The Backdoor Draft

Does that man look like he belongs behind the stick of an aircraft droping bombs? I didn't think so. To me, he looks like a father who needs to take care of his newborn child. He is among the 4,000 former soldiers in the Individual Ready Reserve the Army has contacted and instructed to return to active duty. More than 1,800 have said no.

"I consider myself a civilian," said Rick Howell, a major from Tuscaloosa, Ala., who said he thought he had left the Army behind in 1997 after more than a decade flying helicopters. "I've done my time. I've got a brand new baby and a wife, and I haven't touched the controls of an aircraft in seven years. I'm 47 years old. How could they be calling me? How could they even want me?"

How can they! How dare they.

What is the Individual Ready Reserve? Basically, it's the soldiers who have completed their basic duties to the Army and are no longer on active duty, but for one reason or another, are still eligible to be called up. But there is a specified time limit the average soldier is supposed to be on this IRR. The formula to calculate the time on the IRR rolls? Take the time you agree to commit to the Army [normally 8 years], subtract the time actually served and whamo, there's your time you still owe to Uncle Sam. When this time is up, in theory, that's when you're a civilian once again. The Army likes to use their own fuzzy math when it comes to this simple 1-2-3 equation.

But the Army thinks that it is Howell and the 1,800 others filing suit who have it all wrong. There is a technicality for an officer's commitment to the Army that supercedes the return to civilan life:

For officers, the commitment does not expire unless they formally resign their commissions in writing, a detail some insist they did not know and were not told when they signed their contracts, although Army officials strongly dispute that.

Lt. Col. Pamela Hart, a spokeswoman for the Army, said people in the service are well aware of the provision. "We all know about it," Colonel Hart said.

But would the Army be as smarmy as those TV infomercials, burying crucial information in the fine print? Would they play with people's lives like that? You bet your heart they would, will and will continue to do.

[Howell] said he was told that his obligation to the Individual Ready Reserve would be brief and meant little anyway. "They said it was just a way of having me on the books," he said.

Sounds like a scam to me. The Army and the administration doesn't like the phrase Back Door Draft, but that's what this is. They are drafting people who, at one time or another, decided to be in the Army, but who now, are civilians. What's next, calling on everyone who saw the John Rambo movies to duty?

Photo: Mike Kane/NYT

Comments

[A. Moses]

nice site. Made my way here via browneye. And you are right. The sad thing is this apparently loving father gets tossed into the hell of war and must conform. For all we know the man in the article below was doing the same thing as the man in the picture the day before he shipped out. As Hemmingway said, "Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime."

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1352574,00.html

[nicole b.]

Maybe we should draft people who saw the Rambo saga because I suspect those are the people that voted for G. Dumbya.