“The Fighting Golden 65th”

“The Fighting Golden 65^th”

In his essay “Draft the Boys at Sixty-Five” Clarence Jordan, the founder of the controversial Koinonia Community out of which Habitat for Humanity would later be formed and author of the once popular Cottonpatch Gospels, advances the notion that the military draft is aimed at the wrong age group. In this provocative, tongue-in-cheek piece Jordan concludes that men sixty-five years and older rather than “young boys age eighteen to twenty-six” are the best candidates for the draft.  Although Jordan’s essay, written during the Vietnam conflict, is almost fifty-old (it is reprinted in Clarence Jordan: Essential Writings (Orbis, 2003) ), many of the arguments he makes shed light on contemporary perspectives on the military and war making.

In his essay Jordan argues two interrelated points.  The first argument is foundational—we should have a draft.  According to him, a draft is necessary for two reasons.  First, Jordan argues that it is America’s responsibility to police the world for peace, and, second, a draft is the only way to make sure that the “necessary war-making” happens.  In Jordan’s words, “Without the draft, there’d be just entirely too much talk about peace and too little real fighting for peace.”  The second argument in Jordan’s essay defends his view that drafting seniors is the best way to ensure that the “necessary fighting” be financially, practically, and efficiently successful.  It is in this second argument that the relevancy of Jordan’s article for today is particularly manifest. 

Jordan begins the second piece of his argument eliminating the young and middle aged as appropriate draftees.  Both of these age groups are “simply unsuitable for combat.”  According to Jordan, America’s youth are simply “too young…too flighty…too sexy..too immature.”  “Besides,” Jordan continues, “those kids need to stay home and get married and get into their vocation and start raising a family and all those kinds of things.  Middle aged folks should also be excluded from service because “they’re too productive.” The middle aged need to be kept in the country because “we got to have them to make the bombs and the planes and the napalm, without which there can be no peace.  We need them to run our big banks and our big corporations, to keep the economy booming.” 

On the other hand, Jordan posits, seniors provide the best candidates for the draft and, correspondingly, for military service.  First, seniors are the best candidates for the military financially: “ [Seniors] are getting ready to retire and they could go at their own expense due to nice pensions and social security…We don’t even have to pay ‘em.”  In fact drafting seniors would decrease the costly load of recruitment and training soldiers for, “When a man’s that old he just about as trained as he’s gonna get”—we would not have a band of immature amateurs “but an army of decrepit professionals.”  Second, seniors are the best candidates for the military due to their strong yearning to fight: “I’ve learned that the older one gets the more belligerent they get. There isn’t anybody who’s more anxious to give the Communitsts hell than a man who’s too old to deliver it…If  given the opportunity they’d just volunteer in droves” for “who would want to just fade away in boredom at a retirement center, when he can go down in a burst of glory for his superlative ideals on a foreign shuffleboard court.”  Third, drafting candidates would relieve some of the social stresses war puts on American families for seniors “usually wouldn’t leave a sweetheart or somebody like that at home weeping for him…[also,] it would cut down on the war baby boom as there would be no rush for couples to become pregnant prior to service.”  On this point Jordan argues that elderly men should not be the only ones drafted, but the women should get drafted too .  This way an elderly wife could help her husband be a “ good soldier” and “not turn foreign cities into brothels.”  Fourth, drafting seniors could relieve the financial burden of making war.  Seniors love to travel, Jordan observes, citing “the numerous campers on Interstate 75 headed to Florida.”  Drafting seniors “merely gives them the opportunity to travel abroad.”  In fact, Jordan quips, seniors could even use their own camper trailers for military conquest rather than “expensive helicopters.”  Fifth, seniors are simply more frightening to our foreign combatant than any other age group: “[Seniors’] knobby knees and varicose veins would cause a psychological effect on that country that they would capitulate immediately.”  Along with this visual image their “incessant talk” about grand children and aches and pains would “produce a stampede to the conference table” that “no tonnage of bombs” could ever hope to produce.  Sixth, drafting seniors would “support the future of America” for “when you kill a young man,” Jordan argues, “you don’t know but maybe you’re killing a future Einstein or Lincoln or Washington or some other genius. But when you kill off a guy sixty-five years old, you know what you’re killing.”  Finally, Jordan argues that a military staffed by senior citizens would be able to optimize post-war reconstruction far better than any other age group due to their seasoned professional skills.  These skills in law making, education, and economic stimulus would lead most country’s to actually desire American invasion.

Needless to say, Clarence Jordan’s affinity for wit and sarcasm are on deep display in this delightfully humorous, status-quo questioning essay.  Jordan’s trenchant rhetoric is intended to challenge the moral sensibilities and entrenched dogma behind American military policy.  Through his unique perspective he tries to alert us to the very nature of war.  Jordan forces us to reflect upon the pragmatic downfalls, some might even use the term “evils,” of war: loss of life, financial stress, social corrosion, and misguided patriotism.  He confronts politicians, policy-makers, and news pundits who cry out for war on the basis of “self-defense” or “peace through democracy” or “protection of the American way of life” with the inherent hypocrisy of their actions and statements.  Because of this “Draft the Boys at Sixty-Five,” written almost five decades ago, is actually quite timely.  It is this long dead Baptist preacher’s voice who stands prophetically against young Americans being sent to war for, while we no longer have a draft, it is nonetheless still the young who more often than not bear the weight of making war.