The New Draft Notice: Feminism Confronted with Another Kind of Me-Too

I wonder if Meg Ryan understood what she was doing.

She starred in a film called "Courage Under Fire," (1996) about a woman army commanding officer in Desert Storm, who must stand in the way of the enemy while the rest of her squad, all men of course, flee to safety. She is killed while they escape, under suspiciously unclear circumstances. After an investigation led by an officer played by Denzel Washington, she is given a posthumous Medal of Honor.

Implicitly, it proved a point: Can women fight battles on the ground? Can they command men under fire? If so, they're just as liable--and just as ready, too--to die for their country.

Not a new concept for that gender. Soviet women fought in World War II. Israel has had women fighting for its entire existence, and there we go back to 1947, if not before. And one of the best Vietnamese military leaders in 16th Century wars against China was female, not to mention those who fought successfully against the Americans.

Then there's Joan of Arc, about 800 years ago.

Acknowledging this, officially and proscribing it into our jurisprudence, was a district court judge in Texas, just the other day. He said that women, while volunteers, have more than proven their military capabilities to be equivalent to that of men in this country.

But he also said: They can be made to sign up for the draft when they gain legal age. Too.

"While historical restrictions on women in the military may have justified past discrimination," Judge Gray Miller wrote in Houston in response to a lawsuit brought by the National Coalition of Men, which claimed that male-only drafts were in violation of the 14th Amendment's 'equal protection' clause, "Men and women are now similarly situated for purposes of a draft, or registration for a draft. If there ever was a time to discuss 'the place of women in the Armed Services,' that time has passed."

So someday, our present 17-year-old girls, and those younger, will be getting the same letter from the draft board that boys always get just before they turn 18. It's up to the president and the Congress, but now they're empowered to do so.

Feminism loses its luster here, with this confrontation, as well as American exceptionalism. It's been kind of smirky for women to prove their fighting selves when they feel like signing up for it: kind of ha-ha, we showed you guys, the rarity of it being roughly equivalent to firefighting and police work (where women have also lost their lives, but also as volunteers), for whatever small percentage wished to assume those risks. But the demand that all of them put it on the line will change the way we look at military and foreign policy issues forever.

It's like saying: Take us seriously, damn it. And now Judge Miller has said: We do. But, as Spiderman has always claimed, "With great power comes great responsibility."

War now means that the entire flower of American youth may be at risk. Guys got killed, generally speaking, in our wars until now, and the women stayed home, generally speaking, tended the home fires, even got into the factories to help make war munitions, and waited for their guys to come home, if they could, to start or continue families--to send more males off to war, etc.

Since we have gone to an all-volunteer military in the wake of the draft protests during the Vietnam War, we have not had to conduct another draft, largely because the casualties stemming from our subsequent foreign excursions have been low enough to absorb volunteer replacements. We tend to forget that, when the draft ended, Congress did not abolish it. It held in abeyance the ability to re-open the draft, should that awful possibility become necessary. All 18-year-old men since then have received draft registration notices.

We have floated amidst that wonderland since. We have achieved a comfort zone of disbelief: How could we have another war so big that we would lose so many of our military people that we would need to call up thousands of girls who have barely become women, train them brutally for the ultimate challenge, and send them off to fight, kill and perhaps die?

They are trained that way now. They are doing fine. But they're the ones who wanted to do that.

Wouldn't that make us hesitate before getting involved, even more than we hesitated (and we sure did) before diving into both world wars? Would we be inclined to fight, then, only to defend our own soil, instead of dreaming up excuses to stop international movements 10,000 miles away? Would the neo-liberals, all too eager to push democracy and our markets (Don't forget our markets) into places that aren't used to them, be so willing to commit our women to those efforts? Aren't they exactly the chauvinists who would pause at such a development?

Would that be considered a liberal position? Or a conservative one? Or, since it would involve the very fabric of our nation, wouldn't it matter? Isn't this another kind of Me-Too, flipped on its other side?

Wonder Woman would be proud. If she existed. But this is no longer a comic book story. This is reality served on a hot plate.

I wonder, too, if Meg Ryan is thinking about her role in this: How many girls she inspired to sign up for the military. We'll never know, of course, and the film is a generation old now. But it had to do so; her character displayed incredible but believable courage, and other women have displayed the same. Some are Army Rangers and Marines now, some serve on our aircraft carriers and missile cruisers (I have met some of them), some fly jets (I know of someone; I had her in class) and those folks are very tough indeed, people you and I can be proud of.

But they wanted to qualify for those positions. They didn't have to. They are proving, though, that if called upon, women can step up and deliver the ultimate effort and pay the ultimate price; that in the end, it's our country, together, men and women, as it has been in Israel, in the Soviet Union, in France, in Vietnam.

And they'll go where their commander-in-chief directs them. Just think: the one we now have will automatically have a much, much larger fighting force available if something should happen and Congress allows him.

Or if someone makes something happen. Depending, of course, on how one looks at it. Not that anyone would invent an excuse or anything--like, maybe, a national emergency.

Judge Miller's ruling is declaratory, which means it doesn't have to be acted upon immediately. So we'll wait, most likely, until a larger war is imminent, until there will be general panic about women ages 18 to 35 (the peak of child-bearing, except some of the military women serving right now are mothers, so there's that) suddenly being drafted. It might never happen, of course. But it might.

Let's see who steps up and appeals this federal court decision. If anyone.

Be well. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark