Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Off the Road Again
COLLEGE STUDENTS WERE
redefined in those days of cultural convolution, division, distraction
and practical maneuvering. For decades the stereotype student of higher learning had been a
college Joe, either Ivy League landed or State U drunk. Other cultures took a bemused view;
Americans seemed odd on many levels, but they did have money, and here they were, wasting
four prime years in a classroom poring over books instead of getting a jump on life itself.
Well, many Ivy Leaguers took the baton of cultural leadership from their parents, often
alumni parents. The baton assured greatness in what we hold most dear, which is influence and
affluence. State U students were more practical, studying hard sciences or humanities to teach.
The war of the 60s kept greater numbers of male students in college as a survival option.
Campus life became a postponement of war life. It wasn't real, but the alternative was all too
real; it was like Romper Room for pre-adults, a new phase in the developmental process that
strove for something other than success. Chronic anxiety characterized the challenge of draft-
age males who avoided the jungle war by staying in school. The jungle war waited like a pred-
ator in a burrow. The jungle war was required. It waged dutifully, with numbing measurements
of success and cold comfort in the enemy's exponentially greater sacrifice. Body counts came
nightly, with every one of our boys worth twenty or forty of the strange men who scurried
through tunnels and would not back down, unlike their countrymen on our side. It was a rough
time emotionally, given to rough, hateful profiles, like
slant-eyed, zipper-headed gooks
—that
phrase was a send-up on rightwing fervor from the movie
Candy
, based on Terry Southern's
novel. The cast included Marlon Brando (again; talk about range), Richard Burton, Charles
Aznavour, James Coburn, John Huston, Sugar Ray Robinson, Ringo Starr—and Walter Mat-
thau as the military advisor who also summarized the U.S. military view of enemies: “Mexic-
ans. Albanians. They're all the same.”
The alternative to the jungle war? Get high, get laid, get a C average, become a college grad.
Studies, final exams, essays, pop quizzes and stuff could get tough but added up to a prover-
bial walk in the park next to the jungle belly crawl, with those pesky swamps, snakes, malaria,
booby traps, night patrol, heroine addiction, social diseases unknown to the western world and
friendly fire.
Back in school, a lively social calendar helped suppress the rising tide of anxiety. So the
great wide world shrank back to mundane rigors and distraction. One subject resonated, be-
cause of a graduate student instructor clinging to ideals in art. Ted Schaeffer at twenty-nine
taught beginning narrative and seemed older, verging on old, yet he captured the writer's life
