Excerpted from Reserves and Guard: A More Selective Service.

• Author: HOCHSCHILD, ADAM

First published in The Washington Monthly, January, 1971

IN THE CIVIL WAR DAYS, IF YOU DIDN'T want to be drafted, you could "buy a man" for $300 to take your place in the Army. You can also avoid the draft today, though things are more indirect--instead of paying $300, you can join the Reserves or the National Guard. As long as this escape valve exists for a million privileged men, most of President Nixon's reforms to democratize the draft are meaningless.

The Reserve and the Guard are much easier to be in than the regular Army. First, they usually don't send you to Vietnam; second, you're on full-time active duty for only four and one half months, which disrupts your marriage, career, and friendships far less than being drafted for two whole years. For these reasons, when I was 21, I enlisted in the Army Reserve rather than wait to be drafted.

An enlisted man must join the Reserve or the Guard for a six-year hitch. After those initial few months of active duty training, you go to a two-week camp each summer, and to weekly drills during the year. Theoretically, the weekly drills in your hometown Reserve or Guard unit keep up your training.

When I first joined, I spent several of those drills being processed, paid and promoted. All around me the same was happening to most of the unit's other 500-odd officers and men. I somehow thought this was a deliberate lull to catch up on administrative paperwork, and that the regular program would start in a few weeks. But it never did. Eventually I realized my Reserve unit did virtually nothing but administer itself.

Each drill began with recorded bugle calls played over a loudspeaker, and then sundry saluting and marching about on the small San Francisco Army base where we met. Then the 500 soldiers, with much shouting of commands and waving of clipboards, were sent indoors and divided up for work into more than a dozen different "sections" for what was called "on-the-job training."

One section checked through the sign-in rosters, and sent threatening letters to people who missed a meeting (if you miss five meetings, you get sent to active duty); another promoted people; another issued everybody's paychecks; a truly enormous section with yards of desks and typewriters kept the personnel files in order. Still another section processed men into the unit, while a subgroup processed them out. A section of Military Policemen patrolled the building to make sure no one escaped from all this. (They weren't...