Time has left an ever-widening gulf -- of years and of outlook -- between Bob Hodge, the affable chair of Beloit College's history department, and his students. Decades now separate him from the 20 year-olds who populate his undergraduate classes. But that was not always the case.
To hear Hodge tell the story, it might as well have been yesterday -- though it was actually October 3, 1969 -- that he surprised one of his classes with an unannounced quiz. For about 20 minutes, he let them suffer, even as he smiled inside. Then he called the quiz to a halt, and told them it had all been a joke.
To a classroom of confused students, the young professor next revealed that it was his 30th birthday. "You can't trust anyone over 30," he reminded them. More than 30 years later, he's still tickled by the punch line.
The reason Hodge's joke was funny then -- the reason his punch line resonated with a classroom, and, indeed, a generation -- was simple: You couldn't trust anyone over 30 because they were probably stuck in an earlier time. Probably fighting an earlier war.
There is an old saying that militaries prepare for the last war. So do generations. Even liberal members of the World War II generation had difficulty thinking about Vietnam on its own terms. The lessons they learned from America's experience during the 1940s -- about the danger of appeasement, about the importance of confronting evil, about the honor of serving one's country -- helped shape how they thought about Vietnam. And that made it hard for them to see Vietnam for what it was: an immoral war.
But in the years since Vietnam, members of Hodge's generation have often been guilty of the same mistake, albeit in the other direction. Their propensity to instinctively oppose military involvement abroad has even been given a name: Vietnam Syndrome.
Now, as America prepares to embark on what will likely be the longest and most important military conflict since Vietnam, Hodge's joke suddenly bears revisiting. In 1969, Hodge's students did not entirely trust their parents to think outside the framework of World War II; can today's generation of college students expect their Baby Boomer parents to think outside the framework of Vietnam?
If one of Hodge's junior colleagues were to play the same joke on a class today, would it still be funny?
Would today's young people be justified in their suspicion?
To find out, I tracked down three friends who were undergraduates at Beloit on Hodge's 30th birthday. They were not in his class at the time, but they were -- like Hodge, like Beloit, like America -- grappling mightily with the problem of war. Three decades later, they still are.
Marlene Booth, Gail Evans and Kate Hayden all graduated from Beloit in 1970. During college, they were close friends and sometimes roommates -- sharing, at different times, on-campus dorms and mice-infested apartments -- and have largely managed to keep in touch in the years since graduation.
Booth was raised in Des Moines; Evans and Hayden grew up in New England -- part of a wave of East Coast teenagers who descended upon Beloit during the 1960s, transforming a once-conservative school with deep Midwestern roots into a more cosmopolitan, radical place.
All three have made their way east in the years since college. Booth is now a documentary filmmaker based in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Evans is a vice president at Stamford Health System in Connecticut; and Hayden works in the production services department at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst's Fine Arts Center.
It was Booth who was the most politically minded of the three. "I always felt that Marlene was much more savvy than I, and I always went to her to try to understand Marxism and that sort of thing," Hayden remembers. "I wasn't nearly as political a person as Marlene."
Booth had gotten an earlier start in political activism than her two friends. During her senior year of high school, she delivered a speech critiquing the Vietnam War in front of her civics class, earning the wrath of one of her teachers. And her high school itself was no stranger to controversy: One year before Booth's graduation, the children of a local Methodist minister named Tinker were suspended from school for wearing black armbands to protest the war. Four years later, the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in Tinker v. Des Moines, finding that Booth's high school had violated the Constitution in restricting the students' First Amendment rights.
But there were similarities in their backgrounds as well. All three were daughters of fathers who -- to varying degrees -- struggled with the notion that America was capable of fighting an unjust war.
"He was very, very patriotic," remembers Evans of her deeply conservative father, who had served in Europe and the Middle East during World War II. "I grew up thinking that if we elected a Democrat, there would be a war and there would be a depression."
Did she and her father used to discuss Vietnam? "We had arguments," she responds quickly. "They weren't discussions."
Hayden's father did not see combat during World War II -- he was a Navy dentist in Rhode Island, where, his family used to joke, he fought the battle of Narragansett Bay -- but his views on Vietnam were no less compromising than those of Evans' father. "He believed, 'My country, right or wrong,' " Hayden remembers.
Even Booth's father, who was personally opposed to the war, maintained a strong sense of patriotism and duty that was anathema to many members of his daughter's generation. "You protest all the way up to the induction center," Booth says, paraphrasing her father's philosophy. "And then you go."
During the late 1960s, Beloit was a politically active anti-war campus -- but students' attention often focused more on issues such as civil rights than on Vietnam. "The war was so unpopular it almost didn't draw that much discussion," remembers Jerry Gustafson, a 1963 graduate of Beloit who returned as a professor in 1967. More than specific concern about the war, he says, the school was immersed in a "general miasma of anti-establishmentarianism."
The school's president, Miller Upton, was a dynamic character with strong views of his own -- a conscientious objector during World War II, he vehemently opposed the Vietnam war, even as he clashed with student protesters. "I was not sold on much of the protests," he now says. "And let me say, so much of the protest on our campus was not related to the war. I feel that a lot of the protest during times like that aren't motivated by conscience or anything else."
For Booth, Evans and Hayden, much of their anti-war energies took the form of campaigning for Eugene McCarthy in 1968. But it also sometimes took the form of worrying -- about Booth's high-school boyfriend, Avi Soifer, who was an undergrad at Yale, where he was a year ahead of the threesome.
"Some of our education really did come from Av," Evans says, explaining that she, Booth and Hayden were all concerned that he would be drafted.
Soifer was concerned as well. He remembers applying to graduate schools and law schools in 1968, aware that he might never get the chance to complete his degree. "I was 1A, so I thought that whatever I started I wouldn't finish," he says. But he was lucky; the fall he entered Yale Law School, he learned his lottery number was 343.
His Vietnam-era experiences -- of protesting the war, of working as a young copy editor and reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times outside the 1968 Democratic convention, of knowing he could be drafted -- have left their mark. "I don't think it can be untangled from my present views," he says, turning his attention to America's unfolding war in Afghanistan. But, he adds, "I guess I also like to think I have learned some things since."
On his 62nd birthday, Bob Hodge is still teaching at Beloit. He says that, in recent years, he visited Vietnam twice. The thing that struck him most, he says, is how the country has "moved on" -- how the people he talked to wanted to discuss economic investment, not war. He remembers being surprised at the warm reception he received from Vietnamese people he met, given what his country had done to theirs not so long ago.
Implicit in his story is the question of whether America has moved on as well.
Booth, Evans and Hayden are, today, in varying degrees of loose contact. Still, when our conversations turn to America's war on terrorism, they begin to sound awfully similar.
None of the three describes herself as a pacifist. All accept that America must respond. But neither are they quite comfortable with what we're doing in Afghanistan. Words such as "puzzled" and "ambivalent" come up again and again when they try to make sense of their own opinions. Since Vietnam, they all say, they have not really been able to fully support any U.S. military action -- and this new war is no exception.
"I have a lot of mixed feelings about it. I know this isn't a popular opinion," says Hayden in one comment that was typical of the threesome's views, "but I'm not really sure we should be in there."
"I'm very conflicted about the whole thing," she continues. "I have to say, the one thing that the 60s taught me was we couldn't really trust the government, and we haven't gotten all the information from the government."
Evans' comments echo Hayden's. "It seems pretty absurd to be bombing Afghanistan," she says, and then goes on to use the terms "inept" and "ineffective" to describe the U.S. response, adding that she sees little point in "bombing the rubble into ashes over there." She asks, "What has generated the hatred and the anger for this to happen?" then later offers a partial answer that our nation has been "egocentric."
Booth's views are slightly more moderate, but she too is far from completely supportive of the war. She acknowledges that she no longer sees the world in black-and-white, as she did during the 1960s. "I began to see in my 30s and 40s what I couldn't see in my 20s which is that the world is a complex place," she says, admitting that in 1999 she had toyed with the notion that our bombing of Kosovo was justified.
Still, like Evans and Hayden, she is not sold on this war. "This one has been tricky," she says. "How you tackle the horror of September 11 is a real problem, I think."
Their practical concerns about the war in Afghanistan also owe something to their memories of Vietnam. "We may be in there forever," Hayden says. "It seems like people should be entering this with a lot more trepidation than they are." For her part, Booth worries that we will have a difficult time finding our enemies, let alone eliminating them.
When asked what America should do instead of taking military action, they pull together a few ideas. Hayden suggests treating terrorists like criminals and trying them in the World Court. Evans suggests "modeling" different forms of terrorism and creating "better coalitions of folks." Booth has trouble naming any realistic alternative strategy; she says she will simply always be wary of charging into another country "with guns." No one sounds particularly convinced that there even is a non-military solution.
Some time after we speak, I ask the threesome over e-mail whether they are surprised that their views are so similar. Evans writes back that she is not. "I believe that most friendships are borne of the discovery of either common value systems or of deep respect for a different world view that enriches the relationship," she says. Later in the same e-mail she writes, "My basic logic structure and value system has not changed since my college days."
Polls show that support for military actions in Afghanistan is widespread, but softening. As the war drags on, and as members of the U.S. military and Afghan civilians die, will more and more Boomers find themselves, like Booth, Evans and Hayden, revisiting that part of their conscience that was shaped during Vietnam? Will they find themselves -- as their parents did -- fighting the last war?
Hayden tells the story of how discussions about Vietnam with her father -- the fierce patriot and World War II-era Navy dentist -- often ended. "When he realized everyone was against him -- including my mother -- he would stop arguing," she recalls. When militaries fight the last war, they usually lose. It may be, it should be, the same for generations.
