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Change Your Life! |
Vietnam: An American remembers the war at home |
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News
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April 10, 2000
UNDATED, (AP) - Our high school graduation ceremony began in the best American tradition.
Wearing gowns and mortarboards, we gathered in the gymnasium, our parents watching proudly from the bleachers.
But things didn't go according to plan. The corrosive effect of a war being fought nearly 9,000 miles (14,500 kilometers) away was being keenly felt at Metuchen High School in New Jersey.
First, some students asked us to take sides by wearing a black armband with a white dove, or a small pin showing an American flag.
Then Billy, the salutatorian, junked the "go-get-`em" speech approved by the principal and instead denounced the Vietnam War and the shootings at Kent State.
Some parents stood up to jeer at Billy. The heckling grew louder. "Is this a graduation or a rally?" a parent shouted.
The principal and the president of the Board of Education rushed to the dais to calm the audience. Billy had broken the rules, they said, but he had the right to speak his mind.
About half the students rose to applaud. But many of the students sat quiet and stunned.
It's hard to imagine it now, in these peaceful, prosperous times, 25 years after the Vietnam War ended, but that was America in 1970.
As we graduated that summer, the war was killing an average of 82 American soldiers a week. And we 17- and 18-year-olds were hostages to a government lottery that would soon determine which of us would be drafted into the conflict.
My sister Barbara was home from Kent State University, where she was studying. National Guardsmen had opened fire on an anti-war protest there, killing four students in a dormitory parking lot. We were all deeply shaken.
But the war was not the only catalyst for our generation's rebellion. There was civil rights and Black Power, sexual permissiveness and the pill, the environment, the pros and cons of legalizing marijuana, gay rights, women's lib. You felt the push and pull of such issues in many everyday ways, like the girls at Metuchen High School waging a successful battle for the right to come to class in trousers instead of dresses.
When I entered Northeastern University in Boston that fall, the city teemed with long-haired hippies wearing army jackets with peace symbols. You could get around town by hitchhiking. If a Volkswagen van, the hippie favorite, drove by, you were in luck.
Across the city, folk music and rock 'n' roll - everything from James Taylor to Jimi Hendrix - would pour from dormitory windows, day and night.
Northeastern was then joining other schools in reconsidering its dormitory rules, which were supposed to control everything from the kind of parties that could be held to whether a boy could entertain a girl in his room with the door shut.
So, when the school decided to experiment by letting our four-story, brownstone apartment building on the edge of campus set its own rules, we students in America's last pre-AIDS, pre-crack, pre-dot.com generation decided we didn't want any rules at all.
The result would have horrified most parents.
Meanwhile, in the previous two years alone:
But always, looming over everything else, was the draft.
For years, college students had been freed from the draft as long as they were in college. But President Nixon's government was considering scrapping the college deferment, and my birthday turned up as No. 2 in the 1970 draft lottery.
That meant that if the deferments ended that year as expected, I would immediately be drafted.
It was a difficult time.
We often would stay awake all night in the dorm hallways to discuss the war and what we would do if we lost our deferments.
We could refuse to serve and go to prison. We could flee to Canada. We could seek exemption as conscientious objectors, or fabricate a disability.
Over the Christmas vacation of 1970, many students went home to fierce disagreements with their parents over the draft.
My father was a World War II veteran who had navigated a B-17 bomber on many runs over Germany. He still regretted the killings and destruction he had caused, however just that war seemed to the majority of Americans.
He was also an executive, and therefore a "capitalist pig" in hippie terminology. That offended him. But he told me that whatever I decided about the draft, he would support me.
It's a conversation that I will never forget.
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