College students had the option of either enlisting in the military or waiting to be drafted.

"I think most were drafted," says Robert S. Sturgis '44-'47, a former Crimson president. "There was a little bit of a class thing there. Most of the proper Bostonians I knew went out to enlist the day after war was declared."

Others students at the College agreed that the draft loomed over their years there before they joined the war effort.

"People were being drafted left and right," says MacPherson, who was already in Army ROTC so that he could be an officer when his number was finally chosen.

One unfortunate consequence of his ROTC membership came during the Harvard-Army football game of 1942.

"When Army came to play Harvard, we had to sit on the other side. We were told to dress up in our uniforms, parade around and all the time we were Harvard students," MacPherson recalls with a laugh.

In the winter of 1942-43, MacPherson decided to stop waiting. A recruiter from the Tenth Mountain ski troop came to Kirkland House to encourage Harvard men to volunteer, looking for anyone with either skiing or rock-climbing experience, and MacPherson joined.

"That ski troop had the highest IQ of any troop in the army, because most of them were recruited from college," MacPherson recalls.

MacPherson, who was awarded the Bronze Star during the war, spent most of his two years fighting in Italy, where he was wounded several times, but never sustained an injury more serious than a concussion.

Like MacPherson, other members of the Class of 1946 began to head off to the battlefield. Some even followed the same path he did.

Dee also volunteered for the ski troop that winter. Dee joined with a friend, Courtney A. Crandall '46-'48 with whom he would be together for the next six years, first in the war and then back at Harvard, earning his degree.

"We knew we wanted to get in the service. What intrigued us was that this was an all-volunteer outfit," Dee says.

Dee adds that by 1942 most of the other students were also preparing to fight.

"At least three out of four guys...had either joined the ROTC or the NROTC," Dee says.

Dee and Crandall trained at a camp about 150 miles west of Denver, Dee says, high up in the Rocky Mountains. As Dee tells it, Crandall who was from sunny California, began to regret volunteering for the troop.