MADISON, Wis. - The bricks are still charred in one corner of the Red Gym at the University of Wisconsin here, burned by a bomb hurled by anti-war protesters trying to destroy the offices of the ROTC, or Reserve Officers' Training Corps.
But that was another time and another war.
Today, even on this legendarily radical campus, uniformed ROTC members drill at will and train to become military officers without fear of disdain or worse from what one student newspaper calls "the peace-mongers." ROTC units, which bore the brunt of campus opposition to the Vietnam War a generation ago, now bask in the widespread support for the military and the war in Afghanistan.
"This is one of the top liberal campuses in the country - there are a bunch of hippies out there - but since Sept. 11, we've gotten nothing but support on campus," said Alexandra Vogel, student commander of the Navy ROTC unit here. "We get thumbs-up and cars honking at us when we're in uniform."
At 21, Vogel hadn't been born in January 1970, when protesters firebombed the gym, closing it for a couple of weeks but missing their target - ROTC offices were in the southwest corner of the building rather than the southeast section that was hit.
It was one of a series of attacks on ROTC buildings on college campuses across the country as anti-war students sought to rid their schools of the military's most obvious presence. At Kent State University in Ohio, for example, it was the torching of the ROTC building that prompted officials to call in the Ohio National Guard, members of whom would open fire on protesters and kill four people in May 1970.
And in Madison, the firebombing of the gym similarly was a prelude to a deadlier event - in August of that year, protesters bombed the Army Mathematics Research Center, which they suspected of doing work for the war effort. Again, their bomb - a destructive fertilizer concoction similar to what Timothy J. McVeigh used to strike the federal building in Oklahoma City - missed its target: It killed a young physicist who was working in another section of the building, Sterling Hall, and who opposed the war and the university's support of the Army research.
The fatal bombing took much of the wind out of the peace movement's sails. Since then, Madison has mellowed - even as it retains its leftward tilt.
