20 Years After The Fall : Recollections of five Times Orange County Edition staffers on how the Vietnam War shaped their lives. : On the Home Front, Fighting a Different Battle

David Haldane, 46, Times Staff Writer I still remember the first time I thought seriously about Vietnam.

It was 1964, and a friend more worldly than I sat me down in a school stairwell to explain what was going on in this obscure little country that had been creeping into the news. A civil war was going on, he told me in the uncomplicated manner of youth. The people of Vietnam had wanted an election, but the United States wouldn’t let them have one. And now we were sending armed “advisers” over there to enforce our will on a hapless foreign country.

The analysis made sense to me. And though I didn’t know it at the time, it was to dominate my life for much of the next 11 years, forming values and ideas that still affect me today.

I recall my first anti-war demonstration. It was 1968 and I was a freshman at UCLA. For months I’d been eating lunch on the quad, watching a philosophy professor named Donald Kalish lead a weekly “silent vigil to end the war.” One day, without even thinking, I stood up and joined the ragged little line of students stretched along Bruin Walk. I remember my ears buzzing and my chest pounding as the rest of the student body seemed to walk nonchalantly by with eyes averted, going on with their lives as we symbolically held our breaths in protest.

Things got meaner after that.

The next semester, students occupied the campus placement center to protest the presence there of a recruiter from the napalm-producing Dow Chemical Co. And within months, they were burning draft cards, getting arrested and manning barricades.

From 1969 to 1970, I was a college dropout working full time as an organizer for the anti-war movement. Based in New York, I traveled among East Coast campuses spreading the seeds of dissension. While friends in the movement referred to it as “campus trailblazing,” those with less sympathy would have called me an outside agitator.

Miraculously, I never got arrested.

I did, however, get badly tear-gassed during a major anti-war protest in Washington. Once, while spreading leaflets at a Vermont military academy, I was confronted by a mob of bat-wielding cadets who undoubtedly would have beaten me to a pulp had not brave comrades intervened. And for years my draft card seemed to sizzle in my pocket, reminding me of the moral dilemma of living in a country whose policies I abhorred. Prison or exile, I vowed, would be preferable to induction into the military. Fortunately, I never had to make that choice because I wasn’t drafted.

By the time Saigon fell in 1975, I saw it as the inevitable end of a process I had opposed all along. And though I felt politically vindicated, I was very sad that so many people had lost so much.

I still believe that Vietnam was a mistake. If I had it to do all over, I would probably oppose the war again. But the intervening years have also had a softening effect. As I look across the newsroom in which I work today, I see a sea of faces representing a myriad of pasts. Some belong to people who fought in Southeast Asia as soldiers. Others represent the children of Vietnamese refugees, people who probably wouldn’t be here at all if not for the war.

For all of these and millions of others, Vietnam was a defining event, a thing that changed their lives and the life of this country forever. It changed my life too. I will never be the same. I’m not sure that I’d ever want to be.