Nicholas F. Benton's White House Report:

A new study by a consortium of security policy think tanks reported yesterday that the U.S. military's deployment levels overseas, and in combat zones, are at their highest levels since the Vietnam War, with nothing but growing pressures on the horizon to expand the numbers even more.

More than 27% of U.S. active duty troops are overseas, and more than half in combat zones. The study by the Security Policy Working Group reported by UPI says that "the stress the Iraq war is placing on the military's personnel and equipment could reach a breaking point in as little as two years."

U.S. military brass concerns about readiness, morale and retention already abound, according to the analysts, as do questions about whether adequate preparations were made to support even the current deployment. Over 20% of the Army has already been deployed more than 120 days through only the first three quarters of this year. In all of 2003, the total was 25%.

Still, the two years combined represent more than half all deployable forces, a stark increase over the numbers deployed 120 days a year for the previous eight years. In fact, between 1994 and 2002, less than five percent of the Army was deployed for more than 120 days in any one year.

In reality, most of the Army soldiers deployed in Iraq spend more than a year deployed, and reservists who were activated face the possibility of even more time in Iraq. Deployment of much more than 120 days a year results, the study notes, in deficits in training, special assignments and leave that have cumulative impacts on a soldier's career and personal life, notwithstanding, obviously, the impacts of injury or death.

The burden of such schedules will lead to a mass exodus of soldiers unwilling to re-enlist. Deep losses among soldiers who've not made life-time commitments, fearing ruined marriages and families, will occur. Sixty percent of the active duty force is married.

The study's grim logic goes on, leading its readers toward only one realistic conclusion, the equally grim logic that, thanks to President Bush's unwarranted invasion and occupation of Iraq and everything it has set into motion, there is no other realistic scenario for America than the reinstatement after more than 30 years of a mandatory conscription, or the draft.

This is not fear-mongering. This is hard numbers. Only a dramatic reversal of present fortunes in Iraq can alter this course, and as we know abundantly, President Bush has no intention of changing course not only about Iraq, but about anything he's done. The present direction will lead beyond Iraq deeper into the bowels of the Axis of Evil, and mass bloodshed will be brought to our shores, in escalating terrorist assaults, as well.

Without regime change in the U.S., the die is cast by Bush's compelling policy inertia that no alternative to a draft is possible. If you believe Bush's claims there won't be one, then you'd probably believe there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

I am old enough to remember watching television in the 1950s, and how terrible I felt seeing the film footage of young French soldiers going off to fight a war they did not understand halfway around the world in the jungles of Vietnam.

By the mid-1960s, these soldiers were young Americans, my friends, my classmates, my brother, in fact. My younger brother Chris served two tours of duty in the Mekong Delta, often in lethal combat, on those famous swift boats, in fact. He survived. Two of my good friends didn't, and I visit the Vietnam Memorial to gaze upon their names a couple times a year. Jerry Georges and Ray Bretches.

I recall how we all felt then, all my baseball teammates, all my friends. We all lived with the looming reality that any one of us could so quickly be jerked away from all we'd become so accustomed to in our lives to a faraway, foreign and very deadly place. When I left my post-college job for seminary, it wasn't to dodge the draft. My boss knew the big shots on the local draft board, he said, and could assure me I'd be safe. He told me to persuade me to stay on, and he meant it.

In 1969, Life Magazine published its commentary on the Vietnam War by devoting two dozen pages to pictures of young men lined up as in a high school yearbook. They weren't in uniform. The pictures were, in fact, high school yearbook photos. All gussied up and smiling for the camera, they were. A couple hundred out of the 57,000 who died.

They'd all been killed in Vietnam. Such was life the last time we had the draft.

Nicholas Benton may be emailed at nfbenton@fcnp.com