Vietnam: An American Remembers the War at Home By Thomas Wagner In 1970, 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 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. 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. 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. 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. In the first week of May 1971, Hemenway Street where our dormitory stood became the scene of another police crackdown. Nationwide, a new round of anti-war protests had erupted, including large ones in Washington that led to clashes with police and the arrest of more than 12,000 demonstrators. On its third night, about 150 heavily armed riot police rushed from behind a building toward about 300 anti-war protesters who were milling about on Hemenway Street. They clubbed protesters, smashed windows in parked cars, and broke down doors to chase students into their dorms. I narrowly escaped their charge. It took me weeks to get over the worst violence I ever saw. As it turned out, the longest war in American history didn't begin to wind down until North Vietnam and the United States signed a cease-fire in January 1973. Had the war lasted two years longer, I would have been drafted. Instead, I became a high school English teacher in Quincy, Mass. One of my pupils was Kim Dzung Vo, a Vietnamese refugee. She had arrived in the United States with her family as a 16-year-old in 1975, the year communist North Vietnam completed its victory over the American-backed South, and the year I graduated from Northeastern. Kim arrived speaking no English. But by the time she was a senior in Quincy High School, she was competing in a speechwriting contest to choose the graduation speaker. Kim won the contest and read her speech at the graduation ceremony on June 5, 1978, standing in front of an American flag. ’Today, in Quincy, I go to sleep at night with no fear from bombs, no fear from communist invasion, no need to escape,'' she said in her speech. I'm proud to say I was her English teacher. On that graduation day, for the first time since that other graduation day in Metuchen, N.J., I felt a wound beginning to heal.

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