From: egl1@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Elizabeth G. Levy)
Subject: Clinton Wouldn't Enlist.  He Was Right
Summary: Op-Ed, NYT 9/22/92
Reply-To: egl1@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Elizabeth G. Levy)
Organization: Columbia University
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1992 21:36:21 GMT

CLINTON WOULDN'T ENLIST.  HE WAS RIGHT.
by William Broyles Jr.

Op-Ed, NYT, Tuesday, Sept. 22, 1992.  Copied w/o permission.  Typos mine.

William Broyles Jr., author of _Brothers in Arms: a Journey from War
to Peace," is co-creator of the TV series "China Beach."

I was at Oxford just before Bill Clinton, but while he was lobbying to
get a deferment I was undergoing Marine Corps training, utterly
convinced I was preparing to be killed.  When he received his high
lottery number and went off to Yale Law School, I was leading a
platoon of high school dropouts west of Danang.

More than once, as I lay with my face in the mud, getting shot at, I
thought I'd rather be at Yale Law School, too.  I would also much
rather have been in the National Guard with Dan Quayle or have avoided
the war in any of the ways available to resourceful young men.

The Republicans insist the issue is Governor Clinton's credibility --
why won't he come clean about how he avoided the draft? -- and not
that he didn't serve.  But the real goal is to draw a more powerful
comparison: George Bush, war hero, versus Bill Clinton, draft dodger.

I wish Bill Clinton had been more forthcoming about how he avoided the
war, but when I pay attention to what he says I find myself deeply
impressed with his moral and political courage -- and patriotism.  His
experience wrestling with the moral issues of service in Vietnam is as
valuable as George Bush's heroism in World War II -- certainly more
valuable than Dan Quayle's avoiding Vietnam by quietly serving in the
National Guard.

Like Gov. Clinton and the vast majority of college age men of my
generation, I did everything I could to avoid the war.  Like Bill
Clinton, I opposed it on moral and political grounds, but it troubled
me, as it did him, that my friends from my Texas hometown were bearing
its burdens while I was sipping tea at Oxford.  Why were they there
and I was not?  Why were any of us killing and dying in a war of such
confusing purpose?

These questions haunted a generation during those years.  Bill Clinton
struggled to answer them, and came to the same conclusion I did: he
would not enlist in a war he opposed but if he were drafted he would
serve.

Do I think Bill Clinton should have enlisted in the fall of 1969 and
joined men in Vietnam?  Absolutely not.  We weren't fighting for
freedom in 1969 and 1970.  We were fighting for what Henry Kissinger
called "negotiating strategies."  Citizen armies don't fight well for
subtle diplomatic goals.

I'm grateful for the service of George Bush's generation in World War
II, but that generation also bears the responsibility for mismanaging
the Vietnam War.

Ronald Reagan and George Bush sent my beloved Marine Corps to Beirut
and took away their weapons.  They were massacred there, the largest
number of marines to die in a single day since the end of World War
II.  Military experience is no substitute for common sense.

One thing Bill Clinton did not forget was why he opposed that war and
how he wrestled with his conscience about it.

To the American Legion convention, he said: "I opposed the war in
Vietnam [because] I believed so strongly that our policy in Vietnam
was wrong.  I still believe that.  It weakened and divided America.  I
know that many of you disagree with me.  I respect that."  That took
courage.  Nothing slick or evasive about it.  The politcal and moral
issues he raised in that speech are directly descended from the ones
he confronted in the 1969 letter he wrote from Oxford to the commander
of the University of Arkansas ROTC.

My son comes of age for military service during the next presidency.
I would far rather have his commander in chief be a man who has
struggled with the deep moral issues of sending men to war for narrow
political reasons than one lost in nostalgia for the noble sacrifice
of a heroic crusade that will never come again.

I fought in Vietnam.  Bill Clinton didn't.  If that doesn't bother me,
who should it bother?

--
"I was trying to figure out which of my friends were hedgehogs, and which
were foxes...."
"Shakespeare wrote _King Lear_, NOT _King Leo_...."
Xref: sparky alt.politics.clinton:8518 alt.politics.elections:15193 talk.politics.misc:49603