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Moral Growth. At 6 ft. 4 in., Bun ting has what is called "command pres ence." The son of a Haverford, Pa., real estate man, he was expelled from Penn sylvania's Hill School for "general trou-blemaking," and then, at 17, enlisted in the Marines. After two years, he en rolled at Virginia Military Institute, graduated in 1963 as first captain and third in a class of 1 85. He won a Rhodes scholarship and studied modern British history at Oxford, then settled down to a military career.
It was in Viet Nam, as a plans officer for the riverine force in the Delta, that his attitude began to change. "It was not a matter of seeing a massacre or anything like that," he explains.
"It was a slow, subterranean kind of change: a disgust with the arrogance and unapproachability of the officers, of watching men whose moral growth stopped at the age of twelve. I concluded that we had reached the point that whatever gains we could possibly make, there would never be enough to make up for the suffering we were inflicting."
Such opinions made him increasingly uncomfortable in the military. Some times he amuses himself at parties by playing a truculent young Patton ("If we could just blow out those goddamn dikes up North"). Privately his conversation runs to Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robert Browning. The night the B-52s started bombing Hanoi and Hai phong, Bunting said: "Can we react any more? I don't know. But this makes me physically sick." · Lance Morrow