My recent experience at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, President Clinton’s alma mater and a finishing school for the elite ranks of the foreign-policy establishment, argues that this phenomenon will plague future administrations. After spending four years on active duty as an army officer, I enrolled in a graduate program at Georgetown and was initially puzzled by what seemed to be a total lack of interest in my military experience. I found this strange, since I had served in a small unit that patrolled the inter-German border in 1989 and led the attack against the Iraqi Republican Guards during Operation Desert Storm.

The nonchalance of my classmates, I soon found, was not due to some sort of militant pacifism or left-wing prejudice. They simply had no idea of what questions to ask. The sum total of their knowledge about military matters–ranging from tactics to tanks–came from movies and magazine articles. Sometimes this ignorance was trivial, sometimes not. Once, at a school formal, I was asked by several people where one was supposed to look for rank on an officer’s dress uniform. When I pointed to my shoulder boards they seemed genuinely surprised. During a seminar dealing with national-security policy, one student was asked to come up with hypothetical military options for the president to use in Bosnia. Her solution included flying lumbering C-130 cargo planes off aircraft carriers. This might be comical if it weren’t for the fact that Georgetown grads end up in high places, including the presidency. Although some students with a military background, including active-duty officers, can occasionally be found at schools like Georgetown, they are vastly outnumbered by those who have had no personal contact whatsoever with the men and women who serve in the U.S. armed forces.

It isn’t too surprising to me that many civilians are mystified by military customs, not to mention operational doctrine and tactics. What has really disturbed me since leaving the military is discovering a complete lack of comprehension among my civilian peers for the intangibles, such as morale, esprit de corps and unit cohesiveness. During a class debate on gays in the military, for example, I attempted to explain to other students the disastrous consequences that result when small tactical units suffer from low morale or poor motivation. Their faces remained blank until one woman volunteered, “Well, we have a lesbian living in our house and it’s no problem.” They saw no difference between college students living together in a communal arrangement and the workings of an active-duty combat unit.

It is troubling to me that the end of compulsory military service in this country has meant the disappearance of yet another source of our common values and experiences as Americans. Service in uniform, if even for a brief period, once provided the opportunity for people from different backgrounds to share in an identical experience. Rich kids ate with poor kids, Southerners drilled with New Englanders, and the sons of doctors fought alongside the sons of ditch diggers. Today, enlisting in the services is largely a path taken by poor blacks, Hispanics and working-class whites. Almost never seen in uniform are the people who are most likely to influence foreign policy and who will make the decisions to send U.S. troops into battle. The well-educated men and women who inhabit government bureaucracies, academia and the media rarely serve in the military, and worse, don’t know anyone who does. In September 1990, a senior editor at The New Republic, an influential journal of political opinion, casually wrote that neither he nor any of his friends personally seemed to know anyone serving in the Persian Gulf. This was written at a time when the Pentagon had already called up or deployed close to a quarter of a million troops for duty in the region, drawing from active and reserve units in every nook and cranny of America. The long arm of military service, apparently, did not extend to Washington.

That paradox is reason enough to consider reintroducing the draft–with no student deferments. Many people in this country, both Democrats and Republicans, who strongly influence the most important decision a nation ever makes–whether or not to send its sons and daughters to die–increasingly have zero knowledge of who our servicemen and women are, or even where they come from. A common military experience, of course, would be no guarantee of better foreign policy. But it would at least establish a human link, which is now rapidly disappearing, between those who decide to fight and those who do the fighting.