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Autobiography of a Maquoketa Boy Richard B. Wells own heart, or it isn’t a duty and it isn’t an obligation. You have to take it on of your own free will or it isn’t a moral choice. No preacher, no book, no parent, no person can force a moral choice on another person. Society can make certain actions crimes; society can punish its criminals. But society cannot dictate what morality is to any single person. If you don’t know in your own heart something is right or wrong, if you don’t feel the rightness or wrongness in that inner place where God will touch you if you let Him, nobody else can make it right or wrong for you. Norval was face to face with making the most awful decision of his life. I thought I knew exactly how he was feeling. I had had to make my choice and it had been terrible and painful and frightening. I wasn’t going to judge his choice. I might agree it was the right thing, or I might disagree with his choice, but I wasn’t going to pass moral judgment on his choice whatever it turned out to be. Something else John Stuart Mill had written came to my mind as we talked: If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. I could not make Norval’s choice for him, but he had a right to know what his options might be. He was asking for my advice as a friend, and I knew something he did not. “You could get a draft deferment, Norval,” I told him. He looked at me with a flicker of anger, thinking I was teasing him. “Very funny,” he shot back. “Nixon canceled all the deferments.” “All but one,” I said. “ROTC. If you’re in ROTC, you’re deferred and you don’t have an obligation to go into the army for the first two years. By then the draft will probably be gone.” He looked very thoughtful after I said this, and some of the hopelessness left his eyes. A few days later I was walking along the main street on campus heading back to the frat house when I saw a diminutive Army ROTC cadet walking toward me. I didn’t pay any attention to him, but just as we met up I heard a familiar voice say, “Hi, Rick.” I stopped in my tracks and stared at him. “Norval?” I couldn’t recognize him at all. His long, shoulderlength hair was gone, replaced by a neat short crop. The mountain man’s beard was gone; only a trim little mustache was left. I’d never seen Norval’s face clean-shaven before. In his new uniform he looked just like one of those little British army majors you see in the movies. And he was smiling. The gloom, desperation and despair were gone. Over the next year when we’d see each other now and then, he’d often complain about all the ‘Mickey Mouse’ ROTC put him through, but he stayed in it until the draft ended in 1973. Then he went back to being Norval again. He graduated with distinction in electrical engineering the same year I did and ended up serving our country by working at China Lake as a civilian. There are two other guys I want to mention in connection with the draft. I never actually knew their names. They were in several of the same classes I was, and I’d often see them together on campus. They must have been close friends because where I’d see one of them I’d also see the other. They always sat next to each other in class and I never heard either of them speak very much except to each other. I thought of them as ‘Frick’ and ‘Frack’ just to keep them straight in my own mind. On February 2nd, Frick’s draft number came up one, Frack’s came up two. They both disappeared from campus on the same day less than about a week later and I never saw or heard about them again. I assumed they’d fled to Canada, and I didn’t judge them for that choice either. The draft ended in 1973 without calling up a single one of us born in 1953. It turned out all that worry and heartache had been for nothing. We didn’t talk about the war inside the frat house, and the house took no active part either against it or supporting it. We couldn’t. Some of the guys were in ROTC and planned on serving our country as officers after graduation. Others of us, like me, thought it was an immoral war and our country was in the wrong for being part of it. Still others had even more radical leanings, although no one actually went so far as to be a radical. Nobody among us had started the war, nobody among us could stop the war, nobody among us would have been anything but elated if the war did stop. Arguing about it among ourselves would serve no purpose whatsoever because there was no way whatsoever we could all be united under one opinion except for all of us wishing it would end. 145
Autobiography of a Maquoketa Boy Richard B. Wells There was a large and vocal anti-war movement on campus and some people in it did think of themselves as radicals and anti-establishment. Next to Berkeley, or even Iowa City, it was a pretty peaceful and tame anti-war movement. No sit-ins. No public draft card burnings. No riots. One day in the spring of ’72 I was coming out of the gym after PE and found the four lane road between the gym and the Navy ROTC building packed with hundreds and hundreds of protesters. I don’t remember exactly what Nixon had done to set us off; he did so many things that outraged us it would be impossible to remember what this one was all about. But Navy ROTC was the strongest and most visible ROTC program on campus and whenever Nixon stirred anything up, Navy ROTC was always the first to hear about it. People were shoulder to shoulder in the street, some were waving signs, others trying to get a chant going amidst the incomprehensible angry rumble of the crowd. I quietly found an available spot and joined the crowd, ready to do my part in whatever it was we were doing. I had a voice and intended to use it. The Navy ROTC commander came out of his building. He was wearing his dress whites and carrying a box in one hand and a megaphone in the other. He set his box down and stood on it where we all could see him, a lone, unarmed figure facing a passionate multitude. He lifted the megaphone to his lips and his amplified voice carried across the campus: “What do you want?” The angry crowd responded in a single primal roar: “STOP THE WAAAAAAAAR!” He waited until the echoes died down, then raised his megaphone again. “Who? ME?” The crowd went dead silent. People began looking at each other, and the next thing I knew the crowd just started melting away. It was the greatest example of leadership psychology I’ve ever seen. It took our pledge class what seemed to us to be an unusually long time to satisfy the actives enough for them to concede we could stay and be initiated into full-fledged membership in the fraternity. Our general assumption was initiation should take place some time during the winter quarter. The actives did not share this opinion. My own belief is there was a very large gulf between the traditional views and values of the seniors and the more, shall we say, wild west values of the pledge class. Perhaps we didn’t quite exhibit the same kind of freshman spirit classes in the past had exhibited, although it’s hard for me to envision the sophomores in the house as having been all that different from us. In any case, winter quarter in Ames is a trying time for everyone. In the first place, it’s very cold and very snowy – or at least was in those days. After wearing contact lenses for about a year, I finally gave them up and returned to wearing glasses after I got tired of having my contacts fog over right in my eyes when I stepped out into the freezing winter blast on route to eight o’clock physics class. The physics building was about a mile and a half away from the house, and at times it was a regular Antarctic expedition just getting there. The journey was made a bit more challenging still by the ice polishers. The university used these little gizmos that were basically riding lawn mowers with a big circular plate covered with bristles under it in place of lawn mower blades. Their purpose was to brush the thick snow off all the various campus sidewalks. Unfortunately, there was usually ice beneath the snow and those bristles would polish it to a fine slippery sheen. Hence their popular name: ice polishers. It was an unusual winter morning indeed when I wouldn’t see at least one person’s feet shoot out from under him and down he’d crash, books, pencils, and everything else flying in all directions. Students didn’t have back packs yet in those days and we carried everything under one arm. They would also use the ice polishers to remove the snow from Lake Laverne, a little man-made lake that sat between Friley Hall and the Student Union Building. If anyone was inclined to doubt the ice polishers were well named, all they had to do was watch them preparing Lake Laverne so students could ice skate on it and no doubt at all would remain. In very early spring of ’72, one of the ice polishers was out there doing its thing when the ice broke, dropping half the ice polisher into the water. There was always a huge crowd of students coming and going from Friley, and when the ice polisher broke through there was a resounding cheer that probably could have been heard in downtown Ames. 146
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