The Campanile at UC Berkeley
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The Vietnam War was still visible in the nation’s rearview mirror in 1980 when President Jimmy Carter ordered every 18-year-old American man to register for the draft. He thought it was a necessary response to the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan.
I was one of those young men, and Carter’s order scared me. I’d worked alongside veterans at the foundry. I’d seen their prosthetic limbs and heard their stories and listened to them talk about their struggles with alcoholism and heroin. I knew that war damaged the people it didn’t kill.
I was also influenced – maybe even radicalized – by post-Vietnam media culture. Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Coming Home, and Big Wednesday were playing in nearby movie theaters, and they stoked my emerging anti-war conscience. So, too, did radio songs like Give Peace a Chance, What’s Going On, Ohio, and War (What Is It Good For). I’m not suggesting that my mindset was particularly nuanced or unique; far from it. I was eighteen. But I did know it was wrong for the world’s richest and most powerful military nation to bomb a peasant country into rubble, and I didn’t want any part of that. I also didn’t want to die.