Quality dope. Asian women. Plastique affixed to the undercarriage of my jeep.

Instead, this newspaper asked me to recall the agonizing, tumultuous, conscience-wrenching year of 1968. Because I entered the military smack in the middle of it.

Author Mark Kurlansky dubbed 1968 "The Year That Rocked the World." Extraordinary events occurred at a dizzying frequency and almost everyone seemed personally touched by them.

But it wasn't simply the year that rocked the world or the year of global youth rebellion or the year America turned against the war in Vietnam. It wasn't just the year that bras, happily, were burned at the Miss America pageant.

It was the year the world got small.

I entered 1968 anxious to put the life of a commuter college student behind me and to experience the exploding world order. (Asked recently to name my most memorable college experience, I couldn't come up with one. A colleague commented later, "You should have said, 'Finding a parking space.' ")

As I rounded the turn toward graduation, there was the Tet Offensive and mounting pressure on the freedom-hungry Czechs and the murder of Dr. King. One hundred and twenty cities erupted. Bobby was lost, too.

In my little world, there was the compelling need to make a personal choice. There was the draft, but there also were socially acceptable workarounds for members of the privileged class.

I picked the Army.

Writer Kurlansky gave a nod in his so-so book, "1968," to graffiti spotted in the stairwell of a Paris school. It read, "To be free in 1968 is to take part."

Maybe that's the best to be said for the year. I took part.

I graduated college and signed my soft ass over to the U.S. Army at the armed forces recruiting station on Broad Street because it was the Army guy who was closest to the front door. I boarded a bus to Fort Dix.

My decision to volunteer was not a heroic one and it certainly wasn't an ideological one.

Today, I'd say this act was driven by one part fairness, since so many others could not escape the military; another part arrogance - I had read all the works of Bernard Fall, the great chronicler of the French Indochinese War, after all; and eight parts curiosity. There is a reason why a buckin' bronc rider is tattooed on my right shoulder.

I arrived at basic training at midnight on an oddly chilly night in July. There I became the ward of a black top sergeant named Brown, whose mercilessness was without limit and whose mask never, ever cracked. He taught me rules of survival I have relied upon ever since.

He taught me just how far you could go on sheer will. In my case, the answer happened to be 20 miles on a broken leg.

And there was another simple lesson. In-country, it would be all about mutuality and nothing about beliefs or politics. You cover me and I'll cover you.

In all those weeks of training, Bernard Fall never came up.

Violence enveloped the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Nixon designed a strategy to seize the American South for the GOP. Russian tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. Almost none of this registered with my comrades and me during the rear end of 1968, just as little of what happened back in the world would matter to us in Vietnam in 1969 and 1970.

One thing clicked, and - 40 years gone - it still does.

The best and the brightest can get you into a mess. The Sergeant Browns can get you out. *

Zack Stalberg is president and CEO of the government watchdog group Committee of Seventy. He is a former editor of the Daily News.