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I didn't know about the Vietnam War until my first year in college ('64). My first objection was on the grounds that any war is immoral. I met a Vietnam vet (my first). He was in a Marine recon unit and he was very damaged. He had been given a medical discharge but he had serious post-traumatic stress symptoms that weren't being recognized or addressed.

So many memories...I had friends who loaded ammunition onto ships because it was a good paying job for students. I remember sometimes crying as the C-5s flew over my house out of Travis AFB filled with soldiers and came back filled with coffins. I also remember my mother telling me... that the government wouldn't get involved in the war if it wasn't necessary and that it would never lie to the people.

A couple years later, I was at the airport and saw a kid in dirty fatigues and a blank stare. After sitting across from him for a while, I asked him what he was doing. He said he had been sent home on family emergency leave because someone had died. He said that he couldn't remember where he lived, what plane he was supposed to catch or who had died. He had been in a muddy foxhole the day before with people dying all around him. They had picked him up by helicopter, transferred him to a plane and expected him to be able to adjust. It was surreal. He was going home for 3 days to bury someone and then fly back into the jungle and just continue the war. Anyway, a couple friends and I contacted the Red Cross and started a small group of volunteers who would meet soldiers at the airport, make sure they knew why they were coming home, talk with them a bit, make sure thay got some clean clothes and try to give them some space to go through changes.

I perceived much of the sixties not so much of a time of "superficial judgement" but a time when we could drop the superficial, the uniforms, the masks, and just be people. From my point of view, we asked all people to do so. We were saying to people, "here's your chance to remember that before you were a cop, a politician, a KKK member, a soldier, you were someone's child who loved the whole world."

In 1959, on the Easter Peace Walk, people threw a lot of garbage and yelled abusive things. The police (I especially remember San Bruno] didn't stop them and a couple policemen felt we deserved the abuse. That year we were "commies." We were spending nights at churches, mostly sleeping on floors or lawns in sleeping bags, and I remember the SF Examiner making a big deal out of "coed sleeping arrangements." I felt scared and sorry for the people who hated us so much. (I kept a low profile because I was a runaway.)

In 1962 (I think, or early '63), Rockwell, then head of the US Nazi Party, came to speak at the Univ. of Minnesota. There was a large movement to bar him from speaking. A group of us felt that he should be allowed to speak. (1st, you can't disallow freedom of speech to ANYONE; 2nd, it's better to know what the enemy's agenda is) We were on the steps of a building and the people who didn't want Rockwell to speak started throwing rocks and things. We were pushed up against the glass doors, I turned around and campus police were holding the doors shut and wouldn't let us in. The glass broke. We were pretty bruised but no one was seriously injured. I was terrified. I couldn't believe that so many people were screaming, and full of hate over what seemed to me to be a quite simple freedom. They acted like Nazis!

It appeared to me that later in the sixties, the "peace" movement became more violent. Many of my friends from SNCC, Ad Hoc etc., joined the Panthers. Devisiveness started within the "peace and justice/anti-war/civil rights" movement. I stopped going to rallies and demonstrations (except the Easter Peace Walk). The movement was "against" too many things. It was hard for me to have friends I had known for many years feel torn between our friendship and their loyalty to the black movement. The "peace movement" started being anti-government, anti-establishment, etc, but not FOR very much that seemed productive to me.

I started doing community work, with AFSC's CO program, SF State Free University, migrant workers, high school dropouts and gang members in SF. In early '67, I burned out. I went to live on a Quaker communal farm for a year.