COLLEGE STATION, Texas » Rick Perry arrived on the campus of Texas A&M University in the tumultuous fall of 1968, cut his hair short, regulation military style, and donned a uniform. College students across America were rising up against the Vietnam War, but Perry, a member of the Corps of Cadets here, would not be among them.

“There will be no Columbia, no Berkeley here,” the university president, Earl Rudder, declared that fall. When a small band of antiwar protesters took to the steps of the Memorial Student Center, a building dedicated to “Aggies who gave their lives for our country,” young Perry was incensed.

“I don’t want to use the word ‘long-haired hippie types,”’ said John Sharp, a Perry classmate and chancellor of the Texas A&M University system, “but a person who did not look like they fit into A&M said some kind of Jane Fonda-type stuff, and I remember Perry got up in his face pretty quick over that. He took exception to it, shouted the guy down.”

Today Perry, the Texas governor, is running for president in a crowded Republican field as one of just two candidates with military experience. (The other is Ron Paul.) As an Air Force pilot, he flew C-130 cargo planes out of Dyess Air Force Base outside Abilene, about an hour south of the tiny town of Paint Creek, where he grew up.

On the campaign trail, Perry has focused on domestic affairs, pitching himself as the man who can “overhaul Washington.” His Air Force days give a hint of how he might handle another aspect of the presidency, national security. In recent debates, he has emerged as a muscular interventionist, a stance that can be traced, in part, to his military service.

It was an experience that both expanded and narrowed him, taking him to exotic locales while cementing his Texas roots and the traditional, conservative values that have been so central to his political identity. On Air Force missions overseas, he told students at Liberty University this fall, he had his first encounters with “oppressed people” — an experience that sharpened his idea of the United States as a beacon of democracy and helped convince him that Americans “cannot isolate ourselves within our borders.”

Today, the college student who backed the Vietnam War is, at 61, the hawkish presidential candidate. Perry has called President Barack Obama “irresponsible” for ending the Iraq war, urged the overthrow of the Iranian government — he would not rule out a military strike — and suggested he would deploy troops to Mexico to “kill these drug cartels” there.

He has also pledged to reinstate “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the military policy that barred openly gay soldiers.

Vietnam hung as a shadow over Perry’s service. As a young cadet, he mourned A&M graduates killed in battle. But with the war winding down, Perry did not see combat. Instead, he carried people and supplies (“trash hauling,” he and his buddies called it) around the United States, Europe, Asia and Africa.

“I saw the beaches of Rio de Janeiro, the old cities of Europe that existed long before Columbus ever set sail for the Americas, and the sands of the Persian Gulf, occupied by Bedouins who seemed stuck in a previous century,” Perry wrote in “On My Honor,” his book about the values of the Boy Scouts.

Yet Perry’s world travels did not stir any longing for a life on the road. Rather, he felt “a growing sensation of homesickness,” he wrote. When stationed in Abilene, he lived in a little house he had fixed up out in the country. His fellow pilots remember him more for the cookouts and hunting trips he organized than for any zest to see the world.

“He barely left home, and while he moved around the world it was in the military bubble,” said Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas who has followed Perry’s career. “My sense of it is that it insulated him, as opposed to broadening his perspective.”

Perry declined to be interviewed for this article, and his campaign has declined to release his military records, although it provided The New York Times part of one performance evaluation, dated September 1976, citing him as an “outstanding young officer.” On the presidential campaign trail, Perry has invoked his status as a veteran only briefly, mostly to contrast himself with Obama, who did not serve. But as governor, Perry did release an Air Force publicity photo, a glamour shot taken during his pilot training. In it, he wears a jumpsuit, aviator glasses and a faraway look as he leans against a sleek T-38 supersonic jet trainer — a plane that bears no resemblance to the bulky cargo jets he eventually flew.

As a boy in Paint Creek — a town with no stoplight, no grocery store and a 13-member high school graduating class — Rick Perry dreamed of doing two things. One was becoming an Aggie — a student at A&M. The other was learning to fly.

“We grew up watching those crop-dusters fly in and out,” said Jim Bob Mickler, a friend who now works for a state agency that provides low-interest loans to veterans. “The more affluent men in our county had their own private planes, and if you had your own plane, you were really something.”

The two men Perry most admired — his father and Gene Overton, his scoutmaster — had both served in World War II. Overton, a 1931 A&M graduate, often took his scout troop to College Station for football weekends.

“It was all male, very military,” said Overton’s son, Wallar. “Rick fell in love with the corps.”

Perry arrived, at 18, hoping to become a veterinarian. He collected poor grades (a transcript widely circulated on the Internet is rife with C’s and D’s, with an A in “world military systems” ) and acquired a reputation as a prankster. (He once put live chickens in a classmate’s closet and left them there over Christmas break.)

But he also endured a demanding corps regimen. Cadets woke before dawn to a whistle; they marched in formation to the chow hall for breakfast. Freshmen were called “fish,” as in “Fish Perry,” and were expected to obey upperclassmen.

He graduated in 1972, finished pilot training in February 1974 and was assigned to the 772nd Tactical Airlift Squadron at Dyess, whose duties included two-month overseas rotations at a Royal Air Force station in Mildenhall, England, and Rhein-Main Air Base near Frankfurt, Germany. His missions included a 1974 State Department drought relief effort in Mali, Mauritania and Chad, and two years later, earthquake relief in Guatemala.

“For the first time in my life I met oppressed people who didn’t take freedom for granted because it didn’t exist where they lived,” Perry told the Liberty students. “I saw rulers treat people like subjects.”

The Air Force, faced with a glut of pilots in the aftermath of the war, offered some early exits. Perry accepted. He was, he wrote in his book, “yearning for new opportunities at home.” In February 1977, he retired as a captain and returned to Paint Creek to farm.

He was days shy of his 27th birthday and not much changed by his years away. He seemed more mature, his hometown friends say, and more appreciative of the United States. But at heart, his old friend Mickler said, he was still “just a good old West Texas boy.”

© 2011 The New York Times Company