Word: drafted
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...group of clergymen, led by Yale University Chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr., has suggested a strange linkage between Calley and the young Americans who evaded the draft-a "new jubilee" in which amnesty would be extended to both Calley and draft resisters, in which all would be forgiven, regardless of individual guilt or degree of turpitude...
True, one may suspect that it is unjust for Calley to be the only man imprisoned for the My Lai affair. True, one may wish that clemency eventually be shown to the draft evaders. One may wish, in addition, that both the righteous right and the righteous left soften their positions. Yet the Coffin proposal smacks as much of an ill-considered trade-off as it does of Christian forgiveness. The two situations are really unrelated, both legally and morally. Each therefore deserves to be judged on its own merits, not as part of a jubilee...
Burghardt, the estranged son of an educator who is now president of a community college in Hartford, Conn., went to Deerfield Academy, then Rutgers, began acting in Shakespeare, later taught in the drama department at Antioch. His draft troubles began in 1966 when he applied for a conscientious-objector classification. His claim was rejected on grounds of insufficient "credibility and sincerity." The next year he was sentenced to five years (the average term is two years), but various appeals kept him out of prison until November...
Less deadly, but no less ignored, is the war continuing for American draft resisters. While the dead are buried, while thousands of wounded suffer without real compensation, while POWs return home to offers of shiny Fords and baseball passes, those who saw the Vietnam disaster for the immoral exercise in senseless destruction it was, remain exiled. Hundreds of thousands of dead, wounded, and imprisoned people might today be living in freedom had the draft resisters been heeded in 1965. The perpetrators of so much suffering sit in Congress, in the Ford Foundation, in the World Bank, in the Pentagon...
...will not end until all American military operations in Indochina grind to a halt. It will not end until all exiles of the war--whether POWs or draft resisters--are brought home. No one need noisily celebrate the treaty signed in Paris last month. But American silence on the war now means only more death and suffering...