Vietnam is not free from war, and Nixon's criminal bombing may resume over Cambodia. Yet even to a skeptic, the overall situation in Indochina seems more peaceful today than it has been since America's original escalation in the early sixties. The relentless aerial bombardment of Laos and of both sections of Vietnam for the past decade, highlighted in a perverse way by the savage terror bombing last Christmas, has ended--perhaps for good.

Although the bombing in Cambodia was just as severe, it did not yet have the same immediate impact. Most people know little about the embattled country. Reporting from Cambodia is scanty and shoddy, the outlines of the political dispute there are hazy, and the revolutionary Khmer Rough, to which many Harvard students would be attracted, is still a shadowy and elusive force.

As a consequence, Watergate, which is close to home, has gripped students here as well as the rest of the nation while the more monstrous Nixon crimes go unnoticed. There is no Cambodian Bach Mai Hospital to which one can point as a vivid and burning reminder that that war has not ended.

If the bombing resumes anywhere in Indochina, however, the eerie quiet will be shattered. Eventually, the voices of the screaming children will be heard in Harvard Yard. Protest will slowly mount again, first in the form of picket lines and peaceful demonstrations, then, if the killing continues, the tear-gas and the riot-equipped police and the rocks sailing lazily into the plate glass windows will return to the Square. It may take a long time,but the criminality in Indochina will again be answered in the streets at home.

AS THE STRUGGLE in Vietnam settles into a tenuous peace, we recognize increasingly that it has touched us all profoundly. The first generation of the radicals of the 1960s links its conversion to the early civil rights movement and the Cuban Revolution, but for those of us who abandoned the old ways in the latter part of the decade, Vietnam has been the crucial experience.

Since the Second World War, Americans have been taught to hate aggression and indiscriminate killing. Genocide was never hailed as a virtue, of course, but in the post-Hitler era it has come in for special condemnation. Mass murder, we were told, was the single most abhorrent feature in the programs of both the Nazis and of international Communism. Both systems practiced slaughter and butchery on a mass scale, and that was reason enough for opposing their advances. Even today, the handful of stalwarts who still defend America's entry into Vietnam base their position on the alleged need to prevent the bloodbath that would inevitably follow a Communist takeover.

Increasing numbers of Americans, however, drew the opposite conclusion from the Vietnam war. As the conflict escalated and the body counts from Vietnam continued to mount, students, and others, began to apply this moral imperative against genocide to their own government. Even if the Vietnamese dead were all Communist automatons bent upon subverting liberty, and even if the American cause was initially just, the extent the killing, the mounds of the dead, showed that the U.S. government was pursuing a policy of moral obscenity. No political goals were worth such a toll in lives. Why fight to avert a bloodbath if you create one in the process?

This aversion to mass murder of any sort, which grew with each year of the seemingly endless bombing, napalming and free-fire zones, explains why a growing number of people eventually including a majority of the American population, called for withdrawal from Vietnam. The continuing carnage sickened even those on the moderate right, and the unity against the killing gradually broadened.

Much antiwar sentiment was based solely on this aversion to the killing, but some people, particularly students who had time to ponder such matters, started to search for an explanation for the Vietnamese resistance. In the face of a nearly total onslaught by the greatest military power in the world, why did these people continue fighting? Who were these Vietnamese, and why did they rebuild bridges with their bare hands and go into battle against an enemy that was vastly superior in the weapons of modern War? Why did did they troop down the Ho Chi Minh trail, year after year, to face almost certain annihilation?

We gradually learned that the Vietnamese were fighting for many of the same things Americans had always been taught to cherish--independence, social justice and freedom. As our knowledge of the National Liberation Front and of North Vietnam grew, our political support for their cause expanded simultaneously. A new dimension of hatred for the American government surged up within us. No longer were the actions of the United States criminal merely because they unleashed indiscriminate violence against a smaller nation. Now, we saw those actions as criminal because the destruction was intended to annihilate a people who were striving against almost insuperable odds to achieve some measure of dignity and control over their own lives--ironically, objectives Americans have traditionally championed.

Vietnam became a symbol for us, proof that socialism could work, that people could master their own destiny. The Vietnamese revolutionaries seemed courageous and cooperative, almost superhuman. Socialist men and women stood in the rice field and the high plateaus, calmly firing rifles skyward as American divebombers screamed down to engulf them in flaming destruction. Vietnam showed us that might can never subdue justice, that a people striving together to be free cannot be stopped short of genocide.

So we supported the National Liberation Front. We carried their flags, we applauded their victories, we honored their heroes. Some of us went so far as to see ourselves as fighting for them in the streets of America, a fifth column behind enemy lines. We awaited Vietnam's inevitable victory.

III

FORTUNATELY, the growing supports for the NLF did not force radicals to adopt tactics markedly different from those of liberals who fought the was on loftier, more abstract moral grounds. The goals for both groups was the same: an immediate end to American military involvement in Indochina. The liberals wanted the killing to stop; the radicals wanted the killing to stop and the NLF to win.

The radicals, of course, were always more strenuous in their opposition to the war, but their participation in trashing demonstrations one day did not make it impossible for them to bail out of jail, wash off the tear gas, and join a peaceful rally the next. The antiwar movement was always characterized by several levels of participation: liberal students headed for law school could not avoid a career-crippling arrest by steering clear of militant demonstrations and still contribute meaningfully to ending the was by joining the peaceful waves of people who clogged the streets in quiet and orderly marches.