Uncle Sam Wanted Me
Ripened Reflections of a Lucky Vietnam Era Draftee
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When the President of the United States wrote to me, I was upset but not that surprised. Twenty-one years old, in good health (no bone spurs!), and reasonably athletic, I was finishing my first year of law school at Yale as President Richard Nixon, busy and harassed as he was, took time out from his political scheming to write to me the week before my final exams. I was hard at work studying for those exams in my small, dark, sparsely decorated, monastic dorm room when I nervously read for the first time what President Nixon had to say to me. Although we weren't exactly pen-pals, and I wasn't looking forward to it, I had been expecting to hear from the President for some time. It was a piece of mail I would never forget, and I haven't. It changed my life. The year was 1969, the month was May. The disastrous, unpopular Vietnam War was at its peak, with five hundred forty-three thousand American troops in-country, and each week two hundred forty American battle deaths and more than a thousand U.S. soldiers wounded. The government was drafting forty thousand young men a month. A year earlier, in 1968, all graduate school draft deferments (including law school) abruptly ended because the irascible seventy-six-year-old head of the Selective Service System since 1941 - General Lewis Hershey, the draft system's analogue in personality and length of tenure to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover - was mad at students protesting the Vietnam War. At the same time, in what was known as the punitive "Hershey Directive," he also urged draft boards to reclassify participants in anti-war demonstrations as available for military service. The draft lottery lay six months in the future. Ending graduate school deferments meant I was draft bait, cannon fodder, chum for the voracious, body-hungry, yawning, Moloch-like Pentagon maw. I was about to enter the Labyrinth of the Draft as a sacrifice to the Minotaur of War. Unlike Theseus in the ancient Greek myth, I had no trail of twine, no Ariadne, to guide me. I was on my own. Like those luckless youths of Crete in the myth, I was one of the young people offered by my society to appease a monster. The President's letter, if you could call it that, was only one page long. It wasn't exactly a handwritten personal note, though in some ways it read like an invitation to a party, but without an RSVP card. Some party! On an impersonal pre-printed form, the note read, "From the President of the United States" and, after the word "TO" in capital letters, was my name and address. "Greeting," wrote the President, which I found friendly enough, neither belligerent nor highhanded. I didn't know the President personally, so I thought "greeting" was a nice, cordial way to start our relationship. But then his words took a more foreboding turn, with what grammarians call the imperative mood, and it became very personal and overbearing indeed, an omen of things to come. "You are hereby ordered," it went on. Uh-oh, I thought, here we go. Gulp! "Ordered" - that was not a good sign, rather peremptory too. It was the first of many commands I would soon be receiving. "You are hereby ordered to report for induction into the Armed Forces of the United States" in two weeks. I read those words over again, just to make sure I wasn't hallucinating. It was my draft notice, my wake-up call, a military bugle masquerading in the guise of a mere piece of paper, blaring out a harsh high frequency personal reveille for me alone, like an ultrasonic whistle only dogs can hear. So much for the pleasant, peaceful, intellectually stimulating, bookish life of a civilian law student!
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About the Book
Uncle Sam Wanted Me is the story of Daniel Kornstein’s being drafted out of the comparative comforts and intellectual stimulation of law school into the rigors and worries of Army life during the Vietnam War. In clear, entertaining, and memorable language, Kornstein looks back more than half a century to explain and try to understand how he and his generation felt about and dealt with the moral issues posed by the Vietnam draft. The author describes what it was like to receive his draft notice as he studied for his first-year final exams, what his reactions were, and what choices he made and why. Like Proust, the seventy-four-year-old author moves back through time into his memory, dipping into and out of his consciousness, with his old Army dog tags as his madeleine. Kornstein turns the story of his being drafted into the Vietnam Era Army into an expansive meditation on coming of age in the shadow of an unpopular war and making important life decisions about reacting to that war. It is his eloquent attempt to use his personal experiences and moods to explore larger issues, to connect social, cultural and historical dots about the relationship between the military and civilian spheres of life in America, to think about what it even means to be an American citizen. The climax of Kornstein’s time in uniform was being assigned as a legal clerk for the prosecutors of a court-martial arising from the horrible 1968 My Lai Massacre in which U.S. soldiers killed hundreds of unarmed, non-combatant old men, women and children. He discusses and analyzes that case. In a final chapter, the author provides a personal long-delayed after-action report summarizing significant lessons from his two-year military experience as a draftee. He considers the pros and cons of an all-volunteer military, whether a draft is necessary and if so how to make it fair and equitable, the possibility of other forms of national service, our continuing entanglement in undeclared wars, more recent examples of war atrocities, and the residual effects of military service on individuals. Uncle Sam Wanted Me offers insights, ripened reflections, for the author’s generation as well as for a new generation that overwhelmingly isn’t personally exposed to anything military, much less the draft.
About the Author
Daniel Kornstein has been called “a lawyer as philosopher, as historian, as humanist” (Super Lawyers Magazine New York Metro 2012) and “a man of letters with noble values and an abiding love of America and its promise” (New York Law Journal). He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1969 after his first year at Yale Law School at the height of the Vietnam War. After basic training, he was assigned as a legal clerk in the First Armored Division. When his two years as a draftee ended, Kornstein returned to New Haven to finish law school. Since then, he has been practicing law in New York City for forty-nine years. A partner at Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel LLP, Kornstein has coupled a busy and varied civil litigation law practice with writing about the law. His writings have been cited by several courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.