Dan Asera graduated from UC Berkeley in 1969. Like many young men at the time, he was faced with the prospect of the draft and chose to enroll in the ROTC on campus. He was a member of a fraternity and served as the senior class president in 1969.

Daily Californian: What kinds of activities were you involved in while you were at UC Berkeley?

Dan Asera: I guess I was in ROTC at that time. As you may know, a lot of people were afraid of being drafted. ... The downside of (being in the ROTC) was that as part of ROTC we had to have our hair cut really short, which is not a problem today, but back in those years anybody who had short hair was automatically recognized as an ROTC student. Once a week we had to wear our uniforms to class on campus so that was a dead giveaway. Anything having to do with the military at that time was kind of frowned upon.

DC: What was it like walking through campus in a uniform?

DA: It was difficult, people would throw things at us, like I had eggs thrown at me. People would yell and scream at us and we’d try to find a way to get through campus without having to go through Sproul Hall Plaza, where the demonstrators were. It kind of bothered me, that the hecklers... weren’t even students.

DC: When you say you went to UC Berkeley, do you get a different reaction now than you did then?

DA: Yeah, I think older people who are aware of what happened in the sixties, I think they would joke about Berserkeley, they say, “Oh were you a long-haired hippie back then?” ... The younger people, like some of the students that I work with now and teach now, they think of Cal as one of the top educational institutions in the country.

DC: Can you share your decision-making process and what sort of options you saw as available to you in the face of the draft?

DA: I think there was always that threat of being drafted. ... Nobody wanted to go to Vietnam, especially as an enlisted man in the Marine Corps and so if you got drafted into the army … there was the chance you could go to Vietnam and you’d be fighting in that war and a lot of people didn’t come back from that war. Most of us knew that there were ROTC programs … and so many of us decided that was the best way to go.

DC: On campus, in terms of protesters and hippies, would you say that was one and the same group of people, or were they different groups?

DA: It was a mixed group, you had all kinds of people involved in the demonstrations. It feels like, from my point of view, whenever you went to Sproul Hall steps, where most of the speeches and demonstrations were, the majority of people who were actively involved in the demonstrations were the hippie types.

Tags: