As the March sun’s feeble rays attempt to warm the chill wind left over from winter, discerning coeds, ever quick to observe new fashion trends, have noticed an abrupt shift in “the” color indicated by style as “what is being worn this season.”
The pastel hues of coed sweaters have replaced khaki as the dominant, most popular shade.
Yes, the soldiers have gone, most of them, and the rest will be on their way. At first it seemed strange to walk across a campus that was a cross between an army camp and a military school. It seemed strange to scurry out of the way of oncoming platoons, and to leap off the path and onto the grass when an unexpected “To the left flank, HARCH” caught us unaware. The blare of bugles and the shouted commands of platoon sergeants and corporals disturbed the slumbering air of our quiet campus. The way our soldier classmates suddenly exploded from the ivy-sheltered halls at each 10-to bell was rather startling. Shoving our way into the Co-op for a between-class Coke and smoke was almost impossible.
The whole campus was different and strange. We weren’t sure if we were in a dream or a nightmare, but we knew our familiar campus as utterly changed as a dream world seems to someone who is sleeping. The camp has become a campus again. To be sure, there are a few engineers and area and language students around, and the air corps will be with us till May, but it’s predominantly a civilian campus, just the same.
But — we’re just never satisfied — the campus seems just as strange without the soldiers as it did at first with them. We miss them, our khaki-clad friends. Because after we got used to seeing so many uniforms, we began to look at the faces, and they were the same sorts of faces we had seen on our own former students. Then we realized that these soldier students were not very different from any other college students, and so they were our friends.
We’ll remember lots of things about them. The personal things about the ones we knew, of course, but we’ll also remember things about living in a soldier campus. We’ll remember the sergeant who said “Hup hot HIT har, hup hot HIT har,” and the little southerner who called out, “Lai-uft, raht, lai-uhft; lai-uft, raht, lai-uhft.” We’ll remember the way the columns, from a distance, looked like a giant, khaki-colored centipede. We’ll remember the disconcerting “Eyes right” when a platoon passed a couple of coeds. We’ll remember the Brooklyn, Bronx and Jersey accents. We’ll remember the friendly grins and greetings which came from the ranks.
The ASTU men wrote their final grousings and farewell comments in the last edition of their paper. The air corps men waved bed sheets as a parting salute as the engineers marched through campus, down Willamette Street, and left Eugene and the University of Oregon. And the campus settled back into its familiar routine and quiet serenity, but somehow the old serenity seems rather empty. For they made a place for themselves here, our soldier-friends, and they will be missed.