PEACE CORPS: SEARCH AND DESTROY

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

One of the many consequences of this inane war of yours is the thwarting of humanitarian goals pursued by American Peace Corps Volunteers by your equally inane Selective Service quota system. Of course this is not to imply that those Volunteers interested primarily in saving their skin have remained secure from the draft either. The distinction between motives is irrelevant: the local boards search and destroy indiscriminately, operating in the best of democratic traditions.

And on this happy note, it behooves me to relate the story of one group as muted discouragement to those seniors perceiving in the Peace Corps a painless and sureproof escape from military combat in Vietnam.

Last July, seventy-seven trainees arrived on the plastic campus of sunny California's University of Riverside to learn how to dig irrigation canals. Three months later the surviving forty-four shipped out to a picturesque bressaro camp in tiny town Hemet, also in the Fun State. At this point two were drafted.

In late October twenty-three were sworn in and flew to Delhi, to undergo two more months of arid training before assignment to their villages. There are now twenty-two.

Next week one flies to Bangkok for his pre-induction physical. Three others have just been doomed by the Presidential Appeal Board. Last week two more lost the 2-A classifications earlier promised to them for the term of service.

This decimation of the ranks is unusual, but, despite recent assurances by Peace Corps Washington, Volunteers the world wide are being imported in the name of patriotism. James Rousmaniere '67   Societe Des Etudes Vedantiques   Miriyala, India