Who Will Fight the Iraq War?

By Brendan L. Smith, Santa Fe Reporter. Posted July 27, 2004.

As an Army medical corpsman, he remembers scrambling across battlefields to reach infantrymen whose bodies had been blown apart, a bloody, mangled mess of severed limbs and screaming agony.

Today, Romero is matter-of-fact about his role in the Korean War and his continuing support of the draft, a hot-button issue that has leapt out of the history books because of the pressing need for more US troops in Iraq. "I was doing something – I felt good about it. Help the guys, that's all that mattered," Romero says, while drinking a Bud Light in VFW Post 2951 on Montezuma Avenue. "If they want freedom here, we have to work for it overseas.

"As far as the fighting, if you have to do it, do it and that's it," he says. "When you get drafted, you have to face it whether you want it or not."

The draft. Conscription. Mandatory military service. For younger

generations, it's a foreign concept, but the draft was used to forcibly recruit soldiers in every major US war from the Civil War to Vietnam. Before the draft was suspended in 1973, more than 1.8 million men were drafted for Vietnam. Thousands more burned draft cards, protesting in the streets or fleeing to Canada or Mexico.

Reinstatement of the draft today seems like a remote possibility. Two bills in Congress seeking to reinstate the draft, and make it applicable to both genders, stalled with little support. The Bush administration has repeatedly denied there is any need for a new draft. Michael Donovan, a research analyst with the Center for Defense Information in Washington, DC, says, "There's a better chance of opening up a McDonald's on the dark side of the moon than reinstating the draft."

At the same time, the Defense Department continues to call more and more National Guard and Reserve troops to fill growing gaps in troop strength in Iraq. The Army also is forcing thousands of soldiers to stay involuntarily in Iraq or Afghanistan for months or a year past their retirement dates. Congress is debating adding up to 39,000 more active-duty soldiers to the Army and Marines next year. Donovan thinks troop levels in Iraq won't drop for at least two to three years.

"If we are going to have to sustain these force levels, where are we going to get the troops? Because the military is already overstretched," he says. "That is a conundrum that no one has yet provided an answer." The conundrum also highlights the concerns and skepticism about the role of the US military in foreign affairs, and has reinvigorated a debate about this role among everyone from Vietnam veterans to former draft dodgers to draft-age men and women.

Tim Origer had been in Vietnam for only one month when his life changed permanently. On March 15, 1968, he was on point leading a nine-man patrol of inexperienced, replacement Marines in an area outside Da Nang aptly named "Booby Trap Alley." When he crested the ridge of a sand dune under the pale light of a full moon, hidden Viet Cong soldiers detonated a buried artillery shell which Origer was standing on. The blast blew him 40 feet into the air, severing his left leg above the knee and draining most of the blood from his body. Two US soldiers behind him were killed or wounded by the spraying arc of deadly shrapnel.

After returning home in 1968, Origer suffered post-traumatic stress disorder and later moved to a remote box canyon in Washington state, where he lived for 17 years, surviving on his disability pension. "I built a house and kind of isolated myself and was armed to the teeth," he says. Origer's commitment to see his two daughters grow up forced him out of his self-imposed exile. After his divorce, he visited Santa Fe in 1986 to help a friend who suffered a heart attack, and he never left. Now, at 56, he is active with the Santa Fe chapter of Veterans for Peace. He protests the Iraq war while trying to help other veterans suffering post-traumatic stress disorder.

He likely could have avoided the war, since he had a four-year football scholarship at the University of Minnesota, but he enlisted anyway. "There was all this controversy over Vietnam, and I went to find out what all the controversy was about," he says. "I don't regret having gone in the service and having served. I regret having been in an army of occupation. I don't think we were liberating anybody from anything. I think it's the same war [in Iraq]. We're doing it again in another country."

Origer supports a reinstatement of the draft if draftees can decide whether to serve in the military or a US civilian corps. "People have this weird sense of entitlement that they're entitled to everything. It's how we can go to a country without any pre-knowledge of a country and decide we're going to change it into some version of America," Origer says about both Vietnam and Iraq. "There's nothing that says a standing army couldn't be out repairing urban ghettos or doing work along the highways or building new schools."

Brendan L. Smith is a writer for the Santa Fe Reporter.

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