War & Peace Quote by Bill Vaughan

A neat little boomerang of logic: if the state claims the right to draft bodies for war, why not draft them for peace? Bill Vaughan’s line works because it flips Selective Service’s moral presumption. The draft historically presents itself as an unfortunate necessity, a reluctant intrusion justified by existential threat. Vaughan treats that justification like a detachable mask. If compulsion is acceptable when uniforms are involved, he implies, then compulsion isn’t really about emergency at all; it’s about power and habit.

The joke lands by pushing the premise to its bureaucratic extreme. “Start everyone off in the army” is deliberately absurd, but the absurdity is diagnostic. It exposes how quickly “citizen” can become “resource” once government paperwork enters the room. The punchline—“draft them for civilian life as needed”—turns ordinary freedom into a privilege meted out by administrators, as if the default condition is state ownership and liberty is an exemption.

Vaughan, writing in an America shaped by World War II, Korea, and the long shadow of Vietnam-era conscription debates, is also needling the era’s civics rhetoric: the idea that military service makes you whole, responsible, fully American. He doesn’t argue against service directly; he satirizes the romantic framing that makes coercion feel virtuous. The subtext is a warning: once a society normalizes forced service, it shouldn’t be surprised when the logic of “necessity” starts shopping for new uses.