How Does Crito Decide To Recruit Or Evade The Draft

In making his decision on whether or not he should willingly be drafted or evade the draft, he remembers Socrates. He does not believe in the war. He writes, “I was persuaded then and I am persuaded now that the war was wrong” (O’Brien 18). When he goes to war, he does not go feeling confident and justified in what he was fighting for. Regardless, he remembers the feelings of Socrates when he was put to death by his country. His friend Crito wanted him to try to escape his jail cell, and live a long happy life on an island. Crito wants this for him because Socrates was wrongly being put to death. However, Socrates refuses to go because he cannot turn his back on his country. He has lived in his country for his whole life, where he ate, drank,
slept, and was provided for. He felt it would be wrong for him to not to follow the laws of his land when his land provided him a place to live his life. He cannot leave and break their laws just because he does not agree with them. Despite the fact that he did not want to be a soldier, he writes, “But neither did I want to upset a peculiar balance between the order I knew, the people I knew, and my own private world. It was not just that valued order. I also feared the opposite – inevitable chaos, censure, embarrassment, the end of everything that happened in my life, the end of it all” (22). Even though he felt that America was wrong to get involved in the Vietnam war, he still felt an obligation towards his country. His country had provided him with an education, a place to grow up, and a family. He felt responsible to do right by his country, even when the country was doing wrong. In World War II, America got involved after the country was bombed in Pearl Harbor in 1941.
The war officially began in 1939. Americans were not searching out to become involved in the war, but were brought into it by the attacks of other countries. Perhaps men were more honored to die for their country because they were defending it, and they were trying to avenge the lives of the people who were killed in the Pearl Harbor bombing. They had a deep rooted, intrinsic motivation to fight for the country. Their country and their people were wronged, and so the soldiers who went to fight were determined to make it right for their fellow countrymen and women. Now, in the Vietnam War, O’Brien writes that “The war, I thought, was wrongly conceived and poorly justified” (18). In the case of the Vietnam war, no one had that intrinsic motivation. They were not defending their country, they were attacking another one. People were more motivated by fear than honor. Erik, a friend of O’Brien says early in the memoir, “All this not because of conviction, not for ideology; rather it’s from fear of our society’s censure […] Fear of weakness. Fear that to avoid war is to avoid manhood” (38). For O’Brien and many other men, this war was a pressure, not an
honor.