New book offers a long neglected look at the history of resisting conscription in the United States

"The more I got into it, the more surprised I was that nobody had ever written a history of conscription in the United States over the centuries... nobody had written the whole history..."

Jerry Elmer

Jerry Elmer’s new book, Conscription, Conscientious Objection, and Draft Resistance in American History is “the definitive history of conscription in America. It is the first book to consider the entire temporal sweep of conscription from pre-Revolutionary War colonial militia drafts through the end of the Vietnam era.” It is also an engaging history of a thread on American thought that can trace its lineage to Daniel Webster, lawyer, orator, and Congressman, through the Vietnam-era draft resistance and to today’s economic conscription.

I know Jerry as the lawyer who successfully argued the case against Invenergy’s proposed $1 billion fracked gas and diesel oil burning power plant aimed at Burrillville, Rhode Island while working at the Conservation Law Foundation [CLF] from 2016 to 2020. I learned about his peace activism and conscription resistance in conversations with him and I’m also proud to have published some of Jerry’s writing while I was at Uprise RI. [See: 50 years ago today I turned 18, at the height of the Vietnam War]

Jerry was kind enough to send me an advance copy of his book and to sit down with me for an interview conducted via Zoom, and edited for clarity below:

Steve Ahlquist: I knew, because of your writing, about some of your anti-conscription work as a younger person, but this exhaustive history was eye-opening. I came of age during the latter part of your book, the sixties. I graduated high school in 1981, so I had older cousins who were facing the idea of being drafted. I had cousins who went into the military on their own. I don't think I had any cousins who were drafted, but there was ongoing talk about these subjects when I was a young person. And in 1981, I registered for the draft because otherwise, I couldn't qualify for things like Pell Grants.

Jerry Elmer: That's correct.

Steve Ahlquist: So for me, the idea of conscription was that you turn 18 and now you're an adult. The government can now send you to a foreign country to kill and die. In my yearbook, when they had a little thing about future plans - I was a pretty sarcastic kid - I wrote that my future plan was to be drafted and die in the Iranian war.

Your book opened up a lot of those memories for me.

I was hoping that you could start by talking about some of your personal history with conscription and how that most likely led to your interest in this subject.

Jerry Elmer: You're quite correct that my personal history with conscription is what led to my interest in the subject. I turned 18 on August 30th, 1969 at the height of the Vietnam War. The law at that time said that all men had to register with the draft within five days of their 18th birthdays. I was very active in the Vietnam-era peace movement. I was co-chairman of my high school's local Students for Peace in Vietnam organization. When I graduated from high school, instead of going to college, I went to work for the War Resistors League.

So the draft was a big deal for me, and the question was how I would respond. I decided not to register for the draft and to do it publicly. I took the five days that Selective Service gives you to register, and I fasted. I held a vigil at what would have been my draft board if I had registered. I handed out leaflets to the guys going in and out saying that I was in the same position they were in. I was 18, I was legally obligated to register. I wasn't going to do it. And I was urging them to do the same thing. The big question that I had at that time was whether or not to register and apply to be a conscientious objector [CO].

Of course, many of my friends, and my parents, urged me to register and seek to be a CO. I actually would've qualified under the law to be a conscientious objector. There were two reasons why I decided not to do that. The smaller, narrower reason was that the way the draft worked at the time with student deferments, conscientious objector classification tended to favor white middle-class suburban kids like me who had the background and education to make an argument about being a CO. It was very much geared against poorer, non-white inner-city kids. Most of the COs were white, middle-class suburban kids. And I didn't want to take advantage of that sort of special privilege.

The broader reason, however, was the question I asked myself. If you say you oppose the draft, if you say you oppose the war, how do you show that opposition? How do you manifest it? Do you show your opposition by cooperating with it every step along the way - registering, filling out the form, signing your name, applying for a deferment - or, if you, really, really oppose the whole system, do you show that opposition by refusing to be a part of it and refusing to register? I won't fill out the forms, I won't sign my name, I won't carry your draft card.

I decided that the way you show you're opposed to a whole system is by not cooperating with it. The analogy in my mind was - Imagine an abolitionist in the Antebellum South going around lecturing about abolishing slavery, but at home he owned slaves. We'd say that's hypocritical. If you oppose something, you don't take part in that system. I wanted to make my opposition open and public. I didn't refuse to register clandestinely. I went to my draft board. I went in on the first day and gave the clerk a statement explaining why I wasn't going to register. I sent out a press release, so newspapers and TV stations were there. I wanted to make my opposition to the draft open and public, not secret and clandestine.

At the time, tens and hundreds of thousands of men were refusing to register. They were rarely caught. And if they were caught, they didn't go to prison. They just were forced to register late. But about 96% of the public, non-registrants were being prosecuted. As you know, I wasn't prosecuted for my non-reregistration, but I was later prosecuted here in Providence for burglarizing the Selective Service complex was then located at One Washington Avenue in Fields Point.

Steve Ahlquist: What was the attitude of the people you met when you were handing out anti-conscription flyers outside of the draft board, or when you went inside and handed in your statement to the people working for selective service, what kind of feedback were you getting?

Jerry Elmer: When I went in, it was actually sort of funny. The draft board clerk, Mrs. Abraham, was ready for me. She knew I was coming, and she said, "Here's the registration form." It was a fairly long, I can't remember, 12 or 16 pages. And she was going to fill out the form for me because I refused to fill it out.

She said, "Mr. Elmer, what is your hair color?" And I said, "Well, Mrs. Abraham, as a matter of principle, I won't tell you that." So she wrote in "brown." Then she said, "Well, Mr. Elmer, what color are your eyes?" And I said, "Mrs. Abraham, as a moral issue. I refuse to tell you what color my eyes are." And so she wrote "brown." So she gets to the end of the form and she says, "Sign here." And I say, "No, no, no, Mrs. Abraham, you don't understand. I'm not going to sign." She says, "Oh, I get it, because you're opposed to the draft, you won't sign our forms." And I said, "Yep, that's it." So she pulls out another form and says, "Will you please sign this other form that says that you refuse to sign the registration form?"

Steve Ahlquist: Wow.

Jerry Elmer: So she signed my name to the form and I got a registration card in the mail six weeks later that said, in compliance with the law, you've registered. I burned that at the draft board in November. Then they sent me a classification card and I got rid of that. They sent me a pre-induction physical order. I didn't go. Each of those were counted as felonies. Each of them was good for a separate additional five years in prison. Some people like Vinnie McGee, were prosecuted on multiple count indictments for burning a draft card, refusing a pre-induction physical, and refusing induction. Other people got one-count indictments. So that was the response of selective service. It wasn't very thoughtful, but there it is.

Steve Ahlquist: Sounds very bureaucratic.

Jerry Elmer: The response of my friends and high school classmates was different. One of my classmates, Dave Rosen, had registered the previous May when he turned 18. He decided to sever his ties with selective service during the week that I was at the draft board. So on Friday of that week, we held a demonstration. Dave tore his draft card into three parts, and he burned one part. I burned one part, and a friend of ours burned the third part. The demonstration was fairly well attended and got a medium amount of press coverage. That, I think, is fairly typical of what was happening at the time. One person would resist the draft and that would influence several other people who would resist the draft. And they would influence a wider group. It was spreading quite rapidly at that point. In that sense, I think my experience was fairly typical of what was happening at the time.

Steve Ahlquist: It's really hard as a young person to step up in such a big, public way. What about you gave you the strength to do that? Where does that come from?

Jerry Elmer: So let me say two things about that. One is I was scared. I was a middle-class kid who was committing felonies and inviting the FBI to watch after we burglarized the draft board complex at Fields Point in Providence. We held a press conference about it, downtown in Burnside Park across the street from the federal building, across the street from where the FBI had their offices. So the first thing I would say is, every time in my life that I've been arrested, I've been frightened. And as a friend of mine in the peace movement told me early on, it doesn't matter how many times you're arrested, you're always frightened.

So there's that. But what motivated me, the second part of it, was that my entire family, my parents, all four grandparents, all the aunts and uncles, were Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Some of my family escaped and got out alive, others were killed. And what impressed me as a kid was not so much what Hitler and the Nazis did, because people can be very, very cruel and wars are terrible things. That wasn't so out of character for our species. What surprised me was how the Nazi atrocities could be greeted by such overwhelming silence by the broader population, and that struck me as very, very wrong.

I thought, with the United States committing war crimes in Vietnam, it was not necessarily in my power to stop the crimes from being committed. I had a fairly realistic idea about the power of one person against the entire state. On the other hand, it was within my power to ensure that when my country was committing crimes in my name, those crimes would not be met by silence. I may not be able to stop the crimes, but I did have the power to break the silence. And that is what motivated me. My parents, although they had normal, natural concern for the wellbeing of their offspring and were worried about me - and particularly, coming from their background, standing up to the might of the government has a particularly acute or frightening ring to it - but they eventually realized that, in a way, this was their chickens coming home to roost. They had raised me. We talked around the dinner table about the events of the day, and they made their opinions known. So on the one hand, they worried about me, and on the other hand, they realized, "Well, this is how we raised the kid."

Steve Ahlquist: I get that. In my own experience, having raised children, when I hear my children speaking out as radically and forcefully as I sometimes speak out, I worry for them in ways I never have worried about myself.

Jerry Elmer: Of course, that's the natural response of parents.

Steve Ahlquist: I'm sorry I haven't talked about the book yet. I will. I promise we'll get to it. But I have one other question that's a little bit outside the book, and it's something you hinted at. Today, we don't have conscription in America. We don't need it because we have an economic system that systemically discriminates against whole classes of people, making the military seem like the best option in the life of, as you pointed out, poor inner-city people of color. Oftentimes joining the military seems to be the only option.

This feels like channeling, which is talked about in your book, especially in the later chapters. It feels like channeling via the economic system. You spoke earlier about opposing a system that would do this, but how do you oppose an economic system? You can oppose capitalism, but you still need money to survive. What does it look like in the future to be anti-conscription when conscription is veiled by economic forces?

Jerry Elmer: You raise a very good point. In the 1980s there was a progressive, left-wing black Congressman who introduced a bill in Congress to bring back the draft. I opposed the bill because I oppose conscription, but he reasoned that as the US is fighting all these wars abroad, if it were white middle-class kids out of Princeton and Yale who were having to go to the battlefield and get their heads blown off, maybe middle-class people would be opposing these wars.

The idea that an economic draft places coercion on poor kids to go into the military is very real. There is of course, draft registration still, as you said earlier, and one of the comments that I've had about the book is from a man, Edward Hasbrouk, who is still working on publicizing opposition to draft registration. He was quite critical when he heard about this book being published. He was very negative about it because the publisher and the editors deliberately decided not to have a chapter about post-1975 registration still being required even though there was no conscription. The reasoning of the publisher and the editors was that this is a book about conscription and there is no conscription now, and that the book is already significantly longer than they had wanted. My contract with the publisher gave me an upper limit of 120,000 words, and I am over 150. So they nixed it for that reason. But Edward Hasbrouk is very negative. He says this is terrible. That we are missing out on a whole additional chapter. And that is in fact what you are describing.

Steve Ahlquist: I guess that gives you something for the sequel down the road...

Jerry Elmer: That has occurred to me. I was forced to trim about 50,000 words from my original manuscript, so some of that could go back in.

There is another question, which is perhaps a little further afield and may be of more interest to lawyers than to laypeople. But with the recently expanded arguments that are being made in the legislative branch and Congress, and also in the Supreme Court, about religious freedom - "We are right-wing Christians. We don't want to make wedding cakes for gay couples." There is an interesting and so far unexplored question as to what the possible consequences of that line of legal reasoning would be in the context of religious objection to military service. That is something that has not been researched, explored, or written about. In light of this other argument that we're having, that would be interesting to me.

Steve Ahlquist: I'm also interested in the way that religious freedom is being reexamined these days, especially on the right. What you're bringing up is probably an unintended consequence of their actions, as they mess with what we think of as religious freedom. My gut tells me they would oppose avoiding conscription because it's not a traditional right-wing Christian freedom.

Jerry Elmer: Of course. "We are pro-life from the moment of conception, but we don't oppose capital punishment. A fertilized egg is a full human being when it splits into two cells. But a human being on death row is not a human being."

Steve Ahlquist: I want to get to the book. You more or less start with the War of 1812. At that time, the draft was considered to be unconstitutional. There was no draft for the War of 1812 because it was believed that forcing people to fight would be contrary to freedom.

Jerry Elmer: Let's be candid about this. The Secretary of War, James Monroe, thought it was constitutional. The president at the time was James Madison, who was one of the framers of the Constitution and approved of conscription. But there was a lively debate in Congress. Conscription did not pass. There was a widespread view that it was unconstitutional, which was enunciated most clearly in that speech by Daniel Webster who asked, "Where in the Constitution do you see a right to draft?"

Although Daniel Webster's speech on the floor of the House in 1814 isn't widely known now, it was widely quoted on the floor of the US Congress in 1863 when the draft was considered, by the US Congress in 1917 when it was considered, in 1940 when it was considered by the US Congress, and Webster's speech appeared on anti-war posters during the Vietnam War. There were also legitimate people in the US government at that time and at subsequent times who thought that conscription was constitutional and permitted by the Constitution in Article One, Section Eight. However, there was also a widespread feeling that conscription was not constitutional.

Steve Ahlquist: Then, after the War of 1812, when America decided that a certain amount of conscription is allowable, we seemed to do it poorly.

And it points to an interesting, almost like an alternate history of anti-conscription/anti-draft resistance in America, which is as strong, in its way, as the tendency to sign up for and join wars.

I'm not sure how to enunciate this, so give me a second. We have statues built for all these great wars. You can find them going back to the War of 1812, and throughout New England and all my life, I've seen these war memorials. We don't have any memorials, that I know of, for anti-conscription activities.

So my question is, this vein of people opposing war throughout American history, which you outline in your book, is it a continuous connected line or is it just stuff that pops up when war happens, compelling people to find the old arguments or to remember these old arguments and refine them in a new context?

Jerry Elmer: Well, it is both. I was a Vietnam Era war resistor, but many of my friends and colleagues, when I was on the staff of the War Resistors League or the American Friend Service Committee, were World War II draft resistors, guys like Jim Peck, Igal Roodenko, Ralph DiGia, Jim Bristol, Wally Nelson. I even knew World War I resistors. I was on the board of the War Resistors League with David Berkingoff, who was a World War I draft resistor. I knew Evan Thomas, who was a World War I draft resistor.

A lot of the World War II resistors were men who either had resisted in World War I or who knew World War I resistors. A lot of US Vietnam-era resistors knew the World War II resistors. There was a continuity in that. But in addition to that, there was also a lot of newness to the movement of new people coming in. People who didn't know the history. And a lot of us in the Vietnam era resistance did not know that history.

The other thing I want to say is I agree with you - my principal argument in the book is that there is this whole alternative history of anti-conscription activity in the United States that runs very deep and is largely unknown. However, it is also true that the World War I and World War II drafts were very efficient. More than 70 percent of all men in the United States were registered and got classifications. 9 million men were drafted. Had the war not ended when it did, lots more could have been drafted. These were very, very efficient operations. You can make arguments about whether or not they were successful because success may involve more than merely being efficient. But these drafts were very efficient.

And just the smallest point - you will have read in chapter seven about the Vietnam era, about draft file destruction. One of the first examples of that was the Catonsville Nine in Catonsville, Maryland. There is now a memorial marker to one of the Catonsville Nine. Margie Melville sent me a picture of her attendance at the dedication of that memorial. Also in March of 1970, but I may have the date wrong, the same group of Catholic-left people who were burglarizing draft boards also burglarized the office of the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. Instead of destroying the records, they published all of them, which was very revealing. There is a memorial plaque standing at the site of the former FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, celebrating that burglary. There is a recently published book about that called The Burglary, that may interest you.

The group that burglarized the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania remained anonymous for 50 years. But then it was revealed who did it, and one of the people, I had no idea at the time, was an acquaintance of mine. I wouldn't call him a friend, but we certainly knew each other. Bill Davidon, who was a physics professor at Haverford College in Pennsylvania.

Steve Ahlquist: I think a lot about what we publicly commemorate, and what it says about us.

Jerry Elmer: Oh, yeah. I would love to see a Catonsville Nine-style memorial plaque go up at one Washington Avenue in Fields Point, but the last time I looked, it wasn't there yet.

Steve Ahlquist: There were parts of the book that, maybe funny is too strong a word, but the idea that both the North and the South, during the Civil War, were having a hard time rounding up people for their armies because men were hiding out in the woods and going into the mountains amused me. Not only were these men not helping to fight the war, but both sides were diverting forces to hunt people down and force them into armies. Even if they were forced into an army, they sometimes just disbanded and ran off into the woods again.

Jerry Elmer: And not only that, but those groups, especially in the South, were large, organized, well-trained, and armed. They were armed groups of 50, 70, 100, or 200 people. One of the reasons that they were so successful is Mao's old argument about the fish in the sea.¹ These people were hiding out in the hills and mountains among their friends, relatives, families, and neighbors. And the reason that they were so successful was that they often had widespread popular support. In the North, 40 conscription officers were killed, they were murdered, they were shot down. That was not such a rare occurrence. They were attacked at home, in bed at night. They had their documents and record books burned and destroyed. Those of us who burglarized draft boards during the Vietnam War patted ourselves on the back thinking that we had come up with some kind of a wonderful new, creative, novel approach. Not at all.

Steve Ahlquist: Although, as a counterpoint, the Vietnam-era resistors were, to my knowledge, mostly nonviolent.

Jerry Elmer: We were all nonviolent, for the most part. We held press conferences about our actions afterward. We were prosecuted. Lots of us went to prison. Of course, there were differences, you're correct about that, but the idea of destroying the records of the conscription officers was itself not a new idea.

Steve Ahlquist: I found it ironic that people would say, "I'm not going to go to war, but I am going to carry this gun and shoot somebody who tries to force me to do something against my will." I get that understanding of personal freedom, as in, "I'll shoot people for the reasons I choose, not for the reasons the government chooses" and that makes a certain amount of sense to me. But it seems like non-violence wasn't the central tenant of these particular Civil War-era resistors.

Jerry Elmer: Yes. There were pacifist objectors. There were Quaker objectors, both in the North and the South, there was even this Quaker belt in some counties in North Carolina. The Quakers in the Confederacy, especially in North Carolina, had sort of a double whammy because they were abolitionists and they were pacifists against the war, so many of their neighbors looked upon them with particular animosity and suspicion.

But when you read the statements of people having this individualism streak, "I may carry weapons, I may defend myself and my family, but I'm not going off to war to kill the people that you tell me to kill" - some of the World War II resistors, especially the religious ones, the Union Theological Seminary students who didn't register, including David Dellinger, when you read their statements, there is a very strong streak of that individualism, that "I am an individual person. You can't take away my personal, individual liberty." What struck me about that was that today, that kind of argument feels more redolent of the conservative right-wing. "You can't take my guns. That's my individual freedom." There was certainly that individualist streak in some of the draft resistors over history, whose writings from that time, I think, read somewhat differently today.

Steve Ahlquist: I want to get back to the book again, maybe in a more macro way. Why did you choose to write this history?

Jerry Elmer: In the very first paragraph of the acknowledgments, I lay that out. In 1969, when I was a Vietnam-era draft resistor, I read this article by Jim Forest, who was one of the organizers of the Catholic Peace Fellowship. He was himself a draft resistor. He destroyed draft files in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in one of the very first draft board raids. And he wrote this essay in Time of War in which he said the Vietnam-era draft resistance didn't come from nowhere, there was this history of draft opposition in the United States. He talked about the anti-draft riots in New York City during the Civil War.

I took that piece of information and tucked it away in the back of my mind. I thought it was interesting and over the years and over the decades, when I had some time, I did a little bit of research into what all of that meant. And the more I got into that, the more interested I became. As I retired from the practice of law in June of 2020, like everybody else in the world, I did not see Covid coming. I didn't retire because of COVID-19, but eight months before I retired, my wife said to me, "Jerry, you better have something to do when you retire, or there's going to be trouble around this house." In retrospect, I will say that that may be the best piece of advice anybody has ever given me.

I thought to myself, "What would be an engaging project? What would be interesting, challenging, and fun?" And I thought, "Do this research that has intrigued you for decades." The more I got into it, the more surprised I was that nobody had ever written a history of conscription in the United States over the centuries. There were tons of books about conscription in World War I and conscription during the Vietnam War. There were books on conscription during the Civil War, just in the South. But nobody had written the whole history.

One of the benefits of doing that was that you could try to tease out similarities and differences between the eras that you mentioned, like the channeling. Everybody in the Vietnam War thought this was a new, startlingly different thing. But when you read the testimony in Congress during the World War One draft, they were saying the same thing. When you read the testimony during the World War II draft, they were saying the same thing. When you read General Lewis Blaine Hershey's annual reports to Congress during the 1940s and fifties, he was saying the same thing. So, in 1967, 68, and 69, people were saying, "This is completely new and startling," the reason nobody had picked up on this before is that nobody had studied the history across the centuries.

The bottom line is, I wrote the book because it was a subject that interested me. I'd always been fascinated with it. It was a subject I knew something about because I had been involved with it for some years. And you know publishers, especially book publishers, especially academic book publishers, what they look for is sort of something new that hasn't been done before. I think one of the things that made my manuscript attractive to publishers was that I had an interesting background. This is the guy who was involved in the anti-draft movement, on the staff of peace organizations like the War Resisters League, but is also a lawyer and can bring the perspective both of the activist and the legal side and run them together. That's also something that nobody has done before.

Steve Ahlquist: The book gave me new insight into history and made connections between all these points that I had seen over the years and maybe understood as little stories, but never really saw how they connected.

Jerry Elmer: You know, militia regiments in 1814 refused orders from their officers to go into Canada because the Constitution said the federal government could secund state militias into federal service - to enforce the laws of the United States or to put down a rebellion, for instance - but invading another country doesn't count. That's why, for the Mexican-American War in 1848, the president couldn't use secunded state militias because we were invading Mexico. He had to use a volunteer army. There was no draft, it was a volunteer army. No secunded state militias. You're not allowed to use secunded state militias to invade another country.

Steve Ahlquist: It's funny that they were so sure of their rights, they were so sure of what they had to do or not do, and they were so sure of why they were there. Today, we have this idea that if you join the military, you have to follow all orders, go where they tell you, and shoot who they point at. But these soldiers were like, "Nope." It's an interesting streak of Americanism that pops up, oftentimes in positive ways. Here it seems a check on military authority.

What do you hope people get out of the book? Who should be reading this? Do you think there should be college courses on this based on your book?

Jerry Elmer: Honesty compels me to tell you that because I chose a very obscure topic, this is not going to have a widespread readership. I chose a topic that I find fascinating. I had a great time. I had fun researching and writing it. It was great, but I chose a topic that is not going to have widespread interest. I think I show a part of American history that is not widely known, but there will probably be academic interest in it for a week and a half. I was invited to give a talk at this meeting of historians in Philadelphia. People in the field are aware of the book and are interested in it, and they've been writing to me with interesting questions and so forth, but widespread interest? I doubt it.

Steve Ahlquist: Lastly, let me play Devil's Advocate and put this out there as a defense of conscription: When we have conscription, we have shorter wars.

Jerry Elmer: The congressman's argument in the 1980s that we should draft the white kids out of Princeton and Yale and show them what war is like, and then our presidents will be less inclined to get involved in endless wars in other countries is not fatuous.

Another argument one could make in favor of conscription is that it could be done more fairly than the economic draft that we have now. However, the counter-argument to that is to look at every draft that we've ever had. We give student deferments, so white middle-class kids at Yale and Princeton will get out. We give medical deferments so the sons of millionaires, like Donald J. Trump, can get a physician to say that he has bone spurs in his foot.

It is an interesting question as to whether returning to conscription would make securing participants in the military more fair, but if you look at our history, it hasn't been that fair. We exclude women from conscription because women are not suited for the military. Is that fair? Or does it further entrench gender role stereotypes? When has conscription been fair?

So here's the question: To what extent is it possible for the United States government to institute a conscription system that is, in fact, fair? You say in theory it could be done. The counterargument is, "Let's look at history. Has it ever been done?"

Some people oppose capital punishment, not because it's wrong to ever kill a person, but because in the entire history of the United States, we've never had a fair capital punishment law. And they say, "If we can't do it fairly, should we do it?" I'm a pacifist. I say that wars and conscription are in and of themselves unfair. But I think the counterargument to what you are raising, "Wouldn't a draft be fairer?" is yes, I could imagine a fairer draft, and if you lock Steve and Jerry into a room for two and a half weeks, we might be able to write out such a fair draft law. But has it ever been done? How much faith do you have that that would happen?

Steve Ahlquist: I have no faith that we can do it right.

Jerry Elmer: But the argument that you're raising is non-fatuous.

Steve Ahlquist: There's political pressure when we're drafting people into wars to make sure that our goals are expressed and accomplished. Vietnam didn't seem to have a goal, and it was the resistance to that war and the fact that we were drafting kids into it, that made everybody ask, "What are we wasting these lives for?" Compare that to our adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, we stayed there for 20 years just grinding people up because it was a "volunteer" army. We were happy to say, "These people volunteered for it. Nobody had to go to that war." But we know that that's not quite true." It bothers me that the children of the rich are always excluded.

When I was reading about channeling, I remembered a story about my grandfather, my mother's father. He was a French-Canadian immigrant. He was working at a factory that made parts for sewing machines. During World War II the factory switched over to making parts for guns. Because he was skilled at working these machines, he was never drafted. He got to stay here in America. I probably exist because somebody said, "Oh no, he doesn't go out there. Find some guy who can't work that machine and send him to the front lines."

Jerry Elmer: That's right.

Steve Ahlquist: Thank you for the time on this. I thought the book was great. I hope I can get you a few more sales when this piece goes up.

Jerry Elmer: I look forward to seeing your review when it's published.

Steve Ahlquist: Where you would send someone if they wanted to buy it?

Jerry Elmer: Well, you might give a call to Books on the Square and ask them if they want to carry a few copies. It's also listed on the Brill website. In fact, on the Brill website, scroll down the page and you'll see the introduction and chapter one, available for free, to pique interest.

1. "The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea."