an adventuresome foreign policy. Where will he get the bodies to put on the front lines? John Kerry says there’s already a back-door draft through extended tours and call-ups, and he’s raised the specter of a draft should Bush win a second term. The attack rattles Republicans because it has plausibility, and it speaks to the overstretched military and the issue of national sacrifice. Bush wants to wage a perpetual war against terrorists while not demanding any sacrifice from the broader public. The soldiers are sacrificing enormously in this war while the rest of the population, particularly the wealthy, is getting off.
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