DITTER GREETINGS

Along with the daily debate in the press, this is the third book on the draft this season (Bruce Chapman's The Wrong Man in Uniform -- p. 1270; Colonel Walton's Let's End the Draft Mess -- p. 403). Miss Carper, whose credentials are not known to us, is the most radical and intemperate of the three: she charges, combatively, that parents pick up a three thousand dollar tab for a college education in order to buy immunity for their young; views the draft as synonymous with the war in Vietnam (""it supplies an unlimited number of bodies to fight"" there); condemns the bastardized use of classifications in which priorities become fox holes for deferments; finds the ""draft test"" irrelevant, seconded by Hershey's admission that it has ""only the appearance of being fair""; arraigns the shambles of the local boards, the ""vigorous unwarranted persecution"" of dissenters, and all the inequities to absurdities with their social and/or racial implications. She feels there can be no reforms, no matter how radical, and contends with Bruce Chapman that the draft must be abolished and replaced with a volunteer army....Too much, perhaps too late.