Poll: Draft Dodger Pardon?

Just curious...

Do you agree with Fmr. President Jimmy Carter's pardoning of nearly 10,000 men who evaded the draft during the Vietnam War?

I voted yes, but prefer Ford's 'earned amnesty' program.

P.S. To those of you who've served. Where you upset with Carter's decision?

I think it's crazy to force people to go off and die in the first place.

The draft is nothing but a combination lottery & death penalty for innocent people who aren't elite enough to have connections to get into the champagne units.

My uncle got lucky- he became a cop just before the draft began, and the Minneapolis PD helped him forge papers saying he was in the Reserves because he was such a good cop that they didn't want him to go off and die.
I'm glad they did, or I might not have an uncle. And, at the same time, I feel badly because the men (boys) who did get drafted who didn't have my uncle's connections went off to fight and die. :( I'm conflicted.

As a veteran I am conflicted with the subject regardless of the reason but I constantly wonder what we lost in Vietnam. Did a budding Bill Gates die there? Was there a potential United States Senator to carry the banner of liberalism straight to the white house lost in the jungles of southeast asia? Has a talented leader of tomorrow been lost because of the political war in iraq forced on this country by a man who knows naught of leadership or morality?

Excellent question my friend. And to your question - NO, I was not upset with President Carter's decision. He was/is a kind, compassionate, christian human being. We need his kind in the white house, now more than ever.

with no statute of limitations for anyone who used political connections to worm their way into a national guard spot and deserted before their tour ended.

How immoral to have your poor and less advantaged fight for the special interests of the elite. Too bad service to the country is mainly defined by the military.
I think everyone should be expected to give a year or two of service to America such as service to our social and infrastructure needs. Of course I'm just a god damned communist but it just doesn't sound that evil does it?

GI benefits. They served their country well by refusing to follow illegal orders, which all people in the US military are bound to do. Those who did enter the military then should also be supplied with full benefits and compensation.

Remember all people are obligated to refuse illegal orders, and doing otherwise can subject them to legal proceedings.
http://tomjoad.org/nuremberg.htm

So we should salute those brave men who refused that illegal war, and those who are doing so now by refusing Bush orders to take part in a war of aggression against Iraq.
See those heroes here:
http://tomjoad.org/WarHeroes.htm

would have probably went in the army. I was ambivalent. Actually a part of me was hoping to die at the time because of some girl I now hardly remember. She dumped me for some guy who had a higher draft number. My plan for suicide involved going to Vietnam. (I was 19 - a very dumb 19.) I was mostly terrified that someone would expect me to kill another person, something I do not feel I could have done. I recall that I worried also about not being killed but only maimed, or being captured, or tortured. There was a great amount of uncertainty at the time, and I often shifted my strategies and goals.

I was crazy for a certain amount of time. Then I got better.

Weird, strange. I stayed high for about 2 years while the thing worked itself out - which it did only when Nixon announced that we had won the war in Vietnam. Sometimes as we've seen lately in vast frequency, persons in power announce realities that are not realities. This was about a year before he announced he was not a crook.

I remember that many people I knew were trying to get into the National Guard to avoid Vietnam. There was a waiting list, four or five years if IRRC. I didn't know it at the time that you had to be a diffident semi-literate drunk with a powerfully connected Dad to go in. My neighbor enlisted in the Navy to avoid Vietnam and ended up on a gunboat on the Mekong Delta, getting shot at most days. (He lived.) The draft was inhumane mostly because of the uncertainty and the unfairness. It was set up to fuck the poor and the underpriviledged.

I think President Carter did what he had to do. This war cried out for forgiveness, because it was wrong all the way around. Like the current war, there was no reason to fight it in the first place.

I still believe in compulsory national service - not necessarily for war (I am basically a pacifist) but more to bond one to one's country and to the idea of service and shared experience. However search service - which might involve military service in some cases - should apply equally to all people with almost no, or at least, rare exceptions.

That said, there are points were service conflicts with moral values and people should feel comfortable with taking risks - including risks of exile or imprisonment - to maintain their basic human decency. We simply cannot compell our men and women to enter ranks of torturers, or the practioners of genocide, etc, etc.