Where do these people come from?

Submitted by Charles Brown (United States), Dec 30, 2002 at 22:53

In the mid-1960s, when the Air Force sent me to Boston University for a masters, we got to see the beginnings of the campus protests against the war in Vietnam. At times, we were called "Berkeley East". After that year as a student, I was "given the opportunity for additional postgraduate study" in a little air base called Pleiku.

Returning to the States, I was involved in Air Force Recruiting, and watched while a recruiter was stabbed to death in Oakland, and we had to take our people out of the usual blue cars to protect them. While fewer than one in three draftees ever went to Vietnam, those were the days of running off to Canada and Sweden, of draft card burnings, and street protests. One of the sure ways of avoiding the military draft was to remain in college, and many did, adding to their degrees but not, I fear, to their wisdom.

Today, three and a half decades later, those same dodgers are tenured professors in our halls of academe...planting their ideas in my grandsons and granddaughters.

Thank you Professor Pipes for pointing out what should be obvious; these people have no claim on wisdom, or proper attitudes on public service.

Charlie Brown
Hendersonville, NC

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