What Did You Do in the War?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37124-2003Dec4.html

Howard Dean, age 18, walked into his draft physical with a set of X-rays, walked out with a bad-back deferment and spent most of the next year on the slopes at Aspen. George W. Bush joined the Texas Air National Guard and was lackadaisical about fulfilling even that mild commitment. John F. Kerry was a battlefield hero and then a leader of the antiwar movement. Wesley K. Clark joined the Army, served with honor and splash and never left until he was personally booted by the secretary of defense.

Does this ancient history matter to a decision about who should be president four decades later? Yes, of course it does. Anything that casts light on a candidate's character and wisdom matters. Vietnam was the great personal moral issue of their generation's lifetime, so far. How they each dealt with it is legitimately revealing. To take the most obvious example, there must be more to Kerry than meets the eye. If anything, the senator of 2003 seems callow compared with the youth of 1969.

All the candidates are of the Vietnam generation. And most of them avoided the war one way or another. They did this by signing up for some safer form of service such as the National Guard, by falling into one of many draft "deferment" categories or by benefiting from the luck of the lottery that replaced those deferments toward the end.

But the question is not a simple "Were you there when your country needed you?" Two things complicate that question in the case of Vietnam. The first is that your country did not especially need you. Vietnam was not World War II, which required the mobilization of the entire society. In the end, less than 10 percent of men who were of draft age (18-26) during the Vietnam War actually served in Vietnam or elsewhere in Southeast Asia. For most men, avoiding service in Vietnam required even less effort than Howard Dean made. In fact, the experience of not serving in Vietnam is far more representative of the candidates' generation than the experience of serving there.