ABSTRACT
The three decades following the end of World War II were unique in terms of the central questions of this book. For the first time in United States history, the draft became what appeared to be a permanent fixture. Whether by coincidence or not, during the same period, the nation engaged in a series of undeclared and non-traditional wars. The “Cold War” and wars in Korea and Vietnam are familiar to most Americans. But during the same period the United States Armed Forces engaged in brief, but significant, combat missions in such disparate places as the Philippines and the Dominican Republic. For every American boy who came of age during the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, the draft was a fact of life, as was the possibility of serving on any continent or in any ocean as the United States established hundreds of military bases around the world. And although the Selective Service System primarily drafted men for the Army, and the vast majority of men and women in the Armed Forces were volunteers, we cannot understand who served, how, why, and when, without reference to the draft between 1948 and 1973. Nor can we understand the very explicit relationship that developed during these years between military service and the rights of citizenship without some reference to various civil rights movements in the United States, and to anti-colonial nationalist revolutions throughout the Third World at the same time.
