Forks in the road come along more often for some than others, but everyone makes choices along the way. Some opt to keep everything the same and live their entire lives in the same place they were born. Some never leave the nest, living at home with parents their entire adult lives. Others can’t wait to go see what the rest of the world looks like. The more things we encounter, the more we are affected by the choices we make — and the choices are made for us by others. Some choices change things in ways that from that point forward will never be the same.
Let’s take a look at one case study that has more abrupt changes of direction than a pre-digital-age Ginza parlor Pachinko machine
At the last minute, some star recruit took a better offer from an Ivy, leaving the doctoral program with an extra scholarship. Graduate Student Advisor Dr. Grant Morris decided to offer half scholarships to two applicants who happened to be veterans. One had served three years in the Navy and the other had served four years in the Air Force. The Navy guy was a good choice, because he went on to become a noted professor of Sociology. The Air Force vet was the one Morris took a chance on because he was a real non-achiever with the stats to prove it. His standardized test scores were as high as his GPA was low. One thing that caught Morris’ eye was two gaps in his history that kept the Air Force vet from earning his undergraduate degree until he was 30.
There were nine first-year students in the doctoral program’s class of 1978
Morris took the Air Force veteran under his wing, choosing him as his teaching assistant. With Morris’ coaching, the vet was being prepped for a full-time teaching role the very next semester.
What Morris didn’t know
A few weeks after graduating from high school with poor grades, one of the two future applicants entered a probationary program at Georgetown College, not Georgetown University. His parents were paying, so they chose the school because his sister was a sophomore there and could keep an eye on her little brother.
Little brother didn’t recall much about that summer after the vicious and unprovoked attack
He had gone along with a friend to a small nearby town that had just integrated its schools. It was just after dark when his friend parked the car along the curb in the quaint downtown. They hadn’t gone a block before they came upon five youngish males standing on the street corner, the only other people out. One asked him if he had the time, and as he tilted his head down to look, the guy who didn’t know what time it was knocked the time-teller unconscious with a beer bottle to the side of the head. The thugs kicked and beat on him so many times while he was down that he was unconscious for hours after being ambulanced to the hospital. He had non-life-threatening injuries but was laid up for a while and didn’t make it back to school for another five years.
Now he was nineteen and his draft card said 1-A: Available for military service
This designation meant they can come get you and put you in the Army and send you to Vietnam, where many people will shoot you, stab you, and blow you up because they don’t want you in their country. In the two years prior, 343,000 men had been drafted. In the next seven years, another million and a half American men would be conscripted, few of them eager for the experience. Unlike World War II, where there was no student deferment, males enrolled in college were exempt from the draft during the Vietnam War. This gave tens of thousands of students a powerful incentive to stay in school as long as they could (see Animal House for more details).
So he chose four years in the Air Force over three years on a boat or two years in the Army
After taking the oath and having his head shaved in Brooklyn on Friday the 13th*, 1966, he was sent to basic training in Texas. From there it was technical training in Illinois, where upon graduation they put him and a dozen other guys on a bus to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, gave him a mechanic’s toolbox, and pointed at a B-52 bomber covered in ice and snow. He earned his sergeant’s stripes early and became a crew chief, meaning he got a helmet and flight suit, a trip to the altitude chamber at what was then Bunker Hill Air Force Base, and numbingly cold 12-hour training missions.
Three years into his four-year enlistment, the mechanic volunteered for an assignment in Vietnam
Go figure. Many will warn you that volunteering is always a bad idea. In this case, the assignment was to teach English to members of other nations’ Air Forces. He was pleased to be one of two dozen chosen from hundreds of applicants. All students would be South Vietnamese fighter pilots and the brass figured it ought to be flyboys teaching flyboys, so they sent the teachers-to-be to the Department of Defense Language Institute in San Antonio for training. Upon graduating, they were shipped to Travis Air Force Base in Northern California, flown over to Than Son Nhut Air Base from there, and billeted in Saigon’s Chinese district, Cholon.
The teachers landed in Vietnam just days after the Tet Offensive
On Chinese New Year in 1968, 85,000 North Vietnamese soldiers conducted massive attacks on more than 100 of South Vietnam’s cities and outposts, killing thousands. This shocked Americans who had been told all along that the U.S. was laying waste to the enemy. It shocked them even more when they learned the military brass and top government officials had been lying to Americans about Vietnam every time they opened their mouths. The guerrilla war in the jungle was quicksand that swallowed up 168 billion dollars ($1 trillion in 2025 dollars). One out of every 10 Americans who served in Vietnam was a casualty. Of the 2.6 million who served, 58,169 were killed, 304,000 were wounded, and thousands more will never be the same.
Back in the States, a peace movement was growing from protests by a few beatniks and flower children into a social phenomenon so huge that it tore the country apart. The sergeant was discharged close to the time the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four unarmed students and wounded nine more at a peaceful anti-war rally on the Kent State College campus.
As you can easily imagine, there was more than one side to that story
In the end, the Guardsmen who did the shooting were acquitted of “depriving the students of their civil rights” by a jury that concluded that the university’s ineffective policies deserved the blame. The President’s Commission on Campus Unrest was asked to study “the dissent, disorder, and violence breaking out on college and university campuses.” In its report on the findings, the Commission said:
“Even if the guardsmen faced danger, it was not a danger that called for lethal force. The 61 shots by 28 guardsmen certainly cannot be justified. Apparently, no order to fire was given, and there was inadequate fire control discipline on Blanket Hill. The Kent State tragedy must mark the last time that, as a matter of course, loaded rifles are issued to guardsmen confronting student demonstrators.”
English classes were held six days a week for six hours a day in Cholon
The Department of Defense curriculum was astoundingly effective. Within 16 weeks (576 classroom hours), students with no prior English skills were able to speak, read, and write their new language as well as American high school kids. They also knew more about the workings of the Legislative, Judicial, and Executive branches of the U.S. Government than most American citizens.
When the first 24 classes graduated a total of 192 students, everyone was in for a huge surprise
The students of teachers with Southern accents had learned English so well that they also learned Southern dialects. At graduation, they said things like, “Ha-ah, hah ya’ll doin?” to guys with New York accents, who said “Hey, howyadoon, pal? Fuggedabout it, I’m walkin heah.”
The brass solved the problem by assigning students eight different teachers for two weeks each so students learned beyond the dialect the first wave of students had picked up from spending 576 hours in a room listening to only one accent, you betcha.
Morris was also interested in how this applicant led teams of men in difficult circumstances and had later been a dorm counselor during his undergraduate years
His conclusion was that this Vietnam veteran would be a more responsible adult than his younger and less-experienced colleagues fresh from 16 consecutive years of sitting in classrooms. So Morris chose him as his teaching assistant for his first semester. Morris became a mentor who spent the entire semester readying his half-scholarship assistant to take on a paid full-time teaching load the very next semester. This job would be held in conjunction with his active engagement in the classwork, readings, and exams of the Sociology Department’s doctoral program, of course.
Right out of the box, he was assigned his own Introduction to Sociology 101 class
It was held in an auditorium where the seats in a dozen ever-higher curved rows were filled with more than a hundred teenagers. The most effective way to teach large classes is to have the teacher standing behind a rostrum at center stage and orating (you can ask Professor Kingsley). The teacher took a few well-chosen questions here and there, but most of the time, he walked around the stage while he talked.
The (small p) professor used the same textbook as Professor Morris
It was the logical choice, but it was a dull book; too long, poor examples, and with too much detail for an intro course. It would have been a good text for first-year sociology majors, but not for kids passing through on their way to degrees in business, medicine, music, engineering, law, nursing, media, and more. It’s not the time to teach The History of Giants in Sociology, something they care nothing about because it will have no value for them the minute the class is over.
Most freshmen looking to fulfill a graduation requirement by taking a breeze Intro class in human behavior choose sociology or psychology
Both fields develop critical thinking, problem-solving, objectivity, and discipline. Students who had taken intro courses in both recommend sociology, mostly because it’s somewhat easier than psychology. They have other reasons, too. Here are a few random-ish comments that I cherry-picked for their illustrative value:
- Sociology has more concepts, less technical language.
- Psychology has too many terms to memorize.
- Sociology is all about the bigger picture.
- Psychology only tells you facts, sociology changes the way you think.
- Sociology teaches you to expand your world and your way of looking at things. It’s more interesting and more useful.
The Sixties-looking teacher’s second class was in an 8th floor classroom
Two dozen students sat at the old wooden half-desks that every left-hander hates. Instead of a lecture or an overview of the course, the instructor startled the class by telling them that somehow, all of you have been shipwrecked and just washed up on a remote island where no one will ever find you. This, of course, causes many of today’s Young Moderns to break out in hives because like, everyone’s seen shows with that premise. They’ve been raised during an era where network television has featured dozens of shows with similar themes, so they don’t stop to realize that at the time, Gilligan’s Island was the only show on television where a cast was marooned on an island and thereby the only frame of reference for students in 1978.
The teacher asked the class one double-barreled question: “What will you do and how will you go about it?”
This led to lots more questions, like Who makes the final decisions? How will you choose your leader? How about eating – what do you do about food? Where do you take shelter? What were you able to salvage from the ship? He reminded the class that without television crews all over the place, no star bungalows, and no caterer’s tent over there, nobody is going to bring you anything and you don’t get to go home after work, either. It took several sessions to get through this exercise and figure out some of the lessons learned along the way. From there, it was easy for students to talk about things like norms and values, culture and society, and how they affect our everyday business and personal lives.
At the end of the day the teacher asked, “Who kept notes on everything you did today?”
No one had, of course, so they had to start over again next time the class met. A believer in the Socratic method, the sergeant teacher limited his role to asking questions that helped students realize how exhaustingly difficult it is to figure out everything that needs to be done, how to make the best decisions, and how to solve their problems. And that, folks, is how societies are formed.
He went on to teach two more subjects at two more universities on and off until 2014. And then he took up writing.
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* His first full day as a civilian four years later was also a Friday the 13th. Cue the spooky music and let the numerologists have fun with that.
These are the three photos that had the most impact on his attitudes toward the war. How do they make you feel?
Bonus
There’s much more to the Air Force story over at this article from Veteran’s Day, 2020.
Observation skills: How many forks in his road did you count?
