Though the twenty-four-hour news cycle inundates us with everything from the unending sludge that comes out of Washington to some ‘great new medical discovery’ that turns out to be based on an erroneous paper, finding the right topic to write an article on is not particularly easy. If something has already been covered, shall I, too, beat that dead horse? Sound the same trumpet? I suppose I would if my goal were just to make a quick buck; however, it is not.

During my search, a young woman who knows I write articles asked me what story I was going to cover, and returning the question, I asked her what in the news recently was important to her? What is something she would like me to cover? She said that nothing in the news was really of interest to her.

“I might cover the Iran conflict and the draft.”

“Oh yeah, there is that.”

 Before arriving at that coffeeshop, my mind had already been orbiting the Iran conflict, and her blasé, but friendly reply stuck out in my head as juxtaposed to conversations which I have had not just in the last few years with young men in their twenties, but also very recently, as regards to rising tensions with China over Taiwan.

“Do you think if I said I was gay, I could get out of the draft?”

Young men might joke about homosexuality, but the seriousness with which they ask that has never been lost on me. I remember the day that I had to sign up for the draft myself. It was so alien to me – the idea that I would go to jail if I didn’t allow some old man in Washington to order me to a certain death.

“No,” I would tell the young men, "You still have to serve if you are gay."

“What about if I said I was trans? I could do that.”

The questions were never made as insults but out of real fear and trepidation. In the early days of Russia’s war in Ukraine, millions of young men fled Russia and Ukraine, running from a conflict that was never theirs, but belonged to an old KGB spy who never could let go of the past and the discovery of billions of dollars of rare-earth minerals and oil discovered in Ukraine’s Donbas just a year prior.

What is the price of coffin nails? Will it go down or up in the coming months or years? The young men whose future prospects are already hampered by excessive housing costs driven up by banks and investment firms, whose wages have not moved up with inflation, who missed out on years of socialization with young women due to the length of COVID, will not be the ones to discover the price of burying themselves, but their mothers.

Recently (March 8th) on Fox News, White House Spokesperson Karoline Levitt was asked by Maria Bartiromo,

“I wasn't to get your take about this idea of troops on the ground. Mothers out there are worried that we’re going to have a draft.”

“It’s not part of the current plan right now, but the President, again, wisely keeps his options on the table.”

When I heard her say, regarding the draft, that it was one of “his options," I was reminded of all the conversations that I had with young men who, over the past few years, have spoken to me in earnest, asking if I knew of any way to get out of the draft.

There are already reports of the United States running out of missiles – President Zelensky said on March 5th that in just three days, the United States had fired more than 800 Patriot-interceptor missiles, which was more than all of the patriot missiles used during all the years of the conflict in Ukraine. This statement, if taken without any thought, sounds like an impressive thing for the United States to do, which enemies should be worried about, but what are our US stockpiles? The Center for Strategic and International Studies says it's about 1,600 (before Iran), with the production rate being somewhere between 200 and 600 per year, with an eventual goal by the Pentagon of reaching 2,000 made per year.

The Pentagon spent 800 of those in three days, at four million dollars a missile, that's 3,200,000,000 dollars spent in three days: over a billion a day.

With that addendum covered, I would wager that means that the Pentagon will be in a deficit (if the Iran “conflict" doesn't last at least one more day) of 800 Patriot missiles when China decides to attack Taiwan. How many more young boys will die in that certain conflict because there are fewer Patriot missiles to intercept ICBMs and hypersonic rockets? China has been –very– clear that it intends to be ready to launch an attack on Taiwan in less than a year. For more than a decade now, China has been building landing craft and upgrading its Navy and the size of its invasion force to take the island of Taiwan.

Conversations about a Taiwan conflict are not centered around " if” it happens, but "when.”

The growing malaise among young men who see a draft then, who worry that they will be forced to give up their whole lives to die for old men and their billionaire friends – watching this Iran conflict with a pit in their stomachs, knowing full well that a war with China is immediately on the horizon. The unease is only increasing.

How many more days of missiles are left in a stockpile? And when it is empty, will China attack Taiwan? When we run out of missiles, will we throw more bodies at the problem? And who will count those numbers of death with care? The Pentagon? Surely not the government, as we see firsthand with the V.A., how they treat veterans.

Or will it be mothers, who will intimately know the cost of the draft in the weight of coffin nails?

Austin Petak is an aspiring novelist and freelance journalist who loves seeking stories and the quiet passions of the soul. If you are interested in reaching out to him to cover a story, you may find him at austinpetak@gmail.com.

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