A matter of integrity

Richard  Blumenthal, Connecticut attorney general and Senate candidate, got himself into hot water last week when news accounts reported that he has been saying he served in Vietnam.  It turns out he was in the Marine Corps Reserve during Vietnam, but was not in Vietnam.  Two of the many responses that especially struck me were by Henry Allen and Larry Pressler.

Allen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and editor with The Washington Post for 39 years, who served with the Marine Corps in Vietnam, wrote:

O, the stained souls, the small-hours doubts, the troubled manhood of so many American men who didn’t go to Vietnam when they could have — the strange guilt they seem to feel when they confront Vietnam veterans. … Vietnam veterans who don’t care whether somebody served have had to sit through plaintive confessions.

He recalls the many ways it was possible to legally avoid the Vietnam-era draft — student, medical, hardship, occupational deferments. With a good counselor, it was possible for most of those who didn’t want to serve to avoid it.  So why the guilt? What would lead men forty years later to say they served in Vietnam when they didn’t? Allen concludes:

The fact is that regardless of whether a war was moral, justified, won or meaningful, having served in one — particularly in combat — confers prestige. Harvard and Yale and social connections are nice, but at 3 o’clock in the morning you find yourself outranked by high school dropouts whose names are on the wall of the Vietnam Memorial. Not in the eyes of the world, but in your own eyes. What a withering stare it must be for some men, that they’ll shame themselves far worse than they were shamed before, by telling a lie.

Pressler, a former U.S. Senator, now an attorney, who served with the Army in Vietnam, suggested that the choices made then have a continuing effect:

The issues of integrity in business and politics that plague us today — the way elites are no longer trusted — are rooted in the dishonesty that surrounded the Vietnam-era draft.  …  Many of those who didn’t serve were helped by an inherently unfair draft. I don’t fault anyone for taking advantage of the law. Where I do find fault is among those who say they were avoiding the draft because they were idealistically opposed to the war — when, in fact, they mostly didn’t want to make the sacrifice.

In private conversations with my classmates, I was told over and over that they didn’t want to serve in the military because it would hold up their careers. To the outside world, though, many would proclaim they weren’t going because they were opposed to the war and we should end all wars. Eventually they began to believe their “idealism” was superior to that of those who did serve. They said that it was courageous to resist the draft — something that would have been true if they had actually become conscientious objectors and gone to prison.

He concludes that the mentality of cloaking self-interest in idealism corrupts those of the Vietnam generation who are now in positions of power:

Many of these men who evaded service but claimed idealism lead our elite institutions. The concept of using legal technicalities to evade responsibility has been carried over to playing with derivatives, or to short-changing shareholders. … Too many members of my generation learned to believe that they could work within the law to evade basic responsibilities, cloaking their actions in idealism. It’s a way of thinking that scars us to this day.

I was a public draft resister during the Vietnam war, was arrested, tried, and given a probationary sentence. It’s a decision I’ve never regretted, although I don’t think I’d call it courageous as Pressler does — it was simply remaining true to my conscience. But I certainly feel no shame in not serving, as Allen suggests.

Young men of my generation had five basic choices: serve in the military, leave the country, resist the draft, do alternative service as a conscientious objector, or legally avoid the draft.  I have friends in all five categories: veteran friends who came back physically wounded or mentally wounded, still haunted by events four decades ago; friends who spent years in exile, unable to attend their parents’ funerals because FBI agents were waiting at the service to arrest them if they attended; friends who like me, resisted, but unlike me, spent years in prison; friends who served in alternative service as conscientious objectors — including some who did their service in Vietnam; and friends who avoided the draft with deferments and suffered no consequences.

While I don’t fault any of them — no 18-year-old should have to make that choice — I agree with Pressler that forty years later one should honestly acknowledge the choice he made.  In the end, it’s a matter of integrity.