Word: conscripts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Military conscription was stopped, and seven young men who had been imprisoned for resisting the draft were released. The 12,000 Aussie conscript troops were given the option of resigning or completing their 18-month terms with additional benefits; volunteer members of the armed forces were offered re-enlistment bonuses of $1,000. The 140 Australian servicemen still in Viet Nam, remnants of a force that had numbered almost 8,000 in 1968, were ordered home by Christmas...
...same time, an economic decline had resulted in white coffee planters not paying their African conscript laborers their normal $7 monthly wage. Beginning on March 15, the plantation workers, armed mostly withcatanas or African machettes, and garden tools, attacked the planters and their families, burned crops, pillaged houses and wrecked bridges. Accounts of the atrocities of the time have filled hundreds of Portuguese pamphlets and speeches. Hatcheting of farmers and disemboweling of their families no doubt occured. But the violence of the whites far outside that of the blacks...
...before a permanent medical exemption is granted-all of which can cost up to 500,000 piasters ($1,200). For a time it was not uncommon for boys to chop off the first two fingers of their gun hand; that practice ended when the military decided to conscript the fingerless youths for porters. Today, some desperate draftees dig a shallow hole, toss in a fragmentation grenade, and cover the hole with a foot. If done properly, the practice brings an instant medical discharge...
...Szulc, writing in the April 7 edition of the N.Y. Times, reported that a $1 billion project to expand the "People's Self Defense Forces" from 500,000 to four million was inaugurated March 1. These militia would be in addition to the conscript army of one million troops which the Saigon regime already possesses...
...Clemente. Both Democrats John J. Flynt and Phil M. Landrum reversed their consistent support of the Administration on the war and voted against an extension of the draft (which nonetheless passed 293 to 99). Flynt told a hushed House: "My conscience will not let me vote to continue to conscript young Americans to fight a war which most Americans do not want and a war which the U.S. Government apparently lacks the courage to either win or stop...