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How Ehrhart Was Viewed as a Student Essay examples

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In the fall of 1969, Ehrhart attended Swarthmore College at the age of twenty-one. Also during this time the student body of Swarthmore College “were middle class, academically paranoid, politically aware, and the students were antiwar” (Ehrhart 7). This proposed a problem for Ehrhart because during the spring of 1968, while Ehrhart was still over seas, the college had asked for a picture of him in his Marine uniform. Ehrhart realized that after he sent the photo, it would be used for the school’s Freshman booklet while all the commotion in school existed. He spent most of his days alone to avoid publicity and to keep a “low profile”. By October, however, the reporter for the campus newspaper Phoenix asked if he could interview …show more content…

One might question why Ehrhart would even would agree to put his story in the school newspaper when his objective was to live a normal life and remain anonymous from the student body. Ehrhart mentions that “Vietnam veterans weren’t exactly the most popular kids on the block” (Ehrhart 7). That statement contradicts Ehrhart because he is a celebrity and he planned to live a normal life in college. In fact, Ehrhart wanted to live such a normal life that he wasn’t worried about the Freshman photo of him in the Marine uniform because Ehrhart’s appearance was different the first day of college. Ehrhart said, “fortunately, I didn’t look like that anymore, so a lot of people hadn’t yet figured out who this guy Ehrhart was” (Ehrhart 7). Ehrhart clearly wanted to start a new chapter in his life. As a human being and a scholar, Ehrhart has a right to attend college and live a normal life as he intended to do. The fact that Ehrhart had to really stress over his celebrity is ridiculous. The war played a huge part of Ehrhart’s wanting to remain anonymous during his time in school because he just wanted to erase the past and focus on the present. In fact, Ehrhart mentions some of the trauma that he went through and in his newspaper article it says that nothing else seems as hard as the war. Ehrhart read his section in the paper which stated, “Because

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