Register for Selective Service Under Protest

With no end in sight to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and military recruitment on the decline, a resumption of the military draft looms as a frightening possibility for young people. While many activists have been turning their attention towards anti-recruitment work, resistance to Selective Service registration has taken a back seat.

A cursory search on Google reveals advice that is ridiculously simple-minded. It is unreasonable to ask a young man not to register for Selective Service if he wants to go to college. Anyone who wants to go to college, but cant afford to pay tuition out of pocket, has to resort to student loans. Anyone who applies for student loans must first file a Federal Application for Financial Student Aid. Under federal law, all men between the ages of 18 and 26 are ineligible for FAFSA unless they register for Selective Service. The simple math for this is: Working Class Male Student – Selective Service Registration = No College.

The solution is to register under protest. I realize that this column is a little too late for this year’s batch of graduating high school seniors. After being solicited for some advice by a young comrade in Florida, and looking through my own, old paperwork, I decided to post this information online. I hope it will help tomorrow’s seniors who find it through Google. Perhaps it can help those young people who have already registered for Selective Service, but want to take action anyway.

Just before the war with the eskimos, in 1997, I was a graduating high school senior faced with this dilemma. The advice I received at the time, from the War Resisters League and the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors was to register under protest for Selective Service. In order to do this, you should do the following.

You should actively register for Selective Service. Do not merely check that box on your FAFSA that registers you for the SS. Go to your local post office, pick up a SS registration form and mail it in before you apply for financial aid. Include with the registration form a letter from you explaining that you are registering under protest. Here is my own letter from 1997:

As an editor, I may quibble with this young writer’s precise wording, but the essence is there. I am a conscientious objector. If drafted, I will not serve. Those are crucial statements. If I were writing this letter today, I might add, “I am registering under protest in order to apply for federal student financial aid. I have no intention to cooperate with the Selective Service Administration” and “I oppose the war in Afghanistan, the War in Iraq, and all wars.”

Now, here’s the crucial bit: carbon copy yourself on this letter. Send both copies of the letter, the one to the SS and the one to yourself, via certified mail. Keep all receipts and stubs in a safe place.

Keep the letter that you mailed to yourself sealed and in the same safe place.

The reason that you mail yourself a copy is to save your own skin. What you have in your hands is government certified proof that you were a conscientious objector way back when you were 18-years-old, should you ever be called before a draft board (which was a remote possibility eight years ago, but is not now).

Saving your own skin, as a form of activism, is not particularly satisfying, but you do achieve a secondary goal by sending a direct message to the war machine that you are an active opponent of their scheme. Believe me, they keep track of this stuff. Their statisticians undoubtedly will credit you for representing another ten or fifteen cohorts who didn’t have the nerve to speak up. The more young people who file letters such as these, the more the war machine gets the message that they will have a real problem on their hands should they seek a return of the draft.

When I did this, before our government declared permanent war against invisible enemies, a funny thing happened: the Selective Service Administration wrote me back!

By acknowledging and rejecting my claim of conscientious objector status, the Selective Service Administration provided even more evidence (should I ever need it) that I was a pacifist in 1997, long before the wars and the draft. They also directly acknowledged that they are aware when young people resist compulsory military service (and, again, are almost assuredly keeping statistics on these letters).

I would be curious is a young man who filed a similar letter in 2005 would receive the same kind of response. Please let me know how your own letter is received.

Finally, if you’ve already registered for Selective Service, and filed your FAFSA, you can still take action. In fact, you’re in better shape, since your loans are cleared up, and the SS never rescinds a registration anyway. Send them a certified mailing expressing your desire to rescind your Selective Service registration. Use the same language as I recommended: “I am a conscientious objector,” “I registered under duress in order to qualify for college, “I do not support this or any war.” Your objection will be noted by the statisticians, and hopefully you’ll receive back from the SS a dated letter rejecting your claim of objector status (thereby proving that you were an objector way back when).