The Draft: Out of the Kitchen Into the

Soup When David Miller, 22, graduated from Syracuse’s Jesuit-run Le Moyne College last June, he headed for New York and went to work without pay in a Bowery-area soup kitchen run by the Catholic Worker movement, a charita ble group that is also passionately paci fist. In mid-October Miller got out of the kitchen long enough to land in the soup.

Climbing atop a sound truck parked for a Manhattan rally protesting the Viet Nam war, Miller announced: “I believe the napalming of villages in Viet Nam is an immoral act. I hope this will be a significant political act, so here goes.” Then, while cameras whirred, he set fire to his draft card (classification 1-A) with a cigarette lighter.

He was arrested three days later. Last week in federal court Miller became the first American citizen arraigned under a law, signed last Aug. 30 by President Johnson, by which anyone who burns his draft card commits a federal offense. Miller pleaded innocent, was released on $500 bond until his trial on Nov. 22. (In the meantime, he started a 30-day sentence for intruding on private property during a civil rights demonstration in Syracuse in March.) As he walked out of the courthouse after his arraignment, he declared: “Destruction of a draft card poses no greater threat to national security than the destruction of a bubble-gum card.”

It should certainly prove more costly. The maximum penalty under the law is five years in prison and a $10,000 fine—which may possibly preclude draft-card burning from rivaling panty raids or telephone-booth packing as a post-adolescent craze.