Four Faces of Protest

THE organizers of M-day have tried to make it a national event and have succeeded in drawing many prominent figures into the observance. Still, the demonstration's momentum has relied heavily on local campus leaders with diverse views and backgrounds. Four case studies:

The Harvard Business School is a conservative campus enclave where students still wear three-piece suits. There, Graduate Student Daniel Graham, 25, keeps a green beret in his desk as a reminder of his Viet Nam service as a Special Forces lieutenant—service that won him a Bronze Star. At his home in Atlanta, he has a photo of a Viet Cong he killed in face-to-face combat. Explains Graham: "I didn't want to die. I figured the best way not to was to become a good soldier. I also went to Viet Nam with the best intentions of doing whatever I had to do for my country."

Yet, Graham is an enthusiastic supporter of M-day. "Now I feel guilty for going over there," he says. "I feel ashamed." Solemn and softspoken, Graham traces his transformation to his experiences with South Vietnamese soldiers. For a time, he was in charge of ensuring that each of some 400 of them was properly paid; before that, the payroll had been given directly to a Vietnamese lieutenant and some of it seemed to go astray. He says Vietnamese officers often upbraided him in front of the troops he was advising. Some were so hostile that he became "more afraid of the South Vietnamese than of the North Vietnamese." With three comrades, Graham once killed three Viet Cong in 15 minutes on an infiltration trail that a South Vietnamese officer had refused to explore. "You Americans are always in a hurry," the ARVN leader later complained to Graham. "I intend to be an officer for 33 years."

Whether Graham's experience was typical or his conclusions fair, he is not alone in his bitterness. "There was something wrong with the whole thing," he argues. "It has screwed me up so bad and screwed the whole country up." He now wants the U.S. to pull out "as soon as we can." Why? To win the war, he estimates, the U.S. would have to be willing to lose more than 300 of its soldiers a week for years. "I don't think it's worth killing American boys on the pretense of helping those crummy bastards."

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Mass protest has been neither frequent nor popular at Rice University in conservative Houston. The fact that the Rice campus is involved in M-day action results from the work of English Professor Alan Grob, 37, a scholar in Romance literature and one of the university's outstanding teachers. Grob has helped muster the majority of the Rice faculty behind the demonstration. He thinks that the observance will convince the public that opposition to the war "is not a radical movement or a splinter movement but goes across all spectrums of political thought on campus."