Excerpted from Reserves and Guard: A More Selective Service.

First published in The Washington Monthly, January, 1971

IN THE CIVIL WAR DAYS, IF YOU DIDN'T want to be drafted, you could "buy a man" for $300 to take your place in the Army. You can also avoid the draft today, though things are more indirect--instead of paying $300, you can join the Reserves or the National Guard. As long as this escape valve exists for a million privileged men, most of President Nixon's reforms to democratize the draft are meaningless.

The Reserve and the Guard are much easier to be in than the regular Army. First, they usually don't send you to Vietnam; second, you're on full-time active duty for only four and one half months, which disrupts your marriage, career, and friendships far less than being drafted for two whole years. For these reasons, when I was 21, I enlisted in the Army Reserve rather than wait to be drafted.

An enlisted man must join the Reserve or the Guard for a six-year hitch. After those initial few months of active duty training, you go to a two-week camp each summer, and to weekly drills during the year. Theoretically, the weekly drills in your hometown Reserve or Guard unit keep up your training.

When I first joined, I spent several of those drills being processed, paid and promoted. All around me the same was happening to most of the unit's other 500-odd officers and men. I somehow thought this was a deliberate lull to catch up on administrative paperwork, and that the regular program would start in a few weeks. But it never did. Eventually I realized my Reserve unit did virtually nothing but administer itself.

Each drill began with recorded bugle calls played over a loudspeaker, and then sundry saluting and marching about on the small San Francisco Army base where we met. Then the 500 soldiers, with much shouting of commands and waving of clipboards, were sent indoors and divided up for work into more than a dozen different "sections" for what was called "on-the-job training."

One section checked through the sign-in rosters, and sent threatening letters to people who missed a meeting (if you miss five meetings, you get sent to active duty); another promoted people; another issued everybody's paychecks; a truly enormous section with yards of desks and typewriters kept the personnel files in order. Still another section processed men into the unit, while a subgroup processed them out. A section of Military Policemen patrolled the building to make sure no one escaped from all this. (They weren't always successful. One evening three friends and I got out, saw a movie downtown, and came back to the drill in time to sign out. Others, still bolder, did this kind of thing regularly.) Another section dispensed paper and typewriters and mimeograph ink; another prepared coffee and doughnuts for the refreshment break. As the unit grew new jobs flowered: one section set up interoffice telephones and another provided a messenger service to carry papers between all the sections.

Surviving the Boredom

A number of mechanisms used up excess time. One was lesson plans. Every time somebody gives an Army class, he must turn in a "lesson plan"--a long outline, in a special format, of what he said. However, in my own section of the unit, and I believe in most of the others, there were no classes: Everyone was too busy either doing the administrative paperwork or trying to get out of it. But regulations called for classes, so we had to write out lesson plans each week--outlines of classes never given. We turned in the lesson plans quarterly to another section, which kept people busy tabulating them. Visiting generals could then be shown proof of all the training we were getting.

There were also the movies. Unit members who could not be kept busy in the sections were sent to a large auditorium. There, they were usually shown Army films, with the same film often shown many times over the years. Occasionally there were movies on things like first aid or safe driving, but most were much farther afield. I remember one documentary about Greenland (huskies, ice, fjords, and freedom-loving Eskimos), and one ancient Air Force film, in an extra-ordinary reddish-brown no-man's-land between black and white and color, about "Survival in the Tundra."

For all its insanity, going through this charade each week is preferable to being shot at in Vietnam, which is why Reserve units have huge waiting lists. (Each armed force has its Reserve; the most important are the Army Reserve and the Army National Guard, to which nearly 700,000 of the country's one million paid Reservists belong). Men whose draft notices are about to arrive are sometimes so desperate to join the Reserve that they pay. In New York City alone, there have been half a dozen cases in recent years where Reserve or Guard officials have been arrested and accused of accepting bribes to enlist people. One Chicago National Guard sergeant was charged with letting men into his unit at a price of over $500 apiece.

Only the Right People

Competition to get into the Reserve and Guard is heavy, and the privileged usually win. Defense Department figures show the percentage of college graduates among Army Reserve enlisted men is nearly three times as high as among draftees and enlistees of the regular Army, who do the fighting in Vietnam. In my own unit, most members were attorneys, stockbrokers, insurance agents, students, or executive trainees. A number of people had been fraternity brothers in college. At drills men talked about ski trips, stock tips, and M.B.A.s.

All of this is far different from the World War II Army, where the Hollywood myths had a little truth and rich and poor actually sometimes did fight together. Now the split between the Reserves and the regular Army intensifies the class divisions in the country rather than lessening them.

Besides being unjust, all this matters politically. If the sons of the influential were being killed in Vietnam at the same rate as the sons of black people and the often pro-war white working class, pressure to stop the war would be enormously stronger. An anti-war movement of upper-middle-class college student has already put something of a dent in the Administration's war plans. If this class of men had been forced to do the actual fighting, instead of being able to join Reserve units, their protests might well have stopped the war. The Pentagon must be grateful for the Reserves and Guard, a system that keeps so many of these men out of Vietnam.

Reserve and National Guard units are not supposed to have such an elite clientele. With some exceptions, the law says units are supposed to enlist new members first-come first-served. Theoretically you can't get in until your name comes to the top of the long waiting list. But in practice, it doesn't work that way. As with all things in the military, it takes lots of paperwork to enlist somebody. So when you want to get a friend in, or when you want to keep someone out, you slow it down until he gets drafted.

I know this often happens, because I'm guilty of having taken advantage of it twice. When I joined my unit, I was able to jump over the heads of a sizable backlog of other applicants because a friend of a friend knew a high-ranking officer. A year later I was able to get a close friend in my unit in a hurry, I was told quite frankly: "We wouldn't do it except that he's a friend of yours"

Most Reservists and National Guardsmen are guilty of the same practice. In almost every unit, sons, brothers, in-laws, and former college classmates abound. There are also lots of certain kinds of people whom everybody wants to know--such as professional athletes. We had several San Francisco Giants and Forty-Niners; a 1967 survey disclosed 360 pro athletes in Reserve and Guard units around the country.

Another way the Reserves' and the Guard's class nature shows is that they are virtually all white. San Francisco is roughly one-seventh black, but except for pro ballplayers, my unit had only three blacks out of 500 men. The unit I was in before that drilled a few blocks from downtown Oakland, one of the largest black ghettoes in the western United States, yet we had no black members at all. In the National Guard, things are worse: The proportion of blacks in the Guard actually declined during 1969 from 1.18 to 1.15 percent.

Vigilant Nostalgia

This escape valve for upper-middle-class draft-avoiders is not only unjust, but colossally expensive. In 1969, my old unit cost the U.S. taxpayers $300,000 in salaries alone. Nationally, this adds up. The total Reserve and Guard budget is $2.5 billion a year. There are also certain additional costs, such as the hefty pensions paid retired Reservists and Guardsmen. And altogether the two organizations own approximately $10 billion worth of real estate, armories, airplanes, tanks, guns, ships, and other equipment.

The Reserves and Guard help draft-avoiders, and help the Army by keeping such men out of Vietnam, but they have no other military use whatever--either for defense or for our adventures in Southeast Asia, the Dominican Republic and elsewhere. The best proof of this is that the U.S. is fighting the fourth largest war in its history, Vietnam, almost without them. Approximately 35,000, many of them fliers, were mobilized briefly after the Pueblo incident, but they are all home now. Otherwise there have been no Reserve or Guard units in Vietnam.

Though the Reserves and Guard provided a good deal of manpower for World War II, in the 1970's America doesn't need a reserve land army of 700,000 men for its "defense." And in the days of ICBM's and ground-to-air missiles, the Air National Guard's expensive jet fighters, manned round-the-clock at 22 bases throughout the country, are about as necessary as horse cavalry.

A Sorry System

The cost is one reason for ending the Reserves and the Guard: Vietnam is the other. It is a sorry system: The poor and the blacks fight the war; the courageous of all classes go to jail as draft resisters; the privileged join the Reserves or the Guard. Eliminating that escape valve from the draft would not only be just, it would help end the war. People with power in America have shown themselves little moved by the deaths of Vietnamese and of the U.S. troops there now. If their own sons were there, things might be different. Now, the sons of senators and corporation presidents are more likely to be in Reserve or Guard units than on patrol in Vietnam. It is harder to talk calmly of just "slowly winding down" the war if your own boy is in it. This alone should make elimination of the Reserves and the Guard an urgent goal for all who care about stopping this war and preventing the next.