Uncle Sam Wanted Me: Ripened Reflections of a Lucky Vietnam Era Draftee

By Daniel Kornstein

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781665552899

Daniel Kornstein

DANIEL KORNSTEIN practices law in New York City at the firm of Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel, LLP, where he is a partner. He has coupled a busy and varied civil litigation law practice with writing about the law. A past president of the Law & Humanities Institute, Kornstein has been called "a lawyer as philosopher, historian, as humanist" (Super Lawyers Magazine New York Metro 2012), whose work is "legal writing at its very best, legal writing as literature, his essays inspire us" (New York Law Journal); "a testimonial to cultural literacy at its best . . . gracefully written" (Choice); "the distinctive voice of an American lawyer [who] speaks to our era in the polished cadences of an experienced advocate" (Yale Journal of Law and Humanities). His writings have been cited by several courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.

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© 2022 Daniel Kornstein. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 03/15/2022

ISBN: 978-1-6655-5287-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-5288-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-5289-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022903416

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

1 Reveille, a/k/a My Wake-Up Call

2 Memories

3 The Mission

4 Coming of Age in the Sixties: The Best and Worst of Times

5 And Then the War Came

6 Never Popular, Always Controversial: The Military Draft in U.S. History

7 A Consultation

8 Choices

9 I Will Support and Defend the Constitution

10 In-Processing: Fort Jackson, South Carolina

11 Basic Training: Fort Gordon, Georgia

12 Staff Judge Advocate’s Office: Fort Hood, Texas

13 A My Lai Massacre Court-Martial

14 Congressional Sabotage or Amnesty? The Only Serious Constitutional Issue

15 The Real Catch-22: We Don’t Really Need It

16 War Crimes

17 After-Action Report

About the Author

FOR

THE DRAFTEES WHO WERE

NOT SO LUCKY

But the thing about remembering is that you don’t forget.

You take your material where you find it, which is in your

life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory

traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes

in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows

in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand

different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street

and go for the ride, putting things down as they come to you.

Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (1990)

1

REVEILLE, a/k/a MY

WAKE-UP CALL

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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!

To cover my travel expenses from my parents’ apartment in the Bronx, a subway token costing twenty cents (remember it was 1969) was taped to the notice. I liked the mental image I had of the President of the United States taking a New York City subway token out of his pocket (or asking one of his aides for a token) and then peeling off a piece of scotch tape from a dispenser on his desk in the Oval Office and attaching the token to the letter he was sending to me. But the exhilaration of that odd image was short lived.

The timing of my draft notice was poignant. It came one week to the day after I had heard wonderful news. Seven days before getting the President’s letter, I had learned I had been accepted as an editor of the prestigious Yale Law Journal based on an article I had submitted in a writing competition. Still elated from that week-old good news, I read my draft notice and elation suddenly turned to despair.

My law school routine, my whole life, was being immediately disrupted, quickly flipped upside down. Instead of studying law and helping to edit the law review, I would soon be toting an assault rifle with live ammunition and training to fight in a bad, stupid war on the other side of the globe. In a week’s time, my emotions plunged more steeply than the 1929 stock market crash, from the heights of law school happiness to the depths of my own personal great depression.

Oh no! My heart started to race, my head ached, my vision blurred. The letter from the President was an invitation, all right, but one I was not allowed to say no to. Final exams? Too bad. Summer plans? Fuggedaboutit! Law school? Postponed. My future legal career? On hold. My future life? Who knows if I will have one.

The President of the United States had just made me what a character in the Godfather film, still three years in the future, would call an offer I couldn’t refuse. Or, like others, could I refuse?

On short notice I was being conscripted into America’s Vietnam Era military for two years of full-time active-duty soldiering. As eighteenth-century English man of letters Samuel Johnson said of the prospect of hanging, drafting a man into the military during wartime concentrates his mind wonderfully. I concentrated, or at least tried to, but it wasn’t wonderful. Something was wrong.

Questions without answers bombarded my mind like mortar shells. How could I be drafted? What were we fighting for in Vietnam anyway? What about finishing law school? What do I tell my girlfriend, the brilliant, pretty graduate student in the statistics department? What do I say to my parents?

I was speechless and confused, an inauspicious and unpromising state for a future lawyer.

Why me? What did I do? I was just minding my own business and studying. I didn’t protest or demonstrate against the war. I wasn’t bothering anybody. I wasn’t trying to evade the draft. I was ambivalent about both the war and the draft. I felt a bit like boxing champ Muhammad Ali, who, when he got his draft notice in 1966, famously said: I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong. Me either.

But, then again, I thought, why not me? Why shouldn’t I be drafted? Why wouldn’t I have the same obligation as any other citizen? What makes me so special? Because I’m white? Because I’m middle class? Because I’m in law school? Questions kept coming rapid fire, in machine-gun fashion.

I felt woozy. I couldn’t tell whether my heart stopped racing or just sank. My brain froze, my mind balked, my eyes burned and hurt, my ears had a ringing in them. Talk about a cold sweat, a panic attack, and intimations of mortality!

And now I had just two weeks to get my affairs in order while somehow taking my first-year final exams. More questions. What do I do? (What would you do?) How can I study for finals with such a distraction, not to mention stress and worry? Aihhrghhh!

On the other hand, I shouldn’t have been surprised. I had passed my draft physical six months earlier. On some level, I knew this moment was probably going to happen sooner or later. It was only a question of when. But still, it is one thing to anticipate a worrisome event, quite another to experience it. The actual happening stuns and startles. Nothing really prepares us for it.

For a few minutes my head swam, and I felt like I was drowning. I’d never needed fresh air so badly. I opened the mullioned, leaded glass window above my dorm room desk and stared blankly up at the New England spring sky as clouds, in what seemed to me at that moment to resemble artillery airburst explosion puffs, scudded by. Then I looked down, three stories below, at the peaceful green lawn of the law school courtyard. I watched with envy small groups of smiling fellow students light-heartedly chatting away on that sunny day in May, as if nothing had happened, about how their studying was going.

I felt alone and scared; I wanted to scream out that window: I’ve been drafted! But I didn’t. Deep down, I didn’t want to tell my classmates about my being drafted; it was like having a horrible, incurable, contagious disease you were ashamed of, didn’t want anyone else to catch, and for which no vaccine or N95 masks helped.

Then I looked around my austere dorm room, where I had been spending most of my time studying in the run-up to exams. My only décor, apart from a narrow bed, was a desk and a small, two-shelf bookcase. On the shelves of that wooden bookcase, I saw my well-thumbed and much-annotated first-year red-, blue- and maroon-colored case books — constitutional law, torts, civil procedure, contracts, corporations, and property. I picked up the five-hundred-page constitutional law casebook I had been reviewing and, weighing that thick, heavy law book in one hand and my one-page draft notice in the other — much as the Spencer Tracy-Clarence Darrow character does with the Bible and The Origin of Species at the end of the Scopes Monkey Trial in the film version of Inherit the Wind — I considered their relative importance to my life. I thought about life. . . and death, and my up-to-then youthful confidence in living to a ripe old age.

At that moment I realized, more than ever before, that one’s real education always occurs outside the classroom. Quit your books, the President was telling me in a draconian paraphrase of Wordsworth’s poetry. Enough of science and art / Close up those barren leaves. It was time to find out that character and true knowledge are only tangentially connected with formal education and learning. My real education outside the classroom was about to begin.

Imagination took over. I closed my eyes and peered into the future, which right then looked drab, olive drab. I tried to study the closely printed pages in my law book, but my unsettled mind strayed, and instead I saw hazy images of a tired, sweaty, mosquito-bitten me, helmet on head and clad in jungle fatigues, cradling an M-16 rifle, as I slogged along with other scared draftees through endless rain in a muddy rice paddy or walked point through a field of thick elephant grass, trying desperately to avoid stepping on a booby trap or stumbling into a Vietcong ambush. I shuddered.

In my self-absorbed mind’s eye, I imagined, in a moment of reverie, how I might have possibly come to this sorry and dangerous pass. I conjured up a recent high-level meeting in the Oval Office among President Nixon and his two no-nonsense White House assistants, H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Like Greek gods toying playfully with the fates of mere mortals, they might have talked over the situation something like this:

This imaginary meeting is not on any White House tapes. That it ever happened is, I suppose, unlikely. But for all I know, it may have been in the eight-and-a-half minutes mysteriously missing from the Watergate Tapes.

In my half-hallucinatory state, I was also reminded of James Montgomery Flagg’s famous poster of Uncle Sam pointing and declaring, I want YOU for the U.S. Army. You know that iconic poster, the one used in World Wars I and II, with a white goatee on Uncle Sam’s chiseled face, bushy eyebrows over burning eyes, silver hair flowing out from under a tall top hat decorated with stars, and one bony finger pointing at the observer, as he says, I want YOU!

I want YOU, Uncle Sam was shouting as he looked straight at me and handed me my draft notice. He would have been a bit more avuncular, kinder, gentler and more genial, if my Uncle Sam had smiled, put his hand comfortingly on my trembling shoulder, and said reassuringly, Don’t worry, nephew, everything will be all right. Trust me. You are lucky. But he didn’t. Rather than calm my nerves and fears like a protective, caring older relative, Uncle Sam behaved like a strict Dutch uncle issuing a frank, harsh, severe message.

Wow! I thought: Uncle Sam wants me? Me? The war must really be going badly. I was soon to become the newest and smallest cog in what President Eisenhower, a five-star general and hero of the successful Allied liberation of Europe in World War II, had called, after eight years in the White House, the vast military-industrial complex.

That night I couldn’t sleep, as I obsessed fitfully about the future. Coupling imagination and worry does strange things.

What was I to do?

2

MEMORIES

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More than fifty years have passed since that memorable day I got my draft notice. By now, enough time may have gone by so that I finally might have enough perspective, understanding, and tranquility to make sense of that whole experience, to write about what it was like to be drafted and about my years in America’s Vietnam Era Army and their effect on me. This isn’t poetry, so it may be wrong to speak of emotion recollected in tranquility. Even Wordsworth says, the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion similar to that which existed at the time of the event, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. I am trying to recollect my actual emotions at the time.

After more than half a century of gestation, I can try to capture that important and life-altering experience in the net of words. I can look at the home movie and dream calmly back over the years, voluntarily recalling emotions once involuntarily felt. I will struggle to communicate a message, to tell you about it by depicting the memory and the feelings, the images in my mind’s eye.

Writing about that experience will have an element of self-discovery and help me understand what I think about it. To do so, one must let oneself float along in one’s past, the museum that no one else can visit. Trying to think clearly is a worthy enterprise for its own sake. Writing is a process of thought; nothing appears quite real until one has written about it. A close relationship exists between language and thought; writing is part of thinking. How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

Time clarifies experience, refines the past, and allows memories to ripen. Like wine or cheese, memories need to age to reach a peak, and a half a century seems about right for the memories of one’s early twenties to become more meaningful and situate themselves into life’s context. Memories create a permeable membrane through which the past and the present communicate. Even after more than five decades, I can still close my eyes, return to those long-ago days, and see myself coping with that trying situation; but I sometimes also feel uncertain if what I recall happened, if I am compromising between fiction and fact. Looking back, I sometimes wonder if the events didn’t happen to someone else or in a dream. It hardly seems real.

All human memories of the past, especially more than a half-century in the past, can be unreliable. Human recollection is fallible. As we age, memory not only constructs but also distorts and invents. We lie to ourselves. Reality, wishful thinking, emotions, and error all converge in the rearview mirror of memory. Sometimes I wonder if, in my mid-seventies now, I am misclassifying my own experience, filing it erroneously in my own mind. No memory that stretches back fifty-odd years can escape inaccuracy. Forgetting some aspects of the past is as much a part of understanding ourselves as remembering others. This is not coldly objective history.

And yet, there are flashes of clarity, certain memories are so distinct that they are unforgettable. One such clear memory is about the draft — not a professional sports team draft, or a draft beer, but the military draft. Like the assassination of John Kennedy or the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11, or the attack on Pearl Harbor for an earlier generation, you never forget where you were or what you were doing when you found out you were being drafted into the military during wartime. Although it was more than fifty years ago, I remember that day perfectly. It is as fresh and firmly fixed today in my mind as any crucial moment in my life, like the birth of my children or the day I got married.

But this project is not about a series of images and events frozen in memory. It is about a series of emotions felt anew, relived almost as before. No one else can convey how I felt when I received my draft notice. Only I know what that memory obscurely stirs within me. That way, I for a moment connect with my twenty-one-year-old self. I can see in that memory what I once was. Others may have the same experience with their memories of the same time.

If you were of draft age in 1968 and 1969, the Vietnam War colored everything you did, or decided not to do. It posed a great personal dilemma. It forced young men in America to make choices, hard choices: Do you submit to or try to avoid the draft? What do you do? That was the dilemma.

In dealing with this dilemma, each of us draft-age young men looked inside ourselves and asked hard questions. One way or another, we had to face the perilous prospect of the draft. It was a dilemma because good reasons could be given for either submitting to or evading the draft. What was a young American male to do?

For all of us, the draft was an individual moral crisis, a crisis of conscience, a life inflection point. The choice we made would follow us around for the rest of our lives. We found ourselves thinking about, and questioning, what patriotism, citizenship, civic duty, morality, and personal responsibility mean. Is blind obedience to a government order to take part in an unjust war a patriotic act? Is it moral? We were free to choose. The personal and the political embraced each other closely.

The Vietnam Era was another time that tried men’s souls. We all did a lot of soul searching in deciding what to do about the draft.

Discretion veiled our motives then, and perhaps does so even now. That is part of my desire to explain myself (in part to myself), to take stock of what happened, to try to understand why I allowed myself to be drafted and become a soldier for a time, to discover the hidden, secret springs of action. Some people act without explaining, and after acting, feel no need to explain. Writing this book is a way of explaining my feelings. As an author I can try to make a reasonable pass at understanding that greatest of mysteries, the author’s own life. I now see better, with all the supposed wisdom of hindsight and age. I wrote this book to help myself, and maybe you too, understand what it was like to face the draft and