A giant step towards public service...

I never wanted to be a soldier. As a 19-year-old college dropout with some vague notion of "I just want to write for a living," I was ready for some kind of adventure, maybe even public service. In 1960, there was a public service avenue open to me, and it was the military. In that year, we were at peace with the world.

Well, we knew that the Russians might blow us up at any moment, but nobody was shooting at us and we weren't shooting back. I was totally convinced we would never go to war again - I was 19, naive, full of hope, which is what you're supposed to be at 19, and which I never quite outgrew - but the draft was still in effect. I was subject to the draft until the age of 27, and couldn't bear the thought of waking up to that dark cloud every morning for the next eight years.

But I had this notion that it's not right for me to kill people. Even if it's another 19-year-old soldier in another color uniform speaking another language, it wouldn't be right for me to kill him. So for reasons both practical (practically, my chances of survival as some bloodthirsty commie had me in his sights while I was pondering great issues of right and wrong would have been about nil), and philosophical (it's just flat-out wrong to kill people), I tried to substitute some kind of alternative service for the military.

At the time, I couldn't become a conscientious objector just by saying I didn't believe in killing. I had to be a member of a particular kind of church and, if memory serves, I would have needed a letter from a church official saying that I honestly, truly, really didn't believe in killing people, odd as that may have seemed to the sergeants and generals. Much as I admire the Amish, Mennonite, Quaker and other peace churches, I felt it would be cynical in the extreme to join a church to avoid the draft.

I tried to apply for a CO program I'd heard about, where I would have participated in a thermal stress experiment. My understanding was that I'd have lived in my shorts for two years, freezing part of the time and sweating rivers the rest of the time. But I didn't have the CO credentials I would have needed - maybe that program was an urban myth, anyway - so I gave up, volunteered for the draft, and was inducted into the U.S. Army in August of 1960.

It was, I must say, a maturing and positive experience. True, in basic training I had to shoot a gun (excuse me, a rifle) at a dummy that looked like a man, stick another dummy (this one had a painted-on face) with a bayonet and throw a hand grenade at a target with an imaginary dummy in it. And when I got to my official job, first as a chaplain's assistant then as a personnel specialist, I really could have killed somebody, but I would've had to throw my typewriter at the enemy.

It was a brute.  A 40-pound Remington manual.  I could have killed a cow with it.

But, while I wanted to serve my country, I never wanted to be a soldier.

That's why I was pleased to hear of the expanded AmeriCorps program. It is not compulsory, it is bipartisan and I really believe it can help make our country a better place. Both houses of Congress have approved the bill to expand the program, and the President is set to sign it today.

I feel good about that. I hope you do too. 

Will work for free. J. Loren and Wanda Yoder sold the cows from the Belleville, Pa., farm last fall and hit the road with a mobile canning factory owned by the Mennonite Central Committee. They made a two-year commitment to travel 20,000 miles to 33 different sites throughout the U.S. and Canada. At each site they will lead a crew of volunteers to put up as much as 6,720 cans of beef, pork and turkey for distribution to the needy. It's an amazing story, and Lancaster Farming Reporter Lou Ann Good tells it in section B of the current issue.

"I did not say "gutterball," Governor Bush, "I said "Butterball." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSDhSa2NxYc