I am torn on this. Registration for the draft ended the week before my 18th birthday. Nevertheless, my father demanded I perform some type of military service as partial payment of the debt I owed my country. I joined the National Guard as an infantry soldier in November 1979 and retired in January 2000. The most difficult duty I ever had to pull was road marching around Ft. A.P. Hill with a 50 lb. rucksack and weapon.

My service was nowhere near what the soldiers in Iraq are going through and I think it would be a mistake to think that anything short of actual combat would bring the same sense of social bonding. No matter what alternative service people choose, there will always be a bright line between those who went in harms way and those who did not.

Society, working through families, SHOULD encourage national/community service. It helps young people mature and can foster a sense of community. But we should never kid ourselves that 2 years in the Peace Corps or even noncombat military time is the same as 1 day of facing death head on.

Finally, service should be voluntary. Patriotism and community pride cannot be forced down peoples throat. By the time a young person reaches 18, their parents, schools and communities either did a good job of instilling positive values or they did not. It is a mistake to think a mandatory universal national requirment will be able to instill values in 24 months the family has neglected for a life time. Voluntary service can be a rite of passage for young people who have been properly prepared by thier families. Mandatory service for those who have not would be a waste of time and money.

But see, that kind of defeats the purpose of a *voluntary* military.

You want people to *want* to serve their country/community/etc. Work on that and make the government honor its commitments as well (no renegging on post-service benefits, no extending service past contract-end dates, etc). I know it's significantly more difficult than compelling everyone to service, but give them a cause they believe is worth fighting for & people will come; many people do not believe the government is doing that at present.

If service became mandatory, those who didn't want to be there would likely resent it & end up doing a half-@$$ed job and everyone would suffer -- be it the kid who's being taught by an apathetic teacher (okay, this does already happen sometimes, but it would happen to a far greater degree) or be it soldiers in a raid (I know were I military I'd much rather have people who wanted to be there in the trenches with me than people who didn't, for morale but more importantly for the fact that my chance of survival would be higher and they were more likely to have paid close attention in the training that could save our skins than someone who was just going through the motions).

I hereby make a prediction. Here in DC, the happy home of so many "self-made achievers" who just happen to incidentally have upscale parents (irony fully intended), this will go over like a lead balloon. This will get in the way of getting an early shot at door opening internships!

Instead, you'll get a load of tripe rationalizing how things should be "voluntary", which means of course that it will be mandatory for working class and under kids, if they want to go to college and stop being working class and under. No one will care about that point.

Just another day in DC.

We are sending men who chose to defend their states and country--in the militia, aka, National Guard, to wage an aggressive war in other countries. We are far, far away from being morally able to ask any mother to give up her son or daughter.

Well, with the global warming, I guess I won't mind moving to Canada so much, will I?

Were the only people reading your columns all weekend conservatives?

"...Instead, you'll get a load of tripe rationalizing how things should be 'voluntary,' which means of course that it will be mandatory for working class and under kids, if they want to go to college and stop being working class and under."

You know, I do see your point. But why would the military offer money for college if it no longer had to recruit people? Compulsory service would mean everyone has to serve, so why give them *any* kind of reward for doing so? They'd have to do it whether there was college money involved or not, so it would be in the army's best interest to offer squat. Why even pay people for the work they do while under compulsory service? They have to do it anyway....

"When called upon to serve," the paper says, "and when the cause is clear and noble, Americans have answered and will answer that call en masse. The difference today is that no one has asked!"

The difference is that the cause is not clear and noble. And somehow, I can't see ambitious upper-middle-class parents allowing their children to "waste time" on the military, Peace Corp, or whatever when they could be scrambling to be accepted to Harvard or Yale.

This nonsense is just rose-colored Greatest-Generation nostalgia, imagining some mythical time when the nation came together as one. The military draft was the exception in our history, not the rule. Even when it was in place it largely excluded women and minorities from shared national service.

Indeed, one of the features that characterized the Founding Fathers was distrust of a standing army, and after WWII, there was a lot of concern that a peacetime draft was un-American. Now we're so far removed from that point that some people have flipped that principle on its head. The fact that our country is so wealthy and vibrant that it can sustain a war without gutting civil society is a sign of national success, not a problem.

The proposals for compulsory social work, care-giving, and government paper-pushing are likewise a huge mistake. They send the message that these jobs are so undesirable and so scorned that people have to be forced to do them. It's just a way to avoid paying people what these jobs are really worth.

While calls for universal national service are well-intended, they tend to omit one detail- who will pay for all this service? Even if we don't pay our "volunteers" salaries, we still have to feed and house them (unless we're expecting them to live at home with mom and dad). So what it comes down to is that the government will be hiring a couple of million kids in their late teens to do what essentially are minimum-wage jobs (teaching assistant, nursing assistant, trash-picker-upper, etc). Are we so sure we want to do this? Is this a good use of their time and our money?

Thanks for sharing another fine example of the diversity of thinkers calling for mandatory national service. In the last few weeks, in addition to Melvin Laird and John Edwards, there was a call by the Governor of Oregon, Ted Kulongoski.

These stories and others are reported on the web site for Everyone Serves, a campaign to encourage the next president and congress to create a national service requirement. We also are collecting support on a petition to national leaders.

I am behind this 100% perhaps 10 percent of the slots would be military, the remainer would be everything from old school WPA-type park maintenance to trash cleanup, voluntary guard, teaching assistants, day care help, you name it.

It would work wonders in reconnecting parts of america together and neutralizing the blinders affluence seems to put on our kids towards the plight of real americans.

But what service would Lindsey Lohan perform, or Paris H, oh my we can't let these primidonas have to actually serve their communities can we?

I agree with Tom T.

Why should 18 year olds, who have never voted, never held office and certainly never decided to place our soldiers in harm's way, be forced to work in virtual slave labor for the rest of us? To make us feel more guilty about the policies we older folks are pursuing? To make us feel better about ourselves?

There is no tradition of compulsory national service in this country and that is a good thing. Drafting millions of expendable young people would hardly serve as a check on our society's baser instincts. Quite the contrary -- it would be one more resource government could abuse. It would bring us closer to tyranny.

Democrats have been trying to legislate this through programs like the Peace Department. These are actually aimed to give 'poor' people a way to serve without serving in the military. The goal is to create a draft(compulsary service) and allow people to serve in something other than military, paying the same with the same benefits.

Volunteering and serving is a choice that no one should force. The military has no place telling other agencies of the government to change and become a place to serve instead of the military. The agencies are seperate and a completely different way of volunteering. The benefits and pay are not the same, but no one would argue that the agencies should have the same pay and benefits, but becoming a part of or forced to work with the military is wrong.

The wrtiers of this letter are all retired. They have no service other than military. Maybe they should volunteer for the agencies mentioned. The have little or no understanding of anything other than military service and it the burden of serving in the military is too uch, they should leave. Those probably aren't really wanted anyway. They are dragging the military down with a poor attitude and alternatives that make no sense, except for a larger bureacracy and more federal jobs for those running the programs.

It is very disappointing to see this type of letter from professionals with little understanding of the agencies they are trying to affect.

Good point about the divide between the military and the rest of the country. Having said that, I went through my late teens and early 20s hoping that Reagan wouldn't institute a draft. It had nothing to do with fighting in a war. I just dreaded the thought of an all-male environment. Although I have never been gay, I experienced a great deal of homophobia in school and in college, especially in all-male environments such as locker rooms. An army barracks would have been the worst possible environment for a geeky, unathletic bookworm like me.