WHEN ROTC WAS last an issue at Harvard, the Class of 1977 was busily finishing eighth grade, no doubt reluctantly putting aside Batman comic books for the rigors of algebra and civics. Also in 1969, the Indochina War entered Year V of massive American involvement; 500,000 GIs roamed the Vietnamese countryside, spreading waste and devastation, while American warplanes pulverized much of the rest of Indochina.

Now, ROTC is again an issue here. Harvard's institutional memory is so short that the outlines of the 1969 struggle, the passions that swirled about during the University Hall occupation and the ensuing strike, are only a bit of folklore to most students. The outcome of this Fall's dispute will perhaps be determined by references to the past, but it will not be to a commonly-shared Harvard past. The vast majority of generally non-political Harvard students--whose voice in whether ROTC should return will be decisive--will cast their allegiance according to how they perceived the character of the American War.

Battle lines are being drawn. A radical group, the New American Movement, small in number but committed, plan a full scale campaign capped with a student referendum that will hopefully again put Harvard on record in firm opposition to the training of military officers here.

Arrayed against the Left is a small but growing Harvard Right, centered around the Young Republican Club, who will also push for a vote, hoping that declining passions in the wake of the American withdrawal from Indochina will restore widespread support for the military's return.

PRESIDENT BOK'S June statement gave the Right an opening not to be ignored. The statement, although filled with weighty language, qualifications and hesitations, clearly marked a turn in Administration policy. Conservative Bill Buckley caught the hint right away: one of his nationally syndicated columns a week after the speech obliquely praised its content, expressing pleasure that Bok, hitherto thought to be a "trendy" person, "might give us back our ROTC."

Bok's hints have let the cat out of the bag, but he seems to be determined to play no further role in the developing controversy. He said in August he has no desire to push for a referendum or a Faculty vote. There seems to be little reason yet to disbelieve him. The Right will apparently have to look beyond Mass Hall for support in the upcoming struggle.

The presently peaceful state of the United States military is probably the Right's strongest suit. While the U.S. Army laid waste to Vietnam and Cambodia, arguments in favor of training Harvard students to join it carried little force. Although the Faculty in 1969 opposed ROTC primarily because its existence violated University autonomy, the students who struck for its abolition were moved more by the carnage in Indochina.

Now the war is over, and perhaps with it, the overpowering sense in most students that the military was engaged in a monstrous criminal venture. Feelings of outrage have been replaced by mild resignation, a feeling that the army won't go away so we might as well learn to live with it. As long as the military is at peace, this argument runs, it is best to acknowledge that the structure of world politics requires the United States to keep a standing army.

Better to try and "liberalize" the military rather than butt one's head against a stone wall trying to destroy it, the argument continues. And what better way to insure that the army refrain from rightist adventures than to put Harvard men in its leadership? Surely, compassionate and humane Ivy Leaguers in uniform will protect us against all those proto-fascist stump-jumping hillbillies from the South and midwestern cow colleges.

This growing sense of the importance of an elitist military leadership is the strongest weapon in the Harvard Right's arsenal. The Republicans and their allies generally supported American intervention in Indochina, but they will probably softpedal that line. If the Right want to win a referendum, if they expect that Harvard's left-liberal masses will vote for something like a non-credit ROTC program, they will have to center its appeals on the allegedly ameliorating effect Harvard men will have on the military.

HOW WILL the Left counter this anticipated appeal? Most likely, the rebuttal will consist of a grim recital of the facts. The ROTC program at Harvard before the Indochina War obviously did nothing to mitigate the horrors of the war. As for the humanity of Harvard men, no statistics exist for the incidence of atrocities among ground troops, but at the top of the command chain the criminal venture was planned by Harvard men--McGeorge Bundy, former dean of the Faculty, Robert MacNamara, a graduate of the Business School, and later Henry A. Kissinger '50, a former professor of Government. Do we want heartless war criminals like Bundy and Kissinger anywhere in the army?

In the end however, memory rather than logic will probably be the decisive factor. If the Indochina horrors are only dimly recollected by current Harvard students--eighth graders at the height of the American intervention--the Right's arguments may carry the day. If, however, America's war crimes have not lost their stark, searing vividness, ROTC will once again be turned down. In some sense, the dispute's outcome hinges on when the Class of '77 stopped reading Batman and started reading about MyLai.