A Few Harvard Vets

Chances are, the University won't build another Memorial Church in their honor. Nor has it acknowledged their return with more than a small office of veterans affairs high up in Holyoke Center.

And this makes a certain amount of sense--the sparse numbers of Harvard students who fought in Vietnam amply explain why. Harvard, which may have provided the brain power behind America's Indochina adventure, certainly provided little of the manpower.

In fact, it is only at a school like Harvard--not at state universities and junior colleges--that one has a hard time finding Vietnam veterans. In the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, less than a handful are now enrolled.

"When I came here to Harvard. I was sort of alarmed that I'd be the lone veteran, and I was almost right," Griffith A. (Griff) Marton '75, a 26-year-old transfer student from a junior college in California, says. "There had been lots of veterans where I came from, so we were relaxed, the professors knew how to react to us, the college was experienced in handling veterans problems. It was a lot different from here."

The isolation of Harvard's Vietnam vets is real. Marton, who lives in a single at Currier House, admits that "because I got all the piss and vinegar out of me. I'm more sedate than most around here, and have only a narrow circle of friends." Another undergraduate, John Derho '75, also 26 and also a veteran of combat in Vietnam, moved out of Adams House last year and went incommunicadeo. "We have no way of reaching him except by mailing messages to Post Office Box 8995 in Boston," the Adams House secretary says. "I see him from time to time. Yes, I've seen him once this year. He's been around for several years, you know. No one quite knows where he lives," says senior tutor Hugh Berryman.

And the isolation also gives way to a certain reticence, though to varying degrees. Robert Sullivan, a history tutor in Kirkland House, shies away from discussing his term of Army duty in South Vietnam. "I'm sorry to be disobliging, but although I'm something of a fount of Saigon tales, I don't think my experiences with the ancien regime are worthy of splashing across the newspaper page at the breakfast table." Sullivan says. "I was stationed in Saigon, but never carried a rifle."

Sullivan's students say he often refers to his term of duty in part of a support division as "tit city" in a "country club." "The whole thing's a rather arcane subject, wouldn't you say?" he says. "I'd think you should probably be writing about the Mitre Corporation intervening in Portugal for the CIA, or something like that the future instead of the past."

One Harvard student who didn't share Sullivan's view of sleeping dogs of the past wrote a book about his experiences. Tim O'Brien, a graduate student in Government, published If I Die in a Combat Zone Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, an account of his changing perceptions of bravery and cowardice after he was drafted out of the antiwar movement at Macalester College in 1968. Still, O'Brien wrote reluctantly as many soldiers who write do.

"I never want to forget anything," Marton says. "After I was wounded and sent home to a base in Texas, I tried to write about. It, I tried, and I tried, but I couldn't put things into words. Others who fought in combat could read it and know what I was saying, but I don't think you can fill in the gaps between the words for those who haven't experienced war. The only two books I know that have done that are All's Quiet on the Western Front and The Red Badge of Courage."

Marton joined the Army during Christmas 1968 after flunking out of Westehester State University in Pennsylvania because, he says. "I was looking for adventure." After four months of infantry duty--"mostly assaults on Viet Cong way stations along the Ho Chi Minh trail," he says--in Bin Ding province in the Central Highlands, Marton had a "bellyful of adventure" and began to develop an interest in the politics of the Vietnam war.

But it took a wounding and a midnight ambush where several of his buddies were killed to make that bellyful. At first, Marton says, he "kind of enjoyed the Army--not the combat part, but the idea of surviving basic training and the Central Highlands wilderness." And he senses that, oddly enough, when his Harvard peers encounter him, the respect they show him is "more out of this American male idea of proving your manhood" than out of any guilt feelings over Marton's fighting in their, or their brothers' stead. Marton says he hasn't met people here who feel they are morally superior to me because they avoided the draft and I didn't."

"As far as guilt goes. I didn't want anyone to condemn me for what I did. I know I killed human beings on several occasions, but I'll handle that myself. On the other hand, I don't want people to praise me, either. As far as collective guilt goes, were there people in American responsible for the war, I ask myself? Yes, there were. Were the American people responsible? I just don't know."

Marton says he didn't think about the meaning of the war until he was in the hospital--he almost lost a leg when he stepped on a Pungi stick, a piece of bamboo reed sharpened on both ends and immersed in excrement as poison. After endless "nights when you'd hear guys sobbing in their beds--and I did it too--who were letting themselves feel the things they were repressing in combat," he began to think Vietnam was a mistake.

Marton became interested enough in the politics behind the war to want to study. East Asian affairs in college when he returned. He says he found it "hard to watch the Communist takeover this spring. Although the U.S. was terribly wrong, and while Hanoi is miles ahead of the Thieu government in terms of seeing to the welfare of the people, ideologically. I just can't agree with Communism, and emotionally, the meaningless deaths of my friends killed there leave me very unhappy. I probably hoped that the Third Force would somehow come to power and end the war, but I guess I really didn't have too many hopes at all."