Correction, please!(Correction Notice)

Drafting a Myth

ITEM: Two Democratic congressmen, Charles Rangel of New York and John Conyers of Michigan, called "for bringing back the military draft," reported Reuters on January 7th. The nation, they said, "must debate whether it should continue with a fighting force comprised disproportionately of people from low-income families and minorities."

ITEM: When Rangel called "for the return of a military draft," said USA Today for January 20th, "he evoked images of inequality raised during the early years of the Vietnam War, when black soldiers died at rates much greater than their share of the U.S. population."

CORRECTION: What is being evoked is a myth. It has been punctured by facts from, among others, the Pentagon, Center for Naval Analysis, and professors at Northwestern University and the University of Texas. As professors Charles Moskos and John Butler wrote in their 1996 book All That We Can Be: "Black fatalities amounted to 12.1 percent of all Americans killed in Southeast Asia--a figure proportional to the number of blacks in the U.S. population at the time and slightly lower than the proportion of blacks in the Army at the close of the war."

During the Persian Gulf War, whites accounted for 86 percent of combat deaths; they made up 71 percent of the military. Blacks suffered 11 percent of combat deaths; they comprised 23 percent of the troops. In any event, what really is the proper proportion of deaths? As it happens, disproportionate numbers of combat positions in today's volunteer military are held by whites; blacks, by choice, hold 36 percent of support and administrative jobs and 27 percent of medical and dental positions.

Military volunteers, black and white, come from families with about the same income and educational levels as the general population. In fact, reports UPI's Steve Sailer, "on a number of [economic] measures, African-American enlistees tend to stand well above the black average and very close to, or above, the mean for white enlistees."

By calling for a new draft to end supposed military inequality, Conyers has made an about-face. In March of 2002, he co-sponsored H. Con. Res. 368, which said, in part, "reinstating the military draft or ...