Sterling Hall Web Page and Podcast (review)

When first asked to review this podcast, I did what many reviewers might do: I googled “Sterling Hall bombing.” The first thing that came up was Wikipedia, where the website’s somewhat bland style unexpectedly transported me. This review became a personal journey.

I was in my twenties when the building, located at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was blown up, and I had recently returned from Army duty in the Republic of Vietnam, as the southern half of the country then was called. The Wisconsin bombing seemed like another wave in a sea of craziness in 1970. Working for a civil rights program in St. Louis, I wondered whether the bombing of an Army research facility in a far-off university could in any way help end the war. I didn’t know. I was trying to forget the whole thing. The previous summer Life magazine ran a special issue that showed the American soldiers killed in one typical week: nearly three hundred dead. The editors located photos for each of these young KIAs (Killed in Action’s). They stared from the newsstand like lost brothers. It was particularly stunning to not be in this group, as I easily could have been, on several occasions.

In the spring of 1970, American units invaded nearby Cambodia, which had already received extensive B-52 strikes. I had heard these multi-ton bombs earlier when on assignment up the Mekong River. Like machine guns on Puff the Magic Dragon aircraft (Douglas AC-47s), the sounds of modern war are not easily forgotten. That spring four students at Kent State in Ohio were killed, and some 250 universities were shut down in protesting this expansion of conflict. (An oral history dramatization of the shootings, “May 4^th Voices,” written by David Hassler and presented by the Kent State Wick Poetry Center and the Department of History, was shown at the Cleveland Studio Theatre during the Oral History Association’s annual conference in October 2012. It lasts about an hour and makes great use of many student actors.)

My recent Google search brought back all these memories. With the uproar following Kent State, my then boss suggested I join a new organization, Veterans for Peace, which locally soon became a chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. I spent a year as an organizer in the Midwest, which seemed contrition for letting myself be drafted to fight a war that I did not fully support or understand. Dozens of websites help document an era I would just as soon forget but cannot. I became a little lost in all these sites. That issue of Life lives vividly online. The Summer of Love still revels. The burning of ROTC buildings at Washington University in St. Louis in the spring of 1970, which I witnessed with mixed feelings, also still smolders. Google has lots of forty-year commemorative coverage of the Sterling Hall bombing from local newspapers. Eventually, I tabbed down to the University of Wisconsin Library’s Research Guide, and, after clicking on various buttons to find “Web Resources,” I located the archive’s “Sterling Hall” web page. It is a more quiet, academic setting, just like a library, almost peaceful. This site’s dispassionate stance put me off at first. The war seems far away on this page. By the time of Sterling Hall, more than forty thousand Americans had been killed in the Vietnam War. How many Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Australians, Koreans, and others? This larger historical context is only sketchily inferred.

The focus on the archive’s “Sterling Hall Bombing” web page is appropriately on the Madison campus context. I was first attracted to a thirteen-minute mini-movie, which summarizes the bombing as a whole event and its effects. Narrated by oral historian Troy Reeves, the film uses period photos and short interview segments. Robert Fassnacht, a postdoc researcher, was killed by the 2 a.m. August 24^th explosion; three others suffered...