"I still think of Vietnam as one of the defining political events of my life," says Johnson, a former T.V. news producer about to launch a second career. "Being at Harvard during those years and feeling that the institution had contributed so many strategists to the war gave it an immediacy I might not have felt in a more detached campus. I was deeply angry then; I find those wells of anger still tappable in discussions of the war now."

Other classmates--sharing thoughts on our class' new e-mail discussion list--agree.

"All in all, I remember our years in college as a very dark time," writes Gregg Kilday '71, a writer for Entertainment Weekly. "The war was always hanging over our heads. There was always some moral issue that had to be wrestled with, debated, resolved...I suspect we were cheated out of some of our youth--which is actually a small complaint when so many others in our generation lost their lives."

And Thomas McLeod '71, now a hospice chaplain, comments, "For me it was a loss of innocence which probably would have come one way or another. But to have it shredded away by a bloody inane immoral political game-war was an especially rude loss of innocence."

I don't know. For me, despite the memories tinged with blood, college was not so much a dark time as an exhilarating one. I loved the sense that we could--we must--make a difference, and I miss it.

In a way, I think I was glad to lose my innocence. I was glad to be in a cyclone, on the cusp of something new.

How new was it really? That's harder to answer.

Miles Kahler '71, a professor of international relations at the University of California at San Diego, posted an unsettling question on our class' e-mail list: "If we had arrived at Harvard/Radcliffe in 1957 or 1977 with exactly the same families and previous education, how different would we be today?"

In many ways--as anyone studying the Class of 1971's 25th Anniversary Report would have to conclude--the answer is not very different at all. Most of us are living the prosperous, satisfied lives expected of Harvard grads.

In other ways, particularly for women, the difference was profound. Feminism really Was a cyclone. It hit Radcliffe (and later Harvard) some-where around our junior year. Women 10 years older went through college without it; women 10 years younger never doubted it. But we, the women of '71, we were tossed up in the air by the cyclone, and some of us never came down.

I'm glad we went to college when we did. We were in at some beginnings, feminism, the "sexual revolution," environmentalism, gay liberation just around the corner--and at least one ending.

As Kahler points out, I think we took our country's economic prosperity for granted. We had lots of plans, or no plans at all, on graduation day, but I don't remember anyone worrying about money. Our goals were higher, broader, shinier (and oh yes, we were young).

It seemed so full of promise, this Harvard College, this Radcliffe College. We didn't know--how could we know?--which promises would be kept.

Carol R. Sternhell '71 was managing editor of The Crimson in 1970. She is currently a professor of journalism at New York University.