By Terrie Aamodt

Excerpt from Chapter Nine: "Baby Boomers Go to College, 1955-80
Pages 172-177

The enthusiasm that led students to become involved in campus affairs and to shape the course of the college's social and academic policies also led to a lively, and in the end, wrenching debate on the Vietnam War. The conflict in Southeast Asia crept slowly into the campus consciousness. The first mention of it in print came from Jim Robertson in 1966. The draft was not yet up to full strength, and the war had yet to touch the campus directly, but his article would be echoed by others several years later. Robertson stated that the U.S. was pouring $10 million a day into Vietnam and had been involved there since 1954, "yet the country is no more democratic or pro-american than it ever was." Already the U. S. was divided against itself. Robertson detected the threat of communism in Latin America, which he believed was a more legitimate threat to U. S. security. "We may have to admit that we made a mistake if we get out of Viet Nam," he stated, "but that mistake was made in 1954."

The following week freshman history major Don Scriven replied in a voice much more characteristic of campus opinion at that time: "If we were to pull out of Vietnam," he maintained, "it would mean the seizure of that country by Chinese-dominated Communists almost immediately." That success would encourage communist mischief elsewhere, and soon the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Burma would fall. This would continue the last phase of Lenin's plan for world domination that had begun with the communist takeover of Cuba in 1959. "If we have learned anything from the tragic lesson of Korea," Scriven stated, "it might well be this--that in war there is no substitute for victory."

It was not until a year or two later that the draft began to make a major impact on the campus, but in 1966 a student named Richard Harter returned from 12 months in Vietnam as a medic. The system of medical cadet training and noncombatancy that had worked so smoothly during World War II did not apply to this new war. Harter had flown to Vietnam with a planeload of noncombatants, but he was the only one who remained unarmed once they landed in Vietnam: "Once a guy told me that if he ever saw me in the field without a gun he would shoot me in the back."

The war created many incongruities. A southern California newspaper editor in the neighborhood of the Loma Linda University La Sierra campus was puzzled that a college full of avowed noncombatants favored Republicanism and nuclear annihilation of North Vietnam. Such ironies also drew notice on the Walla Walla College campus and in the pages of the Collegian. In 1968, just after the Tet Offensive, 88% of 80 students polled disagreed with Vietnam policy. Fifty-eight percent wanted to see the war change to an all-out offensive.

From another angle, in 1967 Doug Flaiz and Terry Johnson advocated the 1-0 draft status (total nonparticipation in the military) instead of the 1-A-0 noncombatant status. They stated that serving as a medic in the military was "hypocritical" and done to avoid "the awful stigma of being shirkers." Responding to a recent chapel program in which pictures of U. S. atrocities had been shown they stated, "Any doubts of the fact that the U. S. military is an organization dedicated to ruthless murder should have been resolved by the pictures of the burned, dead babies shown in our recent chapel." Eventually the General Conference met to study the question of draft status for Adventist men. In 1969 the church Autumn Council voted an action spelling out pastoral support for men who chose to perform alternative civilian service rather than be drafted.

Meanwhile, many Adventist young men who faced military service during the Vietnam era entered a military program that kept them in the United States during the Vietnam War--the U. S. Army's Project Whitecoat. In 1955 the denomination negotiated for its drafted members to participate in this defensive biological warfare research program, and it continued until 1973.

The presence of these alternatives, however, did not defuse the controversies. Vietnam became a preoccupation on campus. Students mourned the death of Paul Beddoe, who joined the Marines during the summer after his freshman year and died in early 1968. Jim Robertson, who had written the article against the war in 1966, was the Collegian editor that year. He received a petition from other college newspaper editors calling for a U. S. withdrawal from the war. Although he said that he was still troubled by the war, he was not ready to sign the letter.

A few months later, after the Tet Offensive, former student Glen Chedester was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for saving lives in a battle on April 12, 1968. Glen returned stateside in December of that year, but he was still in the military in the spring of 1969 when his friend and Sonnenberg teammate Daryl Meidinger was killed in Vietnam. It was Chedester's unhappy duty to travel from Texas to San Francisco to escort Meidinger's body home to College Place. Meidinger, who would have been a senior electrical engineering major at WWC that year, was drafted in the fall of 1968 and was killed on April 30, 1969, one month after he arrived in Vietnam. His funeral was held in the College Church shortly before the school year ended. The Vietnam War had come home to College Place, and the entire campus grieved.

The following year the Collegian editorialized that "even though we had always thought of WWC students as being patriotic, we don't blame those who are against the war. As some returning soldiers, now students, say, `The South Vietnamese don't want our help! They would just as soon be ruled by communists as by capitalists. It makes almost no difference to the average Vietnamese who governs him, communists or rotten capitalists'." In 1971 300 Whitman College, Walla Walla College, and Walla Walla Community College students and teachers walked from Cordiner Hall on the Whitman Campus to the Walla Walla County Courthouse to protest the war in Vietnam. Vietnam Veteran and WWC student Mike Hubbard commented, "It is too bad we cannot show our opposition more than two or three times a year."

By 1972 there were at least 15 Vietnam veterans enrolled on campus. Tim Wentland, who had been decorated for valor eight times, went to war as a noncombatant but eventually carried a gun. He observed, "President Nixon's Vietnamization of troops has failed and the North is running over the South." Wentland, who spoke the Vietnamese language and had lived in that country with his missionary parents for eight years, said, "I grew up in Viet Nam. I love the people. . . . The part I found most revolting was the ugliness of the average GI's when they went into a village hitting old men over the head with their M-16's, raping women and shooting pigs and water buffalo for sport."

By the early 1970s 35 to 40 students were actively protesting the war, and one of them was asked not to return to the college because of his Vietnam activism. Bitterness about the war found its ultimate student expression in a 1973 Collegian editorial by Dan Todd. He stated that the American flag should be removed from the College Church because its presence blurred the distinction between God and country. He said the flag could offend Vietnam veterans who had witnessed atrocities committed under that same flag, that it could offend an Indian who lived on a reservation, that it promoted unity between church and state resulting in "the worst form of nationalism." God should be the sole object of worship, Todd stated.

The way the flag has been perceived in different contexts was made clear the following week when engineering professor Edward Cross replied to Todd's editorial. "The placing of a flag in a church makes neither it nor the nation it symbolizes objects of worship," stated Cross. Everyone accepts the benefits of citizenship, he added: "The same flag waves over them all, symbolizing a great nation that holds among its governing principles one which allows freedom to worship, or not, as one chooses. . .. . Thank God for such a nation, symbolized by so beautiful a flag. Long may it wave!"

The realities of an unpopular war quieted the sense of exuberance that the campus had expressed for several years during the 1960s and the early 1970s. The period referred to later as The Sixties was a time that promised to be joyous but whose downside made it painful to relive. Eric Olson, who had followed his carefree 1973 yearbook with a year as a student missionary to Korea, detected apathy when he returned to the WWC campus in the fall of 1974. Why had campus revolutionaries succumbed to the A-word? They had set their goals too low, and, "we were geared for confrontation. We had determined from academy experiences that the only way to get things done was to blow them out of proportion. Unfortunately, we met too many level-headed sheriffs and administrators, people who were willing to sit down and discuss rather than provoke us to greater alienation." Reflecting on that period later, Olson noted another reason for the change: "`Power to the People' affected religion as well." During the mid-1970s "activists and counterculturalists changed to Jesus people." He pointed out that the 1973 oil embargo "made people think seriously."

As the Vietnam War faded into an unpleasant memory, nearby events took on spiritual significance for many students. The editors of the Mountain Ash saw a disturbing image in the flames that damaged Foreman Hall in January 1975, when the adjacent Williams Lumber Co. warehouse burned. They also saw in that scene a symbol of the fragility of complacence:

We built her brick and fireproof not like the
old days of wood, and guarded her with fire
alarms, well protected she stood. But a lumber-
yard is a burnable thing when something kindles
a fire, and a fire is hot whether brick or
stone makes up the oven.

A telephone pole like a klansman cross throws flames against the sky
and plywood pyres and 2 x 4's lace hellish hands up seven floors. There
are broken glass and burning beds, Brothers, Sisters beware. But
staunch she stands while below the Battle rages. The trucks are here, the hoses full, a Creek flows freely away.

Maybe the Lord's a-warning us.
Brothers, Sisters, beware.

About the Author
Terrie Aamodt, a native of Clarkston, Wash., received her bachelor's degree in history and English from the College of William and Mary in 1978 and her doctorate in American and New England studies from Boston University in 1986. She has participated in postdoctoral programs at the Johns Hopkins University and Dartmouth College. She joined the faculty of Walla Walla College in 1979 and is currently professor of English and history.

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