It may sound like hair-splitting, but to me there is a big difference between desertion and civil disobedience. The people who went to Canada to avoid the draft in the Vietnam era (if they were sincere, many just wanted to avoid the inconvenience and danger of being drafted) were perfectly within their moral rights. I do not believe the state has any right to forcibly recruit cannon fodder. It's a bit different when you voluntarily enlist, hoping for cushy duty and bennies, and then decide it's not your cup of tea.

This a a moral dilemma I had to face for myself at the tender young age of 19. I was on the fence about the war, I felt it was an internal conflict we had no business getting involved in, but I also felt it was being exploited by the Communists as part of their plot to take over the world (OK, we've all come a long way since then, but I had to go with what I believed at the time).

I did not want to go fight in a war where I might get killed, or at the very least, suffer considerable inconvenience, but at the same time I could not honestly claim any legitimate pacifism or conscientious objector status; I wasn't one. I joined the Navy because it was less dangerous than being drafted into the infantry, but it's fair to say that my major consideration was getting my military career over with as quickly as possible. The Naval Reserve was a two year hitch, if it had come to a choice between 2 years in the infantry or 4 in some other, less dangerous post, I would have let them draft me into the Army or Marines and been a grunt instead. When I took the oath I did it knowing exactly what I was getting into, and why, and that I had a voluntary obligation that I was determined to fulfill. I already felt guilty about not going to the rice paddies, so I tried to make up for it as best I could by making the commitment that I would do what I was told, no matter what. I'd like to think that if I had found myself in a My Lai situation, I would have had the cojones to say "no" and take the consequences, but I'll never know that and it will haunt me for the rest of my life.

I understood that naval service was not as intrinsically dangerous as being on the ground, but when the Pueblo Crisis broke out and my ship got sent to Korean waters I realized that maybe I would have been safer driving a truck or pounding a typewriter in Da Nang. We expected war, we prepared for it, and I was ready to go if it came to that. And it was expected to be a conflict where the Navy would take casualties. That's what you expect to be asked to do if you're a soldier, since I didn't feel strongly enough about it to refuse the draft, and selected what I thought would be easy alternative duty, it would have been dishonest to suddenly change my mind when things got ugly.