Charles Rangel has served 43 years as a Congressman from the 15th district in New York City. Illustrations by Kyle Hilton.

YES

The draft would compel us to share the sacrifice.
by Congressman Charles Rangel

On a freezing night in November of 1950, I found myself and dozens of fellow soldiers marching along the icy banks of the Ch’ongch’on River amid the cracks of mortar fire and the glints of Chinese bayonets. The war in Korea was in full force, and my battalion was retreating because our vehicle column had sustained an attack. After a three-day nightmarish trek through enemy territory, 40 of us escaped. In the battles around Kunu-ri, more than 5,000 American soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured. Ninety percent of my unit was killed.

When we returned home, many of my comrades were haunted by memories of their combat experience. They were consumed with guilt, couldn’t sleep or function in their jobs, and became severely depressed. In short, they developed “shell shock,” or what today we call post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. Following the lead of generations of soldiers, most of them suffered in silence, did not seek treatment, and never got better.

Today, we have the awareness and the resources to protect our troops from PTSD. We now know that prolonged exposure to combat is a primary cause of this affliction. A 2008 Army Surgeon General’s study confirmed that more tours of duty mean a greater risk of PTSD for soldiers. Twelve percent of soldiers on their first deployment suffer mental health problems, compared to 27 percent of those on their third and fourth tours. Moreover, suicide rates among veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars are approximately three times higher than in the general population. Yet we subject our troops to more cumulative months of combat than ever before, with shorter rest periods in between.

During Vietnam, almost no Americans were required to serve more than a single tour of duty overseas, although some volunteered for more. In Iraq and Afghanistan, however, nearly half of all soldiers are sent on multiple combat tours—sometimes as many as four. These are separated by reprieves that constantly shift in length, but are always too short to allow for substantive mental health treatment.

This is the inevitable result of having less than one percent of our population carry the burden of war for the remaining 99 percent. More than 15 million registered for the Selective Service System; only 1.4 million are on active duty. This explains why 300,000 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars—nearly 20 percent of the returning forces—suffer from PTSD or major depression. It is not fair or morally defensible to saddle the brave Americans who volunteer for the Armed Forces with tours of duty that expand in length and frequency as our conflicts intensify.

As a nation we should ask ourselves how we can protect our troops’ mental health while maintaining our national defense. Two years of civil service from all U.S. residents would allow us to meet both of these goals. Our military ranks would swell and there would be no need to demand repeated service from our troops. That is why I continue to call for Universal National Service, which would mandate a two-year service requirement for Americans ages 18 to 25. While my “draft” bill is unlikely to become law, it is important that we open a national conversation about how we can all share in the sacrifice for our country.

Requiring two years of service from everyone would compel us to rethink how and why we send young Americans into harm’s way. Too few of the country’s leaders have a personal stake in the well-being of the Armed Forces, and the outcome is predictable. Since the end of the draft in 1973, every president, Democrat and Republican alike, has approached warfare with the mind-set of invading, occupying, and expanding our nation’s influence. It was this attitude that got us into the unnecessary and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and that threatens to mire us in deadly wars in the future. We make decisions about war without worry over who fights them. Those who do the fighting have no choice; when the flag goes up, they salute and follow orders.

A universal service mandate would do more than deter future military entanglements. As shown in a report by the Congressional Budget Office, most of our volunteer troops come from economically depressed urban and rural areas. We have developed, in effect, a mercenary army. In New York City, an overwhelming majority of volunteers are black or Hispanic, recruited from lower income communities such as the South Bronx, East New York, and Long Island City. These enlistees are enticed by bonuses up to $40,000 and thousands in educational benefits.

Military service is a privilege, and it should not be shouldered only by those for whom the economic benefits justify great personal risk. If young men and women of all races and socioeconomic statuses served together, our citizens would come to share or at least understand one another’s values, points of view, and beliefs. Empathy and mutual respect would provide a much-needed antidote to the cynicism that today’s youth feel because of the extreme partisanship in Washington.

A universal national service requirement, even if it does not mandate enlistment in the Armed Forces, is the one mechanism we know will truly protect our troops, unify the nation, and bring fairness to our military. Furthermore, it will season our future leaders with the harrowing realities of war, ensuring that they will never commit our troops to the battlefield unless they are willing to send their own children.

Charles Rangel has served 43 years as a Congressman from the 15th district in New York City. He is the ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee and serves on the Joint Committee on Taxation.

View the next page to read defense expert James Lacey’s argument.

The Argument: Should America Reinstate the Draft? The Saturday Evening Post

From October 24-28, 1962, the world held its breath and waited for the news that the Soviet Union and the United States had launched nuclear weapons at each other. This was no media-manufactured event; the Cuban missile crisis had people glued to their television sets, crowding into churches, and pondering how they’d like to spend their last minutes on earth.

If Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev had not backed down from President Kennedy’s blockade of Cuba, the two countries would probably have launched their nuclear weaponry at each other—and half of you wouldn’t be alive to read this. (According to one study, the fatalities of a nuclear war in 1962 could have reached 100 million, more than half of the country’s population.)

President Kennedy and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara confer in the White House Rose Garden.

For those not old enough to remember the Cuban missile crisis, it’s hard to believe how close the world came to Armageddon during those few tense days.

The entire crisis was covered in depth in a November 1962 Post article by Stewart Alsop and Charles Bartlett. The story, “In Time of Crisis” (December 18, 1962), recounts the long deliberations by Kennedy’s ExComm (Executive Committee of the National Security Council), which worked long, tense days from the start of the crisis to the first steps toward its resolution.

As the authors explained, when ExComm first learned the Soviets were building missile sites in Cuba, they weighed every option: invasion, bombing, and negotiation. Eventually they chose a strategy that was muscular enough to counter the perception that Kennedy was weak on foreign policy, but appeared reasonable enough to avoid immediate war. They would block Soviet ships from bringing the missiles to Cuba. “The option of destroying the missiles, and even of invading Cuba, would definitely be maintained,” Alsop and Bartlett wrote. “If the blockade did not cause Khrushchev to back down, then the missiles could and would be destroyed before they became operational.”

Reconnaissance photo of a missile site under construction in Cuba.

It was a risky move. The Soviet Union had a reputation for pushing its luck and rarely backing down. Very likely, it would consider the blockade reason enough to launch nuclear weapons toward America. Attorney General Robert Kennedy said, “We all agreed in the end that if the Russians were ready to go to nuclear war over Cuba, they were ready to go to nuclear war, and that was that. So we might as well have the showdown then as six months later.”

It might have been easy for Robert Kennedy to sound so certain a month after the crisis. At the time, the members of ExComm were anything but resigned to war. For five, nerve-wracking days, they sat with the president, trying out one idea after another, considering every possible move that would keep up the pressure without pushing the Russians too far.

Alone in his office, the president makes the final, fateful decisions.

In the end, to their unimaginable relief, Khrushchev backed down. He accepted a deal from Kennedy that would enable him to present the dismantling of the Cuban missile sites as a constructive move.

Alsop also recalls the evening after the crisis had passed that an elated and relieved John F. Kennedy chatted with his brother Robert. Savoring the moment of achieving peace, he was reminded of Abraham Lincoln’s brief enjoyment of victory between the end of the Civil War and his assassination. “Perhaps,” he quipped, “this is the night I should go to the theater.”

Nuclear Showdown: The Cuban Missile Crisis 50 Years Later The Saturday Evening Post

Illustration by Owen Freeman

As part of the master plan, Bonny Oaks was buffered from encroachment by undeveloped woods. Wildlife flourished accordingly. Raccoons. Chipmunks. Deer. Because the deer had no natural predators, they became more and more brazen over the years, tearing up hedgerows and nibbling azaleas in broad daylight. At night, they leapt like fools in front of cars. Residents were divided on the issue. One camp insisted that the deer were a nuisance, a hazard, an infestation to be exterminated like rats or fleas. A number of solutions were posed, including poisoned salt licks. Those turned out to be illegal, not to mention dangerous to pets and children, so this camp contented itself with deterrents like mail-order coyote urine sprinkled around their gardens. The second camp believed that the deer were part of the natural beauty that made Bonny Oaks such a desirable home in the first place, believed the deer should not only be tolerated but welcomed. To this end, several members of the community put out pans of oats in winter, when the woods alone failed to provide. Mr. LaPointe preferred to remain above the fray but before he died, before an embolism stopped his heart forever, he took real pleasure in directing his wife’s gaze toward twilight deer like statues on the lawn.

All things considered, then, it came as no great surprise when Mrs. LaPointe, two years a widow, stepped out to retrieve her newspaper one morning and spotted a dead doe in the middle of Shady Dell Lane. She assumed it had been hit by a car and she was prepared, at that hour, no witnesses in sight, to let somebody else worry about the carcass, when she noticed an arrow buried to the fletchings behind the doe’s right shoulder.

Mrs. LaPointe told her housekeeper, Sadie Petty, how she clapped both hands over her ears at the sight of the arrow, as if she’d overheard something filthy. On the phone with her best friend, Mrs. Penelope Ragland, she described the doe’s eyes—already iced over, she said, as if bored by its own death. And that afternoon, while undergoing her monthly color rinse, Mrs. LaPointe recounted for her stylist, Brenda Wimpel, the way the men from animal control hoisted the doe by its legs and swung it into the back of a truck—one, two, three, like a sack of mulch. She was amazed by the sudden potency of her metaphors. And the more she embroidered the details the more convinced she became that something significant had happened. She was still telling the story that evening to her son and only child, Blackmon, a substitute teacher with literary aspirations. He preferred the flexible schedule, he claimed, because it left him time to write. “The police were no help at all,” she said. “They stood around in my kitchen like, like—”

Her powers of comparison had abandoned her, a fact she attributed to the presence of her son. Blackmon had a knack for rendering her uncertain, for insinuating in her mind a whisper of self-doubt.

“You called the police?” They had finished supper—Sadie Petty’s shrimp and wild rice casserole—and retired to the wrought iron table on the patio. Drifting over from next door were muted, jolly voices, the scent of grill smoke, but none of the lots in Bonny Oaks were less than two acres, the tree lines deep enough to allow for privacy. Blackmon was drinking a Diet Coke and reading her newspaper. He decried the local paper as the work of half-wits and hillbillies, but he seemed pleased enough to take advantage of her subscription. He had been living with her since his divorce. He’d given up their condo in the settlement, despite the fact that it had been paid for by his father, ceded custody of his son despite Mrs. LaPointe’s offer to hire a lawyer so he could fight. The “Arts Section” was open between them, the evening light over Blackmon’s shoulder making a Chinese lantern of the page.
“Well of course I did,” said Mrs. LaPointe.

Blackmon flicked a corner of the paper down. “What about the paramedics? They might have tried CPR?” He coughed up a laugh, then snapped the paper back into place so that his face was hidden once again.

Mrs. LaPointe was about to tell him that he could at least pretend to care, when her neighbor, Herman Pickering, pushed through the screen of trees between their yards, wearing an apron and bearing a meat fork. His apron read Support Our Troops in red and white letters against a blue background. “I thought I heard you folks,” he said. Sweat ran in the folds and creases of his smile. He turned back to his house and shouted, “Douglas, come on over here a minute. Come say hello.”

A few seconds later his son appeared on the LaPointe’s side of the trees. Barefoot. Feet and ankles pale. He had a younger version of his father’s face, as big and square and handsome and uncomplicated as a coffee table book.

Herman said, “Did I tell you Douglas was home on leave?”

Bonny Oaks–May 2004 The Saturday Evening Post

In the 61 years since then, this remarkable man has inspired a growing number of admirers. After his death, the Army recognized his service with a Bronze Star and Distinguished Service Cross. Today, he is being considered for the Medal of Honor by the President and for canonization by the Vatican.

The Post acquainted its readers with him in 1954, when it carried Ray M. Dowe, Jr.’s account of “The Ordeal of Chaplain Kapaun.” Dowe had been in the same prison, and knew how the Captain’s self-sacrifice had helped save the lives of many GIs.

Even before his internment, Dowe said, Father Kapaun had become a legend. He visited front-line troops on an old bicycle after his jeep was destroyed.

Helmet jammed down over his ears, pockets stuffed with apples and peaches he had scrounged from Korean orchards, he’d ride this bone-shaker over the rocky roads and the paths through the paddy fields until he came to the forward outposts. There he’d drop in a shallow hole beside a nervous rifleman, crack a joke or two, hand him a peach, say a little prayer with him and move on to the next hole.

It was his devotion to the wounded that finally cost him his freedom, and his life.

On November 2, 1950, the 8^th Cavalry was encircled by Communist troops at Unsan. The soldiers were ordered to get past the enemy as best they could and regroup behind American lines.

Father Kapaun, who was unwounded, might have escaped with them. He refused to go. Of his own free will he stayed on, helping Captain Clarence L. Anderson, the regimental surgeon, take care of the wounded. And there, just at dark, the Chinese took him as he said the last prayers over a dying man.

Kapaun and Dowe were marched to a prison camp where they were barely kept alive on 500 grams of millet or cracked corn every day.

Korea 1950: An exhausted soldier is evacuated by Capt. Jerome Dolan and Chaplain Kaplaun.

Then they cut it down to 450 grams. It was obvious, Father said, that we must either steal food or slowly starve. And in that dangerous enterprise we must have the help of some power beyond ourselves. So, standing before us all, he said a prayer to St. Dismas, the Good Thief, who was crucified at the right hand of Jesus, asking for his aid. I’ll never doubt the power of prayer again. Father, it seemed, could not fail.

At the risk of being shot by the guards, he’d sneak at night into the little fields around the compound… and find hidden potatoes and grain.

When men were called out to [the supply shed] Father would slip in at the end of the line [then] slide off into the bushes… He’d come up behind the shed, and while the rest of us started a row with the guards doling out the rations, he’d sneak in, snatch up a sack of cracked corn and scurry off into the bushes with it.

Father Kapaun took his greatest risks, Dowe said, to slip away with food and supplies to the isolated house where the wounded were kept.

He scrounged cotton undershirts to make bandages. He took their old bandages, foul with corruption, and sneaked them out and washed them and sneaked them back again. He picked the lice from their bodies, an inestimable service, for a man so weak he cannot pick his own lice soon will die.

He joked with them, and said prayers for them, and held them in his arms like children as delirium came upon them. But the main thing he did for them was to put into their hearts the will to live. For when you are wounded and sick and starving, it’s easy to give up and quietly die.

He gathered and washed the foul undergarments of the dead and distributed them to men so weak from dysentery they could not move, and he washed and tended these men as if they were little babies.

He traded his watch for a blanket, and cut it up to make warm socks for helpless men whose feet were freezing.

He did a thousand little things to keep us going.

Inevitably, Kapaun fell victim to the starvation and harsh conditions that struck down so many of his comrades. Captain Anderson, the camp surgeon, nursed him through two serious illnesses. Kapaun had just recovered from them when he contracted pneumonia and fell into a delirious fever.

I believe that period of semiconsciousness was the only happy time he knew during his captivity. Around him there seemed to gather all the people he had known in his boyhood on the farm in Kansas and in his school days. Babbling happily, sometimes laughing, he spoke to his mother and his father, and to the priests he’d known in seminary.

Finally, he sank into a deep and quiet sleep, and when he awoke, he was completely rational. The crisis had passed. He was getting well.

He was sitting up, eating and cracking jokes, when the guards came with a litter to take him to the hospital [where] men in extremis were left to lie untended in filth and freezing cold, until merciful death took them.

The doctors protested violently, but the Chinese ordered Kapaun onto a stretcher and forbad anyone from going along to care for him.

Father himself made no protest. He looked around the room at all of us standing there, and smiled. He held in his hands the golden ciborium, the little covered cup in which, long ago, he had carried the blessed communion bread.

“Tell them back home that I died a happy death,” he said, and smiled again.

Then he turned to me. “Don’t take it hard, Mike,” he said. “I’m going where I’ve always wanted to go. And when I get up there, I’ll say a prayer for all of you.”

I stood there, crying unashamed, as they took him down the road, the little gold cup still shining in his hand. Beside me stood Fezi Gurgin, a Turkish lieutenant, a Mohammedan. “To Allah who is my God,” said Fezi Bey, “I will say a prayer for him.”

A few days later he was dead.

We hasten to add that Emil J. Kapaun, while a remarkable and inspiring individual, made no greater sacrifice than any of the 36,000 Americans who died in that war, or the hundreds of thousands who lost their lives defending this country.

All are heroes. All deserve to be remembered for the price they paid for our liberty.

Father Kapaun helping a wounded comrade. Statue located in Pilsen, Kansas. Image taken by Art Davis… Wikipedia

The Non-Combatant Hero: Emil Kapaun The Saturday Evening Post

On July 30, 1916, saboteurs working for the Imperial German Army blew up a munitions plant on the New Jersey shore, directly across from Liberty Island and Ellis Island. The blast, which was felt throughout New York, had the equivalent force of a 5.0 Richter-scale earthquake. It knocked sleepers out of their beds in Manhattan and rained debris for a two-mile radius. The shock of its force drove shrapnel into Miss Liberty’s gown and weakened the structure of her arm.

Incredibly, German agents caused this damage—estimated at half a billion dollars in 2010 currency—eight months before they were at war with the United States.

According to a 1940 article, the explosion on Black Tom peninsula might have served several purposes for the Central Powers. The author, Emanuel Voska, was a Czech spy living in New York who provided intelligence to the British government. In 1916, as he learned that German agents were tampering with munitions intended for Czarist Russia, which was then fighting for the Allies.

Cases labeled and listed as ammunition, but really containing scrap iron, old lead, or anything else heavy and useless, were being sent to Russia. This was not only sabotage but graft on a large scale. The men back of this were undoubtedly Russians collaborating with Germans. They made the Russian government pay for this junk as ammunition, and pocketed the money.

By the middle of July, thousands of cases of this stuff, together with enormous quantities of genuine ammunition, had piled up in warehouses, barges and freight cars at the Black Tom terminal of the Lehigh Valley Railroad.

This extraordinary accumulation of explosives worried me. It seemed like an invitation to the German dynamiters.

Allied Intelligence was already increasing the number of inspectors munitions factories. According to Voska, he ordered a dozen men specifically to guard the approaches to the Black Tom peninsula. He then informed the head of Russian intelligence in New York about his suspicions. Before any action could be taken, though, the saboteurs struck. Shortly after 2:00 AM, on July 30—

I woke in the small hours of the morning in terror. My stout brick house was shivering, my bed was swaying, the windows were rattling. I jumped up, fully awake, and ran to a window facing south. The distant skyscrapers rose black against a sky that seemed all aflame. My mind jumped to the explanation. The worst had happened! Someone had blown up Black Tom.

The phone rang. The jerky, excited voice of one of my guards on the Jersey shore reported, “Everything is blown up—everything! Black Tom is just one big flame!”…

I took the subway to South Ferry. The port of Manhattan Island, usually deserted at that hour, boiled with activity. Police reserves were pushing back crowds to make way for fire engines. My feet crunched on glass—the explosions seemed to have smashed every window around. Southward, huge geysers of flame showed where burning barges were loose from their moorings. Now and then, a dull explosion would precede the appearance of a gigantic moon in the southern sky. A sickening odor of burning chemicals filled the air.

I crowded onto a ferryboat for New Jersey. By enthusiastic shoving, I managed to land ahead of the others. For a fare amounting to a bribe, I got a taxicab. We made slow progress—all New Jersey seemed to be rushing toward Black Tom. When I posted my guards, I had selected a little all-night beer joint as a rendezvous. I found that although the explosion had smashed all its windows and blown its door off its hinges, the bartender was still doing business.

These live shells were salvaged by workers after most of the vast store of ammunitions at Black Tom had been destroyed in the blast.

Machachek, commander of our patrol on Black Tom, was waiting for me. He gave a quick account.

At a little before one o’clock in the morning a sudden fire broke out in a freight car. Near it were dozens of cars filled with shells and raw explosives. Sensibly and prudently, the watchmen gave an alarm and ran. At eight minutes past one, the barge, tied to a wharf more than a hundred yards from the fire, blew up. It was half an hour later before the fire in the freight car reached the other cars on the tracks, bringing the second explosion.

Only one detail of his story has any special interest after all these years. “The first explosion,” he said, “was on a barge tied up to the pier. A few minutes before the barge went up, I saw a rowboat approaching it. I could make out the figures of two men aboard. After that, everything blazed, bright as day. I saw no boat come away.”

By now, the German agents were not working in one tight organization, but in groups. Jealousy and the secretiveness of men engaged in a trade, which endangered their necks kept them from confiding in one another. Probably, the cause of the fire in the freight car was one of those time bombs, which the Germans had used to burn ships at sea. But the men in the boat? Machachek saw them approach the barge; he did not see them come away. It is possible that the directors of the plot worked a diabolical trick on their own dynamiters. This affair was so dangerous that they wished to take no chances with an operative who might be caught and confess. The man who ordered the job may have handed the perpetrators an apparatus which he described as a time bomb, but which, actually, would go off when it was set.

Ultimately, Germany accepted responsibility for the destruction and paid reparations to the United States. To Voska, though, the responsibility lay elsewhere.

As I went home that night, I kept repeating to myself, “It was the Russians—it was the Russians!” Even after all these years of reflection, I cannot get that thought out of my head.

He was convinced that Black Tom was destroyed by Russian double agents. They had accepted money from the Kaiser’s government to keep munitions from reaching the Russian army. They were also probably working for the Bolshevik forces who hoped a Russian defeat would speed the revolution (which it did). And they were lining their own pockets by selling the same withheld munitions time and again. And, most likely, they were directed by the head of Russian intelligence in New York—the same man Voska had informed of his suspicions.

For more information, you should check out the original Post article, “‘Canadian Invasion’ and Black Tom” [PDF], published in 1940.

Enemy Agents Strike New York—In 1916 The Saturday Evening Post

Farm Appetites – Clyde Forsythe – November 24, 1917

Farm AppetitesClyde ForsytheCountry GentlemanNovember 11, 1917

We have plenty of poignant wartime covers, but this one is fun! These are hearty farm-boys-turned-soldiers, and the painting is appropriately named: “Farm Appetites.” It was done by cartoonist Clyde Forsythe, a friend of Norman Rockwell. In fact, it was Forsythe who encouraged the reticent, nervous young Rockwell to try to sell a cover to the venerable Saturday Evening Post. So Forsythe not only painted history, he helped to make it.

Women Work for War – Charles A. MacLellan – July 20, 1918

Women Work for War
Charles A. MacLellan
September 8, 1917

And who, pray, worked the land while the male farm hands were fighting the war? The “women’s land army”, that’s who. Some were country girls, others were out of their element working farms, but the women of the U.S. and Europe wanted to do their part back home.

Her Boy – K.R. Wireman” – September 15, 1917

Her BoyK. R. WiremanCountry GentlemanSeptember 15, 1917

Another seldom-seen Country Gentleman cover shows a proud mother at the mailbox, receiving a photo of her son in uniform. Let’s hope he’s back at the farm soon. This was by artist K.R. Wireman.

Necessary Height – Norman Rockwell – June 16, 1917

Necessary HeightNorman RockwellJune 16, 1917

Back at The Saturday Evening Post, a gent we all know and love, Norman Rockwell, was also recognizing the war in his art. Only about 22 himself at the time, Rockwell shows us that even the youngsters were getting into the war effort. Playing recruiter, a boy (notice the “recruiting poster”) seems to be questioning the qualifications of a vertically challenged applicant.

Uncle Sam – Herbert Johnson – June 16, 1917

Uncle SamHerbert JohnsonCountry GentlemanJune 16, 1917

This trio was vitally important to the nation in World War I. The American soldier, good old Uncle Sam and the American farmer. This was from a painting by Herbert Johnson, a well-known political cartoonist for both the Post and Country Gentleman.

Soldier’s Christmas – J.C. Leyendecker – December 22, 1917

Solders ChristmasJ.C. LeyendeckerDecember 22, 1917

I can’t leave without sharing my favorite World War I cover, “Soldier’s Christmas” by J.C. Leyendecker. A soldier is sharing his meager holiday meal with a tiny French girl. Can’t help it – gets me every time.

Classic Covers: World War I The Saturday Evening Post