High School and Anti-War Activities in 1970

Admittedly, my father would have been devastated to think that his PTSD was a cause of my anti-war activities. The trouble I noted was questioning if the scars of war were worth the results. In other more famous words do the ends justify the means? Certainly, that became the underlying and unspoken concern with the constant allowable conditions of war, the treatment of POWs and civilians caught in the fray.

Watching the aggressive activities of the current day, it seems we have forgotten any concern for civilians or the treatment of soldiers (read torture). All that is wanted is the result as quickly and completely as possible as if the warlords were playing the board game Risk.

Anyway, in 1970 I marched along with 324 of my schoolmates to the State Capitol to protest the war in Vietnam. I was a Junior in an all-girls Catholic high school. The total number of students at the time was 506. So, more than half of the student body believed strongly enough to walk the 2.6 miles to the State Capitol and express our concerns.

Standing within a crowd of thousands at the capitol building I felt connected to power. We expressed our anti-war opinion. We did so peacefully because becoming violent at a peace march would be stupid, right? I stood with a group of girls in our school uniforms and photographers took our pictures. We were on the front page of the St. Paul Pioneer Press the next day. I managed to hide behind one of my friends and my face was obscured. That means my father missed me and I avoided one of his talks about how some wars are necessary. Years later I learned of the horror of the German concentration camps and what they did there, and my young mind learned to both hate war and see the need for it.

Next: my first boyfriend was a Vietnam Vetran. How's that for irony?