"Mark Jerde" wrote in message
news
Ed Huntress wrote:

When John Belucci, in "Animal House," said "seven years of college
down the drain," I knew just how he felt. g

g I recall it as, "Seven years of college shot to hell."

I marched in my college NROTC unit in the homecoming parade shortly after
the movie came out in 1977. I was expecting someone to do something to us
but nothing happened... ;-)

By then, things had calmed down. What the youngsters don't fully appreciate
is how fast our understanding of what was happening in Vietnam developed,
when it occurred, and how it changed the country.

In 1966, I was signed up for Air Force ROTC. By the end of 1967, it looked
like the stupidist thing a human could do.

The final turning point for me when I was home from college and my cousin, a
Marine sniper in the First Marine Division, was staying at our house while
he was home on R&R, having been shot out of a tree. Melvin Laird, then
(1969) the new Sec. of Defense, came on the tube and said, "We do not now
have, nor have we ever had, US troops in Laos," or something like that. My
cousin turned to me and said, "That's funny, I was there just a couple of
weeks ago. That's where I got shot out of the tree."

That did it.

Ed Huntress