The Vietnam vets, largely kids who had been conscripted out of high school, were grandly given the full G I Bill, sorta, kinda, by LBJ. What that meant was, a lot of confused kids with recent horrifying experiences were brought home and sent off to college ASAP. The idea, as I recall, was to get them back to normal life, except American campuses wre anything but normal after 1966. By 1971, towns like Madison and Ann Arbor were war zones themselves -- you think I'm exaggerating, but if you weren't there you don't know.

What this did to the vets was complex. It was a little early for classic PTSD but some of them went that way anyway. The point is, demonstrations, plus a national program of massive overreaction, had turned the universities into exactly the right kind of place to radicalize a recent combat veteran.

Today's veterans have already used that education benefit. Chances are, that's why they signed up in the first place. They're older and have homes and families to go back to, sol when they get home, they go home. Vietnam trauma showed up ion a wave of homelessness, drug addiction and self-inflicted violence. Iraq will show up in vast increases in domestic violence -- it already has.

"Vast" increases in domestic violence? Well, the evidence is not there, but I could claim an uptick. The press is paying close attention to military cases of domestic violence, which helps to crate that impression.

In any case, I have no desire to crate a counter-myth. Viet vets were tarred as drifters, losers, junkies and psychos -- not very attractive as an image for America's Heroes, was it? While I expect a good deal of PTSD coming out of this war, the military has somewhat preselected for stability (until recently, at least) and is finally catching up on what will be a sizable mental/emotional health problem. MUCH better coordination between the military and the VA will be required for this, but that is in the works.So no; Iraq vets are not all wife-beating time bombs. The problem we face as a society (and this is not limited to Veterans' Affairs) is how to anticipate need without stereotyping people.

The real issue here is conscription. Maintaining the kind of force levels our occupation will need to be effective will require a draft. Privatizing the war is a non-starter, as the Blackwater scandals have shown us. While you might not be able to use draftees for nation-building, yhou can't use mercs either.

If McCain wins and commits to a draft (about the only way he could continue the war as he says he finds necessary) the whole culture of our engagement and also of the veteran community will change, and the longer we stay in, the more it changes. If we stay in Iraq as long as we stayed in Vietnam, the damage to the military will be the same or worse, and that veterans' antiwar movement that Slate's designated expert finds so puzzlingly absent will be quite present.

Great analysis in the first post. But barring something incredible happening, there's not going to be any draft, regardless who is president. There's absolutely zero support for that. Stretching the military too thin is a real concern and would lead to internal dissent, to be sure, but there's not going to be any draft.

McCain deserves points for having the guts to say what most know is a reality. (And "most" would include Hillary Clinton, though for political reasons she's kept quiet to avoid the backlash like McCain has had from the "get out now" crowd.) Leaving Iraq immediately isn't a smart move. A power vacuum and civil war there are contrary to the best interests of not just us, but the entire Western world. Once you have stepped into quicksand, you lose the option of just hopping out in a blink of an eye--and trying to do so will lead to you being in even worse shape.

Now, I think McCain was off with his "100 year" comment, but it's hard to argue that it makes more sense to be ready for that sort of commitment and then scale it back drastically than to assume everybody can be home tomorrow, then try to figure out what to do when that is revealed to be a complete fantasy.