Viking_Yearbook_71

PSU Graduate in the Military I got into the military approximately two years ago. And I've been fighting them ever since. I have from a year and a half to two years to go because I signed up for four years. It has been enlightening in the sense that I now know a definite ill. I know that the military is wrong . I've been radicalized by it. I was a fairly moderate person when I went in and, sure enough, after they beat upon me for awhile I began to ask questions I shouldn't have asked . It's enlightening when you come back, especially to your old university, which I have had the fortune to do, on the average, once a month because I'm stationed not too far away from here. You're still a part of the university and you're not a part of it . You still have friends here and you talk the same language, but it's a little hard to talk to some young sophomore who'll come up to you and say "Wow, classes are a drag-this whole college is so structured, I can't take it, they're stifling me ." There may be something legitimate to his complaint but the guy has no idea how stifled and structured he really can be. While college has its problems, they are nothing compared to the problems the average G.l. has. I understand a lot of the veterans around here now. There were veterans at PSU when I was an undergraduate but I could never communicate with them. They were always, at least then, very easy going and nonchalant. They didn't take things as seriously as I did. We would get involved in student politics and not many veterans would. That's because PSU is such a change, such a relief, that they find it hard to take seriously. Whether Gregory Wolfe does such and such is kind of irrelevant to them because they're enjoying life here. This is what they've been dreaming about for those two to four years in the service . I've been around here for about seven years : the four years that I was an undergraduate, the year or so I was a graduate student, and the times I've been coming around while serving in the military. You can't help but notice some changes. In 1963, when I started here, PSU was sti II pretty much of a rah -rah school. It was just the beginning of what they now call the counter-culture. Then it was made up of Dylan, a bit of drugs, and the Free Speech Movement . I kind of watched this evolve and evolved with it myself. Until recently I had an attitude which a lot of the students had, that we could change things . Kennedy was involved in this and the Peace Corps. Eugene McCarthy was kind of the epitome of this attitude. After a decade of youthful turmoil we've essentially accomplished nothing except the defeat of one President substituted by another President who's just as bad. The attitude has changed , and people are dropping out. Vietnam Veteran on Campus Political activity around Portland State is very low key at present, even though there has been a call for national mobilization and civil disobedience because of the Laotian invasion. Politics on campus has outgrown its usefulness, especially since the young radicals of the past have become post-graduate students. Now they cling to the university that they pretend they want to destroy, because without the university they seem to have no identity. They refuse to take the movement to•the streets where the breadbasket of revolution is. Concerning Laos, there was a bit of a march from the college. SDS, the Progressive Labor faction, and Women's Lib took over the actual physical conduct of the march. That march was what I call the Walking Masturbation Blues. Subliminally, perhaps, they wanted to have an unformed, unstructured march without a permit so that the pigs could hit them and therefore create an issue. But the pigs have learned from the strike last May and the People's Army· Jamboree that a low key presence is much better for their public image than coming down with the sticks. I wasn't politically for that march, but I played road guard and medic. Whenever people put themselves out on the streets they might need a bandage. What the march signified to me was that Portland State really didn't want to do anything about the Laotian invasion, but it wanted to pretend it wanted to do something so it held a march. During the May '70 strike there was a picture taken of the people standing in front of the first aid tent before the police moved forward . I was in the front rank, and I was one of the only ones identified as a non-student within that rank . For a time it looked like I was going to be the outside agitator-be prosecuted in court as an example. I managed to keep from getting subpoenaed before the grand jury during the summer. The defense that I was going to have was twofold. Part of my defense would have been that I was a veteran of the Vietnam war and, if for no other reason, I had the right to be anywhere that that war was under discussion . The second part of my defense would have called upon the myth of a state school and a community-sponsored school. If this school is supported by public funds and is a state school it belongs to the public. If it wants to maintain the charade of being a community college with the involvement of the community then it means that not just the "right" parts but all parts of the community be involved. The strike was called by a certain group of students and they asked the community who felt sympathetic to their issue to support them . I was participating as a member of the community within a conceptual community college. The outside agitator issue should be given to alumni because they, through their money, their control of the university purse strings, generally end up controlling the policy of the school . .. This summer I want to go back to the sea . I want to go commercial fishing. To sit on the water with no place to go. 65