Fact checking, of even the simplest sort, is beyond the scope of the media’s duties these days. Hence, we get strange, ill-informed “news” articles, such as one noted by Captain’s Quarters insinuating that Samuel Alito dodged military service in Vietnam:
Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito joined the Army Reserve while he was a college student because his lottery number had made it likely he would be drafted for the Vietnam War, college roommates said Wednesday.
Alito was part of the Army's ROTC program during his years at Princeton – 1968 to 1972 – a period when the war in Southeast Asia escalated and more American men weredrafted. . . .
In the first [draft lottery] drawing, held December 1, 1969, Alito received the lottery number of 32, according to the U.S. Selective Service.
Although the military was calling up men with numbers as high as 195, Alito had a student deferment.
He participated in the ROTC program and did two summers of training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and Fort Indiantown Gap in Annville, Pennsylvania.
With graduation looming, the student deferment gone and Yale Law School waiting, Alito joined the Army Reserve.
“It was draft-related,” college roommate Mark Dwyer said of Alito’s decision. “I joined the teacher preparation program. We were all focused on the draft lottery when those numbers got called. We thought about where we were.
“Sam looked like he was sure to be drafted. He said, ‘If I’m going into the Army, I might as well be an officer.’”
What the reader is obviously supposed to take away from this hit piece is that young Alito found a way to evade service in Vietnam. The point is driven home by a recycling of stale attacks on President Bush’s military record.
What is left out – through the reporter’s ignorance of history, I’ll charitably presume? Joining ROTC was a commitment to active military duty, surer than drawing number 32 in the draft lottery. Many draftees were medically deferred, and there were options, like teacher training and divinity school, to keep student deferments alive after graduation. On the other hand, when Sam Alito signed up, all ROTC enrollees were required to serve (they were liable to immediate conscription if they dropped out of the program), the vast majority of Army ROTC graduates went to Vietnam, and a daunting proportion were killed or wounded there. Leading a platoon in the jungle wasn’t a soft billet.
By the time he graduated from Princeton in 1972, the situation had changed. The American withdrawal from Vietnam was almost complete, and the Army didn’t need huge numbers of ROTC graduates. Starting in 1971, it began offering most of them the option of Reserve, rather than Regular, commissions. Joining the Reserves was convenient, because it didn’t require two years of active duty, but, the ground war being effectively over for the U.S., the choice wasn’t dictated by considerations of personal safety.
This background shouldn’t be hard for a diligent reporter to discover. Just ask any male over about age 55. That was, it appears, too much trouble for the Associated Press.
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