Dave Boger never intended to protest anything in college.
Boger, now 74, was studying engineering at Ohio State University from 1967 to 1972 -- the peak of the anti-war protests. He disagreed with the United States' war in Vietnam, but he didn’t get involved in demonstrations.
“My big problems were math problems,” he said.
Then, something happened to a friend that fundamentally changed him.
His buddy Bob, a polio survivor, was walking across the Oval -- a prominent gathering space on the OSU campus where a lot of protest activity took place. He dragged one leg behind him, a lingering effect of the childhood affliction. The school paper later ran a photo of a National Guardsman pointing a rifle with a bayonet a few feet from Bob’s chest.
Just for being in the vicinity of a protest, Bob was arrested and charged with a low-level felony.
Boger, a retired mechanical engineer who now lives in St. Louis, was shocked and angry about the arrest. He knew his friend wasn’t a troublemaker or rabid activist of any sort.
“He was just a regular guy, like the rest of us,” he said.
That arrest was the last straw for Boger. It crystalized his distrust of the government and university administration.
He started going to nightly protests with his roommates. Boger vividly remembers the chants they shouted:
“1, 2, 3, 4
We don’t want your f-ing war
5, 6, 7, 8
F- the Army, f- the state”
He had an old camera and took pictures to document what he saw as state misconduct. He dropped the film at a nearby photo developing store, but when he went to pick up the pictures, the clerk told him the Guard had confiscated all the film dropped at that location.
Boger never saw those photos.
Students occupied the university president’s office. He remembers the Guard using tear gas on students during the day as they changed classes. The chemicals burned his eyes and made him cough uncontrollably. Some students would throw up.
“Everything in your being is going to hell in that moment,” he said. “There’s no escape from it.”
He wasn’t sure if the university, the cops or the Guardsmen really knew what they were trying to accomplish during those days.
“They thought it was crowd control, but all it did was make everyone mad,” he said.
Boger would go out to the nightly protests after finishing his homework. He never got arrested, and he was never in a group that got kettled. Eventually, the university canceled classes for the remainder of the semester, and his father came to take him back to Akron.
Two years later, he was drafted.
Boger spent his time in the Army running experiments in a lab. He never had to go overseas, but he met plenty of soldiers who had, and heard their stories. “The things they did and the things they endured were just terrible,” he said, getting emotional recalling those conversations from more than 50 years ago. He listened to soldiers who had been ordered to extinguish entire villages because someone thought Viet Cong soldiers were in there. He saw a soldier’s arm that had been burned and disfigured by napalm.
“I came out of the Army as someone who absolutely hated war,” Boger said.
When he talks about those days, he keeps drawing parallels to the current war in Gaza: white phosphorus chemical attacks. Entire villages razed. Dehumanization of innocents.
Students at more than 60 colleges around the country are protesting the war in Gaza, but only a handful -- including Washington University -- have made headlines for militaristic crackdowns and dozens of arrests. The heavy-handed approach, painting protesters with a broad brush and responding with harsh punitive force, only deepens the chasm of distrust between students and administrators.
The majority of students are protesting what they see as their institutions’ complicity in the mass killing of tens of thousands of innocent people. They see their actions in the same tradition as students who protested the Vietnam War and apartheid in South Africa.
Of course, there will be those who see the protesting students as misguided, or worse. Social change and unrest have always provoked these responses. But they have support from those who lived through similar struggles in an earlier time.
For his part, Boger has written six letters to President Joe Biden in recent months, asking him to stop funding the war. He’s joined a few pro-Palestinian marches.
As for the friend who inadvertently put him on this path, Bob wasn’t able to get a job right after graduating because of the felony on his record.
Instead, he joined the Peace Corps.