ANTI-PERSONNEL bombs were manufactured in the small towns that dot the rolling dairy country of Wisconsin and Minnesota. Teen-age kids who had to keep their cars moving and farm wives who needed to supplement the family income took jobs in the munitions factories, which were turning out all types of shells and bombs around the clock at the peak of the Vietnam War. Anti-personnel bombs were shipped to Southeast Asia, loaded aboard bombers, and dropped over wide swaths of Vietnamese territory.

Anti-personnel bombs flutter to earth and land silently in darkened rice fields. There they wait sinisterly, like chunks of debris. They explode only at human contact, spewing out hundreds of tiny steel pellets which rip, shred, maim and blind. Anti-personnel bombs do not discriminate between soldiers and old women and small boys walking behind the family water buffalo.

There was a savage logic behind the use of anti-personnel weapons. The men in Washington who planned this war knew that the National Liberation Front and North Vietnam had only limited medical facilities and that widespread injuries, instead of deaths, would severely tax those facilities and weaken the Vietnamese war effort. So they issued crisp orders which set in motion the farm wives and the bomber pilots. And more small boys clutched shredded bodies and blinded eyes and screamed in agony.

A group of Chilean leftists recently chose an improbable phrase to inform the rest of the world that they intend to remain in Chile and fight the military dictatorship instead of seeking asylum abroad. The Miristas, a Chilean New Left of students who left the universities to work with landless peasants and urban workers, said only that they would remain in Chile "to fulfill our obligations." They consciously chose a future of furtive meetings and constant fear which for some of them will surely culminate in electric-shock tortures and machine-gun executions.

When I entered this University in 1970, American bombers were carpeting Vietnam and Salvador Allende had just been elected president of Chile. During the past four years, millions starved in Africa and Bangla Desh, more Vietnamese were dismembered by bombs made in Wisconsin's dairy hills, and the Chilean president who had quickened the hopes of his people was lowered into an unmarked grave in a Santiago cemetary.

At times in the past four years, I have had difficulty reconciling my comfortable presence at Harvard with the continuing sorrow elsewhere on our planet. I was conscious somewhat of my obligations to the rest of the world, yet I read books and wrote articles while some of our brothers and sisters screamed and died. I strained to keep up my connections with the world outside Harvard; I returned to my Chicago neighborhood to organize with the people I had left behind and to distill some common meaning from the diverging patterns of our lives. Yet I still could not shake the sense that I had exiled myself from my responsibilities. In fact, some of the clearest memories I have of the past four years--being locked in a narrow jail cell with 50 other people after the antiwar demonstrations at the 1972 Republican Convention or walking down Brooklyn streets with a green-eyed woman--have nothing to do with Harvard.

I expressed some of my ambivalence as a hatred for Harvard, an institution I saw as a grim and sinister counterfeit of liberal values. Henry A. Kissinger '50 helped plan the policies which brought more long years of war to Indochina. There is no getting around it; the man should be tried as a war criminal in the name of every blind and dead little boy and girl in all of Vietnam and Cambodia. Harvard held Kissinger's chair in the Government Department open for him even as Indochina glowed with burning napalm fire; this University's values had retreated so far into the grey twilight of relativism that the values meant nothing.

I HAVE come around to a different view of Harvard, although my feelings regarding Kissinger can never change. There are men and women here, I realize, who live an alternate view of the purpose of a university. These people study American foreign policy or Vietnamese culture not because they wish to plan aggressive war or destroy Vietnam, but because they seek to push outward the frontiers of knowledge and enable people everywhere to grapple a bit better with the problems which confound us all.

The tyrants who rule the world and brutalize its people thrive on ignorance, doubt and suspicion. Truth is radical; it works like water gently seeping, eating away at the structures of oppression. I no longer think of a university as necessarily a staging ground for the Kissingers; I think the Kissingers pervert the meaning of a university. My disgust for Harvard is no longer so general. It is directed at the Kissingers and the Bundys and the McNamaras and their apologists who murder and lie and then smugly smirk behind the liberal values they betray.

Harvard does not measure up to this ideal conception of a university but some people here do, people who serve truth and thereby fulfill their obligations to the rest of the world. Some are my friends, some I know only vaguely. Some have been teachers and some students. I could not name all of them, but one man, Alexander B. Woodside, associate professor of History, serves as a good example. I hardly know Professor Woodside; I took his course on Vietnam and I asked him occasionally for explanations about Indochina developments. But his quiet dedication to his craft has impressed me, and those of us who have gained from him an increasing awe for Vietnam and its history are thankful. This University should belong to the people like Professor Woodside, and we are fortunate that they are around in its quiet corners.

Just as there is a better side of Harvard, so too is there cause for optimism in a world filled with visible evil. There has been plenty of destruction and hatred in the world in recent years, but there have also been uncounted acts of love and compassion and the unrelenting pursuit of justice. It is almost as if the hate calls forth the love and terror the resistance, as if oppression awakens in people their obligations to each other. The Chilean revolution, the Vietnamese resistance and the American presidential campaign of George McGovern are all different sides of a common thirst for justice.

IN CHILE, Salvador Allende worked his entire life for his countrymen--for the workers who had never had a vacation, never been to the seashore even though Chile is but 60 miles wide, and for the peasants who starved without land in the shadow of the great estates. A new world dawned in Chile as scorned and ignored people began to join hands and say, look, we matter--we matter to each other and to our common future. The factories became their factories, managed by committees of workers they elected. Many of the great rural estates were broken up and divided among the poorer peasants, who got back land stolen from their ancestors. And children in the industrial slums whose minds were stunted by malnutrition drank milk for the first time.

On September 3, 1973 almost two million Chileans, about one-fourth of the nation's population, marched in a giant revolutionary celebration through Santiago and waved at the modest looking man on the reviewing stand. One week later, he gave his life not because he was their patron but because he was their brother. It is not only that the United States may have been directly involved in the coup that concerns us. Chile matters to us primarily because a just revolution was ended and many good people were murdered. Even as we mourn their deaths, we draw renewed courage from the examples of their lives.

Vietnam, in recent years a continual example of the brutality in the world, is another shining reminder of the alternatives. None of the American onslaught--the heavy bombs and the anti-personnel bombs and the napalm and the bullets and the prisons--could break the spirit of the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese liberation forces are peasants who are starving without land, and rural school-teachers who cannot teach hungry students and urban intellectuals who cannot accept oppression. My favorite high school teachers, the ones who always had extra time for students, would no doubt have been members of the NLF had they lived in Vietnam.

Contrast, for instance, the two 1973 winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. Le Duc Tho, the North Vietnamese Politburo member, has devoted his life to his people; he spent 10 of his 62 years in colonial jails for resistance activities. Henry Kissinger seeks only a world of stability which excludes revolutionary change, and he has bombed little children in pursuit of his goal. Le Duc Tho refused his half of the prize, explaining that the war had not ended. Kissinger sent one of his subordinates to fetch his half.