Column: Keeping in rhythm

Many people I know have experienced life on military bases, and I have only experienced life near one. I grew up across a lake from Fort Jackson in South Carolina, waking every morning to the trainees shouting out cadences. They were people whom I did not know, whom I never bothered to visualize, and they were keeping the rhythm that would become the soundtrack of my childhood. Rhythm carries surprisingly well over water. Words do not. I never could decipher what the soldiers were saying, only that they were saying it in unison. I knew they stayed in line and in step. I knew their lives had a predictable tempo.

In the years following my life on the lake, the years during which I never woke before 8 a.m. and never woke to anything but the shrill siren of my alarm clock, I developed a fascination with the military lifestyle. I briefly entertained a fantasy of attending Annapolis, one that dissolved entirely upon my admission to Duke. I romanticized military discipline and training because I saw it as forcibly imposing order on a world that had none. I liked the idea of doing one-armed push-ups. I liked the idea of making a bed that I could bounce a quarter off of. I did not like the idea of going to war.

America now faces a two-fronted conflict (the war on terrorism and war with Iraq), and from one of those fronts we can't even see the enemy. On the other, the specter of foreign occupation is looming. This is no Vietnam. Our military goals have become hydra-headed. Over 280,000 American troops are already committed to positions in France, Korea, Japan, Bosnia and other foreign countries. The occupation of Iraq, should it be necessary, is a long way from "Playstation war." It requires real soldiers.

I learned on Dec. 31 that Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., is calling for a reinstitution of the draft, dead since 1973. The subject has been bouncing around in the American consciousness, yet it has been dismissed by the George W. Bush administration. Donald Rumsfeld says he is "absolutely not" considering a draft. The Pentagon reports that 250,000 of the 1.4 million American troops may be mobilized if we go to war and possibly as many reservists. Rumsfeld believes our current military manpower to be sufficient. Yet Bush's Leave No Child Behind Act and the National Defense Authorization Act require high schools receiving federal funding--which is nearly all public schools and a good deal of private ones--to turn over the names, addresses and phone numbers of male students eligible for military service. Most parents don't realize they have the option of refusing a school's release of their child's information. Salaries are much higher for voluntary soldiers than for draftees. The Selective Service System is also building up its personnel.

Rangel supports a draft because he wants to intensify the debate in Congress over war with Iraq. An African-American legislator, Rangel believes a draft would more evenly distribute military responsibility, which now rests heavily on minorities (41 percent of the troops on active duty are non-white) and bring the harsh reality of war--something that has gotten hazier as technology has made things easier--to the members of Congress who are clamoring for armed conflict. No one wants a war that may kill his child. What Rangel fails to confront, however, is that the same people who managed to dodge the draft pre-1973, the people of privilege (earned or unearned), will be the same ones who will dodge it this time. Conscription is unlikely to make the military burden more racially egalitarian and might make it less so. And what would this mean for women? A draft would provide unlimited "human resources" for a war Rangel says he doesn't want. All that aside, an issue that most American citizens considered a distant, unimaginable possibility is now on the table and up for debate. The unspeakable has been spoken.

I no longer know how to feel about the American military. As our government gets into deeper political water, I wonder when we might be over our heads. In all my romanticism, I never thought to actually imagine my peers in uniform, or my classmates being shipped off to combat. I never thought I would have to. One thing is certain: the American pulse is starting to quicken. Whether it is keeping time with the momentum of the military machine or racing from anxiety, I'm not sure.

Bronwen Dickey is a Trinity senior. Her column appears every third Wednesday.