DAVE AIRHART

In the TV spots, a burly recruit scales a sheer cliff face, braving death -- only to be transformed, upon reaching the top, into a steely-eyed, sword-wielding Marine. But on a crisp day in October, college freshman Dave Airhart staged a stunning reversal of such pro-military images. The rugged, twenty-four-year-old Marine -- a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan -- scaled a climbing wall set up by a military recruiter on the campus of Kent State University, only to reveal himself, upon reaching the top, as a determined anti-war activist. The message on the banner he unfurled: "Kent, Ohio for Peace."

Airhart's anti-war drama -- taking place on the same campus where National Guardsmen massacred four students at a Vietnam War protest in 1970 -- became the nation's most-watched struggle over the war. Enraged by the banner, a military recruiter screamed, "Get the fuck off the tower!" and scrambled up the wall after Airhart, forcing the combat vet to ditch his harness and climb down the steel beams on the back side of the wall. Once on solid ground, the anthropology undergraduate was charged with disorderly conduct and threatened with expulsion.

Battling to keep his peers out of the military may seem an unlikely cause for a man who eagerly enlisted in the Marines at age eighteen. But Airhart has seen the horrors of war up close. "I can't imagine many people having a more well-rounded perspective of the war on terror than me," he says. Airhart saw friends killed by friendly fire, unarmed civilians shot for no reason and prisoners abused by his fellow Marines at Guantanamo, where he served as a guard. "I was there four months," he says, "and there wasn't a day that there wasn't some sort of prisoner-beating festivity going on."

After "four miserable years," Airhart received an honorable discharge in 2004. An Akron, Ohio, native, he enrolled at Kent State in large part because of the school's anti-war reputation. On campus, he joined the local branch of the Campus Antiwar Network, a student group with chapters at more than a hundred colleges and universities nationwide. CAN's strategy is simple: Deny the military fresh recruits, and the Pentagon -- already facing a 7,000-troop shortfall -- will be unable to sustain the war. Although federal law requires universities to open their campuses to military recruiters in return for student aid, CAN has succeeded in kicking recruiters out of schools from Seattle to New York. In November, the student group scored a major coup when San Francisco passed a ballot measure barring military recruiters from the city's high school and college campuses -- a move that inspired Bill O'Reilly to invite Al Qaeda to strike the city.

Airhart has made it his personal mission to protect his classmates from recruiters who distort the truth to seduce them into service. "I wish that I could have had someone who had been in the military tell me, 'Hey, your recruiter is full of shit. He gets bonuses for recruiting people, so he'll do whatever it takes to get people to join.' It's like the rock-climbing wall they put up at Kent -- what's that have to do with going to war?"

Airhart himself has received widespread support, including an international petition campaign called "Hands Off Dave." The pressure worked: In November, Kent State did an abrupt about-face, canceling Airhart's disciplinary hearing and dropping all charges against him.

"Dave is drawing attention to the immoral use of fun and games to recruit students," says anti-war leader Cindy Sheehan. "My son, Casey, was recruited out of college. His recruiter promised him the sun and moon to enlist. But he delivered only an early grave."

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