he Harvard class of 1969 watched with uncommon interest as the class of 1968 in campuses across America ran for cover from the war in Vietnam.
Family doctors perjured themselves in letters to draft boards asserting that asthma had debilitated strapping lacrosse players. Young men who had never darkened the doorstep of a church discovered a sudden passion for a life of faith. Students without a whiff of compassion for the poor sought meaningful experiences in the Peace Corps and VISTA.
There was no end to the stratagems that led away from the alluvial rice paddies of the Mekong Delta while skirting Canada or prison.
I recall little guilt among the young men who avoided military service. Their opposition to the war was usually grounded in a combination of cowardice, principled opposition, and conviction that death in Vietnam was a dumb way to go. So in a tradition stretching back to the Civil War, when men of means bought their way out of service for $300, those with options in 1969 exploited them. At the end of the day, fear trumped conscience.
Another group of able-bodied seniors chose enlistment as the best of a bad set of options that included jail or flight to Canada - but as far from Vietnam as possible. Unlike their civilian counterparts, they signed away at least three years of their lives. Yet they were in the same moral limbo as those who avoided service. I was part of this second cohort.
Someone heard about the Army language school, formally known as the Defense Language Institute, in Monterey, Calif. It entailed a three-year tour - one more than the draft - but involved no incoming mortars (provided you didn't study Vietnamese.) The buzz on this one spread like wildfire among elite colleges.
Many of us who are Bill Clinton's contemporaries find the sophistry about his experience with the draft so galling precisely because we were all in on the same plan: avoid death. Like the rest of us, Clinton didn't want to get shot. He just has never come clean about his motives. We know better. In maintaining this fiction, he insults our intelligence.
I was abysmal in math and science but had an ear for languages. My draft board lurked like a great white shark, so I signed up for Monterey in the spring of my senior year under the delayed-entrance program, which allowed me to graduate in June. I was the only person I knew in my Harvard class who went directly to active duty.
Monterey was where soldiers from all branches of the military, as well as the odd spy and State Department officer, were sent for language training. It was billed as the best language instruction in the Free World, a campus where you ate, slept, and drank a language for up to a year.
When I applied, the Army had openings in Vietnamese and Hungarian. I hesitated for about a tenth of a second before choosing Hungarian, a language in which I professed a deep interest. Love those zany magyars.
My only extended experience with the real Army was an unamusing eight weeks of basic training at Fort Dix. I recall being ordered to watch the moon landing on television in what seemed like the middle of the night, and I mourned my absence at Woodstock. When the company commander read out our assignments at the end of the ordeal, I was one of the very few who was not slated for advanced infantry training and then Vietnam. There was curiosity rather than anger about my posting. What the hell was the Defense Language Institute?
As advertised, Monterey was the Gentleman's Army. Classes ran from 8 to 12 and 2 to 4, five days a week. We swam at the beach in Carmel, a rich little community of faux charm, and drank in Clint Eastwood's bar, The Hog's Breath. To the south lay the majesty of Big Sur. Less than two hours north were the sweet sins of San Fransisco and beyond, the sweep of Marin County.
During a four- or five-year window when the draft bit hard, Monterey teemed with East Coast preppies and Ivy Leaguers who pursued the same scheme. The place was surreal. Privates drove Porsches and BMWs. An heir to the W.R. Grace fortune played polo at Pebble Beach. A few of us ended up one Saturday night in white tie at the Spinster's Ball, a snooty post-debutante affair closed to all but San Fransisco's ingrown Social Register crowd. As skinheads in rented tails, we looked bizarre, and more than a few of the city's elite were appalled to learn that we were defending them. We were too.
When we weren't in tails, we were listening on weekends to the Grateful Dead or the Jefferson Airplane in the Fillmore West or Winterland, wandering around the Haight, or watching hallucinogenic sunsets from the summit of Mount Tamalpais.
Our only glimpse of the other Army during this period was the annual trip to the rifle range at nearby Fort Ord to qualify with M-16s. The fierce range instructors there would assume the womb position under the bleachers whenever a contingent from the language school appeared, because we couldn't remember from basic training how to shoot the things, and we sprayed lead all over Monterey Bay with brio.
After finishing my 47-week course, I was sent to a ludicrous eight-week interrogator's course at Fort Holabird in Baltimore, where I learned nothing other than the fact that I was among the most expensively trained soldiers in the Army. I was no more an interrogator than Gomer Pyle.
After Fort Holabird, now defunct, I was assigned to an intelligence unit in Munich where I interviewed Hungarian border-crossers and wrote up reports for the intelligence community. It was damned interesting work, and I became quite good at it. I spent weeks with a Jewish chemist and wrote about anti-Semitism in Hungary. I debriefed an illiterate truck driver who served at an important missile base. (I later declined a CIA job interview so I could grow my hair long.)
My Army experience, along with the war, is a distant memory today. My Hungarian now consists of ''There are no bombs in the hanger.'' When I run into Vietnam vets, they dismiss me with the rest of the draft-age men who avoided harm's way in Southeast Asia. I would too were I in their shoes. Still, they credit me at least for having put on a uniform for three years.
I'm tempted to say that the moral lines of demarcation have blurred since Vietnam. But they haven't. They've just been under the radar screen for most of us.
Sam Allis is a member of the Globe Staff.
Sam Allis at Harvard, top, and today.
