Let's Talk Seriously About Returning the Draft

It is time for serious discussions to be tabled about mandatory service. It is time to require everyone give two years after high-school no matter who they are, or who their daddy's are. It need not be military. It can be Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, it doesn't matter. But everyone needs to pay the same price. I will even go so far as to say that the time has come for action.

And my kind should be the first to face call-up.

By "my kind" I mean First Responders and emergency room personnel. We are the logical choice. The first time we stepped up, we stepped away from the pack. Service and sacrifice and a dedication to others doesn't just course through our veins; it is in our marrow.

On the streets of American cities, our first responders run into fires and fire-fights every day. (So do our rural brothers and sisters.) As a paramedic, I wore a kevlar vest, and was glad of it a few times. Although nobody ever actually hit me with a bullet, I have been shot at. One of those times I heard the bullet whiz past my ear.

I have felt that wierd feeling in my gut as the chopper lifted off the ground. I have gone into more than one burning building to get a fireman who fell through a burning floor. I have put my hands inside a gunshot victim and tried to slow an aortic bleed enough to keep the patient alive until we landed at the trauma center.

I have attended the funerals of paramedics and flight nurses who died in crashes, and I have attended the services for those I could not save.

I almost went to OCS last year, then didn't at the insistence of my husband.

We should go first because the time is at hand when we must either reinstate the draft, or pull back to an isolationist stance because that is all the current troop levels can support. And somebody has to go first.

We are the logical choice.