J. F. Saunders
No Cheering on Campus
There is hardly a college campus in America today where the spector of Viet Nam does not hover like a pall of smoke over a disaster area.
Even in the lounges of the women's colleges any talk of post-graduation plans is geared to the status of male acquaintances under the age of 26.
The talk in college union buildings centers around the chance of temporarily fending off service in the armed forces by getting into graduate school or some occupation rated as important enough to gain a military reprieve.
J. F. SAUNDERS
No matter how much frivolity attends a college social affair, eventually the conversation will swing to Topic A, the expected impact of the Viet Nam war on America's young set fresh from their teens.
THE ERA WHEN A COLLEGE SENIOR spent his last two months on campus being interviewed by prospective employers and then chose the most lucrative offer has runs its course. The senior with a military commitment is a poor employment risk no matter how sensational his scholastic average may have been.
Graduation Day, once a moment that could not arrive too soon, is now a zero hour when the Class II-S designation expires and, at the pleasure of the draft board, is replaced by Class I-A.
Instead of jogging down the home stretch of his educational experience filled with the eager anticipation of finding a niche in industry or the professions, and subsequently marrying, the young graduate of today is a traveler without a
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map, a trained runner without a lane, a new participant without time to try his hand.
TO THEIR CREDIT, most of them are reacting as millions of Americans before them have acted when diverted from a normal life by a crisis national in scope.
They have seen the pamphlets emanating from the University of California at Berkeley and suggesting ways to avoid induction, and they have rejected it in disgust.
The pamphlet tells how to qualify as a conscientious objector, how to act like a homosexual, how to fake an epileptic's seizure, how to indicate mental instability, how to mark the skin to simulate drug addiction, how to be a foul-up mistaking orders and forgetting instructions, and how to be so hygienically repulsive as to make rejection a certainty.
BUSINESS-AS-USUAL AMERICANS should remember that today's youngsters have entirely different views than did their forbears about risking their futures in foreign conflict.
They are not stimulated by a wave of patriotism such as was triggered by Pearl Harbor and they are not convinced that the immediate enemy, if not defeated, is going to overrun American soil.
Daily, they can read the assertions of responsible Americans in important positions that the United States is wrong in being involved in Viet Nam.
Under such circumstances, if they go resolutely about doing what their country is asking of them, they are entitled not only to our thanks but to our unending admiration and respect. These tributes will not compensate them, of course, but there should be no doubt that they are accorded.