Ronald A. Brown ’68
Dartmouth College Oral History Program
Dartmouth Vietnam Project
August 10 and 15, 2017
Transcribed by Mim Eisenberg/WordCraft
[Transcriber's note: The audio is quite compromised; namely, there is a persistent echo throughout, Mr. Brown’s voice is often muffled, Ms. Stern’s voice is often distorted, and there are moments of static and times when the call from Hanover to Phuket, Thailand, drops.]
STERN: This is Samantha [M.] Stern. It is August 10th, 2017, and I am in Rauner Special Collections Library in Hanover, New Hampshire, at Dartmouth College, speaking to Mr. Ronald [A.] Brown, Dartmouth alumni of Class of 1968, who is now in Phuket, Thailand.
So thank you so much for your willingness to speak with us, Mr. Brown. If it’s okay with you, I’d love to start with some bibliographic details, so—sorry, biographical details, so if you wouldn’t mind just telling me where were you born?
BROWN: I was born in New Haven, Connecticut, home of Yale University [chuckles]—
STERN: Indeed.
BROWN: —and obviously a big [unintelligible; 0:43] radical.
STERN: Right. And was your whole upbringing in New Haven, or did you move starting from an early age?
BROWN: No, actually, I was born and reared in New Haven until I went away to school.
STERN: Okay. And what are your parents’ names?
BROWN: I’m sorry?
STERN: What are your parents’ names?
BROWN: Oh, my father was Allen [L,] Brown, and my mother was Helen [Radcliffe] Brown.
STERN: Okay. And what did they do professionally?
BROWN: My father was a mechanical product and design engineer, and my mother was a primary school teacher.
STERN: Okay. And so what did your father do, growing up? Did he work for companies or for himself?
BROWN: He worked for—he worked for a company—I'm trying to remember. The company that I recall growing up—he worked for them for, oh God, I would say at least 15, 20 years, and then he switched to another company, both in New Haven.
STERN: And do you remember what those were?
BROWN: The names of the companies?
STERN: Yeah.
BROWN: Oh. The first one was called Mettler Brothers [Manufacturing], M-e-t-t-l-e-r Brothers, and they were—as I said, they were a mechanical design and product engineering firm stationed in New Haven, Connecticut. One of their main contracts at the time was with the U.S. Defense Department [sic; U.S. Department of Defense], and they did—this [chuckles] will predate you by quite a few years, but in the days that the United States was testing rockets, the United States Navy had a class of rockets, Vanguards, and the firm that my dad worked for actually built vibrators, and the vibrators were designed to duplicate the kinds of vibrations that a rocket would—would experience when it reached outer space, if you will.
STERN: Wow. So the company was clearly—
BROWN: [cross-talk; unintelligible; 3:20].
STERN: —clearly involved in the space race. [Chuckles.]
BROWN: Oh, yeah, yeah. Now, I remember going to the shop a couple of times, and you’d walk into these huge rooms. They had these huge vibrators that were literally 20 feet tall, and I don’t know what the diameter [was], but they were huge. And they worked on those. And then as time progressed, obviously everything improved, and they started making smaller and smaller ones because they were actually using those to test the satellite that would fit on the rockets. It was impressive stuff.
STERN: And so would your dad talk about his work at home?
BROWN: Actually, no. He—I mean, he’d bring it home and sit there with a little slide rule, doing some work, but I never—never really talked to him about anything specific. I don’t know. Home was—home was—the good thing about home was nobody talked about their work. [Chuckles.] We talked about everything else. We talked about your school day and what you did in class and the kinds of things that were just going on generally in life, so in a way, I think those were probably better days than we have today, where people spend too much time talking about work.
STERN: Probably true. So was he allowed to share this information and just chose not to, or was he supposed to keep things confidential?
BROWN: To tell you the truth, you know, I was so young, you know, literally—
STERN: Right.
BROWN: --you know, I recall this up until about age, you know, maybe 11 or 12, so he never—I don’t think there was any kind of national security clearance or anything that was required for the work.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: Yeah. And I don’t think there was anything classified [chuckles] about [unintelligible; 5:27]. Now, I think he was just happy to come home. The one—the one thing I do remember: Every day, my mom would make him a martini, and I’ll never forget, he’d—he would come in the door and take off his jacket and tie, and the first thing she’d do was she’d go to the refrigerator—
STERN: [Chuckles.]
BROWN: —and give him his martini. [Chuckles.]
STERN: Did she join him, or no?
BROWN: No, no, she didn’t. [Both chuckle.] Yeah, I don’t think she needed it,—
STERN: And so—
BROWN: —or a roomful of kids is probably less harrowing than what he was doing.
STERN: And so you had mentioned that he worked at two different companies that you remember. Was the first one Mettler Brothers? Did he work there throughout your childhood and then change once—
BROWN: Yeah. My—my recollection is he was at Mettler Brothers until I was—I think I was probably around 14 or 15 years, and then he moved to another company, but I honestly don’t recall the name.
STERN: Okay. And do you know what they were doing, or no?
BROWN: It—it was a similar—it was another engineering firm, but I—I don’t know of anything specific they were working on. Nothing that I’m aware of, nothing along the lines of, you know, the—the satellite related program,—
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: —which is probably far more interesting.
STERN: And so you mentioned that your mom was dealing with a roomful of kids, so how many siblings do you have?
BROWN: I have two younger sisters. One is seven years younger than I; the other one is 12 years younger than I.
STERN: Okay. And what are their names?
BROWN: The middle—the middle one is Yvonne [Brown? 7:26], and the youngest is Michelle [Brown? 7:31].
STERN: Okay. And so were you close, growing up? Obviously there was a big age gap.
BROWN: I—I prob- —in recollection, I would say we were as close as sort of siblings would be, given the age gap, but it was not sort of buddy-buddy. Also, you got to remember, you’re an older boy, and you have two younger sisters, so—but it probably would have been different if I had a younger brother.
STERN: Were you protective of them, or did you play pranks on them?
BROWN: Oh, of course. Of course. I mean, every—every older sibling is going to take advantage of a younger one. [Chuckles.]
STERN: Yup. I’m also an ol- —
BROWN: Pardon?
STERN: Continue, continue. I was just saying I’m also an older sibling.
BROWN: Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I was just saying of course I had my share of—of little—little things that I would do to needle them. You know, that’s the only bad [cross-talk; unintelligible; 8:37].
STERN: Do you remember anything in particular?
BROWN: Anything in particular. Well, my middle sister, I remember, my parents would go out socially, and—and I was old enough at the time. They’d let me babysit, and I used to love to watch the old [The] Twilight Zone with [Rodman E.] “Rod” Serling, which came on on Friday night. And I loved to watch horror movies as well, but I didn’t—I didn’t particularly like doing it by myself, so I’d end up waking up my younger sister and dragged her out—
STERN: [Laughs.]
BROWN: —into the room [laughs] and make her sit there on the couch with me while—at least while I watched them. She ended up going back to sleep, but that was—that was probably the—probably the worst thing I did to her, other than—
STERN: That’s not too bad.
BROWN: —other than the usual teasing. Yeah, yeah.
STERN: And so were you entrusted with a lot of responsibility as the oldest one?
BROWN: Prob- —you know, I—I don’t know relative to what. I think it was common for the oldest child to take care of the younger children. It wasn’t something that was done that regularly. I mean, when my parents went out on a Friday or Saturday night to a social event, you know, it probably would be three or four hours that I would take care of my sisters, but that was it.
STERN: Okay. And so what was your relationship like with your parents?
BROWN: My parents—my relationship with my parents was—was a bit different in that my mom and I were extremely close. We literally talked about everything and anything all the time, and if you ask me what, I couldn’t tell you because whatever came up, we could talk about it.
My dad, on the other hand, was a very quiet, introverted person and didn’t say much, and so my relationship with him was quite—it was quite strained and—and—only in the sense that we didn’t communicate as—as well as I did with my mom. And it wasn’t until after he had passed away that my mom and I had a talk one day, and she told me the story about how my dad had—had come in to her one—come into the bedroom one night after he had heard us—heard my mom and I out talking in the kitchen. I guess I was about 13 or 14. And he said that he—he came in, and he asked her—he said, “How do you talk to him?” And he was really trying to figure out what was the key to the communication that she and I had.
STERN: So he tried.
BROWN: Yeah. Unfortunately, it happened after he had already passed away, and I didn’t know at the time that he was struggling with that, so it was unfortunate that—you know, the opportunity lost, I guess you can say.
STERN: And so was his personality like that? Was he also introverted when it came to speaking with other adults?
BROWN: No, actually—you know, they had their social circle, and he was quite—he was quite active in that, and he had a lot of—I knew a lot of the family’s—a lot of my parents’ friends since they—around the house [unintelligible; 12:37] we’d go over there, so I got to meet quite a few of them. And, no, it was really funny seeing him around his—his own—if you will, his own age group because he was entirely, you know, animated and talking, laughing. And I—I realized as I looked back, that I think the difficulties that he had with me was the difficulties he had with his father, as my grandfather was a very stern man, and I could—even though I was very young when he passed away, I could—you know, you could tell your granddad was a strict disciplinarian. I got the impression that he—he was pretty strict with my—my dad’s siblings. So that may have been [unintelligible; 13:39]. He felt—he felt [unintelligible; 13:40].
STERN: I’m sorry, you’re getting a little bit cut off. Can you hear me as well?
BROWN: Oh, sorry, yeah. No, I can hear you fine. Is that better?
STERN: That’s much—much better.
BROWN: Oh, sorry.
STERN: Would you mind repeating, sorry, that last part about your grandfather?
BROWN: Oh, I was just saying that my grandfather, as I recall, was a very stern, very disciplined person, and I could see how it might have been that the relationship that he had with my dad was one that probably didn’t entail a whole lot of communication, either.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: And that may have been why it was difficult for my dad to find a way to communicate with me.
STERN: And so were your grandparents around, growing up? This was your dad’s father. Did you know your grandmother on your dad’s side and your grandparents on your mom’s side?
BROWN: Oh, yeah. My—on my father’s side, my grandparents were originally from Virginia, and they—when they were retired, they were living in Atlantic City, New Jersey. So the kids would spend the summer with them every summer, and I did that until—I guess until we were about 11 or 12. Then my grandfather passed away when I was—when I was 13 or 14. And then my grandmother, my dad’s mother actually came to New Haven and lived with us for, oh God, I don’t even know, because I—I had by then gone away to school.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: But anyway, she lived with us for a number of years until she passed away. She was—she was in her 90s, probably about 94, 95.
STERN: Wow.
BROWN: Yeah.
STERN: And so—
BROWN: My—
STERN: No, please continue.
BROWN: Oh. I was going to say on my mother’s side, I never knew my maternal grandmother because she died when my mom was only 18, and my grandfather on my mother’s side remarried, so I knew—I knew both him and my step-grandmother, if you will. But she died when I was about 10, 10 or 11 years old, so—
STERN: And where did they live?
BROWN: They lived in—they lived in New Haven, actually, New Haven, Connecticut.
STERN: And so had your parents—your mom had grown up in New Haven as well?
BROWN: Yeah, my mom was born in New Haven and spent her whole life in New Haven until later on, after my dad died,—
STERN: And do you know—
BROWN: —and she remarried—
STERN: How did your parents meet?
BROWN: Sorry?
STERN: How did your parents meet?
BROWN: You know, I’m not sure all the specifics, but I do know that my dad had initially dated one of my mom’s older sisters. [Chuckles.]
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: I don't know—I don’t know all the details. They never went into it. They just said that he had—he had dated one of my aunts and then, for some reason, whatever, decided he liked my mother better, so they started dating.
STERN: [Chuckles.] Okay.
BROWN: And it was right around the time off World War II, so he ended up going in the [U.S.] Army, and then they communicated throughout the time he was in the service.
STERN: And did your dad ever talk to you about what he did in the Army?
BROWN: He was a combat engineer and never—never really talked specifically about what he did. I mean, combat engineers—they build bridges, repair bridges and they do all the heavy lifting, if you will, for transportation of Army vehicles and supplies and things like that. But I do remember that he was—he landed—I remember his first overseas posting, he went through Sicily and then up through Italy and Germany and France right up, you know, till the end of the war, so he saw quite a bit of the European theater after [the Normandy landings on] D-Day.
STERN: And do you know if he was drafted or had enlisted?
BROWN: No, he was drafted. He was drafted. And—and contrary to what a lot of people wanted to believe about World War II, even though, you know, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and everybody wanted to believe that every able-bodied man and woman raise they hand and said, “I’m ready to go.” I [sic] really wasn’t like that in World War II. I mean, a lot of people did volunteer, but they were substantial numbers of people who got drafted.
STERN: Right.
BROWN: And my dad was—my dad was a draftee. At any rate, he and I had that conversation once because I had always been under the impression that every—every able-bodied person had volunteered to go in the Army and fight the Japanese and the Italian [sic] and the Germans, but my dad said, “No, I was drafted.” [Chuckles.]
STERN: And so—
BROWN: Yeah, it was—it was interesting.
STERN: And so where had your dad grown up?
BROWN: He—he grew up in—in Virginia, outside Richmond.
STERN: And I assume your parents had met in New Haven?
BROWN: They met in New Haven. I actually don’t know what brought my dad from—from Virginia up to New Haven, actually.
STERN: All right!
BROWN: Because—yeah, I mean, it’s funny. It’s something that we never—at least the topic never came up, and I—to this day, I have no idea how. But I knew after he graduated high school, he ended up coming north to work, and his first job was at the Winchester rifle arms [sic; Winchester Repeating Arms Company] factory in New Haven. And he was a machinist. And when the war broke out, he got drafted. He then went into the military and was an engineer, or in engineering, and decided he liked that, and so when he came out of the Army, he went to New York University, NYU, on the G.I. Bill.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: And he got his undergraduate and his master’s degree in engineering from there.
STERN: And did your mom attend university?
BROWN: My mom attended a local state teachers’ college, New Haven. I don’t think it exists anymore. I think the name is Southern Connecticut State College [sic; University] now.
STERN: Okay.
And so I just want to go back for a moment. You had said that you spent your summers with your dad’s parents in Atlantic City. Can you talk a bit about that?
BROWN: Right. I don’t know. [Chuckles.] What do you want to know? It was—
STERN: So did have cousins who would also go?
BROWN: Oh, yeah, yeah. My—one of my—my father’s youngest sister lived in Atlantic City as well with her husband, and they had—they had five kids [chuckles], and so when—yeah, when we got down to New Jersey it was always a—a good time because all the cousins were—all the cousins were around, and we’d go out to the beach on a regular basis, and, yeah, we had good times, good times. Two of them were close to my age—a sister was—I think Lisa was probably about a year younger than I, and then her next brother, Clyde, was probably about two years younger than I. And so he was—he was sort of the surrogate little brother that I didn’t have.
STERN: And were there other siblings, other cousins?
BROWN: There were—well, in that family there were—there were two more boys and a girl, but they were a bit—a bit younger, so not as much time spent with them. But not in Atlantic City. In New Haven there was—one of my—my mom’s youngest brother lived in New Haven as well. And he had—he actually had seven kids.
STERN: Wow.
BROWN: Yeah, well, he had—he had five girls, and he really wanted a son, and [chuckles] he was dedicated, and finally—finally, on the sixth try they had a son.
STERN: And was the seventh a girl or another son?
BROWN: No, no, the sixth was the son. But then they didn’t stop and ended up having a seventh, and it turned out another girl, so I think he decided it was time to quit.
STERN: [Chuckles.] Okay.
BROWN: But yeah. But they lived in New Haven as well, and my—the eldest of the cousins there was about a year younger than I. And then it just sort of worked its way down, literally at two-year intervals, pretty much.
STERN: Okay. And so would your mom or dad go with you to Atlantic City for the summers, or did you just go and spend them with your grandparents alone with your siblings?
BROWN: Yeah, no, this was—this was the way my parents were able to spend some time together, so they’d send the kids down, and we’d go down for about a month. I don’t recall longer than that, but we would definitely go down for at least a month and stay with the grandparents. And then—I can’t remember when it started, but I remember going to summer camp every summer from the time I was about seven or eight years old as well, so that was another month that was—that was spent in New Haven, or [unintelligible; 24:54].
STERN: So was that a sleep-away camp?
BROWN: No, it was a daily—it was a day camp.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: It was a day camp, yeah.
STERN: And so what about during the year? What did you like to do for leisure, growing up? What did your parents do leisurely?
BROWN: Ah! You mean other than school? [Chuckles.]
STERN: Other than school.
BROWN: Yeah, other than school. Back then, we—you know, school—we’d go to school from 8 to 3 in the afternoon. You’d come home, you’d do your homework for a couple, three hours. Then if your parents were home, it was time to eat dinner, and then after dinner, if you had any more homework, you did that, and then to bed.
The weekend—the weekend you spent outside pretty much all day, every day with your buddies—you know, the neighborhood. There were a bunch of—there were a bunch of kids my age, so we used to go out and do the usual thing that kids did back then—you know, go out in the street and play street ball and whiffle ball and football or whatever was—whatever ball was handed, you went out and played. Or you just went to the local park and, you know, met other kids and played out there. But that was—that was Saturday and Sunday, pretty much.
STERN: And so was the neighborhood fairly safe?
BROWN: Oh yeah, yeah. No, the neighborhood was—the neighborhood was—was no problem. You know, back—back then, New Haven—New Haven wasn’t a very big city to begin with. I don’t even know if its population got over 100,000. But even growing up, I don’t—I don’t recall—I was not aware, anyway, of there being any huge crime problem or anything like that. You know, it had the usual—the usual types of crimes that every—every city has, but nothing that made it inordinately unsafe.
You know, parents—back then, parents didn’t worry about their kids being outside playing or, you know, walking—walking home from home, to and from school, going over to the park, which, you know, was a substantial walk away from home, but parents had a—fortunately, at least, had a—I think a much better environment, much safer environment for their children than unfortunately it is now.
STERN: Okay. And so did your parents—you had mentioned your grandfather was a disciplinarian. Would you say your parents had any strict rules?
BROWN: What do you mean strict rules? Well, there were no strict rules, but essentially we were—we were brought up in a—in a family that was very much focused on education and, if you will,—because my mother majored in English when she was in college, we—we used to—we used to get corrected all the time about our English grammar. And even my dad would get corrected by my mom.
STERN: [Chuckles.]
BROWN: But you know, the—the—the key was: Study hard, get good grades, mind your P’s and Q’s. You know, if we sat at the dinner table, we had to learn how to use a knife and fork properly. You didn’t eat with your hands.
STERN: Yeah.
BROWN: Every- —you know, everything was “Yes, sir” and “No, sir,” Yes, ma’am,” No, ma’am.” If you met people out, you extended your hand, shook firmly and said, “Nice to meet you, sir.” You know, these are the things that were I think very common in the ’60s, anyway.
STERN: And so you were taught those—
BROWN: [cross-talk; unintelligible; 29:05] now. Hmm?
STERN: So unfortunately not, but were you taught those from a young age?
BROWN: I’m sorry, were we what?
STERN: Were you taught those manners from when you were really little?
BROWN: I tell you, I remember them from as far back as I can remember, so—[Chuckles.]
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: And, yeah, no, it wasn’t—it wasn’t a question of getting—you know, getting rapped across the knuckles with a ruler or getting spanked or anything like that. I mean, you know, back then you—you—when physical discipline was necessary, you got physical discipline. There—there was not that attitude of “spoil the child, spare the rod,” “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” But we never felt—we were not—we never felt we were being abused or anything like that.
STERN: [Chuckles.]
BROWN: You know, it was just the way—it was the way their parents brought them up, and it’s the way they wanted to—to bring us up, which was—you know, in retrospect, I’m very fortunate and very glad that they did that.
STERN: And do you think that was fairly typical? Did your friends have similar upbringings?
BROWN: Yeah, yeah, most of the—most of the kids that I grew up with were from similar type families, you know, which I guess you’d call middle-class families. Parents were educated, so they were all of a similar type of—of mind-set when it came to disciplining the kids. One—one thing, though, that always stood out was the fact that my mother used to always say—and because she grew up in New Haven and there was a small enough community—a lot of people knew us or knew my parents. I didn’t necessarily know—know them, and there were a couple of times when I did some things that I shouldn’t have done, and my mother caught me out, just that, you know, “Did you—where were you? What were you doing?” And I’m looking at her, and I’m thinking, The fact that she’s asking me—
STERN: You mean she knows?
BROWN: —means she knows the answer. Yeah, yeah, so don’t lie. And sure enough, I tell her what I did, and then she’d say, “You know, I told you that there are people in this city who know you, whom you don’t know.” [Laughter.] “You will never be outside of my supervision, or vision,” if you will. And that stuck with me. That stuck with me. I never did anything again [chuckles] that would have caused her to have to upbraid me.
STERN: Any examples you’d be willing to share that you were called out on?
BROWN: Oh, yeah. We used to go to the—every Saturday, the kids—the kids in the neighborhood would go to the movie theater, which was—I can’t even remember now, but it was a few blocks’ walk. And coming back from the movie theater, there was—there were train tracks, you know, a couple of blocks from where the movie theater was. And I was always told, “Never walk on the train tracks,” because there had been an accident with some local children.
And so this one Saturday, we come out of the movie theater and my buddies are—[Hank? 32:35] says, “Oh, let’s go back on the train tracks.” And I said, “I can’t do that. My mother told me not to.” And, of course, the last thing you can tell a bunch of guys is, “My mother told me not to.” You’re going to get harassed. So I ended up—
STERN: Right.
BROWN: —walking back on the train tracks with them. And literally the next day, a couple of—maybe two days later, my mom looked at me one morning. She said, “How did you get home from the movie theater”—[chuckles]—“on Saturday?” And as soon as she asked the question, like I said, I knew she already had the answer.
STERN: Eyes all over town.
BROWN: Oh, yeah, yeah. It turned out some neighbor had seen me and called her up. [Chuckles.] So I even—when I got into grammar school, I was in the—I was in the fourth grade, and my English teacher, the first day of class, she’s reading the attendance, and she gets to my name, and I say, “Here” And she said, “Are you Helen and Allen Brown’s son?”
STERN: [Chuckles.]
BROWN: And I knew I was in trouble. [Chuckles.]
STERN: So did your mom work at that same school?
BROWN: Well, I—I think this woman was—was older, much older than my mom, but I think they knew each other, either through school or—you know, there was a connection there. But she was well aware of who I was.
And my—my mom’s side of the family, because they grew up in New Haven—there were eight kids. There were four boys and four girls. And so the—the Radcliffe family was fairly well known, and my grandfather, my mother’s father, worked at Yale University as well, so there were—there was a lot of awareness of the Radcliffe kids, if you will. So growing up, I think they—they made a lot of acquaintances, and a lot of people stayed in New Haven, so, you know, as my mom got married and had her own family, there were a lot of people who still remembered—remembered her and her siblings growing up.
STERN: And so could you tell me a little bit about the neighborhood friends you had? Would you say most of your friends were just neighbors, or were they from primary school?
BROWN: Let’s see. The first—we moved—we moved three times. So the first—when I started nursery school, grammar school, there was—there was a kid that I met at school, given—given the ages. And I don’t—I mean, you know, these are just kids in nursery school, so, you know, at that age you—you know, you’re three, four, five years old. You’re—you’re friends with these children, but you—you all sort of outgrow each other, and then you go to grammar school. And I guess my two best friends growing up, at that point, at least, when I started grammar school, were—were just kids I knew from school, as opposed to in the neighborhood.
STERN: Any lifelong friends from that age?
BROWN: You know, I [unintelligible; 36:08]. Funny you asked, because one of the regrets I have when I look back at having grown up in—and I’ve literally been moving my whole life; I’ve just had wanderlust, I guess. But I wasn’t great on writing letters, so as I moved and—and moved from one city to another and moved on in my life, I never kept in touch with—with any of my friends from when I was younger. And I’d run into—I’ve actually run into one or two, three of them within the last 20 years or so, and it’s always been good to sort of reminisce and catch up on things that, as children, if you will, we—we did or didn’t do and didn’t know enough about, so it’s good to sort of go back and rehash that.
When I—when I got into what was sort of middle school, junior high school, again, my friends were mainly the kids that I knew from school. In the immediate neighborhood [unintelligible; 37:27]. There was actually one boy who was my age, so we were friends in the neighborhood, but that was pretty much it. Every- —everyone else you [unintelligible; 37:35] from school.
STERN: And what about—
BROWN: And—
STERN: I’m sorry, what were you saying?
BROWN: Oh, no, I was going to say and then I—then I went away to boarding school when I was 14, and so I sort of lost touch with the kids that I had grown up with and didn’t—you know, didn’t really keep up—didn’t really keep up with them as I—as I got older.
STERN: And so what were your parents’ social circles like? You mentioned that there were a lot of adults who had come through your house.
BROWN: My parents’ friends were from all walks of life, professional: the doctors, lawyers, the judge, accountants, engineers. Pretty much run-of-the gamut. And he—he also belonged to—to a fraternity, so in the fraternity and a couple of other organi- —social organizations he belonged to, there were., you know, a large number of friends that he and my mom used to social with on a—on a regular basis.
STERN: And did you know their whole families, or it was really just the parents?
BROWN: For the most part, it was just the parents. I don’t—to be honest, I don’t recall—I know there were some children in some of the families, but not—either not my age or we just weren’t living in a close enough area that we would see each other on a regular basis, so I—yeah, I would say probably—probably not a whole lot of socializing with—with children of parents’ friends.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: It was just kids that—yeah, kids that I knew from school and other places.
STERN: And so what do you remember from nursery and then grammar school? What were your interests kind of academically?
BROWN: When I was—from—from the time I remembered in grammar school—and, of course, back then, your—your interest is predetermined because there’s a set curriculum that you have to follow,—
STERN: True.
BROWN: —so I—yeah, I pretty much just—whatever was presented, I just jumped into it and tackled it. When I got to—when I got to junior high school, the first sort of difficulty that I found I had was in math, and not—not so much algebra or—algebra was not a problem, but when I—when I started getting into some of the more complex things and—I—I remember my—because my dad was an engineer, obviously, not being good at mathematics was not something that you wanted to do in my household. And [chuckles]—
STERN: Sounds like you had to be - both English and math.
BROWN: As he used to say, “You could have got—you could have got my math genes or your mother’s English genes, and you got your mother’s English genes.”
STERN: [Chuckles.]
BROWN: I—I remember sitting—I remember—I'll never forget this story. I was sitting at dinner table one night, doing—doing my math homework, and I was probably—I was probably in middle school. I was probably about 13. And I remember my dad sitting there, and he was going to help me with—with this homework. And I’ll never forget. The question had to do with: “If Train A leaves the station at, you know, four o’clock and travels 25 miles an hour, and Train B leaves the station 13 minutes later and travels at 40 miles an hour, how long will it take the train to”—you know that one. You know that one.
STERN: Yup, I think I had the same one.
BROWN: Right, right, probably the same train, too.
STERN: Yeah. [Laughs.]
BROWN: But for the life of me, I could not get the answer, and my dad would sit there, and he—he would go over and o- —he’d say, “Well,”—and he—he knew the formula, so “here’s the formula. You plug this in”—and I just could not get it right. And I remember [chuckles] he got so upset he—he literally just stood up and walked off. [Laughter.] And I remember just sitting there feeling—feeling really badly because I—I felt I had let him down because I—I just could not get it. But I knew also at that point in life that mathematics was not going to be one of my subjects.
STERN: Not your strong suit.
BROWN: Yeah. I—I knew that I was not going to be an engineer.
STERN: And so would your parents typically help you with homework?
BROWN: Well, you know, it was—it was funny. Back then, I never found homework to be a problem. You know, I’d—I’d get out of school around three in the afternoon, and I’d come home and do my homework, and—and usually by the time my parents got home my homework was done, so I never had—never had any issues. And, in fact, from—I can’t—well, I—I honestly don’t—don’t remember because we had different grading system in grammar school versus high sc- —junior high school, but in junior high school we got graded on a five-term basis or five-semester basis each year, and for the three years, I had set a goal for myself. I wanted to get straight A’s all three years.
And I was going along really well into my third year, and then in the second—second or third—the winter term, I got ton- —I got a bad case of tonsillitis, and I ended up missing—missing about a week or two of school. I had my tonsils out and all that. And it was right around the time they were just starting algebra. And by the time I got back to class, I was behind those couple of weeks, and I ended up getting a—getting a B in that course. And it—it just—it devastated me at the time because that was the only B I had in the whole three years. And I remember—I remember that was—you know, there are little things when you’re a kid that really are important to you when you set goals.
STERN: Right.
BROWN: And what you have to learn, though, is you’re going to have disappointments. You’re not going to achieve all your goals. And therefore you have to learn to pick yourself up and get another set of goals and move on so—
STERN: But fairly self-motivated.
BROWN: Oh, yeah, yeah. And no one—no one—it’s funny because—unless I just don’t remember, but I honestly don’t remember anybody saying to me, “You need to get straight A’s” or “want you to get straight A’s” or whatever. I just remember deciding that’s what I wanted to do. And so a bit of a disappointment because I didn’t make it.
STERN: And so were—I know you ended up going to a prep school for high school, but were grammar and junior high private schools or public schools?
BROWN: Oh, no, no. They were both public schools.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: And the reason why my parents wanted to send me to private school was in New Haven right about the time I was in the ninth grade, the school districts were re- —redesigned, and where we lived—we lived literally right in the middle of what they were doing so that—at the end of our block—at one end of our block, if they had drawn the school lines—the lines down that, I would have gone to one high school; if they had gone a block over and drawn it on the other side of our—of where we lived, I would have gone to a better school. And literally once that line was drawn, my—my parents said, “There’s no way we’re gonna have you go to this high school.”
So I ended up going to—Yale University had set up a—a foundation to identify what they considered to be academically gifted black kids, minorities, in New Haven, and so they would—they knew [unintelligible; 47;13] and they’d decide whether to take you in or not. It was a very small program. There were maybe only six—six to ten kids in the whole program. A lot of them [unintelligible; 47:26]. And what they did was every—every afternoon after school, we’d go over to the university, and we’d get tutored in—in mathematics or algebra, Latin and English composition. So I did that for—did that for two, three years.
STERN: And that was beginning when?
BROWN: That was seventh, eighth—what would be seventh, eighth and ninth grades.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: Yeah. And then at the end of the time, then the guys in the foundation—they were all Yale students, undergraduate students. The foundation would then go around to different prep schools in New England and identify what school they thought you’d do—you’d do well in [unintelligible; 48:21]. And so that’s how I ended up at—at the school that I ended up at.
STERN: So can you tell me a little bit about The Gunnery school?
BROWN: Yeah. It’s—it’s in Washington, Connecticut, which is in Litchfield County. I don’t know how much you know about Connecticut, but—
STERN: I actually have been to Washington, Connecticut, but—
BROWN: Oh, you’re kidding.
STERN: No.
BROWN: What school?
STERN: So the school I went to—and so I’m from New York, actually, and the school I went to had kind of a nature center/reserve up in Washington.
BROWN: Oh. Which school did you go to?
STERN: Horace Mann [School].
BROWN: Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay. In New York, right?
STERN: Yep. Yeah, in the Bronx.
BROWN: Right. I—matter of fact, I had a law school classmate who went to Horace Mann, I believe.
STERN: What a coincidence!
BROWN: Small world. Yeah, small world. But—yeah, but The Gunnery is—is a boarding school up in Washington, and it’s—it’s a small school as private schools go. It was about 220 students. There were about 200 boarding and I think about 20, 25 day students. And it’s—it’s a four-year school. At the time I went, it was all boys. There had been a school for girls that was nearby called Wykeham [pronounced WICK-um] Rise [School], but that school had closed down approximately four or five years before I got to—got to The Gunnery. And unfortunately [chuckles], they reopened Wykeham Rise after I had left The Gunnery, and they sort of ended up merging the two, so The Gunnery is now a co-ed—co-ed school.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: And it always seemed like I was—I was always a year late—
STERN: [Chuckles.]
BROWN: —because—
STERN: At Dartmouth, too.
BROWN: [cross-talk; unintelligible; 50:26]. Yeah. Dartmouth, I left in ’68 [chuckles], and they started with the co-ed classes I think in ’69.
STERN: And so did the—
BROWN: Pardon?
STERN: Did the Yale Foundation identify the school for you, or did you and your parents have a say in where you were applying?
BROWN: You know, I honestly don’t know how the process worked. All I know is that the guys said, “We’ve identified a school that we think you’d be—you know, you’d be comfortable in.” And they took me up to the interview. I actually went up with the two—two of my tutors, who were from Yale, so I went up to The Gunnery with them and—and had my interview with the headmaster. And—and that was—I wasn’t even—I wasn’t even aware—I’m sure they spoke with my parents, but I’m—I’m—I’m not aware of whether there were any other schools that were under consideration or whether my parents said, “No, we want him closer to home.” I have no idea, because we never talked about it, actually.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: Yeah.
STERN: And did any of the other—did any of the other six to ten students in the program also attend Gunnery?
BROWN: No, not Gunnery. One—one classmate went to [The] Hotchkiss [School], and—as a matter of fact, there were a couple from the program who went to Hotchkiss. Not the same year. Another went to Kent [School], and I believe another went to Taft [School] and I think one may have gone to Johns Hopkins [University], which was—not Johns Hopkins, Hopkins Grammar [School, now Hopkins School], which is a day school in New Haven. But—
STERN: And so what—what was your initial impression of Gunnery?
BROWN: I was scared. I was scared to death, because all of a sudden, you had this little city kid going to a school of very wealthy—and an all-white school. And you—you—you learned very quickly when you’re—when you’re the—well, there was one other—there was another black student there who was a year ahead of me, from Washington, D.C., and so he and I were the only two in a school of—in 220. And it was—it was a bit daunting because I had never been exposed to that kind of an environment before, academically or—or socially—well, socioeconomically, if you will. And so that was a bit—a bit overwhelming.
I mean, to give you an ex- —a sense of it, some of the kids who were at the Gunnery during the three years I was there were the Tisch brothers [P. Robert Tisch and Laurence A. “Larry” Tisch]—you know, the Loews family or the Loews entertainment complex?
STERN: Yeah.
BROWN: All right, the Tisch brothers. [Richard A.] “Dick” Wolf, the creator of SUV [sic; Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, also known as SUV].
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: Yeah. And [Andrew] “Andy” Lack, the chairman of NBC News. [Jonathan S.] “Jon” Linen, who was at The New York Times. [Transcriber's note: Verify.] So there were a lot of heavy- —heavyweights there. And it was—as I said, it was an entirely different world from the one I had grown up with—had grown up in. So it was bad.
STERN: Did you adjust to that environment?
BROWN: Did I adjust? I survived it. I’m not sure—I’m not sure if adjusting is an accurate term. And I’ll try to put that in perspective. When I—when I was—when I was growing up—I grew up in a mixed city. I mean, New Haven, Connecticut, was—was racially integrated, so you were never—you were never outnumbered in the sense that you felt isolated. There were always people around that gave you a sense of—of who you were and—and your place, if you will.
When I got to The Gunnery, that all changed because all of a sudden you’re—you’re this kid who’s from the city. You are poor, poor compared to the very, very wealthy kids, who have an entirely different lifestyle and outlook on life, and yet what was interesting was how quickly you could still make friends. I mean, you know, I never felt that I was isolated or—or nobody—at least no one ever made reference to—to my being—my being black or anything like that. That never came up. And if you will, you were sort of accepted in- —into the school on—on an equal basis with everyone.
The—the funny—the funny thing that did happen, though: My very first day at school, I was walking up to the—the dining room, and one of the teachers, who, it turned out, was the Spanish teacher, Mr. [U. Chester] Ullman, came walking up beside me as I was climbing the steps to the dining hall, and—and he said, “Good morning. How are you?” And I said, “Good morning. How are you?” And he said, “How are you finding the United States?” And I—I looked at him. I said, “Excuse me?” He said, “How are you finding the United States?” And I said, “I live in New Haven.” [Both chuckle.] And he—he—he went—he went completely blank, and he said, “Oh, I’m so sorry.” He said, “I heard we had an exchange student from Africa, and I thought you were he.” I said—I said, “No, New Haven, Connecticut.”
So the funny thing is [recording glitch, unintelligible; 57:12] from Africa [chuckles], so—you know, I don’t know—I don’t know what—what he had seen. We had—we did have a student from Kuwait, so maybe that’s what he confused me with. But—
STERN: It’s pretty unique, having a Kuwaiti-
BROWN: That was—that was—to me, that was very funny. You know, just—
STERN: So you weren’t offended, and you found it funny at the time?
BROWN: Well, yeah. I mean, you know, as a kid, you have a teacher come up to you and he says, “How do you find the United States?” And, you know, “I’m from New Haven.” I mean, it was not—you know, in that particular circumstance, it was not offensive or anything like that. And, again, as I get older in life, I—I look back on some of the things that—that I went through growing up versus what kids are going through now, and—and I get what they would say today as: Oh, that was a micro aggression.
STERN: Very true.
BROWN: My response—yeah, I mean, my response would be, “Get real.”
STERN: Right.
BROWN: Life is not all about intentional, quote, “micro aggressions.” Sometime people make honest mistakes, and you just have to go with it. But it sort of addressed your earlier question about adjusting.
One of the things that is—that is, if you will, necessary in—in the environment I was in when I was growing up and going to school—and—and probably even today, to a certain extent—because you’re minority, you—you accommodate, and you adjust to the situation in which you find yourself. And for me, being in an all-white school, I adjusted to the extent that obviously, because of my academic background, I was already able to compete. You know, I spoke—I spoke the King’s English, You know, I didn’t have any—well, of course, this was in the ‘60s. Nobody had tattoos. Nobody had Afro hairdos. There were no—there were no outward, if you will, symbols of my race other than me. And—and I think that that probably went a long way toward allowing other people to deal with me just on an individual basis. And as I said, there may have been things that were going on under the surface that I never heard about or never knew about, but it was never anything that I was aware of. And the other guy, who was a class ahead of me, had the same—had the same feeling, You know, he never—never experienced anything. So that was—that made it easy, I think, for an adjustment.
But you clearly knew you were different and you were in a different environment, and it wasn’t just a question of race, but it was also a question of socioeconomic status because my parents were not wealthy compared to the other students who were in the—in the school. So it was—yeah, it was an adjustment, but it was easy to make because I had already been exposed to the Yale—the Foundation at Yale that had given me exposure to the academic side, if you will.
STERN: Great.
BROWN: So when I got to Gunnery, it wasn’t—yeah, that turned out not to be a problem [unintelligible; 1:01:09].
STERN: And so what was a typical day like at Gunnery?
BROWN: Well, you got up at—you got up at 6:30, 7. You—you were responsible for keeping your own room clean, so you had to make your bed and do that, and then you got dressed. You had a uniform that you had to wear: the school blazer and—and then you went to breakfast. And breakfast you—and then you went to classes from—from eight o’clock till noon. Then you had lunch. And then you may have—after lunch, you may have a class—a class [unintelligible; 101:52], so after lunch, but normally it was athletics for the rest of the afternoon.
And then after athletics, you come back and get ready to go to dinner. And then after dinner you had study—study hours. And depending on what year you were, the study hours—your curfew, if you will, for going to bed was—was a different time. It was nine o’clock for freshmen, and I believe it was ten o’clock for sophomores and eleven for juniors, and then seniors essentially had no—had no curfew.
So you—you had—you know, as a younger—younger student, you obviously had a short window of time to do all your homework. And I struggled mightily the first half of the first semester, mainly because I had not gotten in public school the same rigorous requirements for—for producing academic work as I did at boarding school. So I—I fell behind very quickly. And I was—I was actually on the—I forget what it was called, but they used to paste outside one of the classrooms after the semester those students who had to go to mandatory study school. Rather than study in your room you had to this huge study hall. And unfortunately, we’d call it the “dummy hour.” And all the kids—all the kids who did not do well for the semester had to go.
And I was so embarrassed when I saw my name on that—on that list that I don’t know what happened or what kicked in, but from that moment until the end of the semester, my—my turnaround was a hundred—well, I was going to say 180 degrees, but all the teachers were trying to [unintelligible; 1:04:01] “What happened? You know, it’s like you just caught fire.”
STERN: Yeah.
BROWN: And essentially, I—I said, “Well, I—I just understood the routine.” It wasn’t that the work—that I didn’t understand the work; I didn’t understand how to prepare and produce. So from then on, I was—I was always ranked at the top—I was always ranked in the top five in my class from that point on.
STERN: Wow. Huge improvement.
BROWN: Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, no. I mean,—and—and it was easy after that. I never had any academic issues, until I had to come up with math again.
STERN: [Chuckles.]
BROWN: Well, it was funny. My senior year, we had a—they didn’t call it as such back then, but it was the equivalent of an AP [advanced placement]—an AP in math. And I had already done Algebra 1, Algebra 2, et cetera, and so senior year, we had a math AP, and I ended up in the math AP, and for the first semester, we did—we did calculus. And then we did geometry. And I—I just could not get—I couldn’t get it at all. I—I was totally flustered by—by the calculus and geometry, to the point where at midterm, at the end of the winter, the teacher—my math teacher just came to me, and he said—he said, “You’re not getting this.” He said, “Do you want to continue, or do you want to go back into the regular section?” And I said, “No, no, no.” I said, “I wanna—I wanna work this through.”
So the spring semester started, and we went on to trigonometry, and I aced it. And—and the teacher [chuckles]—I’ll never forget the teacher saying—he said, “What happened?” He said, “For the life of you, you couldn’t get geometry and calculus,” he said, “but trigonometry, you just took off.” And I said, “I don’t know. I just found it easier.”
But, again, I think it was just a question of being disappointed in performance and then wanting to—to improve it as best you can. But—
STERN: So did you have a favorite subject in high school?
BROWN: Yeah, I loved history, European history. And that’s why when I got to Dartmouth I majored—I majored in history, and an emphasis on—on modern European history. But, yeah, I just—I don’t know what it was or why. I just loved—I loved it. And it—in retrospect, I—I found that majoring in history was actually a big help in law school as well, because—
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: —so much of what you learn in the casebook method involves you going back to study precedent, and at different times in the development of the country, there were certain things happening in a historical sense that affected how judges would decide cases. And without that history background, you—you wouldn’t have a clue why a particular judge may have taken a certain set of facts and decided them the way he did, or she did. And that was—that was something I didn’t know at the time, obviously, when I was taking history, but I was glad I—I had chosen it.
STERN: And so what about social and athletic life at Gunnery? So I think you played football, basketball and baseball? Is that correct?
BROWN: Yeah, yeah.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: We had to—yeah, every student had to have a sport or an athletic—an athletic exercise that they took, so the choices were—we had limited choice back then. Now I understand they’ve expanded it; they’ve actually got quite a few more. But back then—back then it was soccer, football and crew. And in the winter it was wrestling [chuckles]—it was wrestling and basketball. And I don’t even remember if there was another sport in the winter. And then in spring it was baseball, tennis and golf. Now I understand they have lacrosse, they have field hockey—oh, there was hockey in the winter as well. But—but those—those choices—if you will, it was sort of—you didn’t really have a lot of choices, at least from my background. So I—I did the—if you will, the normal football, basketball and baseball endeavors.
STERN: Did you excel in any of those?
BROWN: Not particularly. [Both chuckle.] I had—I had grown up wanting to be a football player, and I imagined myself as being a good football player. And then when I got to school, although I progressed and played varsity and got—got my letter, I never felt that I had—never felt that I had achieved what I—what I believed I was capable of or could have, so it was a bit of a disappointment to me, anyway.
STERN: And were you involved with any other extracurricular activities?
BROWN: We had a chess club. We had a glee club. I wrote for the student newspaper. What else? Those are the only—those are the only three—the only three that I recall off the top of my head.
STERN: And which did you enjoy the most?
BROWN: The chess club was actually—yeah, the chess club I enjoyed because my dad had introduced me to chess when I was younger, so that was—that was a lot of fun.
The glee club was—was good—good fun. We had—we had several concerts and traveled. We did some limited traveling to other schools, but—but it was—it was just—it was good fun, good fun.
STERN: And—
BROWN: And then [cross-talk; unintelligible; 1:10:57].
STERN: What about socially?
BROWN: Oh, well, you’re in boarding school, so you don’t really have a social life. There were—there were school dances, if you will, or mixers, like—those were—for me, those were very uncomfortable, and—and so I didn’t really like them. And—and also they weren’t required, so I didn’t—I didn’t go, quite frankly. And it was—it was interesting because the schools—I don’t know if they do it now in boarding schools, but the boys’ and girls’ schools had dance committees, and the dance committees are usually populated by the most popular students in the—in the school. And so you have—you have a group of five—I think we have five—five guys who were, you know, sort of the Big Men on Campus, who sat down, and they had a counterpart at the other schools, and they would make a list of all the students or all the people who were going to go to the mixer. And they’d rate them. Now, this is something—
STERN: Wow.
BROWN: —probably no one—yeah, no one knew about, but it’s very common. They probably still do it. And you get rated from one to five, and then—then they would pair you. The mixer wasn’t everybody just showing up in a room and mingling. You got paired with someone. So—
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: —they rank you from one to five. You would get paired with your counterpart, whatever that number was. And I just decided I wasn’t going to put myself through that, so—I also wouldn’t have wanted to put another young lady through that—
STERN: [Laughs.]
BROWN: —because, quite frankly, even at that age—no, no, seriously, because at that age, you know, again, you’re still very much aware that you’re—you’re the lone—you’re the only black person in the crowd. And, quite frankly, the young lady who—who gets you is probably, sadly for her, not rated high among her peers. And I—I think—I think she would have already felt badly enough, but, you know, you get paired with the only black guy, back then—back in the ’60s, and probably even now, today, it’s somewhat similar, but I’m sure it was not a—not something that anyone wanted back then, so it was easy to just not to bother.
STERN: And who were your friends at Gunnery? Did you have roommates throughout your time there? Where did you meet most friends?
BROWN: Yeah, actually, my first year, I had—I had a room by myself, as did most of the students in sophomore year. And then junior year, I had a roommate who was the third black guy to come to the school. He came in his junior year. And he was from Houston, Texas. So he and I roomed together our—our junior year. And then senior year, all the seniors had—have their own rooms, so sophomore and senior year, I had my own room, my own room, and then junior was the only year I had a roommate.
But I—I’ve not kept in touch with many—many of my classmates. I’ve—I’ve had—I’ve had some communication over the years, since we had a 25th anniversary and then 50th anniversary, and they ask you to write something covering your 25 or 50 years. And they had a big reunion two—I forget when we had our 50th, but it was a couple of years ago. And—and so I was in communication with some of my old classmates then. But other than that, nothing.
STERN: And do you remember where most of those were from? Do you think classes or athletic activities or just all around?
BROWN: I’m sorry, what?
STERN: Your—the closest friends you had at Gunnery—do you know—did you meet them through athletics, through classes?
BROWN: Oh. Well, you know, it’s only a school of 200, so you—everybody knows everybody. And the class—my class was only—there were only 50—45 to 50 in my class, so we had—we had our classes together, we had sports together, we ate together, we lived in dorms together, so, yeah, I mean, I—everybody was—
STERN: Did everything together.
BROWN: —everybody was friendly. Yeah, yeah. Basically everybody was friends with one another from that standpoint.
STERN: And so you said that you haven’t been great in later life in writing letters, but did you communicate a lot with your parents and siblings while you were there?
BROWN: Not my sisters. I did—I think I did call—I think we talked on the phone more than anything. I called my parents. I—I honestly don’t recall writing [chuckles]—I don’t recall writing a lot of letters to anybody, which is—you know, in today’s world you have instant communication, so it makes many things a lot easier and, yeah, something I wish we did have back then. [unintelligible; 1:16:42].
STERN: You said what?
BROWN: [unintelligible; 1:16:44]. Yeah.
STERN: Okay, sorry. It got a little fuzzy again.
BROWN: Oh, no, that’s just me moving.
STERN: Oh, okay.
So one thing I wanted to touch on that we haven’t yet is both religion and politics. So did you come from a religious family, and were your parents politically involved at all?
BROWN: My mother was Roman Catholic, so I was reared as a Roman Catholic. My father was a Baptist, but he—he never converted, but he—he went to church. He went to church with the family every Sunday, so we were brought up in the Roman Catholic religion, and I—I did catechism after school [chuckles] when I was in grammar school. You’d go over to the local parochial school and do your catechism in the afternoon. And then I was an altar boy for two or three years. So, yeah, I went through the whole [chuckles]—the whole regimen of being proselytized as a Catholic.
STERN: And were there any religious ceremo- —
BROWN: [unintelligible; 1:18:07].
STERN: Okay, that’s my next question. No, I was just going to say, were there any kind of religious ceremonies at Gunnery?
BROWN: Well, at Gunnery we were required to attend chapel twice a week, and it was—the chapel was in the evening before—before dinner. So you had to—you had mandatory chapel twice—twice a week. Any—any of the two—any two of the five days. And then on Sunday there were a group—there was a group of us who were Catholics, who would walk down the hill into Washington and go to the local Catholic school—uh, Catholic church. But I—I actually stopped doing that [unintelligible; 1:18:59]. [Chuckles.] To the dismay of my parents.
STERN: And what about politics?
BROWN: My parents were both Democrats. When I—you know, I don’t—I don’t really know to much about what they did politically other than they were registered as Democrats and voted. That’s about the extent of—of what I knew about their own political activities.
STERN: Did they ever talk about national politics at home?
BROWN: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, growing up in—growing up in the ’50s and ’60s was during one of the more transformative periods in—in the country’s history in terms of race and politics.
STERN: Right.
BROWN: So there was—you know, there was Brown v. Washington Board of Education [sic; Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka] in 1954. And then you had any number of series of other, similar type cases that were—that were being litigated. And then you had the—the Montgomery bus—the bus boycott. You had, you know, Rev. [Dr.] Martin Luther [King] Jr., the Birmingham marches and things like that. So all of those things were—were topics of conversation.
And I read—I read Dr. King’s Letters [sic; Letter] from Birmingham Jail, Malcolm X and—and [L.] Eldridge Cleaver, so there was—there was a lot of—yeah, there was a lot going on, talking about what was happening and how—how people were responding to it.
The thing I—the thing I learned the most from my dad was—were—was an incident where he was interviewing for a job, and he had got—he had got the job, and he had gone in and was talking to the head of the company. I don’t know if it was the president or the owner, whatever. Anyway,—and he was telling this story at the dinner table, because he—he turned down the job. And he was explaining that after he had met with everybody and obviously things had gone well and they had made him an offer—as I said, he was in the office with this—with this gentleman, and during the conversation, this gentleman told a—a—a joke. It was an ethnic joke. And my father’s reaction to himself was, If he’s talking about these other people this way, what might he say about me behind my back?
And so just as a matter of principle, he—he said he wouldn’t work for the man. And I always admired that. I thought that was really a statement of principle that—you know, you—you live by—you live by your principles, and then to stand by them also is—is extremely impressive.
STERN: Definitely shows a lot of courage.
BROWN: Yeah.
STERN: So you said that you had read some of Dr. King’s letters. Kind of what were your feelings or thoughts on the civil rights movement at the time?
BROWN: Well, you know, as a—as a young person, you’re—you’re not really—you’re aware of what’s going on, but you’re not really sure what will happen, what the outcome will be. You know, living in New England, you have a different view and a different experience than what people in the Deep South had. And so you’re very much aware of that. But as you get older, you start to realize that color is becoming more and more a factor in your life choices.
You know, when—when you’re—when I was in gram- —nursery school, there were all sorts of kids there. I mean, there were, you know, white kids, black kids. I mean, everybody mingled. Nobody thought about color. When you got to grammar school, it was similar. Your friends were your friends. And then you got into junior high school, and all of sudden people were starting to talk about race. And then prep school and—and college—and—and, of course, the things that were going on in the world, in the real world were also having an impact on—on you and how you viewed yourself with the people around you in society.
So, yeah, it became—it became—it became difficult because I think living in New England, you were much more isolated or insulated from it. Yet listening to my father talk about things that were happening in his particular situation, you realized that it was—it was happening in New England the North as well, but the Northerners never would want to admit that—that prejudice and racism was almost as deep seated in the North as it was in the South.
I mean, one of the—one of the ironies of Brown v. Board of Education and the desegregation orders that were imposed on the Southern schools is that some of the most segregated schools in the United States were in New England [chuckles],—
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: —and yet no one ever talked about desegregating New England schools or Northern schools.
STERN: Right.
BROWN: Yeah.
STERN: So the movement was something, though, that you followed pretty closely, it sounds like.
BROWN: Well, yeah. I mean, you didn’t really—you couldn’t avoid it. You know, you lived it, particularly after—after what happened with the riot—you know, by the time—when I was in boarding school, there wasn’t that much going on, at least that—that was in the news, of any moment. It wasn’t until I got into college that—that things really heated up with the riots in Watts and then in—in Detroit [in 1967], and then Dr. King’s assassination, followed by, you know, Robert [F.] Kennedy’s assassination. So things—
STERN: Right.
BROWN: —were starting to heat up back then. [cross-talk; unintelligible; 1:26:10]—
STERN: And so you grew up kind of—no, please.
BROWN: No, I was going to—I was going to give you a—tell you a little story. I—
STERN: Sure.
BROWN: —I have a good friend, who’s—whom I’ve known for the past 10—10 or 12 years. We—we met playing golf in Hawaii, of all places. But he and I have become friends, and he’s—he’s an Irish Catholic from the South Side of Chicago. And we have had conversations about just about everything, and it’s quite funny because just a couple of weeks ago, he was here in Phuket. He’s retired to Bangkok. But he was over here at Phuket, visiting. And we were talking one day, and I had—back in San Francisco in—in June—I had driven down to Los Angeles because the same guy used to live in Los Angeles and had come back to visit some friends.
Anyway, he asked me why it was I got up early in the morning and drove down from San Francisco. It’s about a five- or six-hour drive. And I had got up at two o’clock in the morning and got on the road and—and drove to Los Angeles. And I said, “Well,”—I said, “It’s something I started when I was a kid.” I said, “My dad used to get up at two o’clock in the morning, and we’d get on the road at three o’clock and we’d drive down to Virginia”—or, you know, during the summers to Atlantic City or to Virginia, to my grandparents.
And he looked at me, and he said, “Why would you do that?” And I laughed, and I said, “Oh, you’re from Chicago.” I said, “Believe it or not, even in—in New England, you—you could not stop on the—on the public highway, on the turnpike, with taxpayer money—you could not stop at the Howard Johnson because they wouldn’t put Negroes up.”
STERN: That’s unbelievable.
BROWN: So you got in the car, and you—yeah, I know. And a lot—he—he—he said, “I never—I never heard that.” And I said, “Oh, yeah, yeah.” I said, “Have you ever heard of The [Negro Motorist] Green Book?” And he said he had heard it but only recently. And I said, “Well, The Green Book was a book that was put together by—by Negroes who were traveling up and down the East Coast, north to south, during the ’40s and the ’50s, and it listed all the places that Negroes could go and get food, where they could stay overnight, where they could basically do things they couldn’t do otherwise. And—and—and that book was like a Bible when you went traveling. But all of that’s just to say that there were things going on back in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s that even today a lot of people aren’t aware of. And he was—I mean, it was funny because he—he had never heard of that. He had never known that that was—that was the case.
STERN: Yeah.
BROWN: Even today, I will not go into a Howard Johnson. [Chuckles.]
STERN: So you grew up not only in the moment of the civil rights movement but also internationally, kind of in the context of the Cold War. Can you tell me a little bit about any kind of key international events that you remember? So what you remember about the space race or [the] Bay of Pigs [invasion]. Cuban Missile Crisis would have been ’61, ’62, so during your years at Gunnery.
BROWN: Yeah, the—you know, it’s—it’s funny. Just the other day, I—and I can’t—I was watching—because I’m a history major—I’m a history buff, so I watch the History Channel a lot, and they were doing Mao [Zedong] and—and Mao’s rise to power and Mao and the Cold War in China.
And they were talking about the Korean War, and I—I remember thinking back when I was—I would have been about four—I would have been about five or six years old, born in ’46, and the Korean War was ’50 t ’53, but I could honestly remember—and I couldn’t have been more than six or seven—but I remember looking at the newspaper and—and remembering, in my mind’s eye, a headline or headlines that had to do with something about what was going on in Korea. But at that age, you have no idea what war is. You know, they say “war,” you just can’t visualize. But I do remember the Korean War in that concept.
And then the next—the next biggest international incident was Sputnik [1], when the Russians put a man into space in ’59, and that caused all sorts of panic in the United States. I remember the—the Russians going into—into Hungary in 1956. That was on television. And the Berlin Wall went up in—I think the Berlin Wall went up in ’60. I may be wrong. But all those things were happening.
The Cold war was a real—a real threat because in grammar school we used to practice our air raid drills.
STERN: I was going to say, did you have “duck and cover” drills?
BROWN: Yeah, yeah. I mean, we had regular drills in grammar school where you would, you know, have to get under your desk and cover your head and all that. And at that age, you have not a clue. All you know is people are telling you, “You need to do this or you could die.” And I still question at that age, even at, you know, seven, eight, nine, kids really know what it means when you say “die.”
STERN: Right.
BROWN: It’s a concept—I think it’s a concept adults need to pay more attention to when they’re talking to young people. But I was—I was at The Gunnery when the—when [President John F.] Kennedy was assassinated and also when the—when the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred. And I remember sitting—I was sitting in my Latin class as the Russian ships—there were Russian ships approaching Cuba, and the United States would set up a naval blockade.
STERN: Right.
BROWN: And literally—yeah, literally we had been told, “If anything happens, it’ll happen.” I think it was around 11 a.m. or 12 p.m. Eastern time, and we were sitting in class, trying to concentrate on Latin translation, wondering whether there’s going to be a mushroom cloud over the hill soon.
STERN: [Chuckles.]
BROWN: And, yeah, no, it was—it was real life, real life.
STERN: So the fear was palpable.
BROWN: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. But, again, you—you’re aware from a theoretical standpoint, so the United States has never experienced war, so you can only imagine what it’s like based on what you’ve seen in the movies or read about. But until you’ve actually touched it and felt it, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s all in a vacuum.
But the funny thing is just what’s happened these last couple of days with the North Koreans because it takes me back to those days in the ’50s and ’60s, when the Russians had nuclear weapons and there was just fear that at any time the United States could be hit by nuclear weapons.
STERN: Yeah, I can imagine.
BROWN: Yeah, people were sort of sitting around on pins and needles because they were helpless to do anything about it.
STERN: And so the Kennedy assassination would have occurred in the fall of your senior year?
BROWN: Yeah, yeah, November, yeah.
STERN: And what do you remember about that? Do you recall kind of where you were and what the effect was on both yourself, the community, kind of the country as a whole?
BROWN: Well, in terms of—again, I was in class, and—and word came out that—that President Kennedy had been shot, and then at that point, no one knew what happened. It was just the president had been shot. And I think it was maybe an hour or two later before they announced that he had died. But right after that, everybody sort of left class and went to—you know, we had a couple of areas where there was television, and—and people just sort of sat around.
And it was mainly just people were stunned because there was this uncertainty as to who did it, why they did it, what was going to happen, the transition with President [Lyndon B.] Johnson being sworn in. It was just a—it was just a shock that hit us.
And then—that was on a Thursday. I think Thursday, or Tuesday? I can’t remember if it was Thursday or Friday, the 23rd. And then the following Sunday, Lee Harvey Oswald got shot, and—and we were watching it live on television that Sunday morning in the dining room, I remember. And we were just sitting around, talking and no big deal, and all of a sudden you see him come walking down the hall with two deputies, and then all of a sudden there’s a gunshot, and people were just jumping around, saying, “Oh, my God!” You know, “Oswald just got shot.” And it was just another—it was like getting hit with a—with a right cross when Kennedy was shot and then getting hit with a left uppercut two weeks—two days later. Yeah, I mean—
STERN: Unexpected.
BROWN: We didn’t know what to make of it. Yeah. And you have no idea what is going to happen as a result of it. And, yeah, it was a really sad—sad day because Kennedy was my generation—I guess he would be equivalent—if you will, my generation’s [President] Barack [H.] Obama. You know, to young people he represented a new hope, because he was our age—you know, not our age, but he was a younger man, and he—he was very optimistic about what—you know, what—what would happen and what could happen. And that, I think, what the country needed at the time was a lot of optimism.
STERN: And so you graduated from The Gunnery in 1964 and then came to Dartmouth.
BROWN: Yeah.
STERN: So I’m wondering a little bit about what attracted you to Dartmouth, if you had visited it in advance of applying, and given that you had been part of this Yale program, whether you had considered Yale at all.
BROWN: You really hit a sore subject. [Chuckles.]
STERN: Sorry! I apologize!
BROWN: Oh, no. [Laughter.] I’ll tell you—I’ll tell you this because it is quite—it’s quite interesting how it worked out. When I—when I decided to apply to colleges [chuckles], my—my first criteria was I wanted to go to an Ivy League school and I wanted to go to Yale. I grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. From the time I can remember, I went to every Yale home football game. And [chuckles] there was no way anyone was going to keep me from going to Yale. I mean, I—I was dyed blue, white and blue, Eli Yale.
STERN: And your grandfather had taught there, right?
BROWN: Pardon?
STERN: You said your grandfather had also taught at Yale?
BROWN: No, no, he—oh, no. My grandfather worked at Yale. They didn’t have any black professors—
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: —back then. [Laughs.] No, he worked—
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: That’s okay. But I—I was going to go to Yale. Nobody was going to keep me from going. And when it came down to apply, I applied to Yale, I applied to Dartmouth, and I applied to Tufts [University] and—I can’t remember the other school. It was either Colgate [University] or—no, it was Colgate. And back then we were told you apply to a top-tier school, then you have backup, so you’d apply to a second-tier school, then a third-tier school. So that’s how I picked Dartmouth.
STERN: Same today.
BROWN: Yeah, okay. Anyway, when I went through the Ivy—I figured I’ll do Yale, but just in case I’ll get a backup. I went through all the other—other seven Ivy League schools, and, having gone to boarding school for three years and having had to wear a coat and tie every day, I said, I’m not goin’ to a school where I have to wear a coat and tie, even though Yale—back then, Yale required it, but I—I’m not gonna go. I picked Dartmouth based on that. Seriously. [Chuckles.]
STERN: So had you visited it at all?
BROWN: Pardon?
STERN: Had you visited the school at all before you applied, or no?
BROWN: I had not gone to the school. I had not—I had seen pictures of the school, and that was it. [Laughter.] Literally. Literally, it [unintelligible; 1:40:25]. I didn’t—I looked and I went, Oh, don’t have to wear a coat and tie, and it’s an Ivy League school.
STERN: “That’s the one for me.”
BROWN: [unintelligible; 1:40:33]. But—but the irony of it is I got rejected at Yale. And I almost died. It broke my heart. I could not understand how they could not have taken me.
STERN: Mm-hm.
BROWN: And for the—for the freshman year at Dartmouth, I—I mean, I was happy at Dartmouth, but I was—I was crestfallen that I didn’t get into Yale. And I went home for my—I can’t remember what—it might have been spring break, like Easter or something. And my family had been friends with a gentleman who they had known for a while, and I don’t know how they met him, but [Charles E.] “Charlie” [McCarthy, Jr.] had worked in the admissions office at—at Yale, and Charlie knew my parents very well and knew me. Charlie McCarthy, a good Irish name. They called him [unintelligible; 1:41:33]. We were in the same church. And Charlie knew that I had attended the [Ulysses S.] Grant Foundation at Yale and had gone away to prep school.
So I went to his office at Yale, just to drop in and say hi. And I went in his office, and I sat down, and he said, “So,” he said, “How do you like Dartmouth?” And I said, “Oh, it’s really nice. You know, I’m enjoying it.” And he said, “Yeah, I thought you would—I thought you’d like it.” And I looked at him quizzically. I said, “I’m sorry?” And he said, “Well”—and this is—remember, this is 1964. The Ivy League schools had decided at some point—I don’t know exactly when, but somewhere in the ’60s—that they needed to extend their reach to minority students, to specifically black students.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: And so they went literally on a talent—talent search for academic—high- —highly academic achieve- —high academic achievers who were—who were black. And what they did was the Ivy League schools had a council or a committee of admissions officers, and they would get together, and they would go through the applications that they had got from black students, and they then decided who would take whom. It had nothing to do with—
STERN: So he was aware.
BROWN: So basically, what he—and what he told me after he told me this was he said, “Well, I had figured, you know, you—you would do better away”—because he knew my mother and—he knew my parents. I didn’t know this, but he said, “I figured you’d do better away from home.” So that—and he said, “So that’s why you ended up at Dartmouth and not Yale.” And I—I—I—I really had to bite my tongue because I was mad. I was really mad at him because—
STERN: He had decided your college experience?
BROWN: Yeah. Here I was, a 17-year-old, 18-year old, who felt comfortable enough to make his own decisions about his future, and there was a group of eight people whom I didn’t even know deciding where I was going to go to school. And it just floored me, and I was very resentful. I didn’t say anything to him, but I was very resentful. And—and I thought about it afterward, and I said, Well, suppose I had just applied to Yale and no other Ivy League school.
STERN: “And maybe I would have gotten in.”
BROWN: Well, I didn’t ask him, but I always wondered whether I would have got accepted at Yale. [Chuckles.] But anyway, you know, that was water under the bridge. I—I enjoyed Dartmouth. I had a great time. Made a lot of good friends and had good roommates. [Chuckles.] No regrets. No regrets. I only had a regret—
STERN: So can you talk—
BROWN: —when Yale kicked our ass my junior year.
STERN: [Laughs.] In football.
BROWN: Oh, God, yeah, because one of my friends in the Grant Foundation, who went to Hotchkiss, did go to Yale. And that year, they—we had beaten them pretty badly a couple of years, and then that year they beat us 56 to 15. And—and it was 35 to 2 at halftime, and I’ll never forget: WDCR [Dartmouth College Radio] had a—had a guy, [Theodore E.] “Ted” Nixon [Class of 1968], who was doing sports, and I remember Ted saying, “Well, the score here at the Yale Bowl at halftime is 35 to 2. Yale [cross-talk; unintelligible; 1:45:28].” [He said? 1:45:28], “That too just adds insult to injury.” [Both chuckle.] And I never heard the end of it from my buddies.
STERN: Would you be able to walk me through a little bit your four years at Dartmouth? So you arrived in 1964. Did you go on freshman trips?
BROWN: No, I didn’t. I didn’t, actually. And to tell you the truth, I don’t know why, but I di- —you know, they had the freshman orientation up to Moosilauke [Ravine Lodge], and—and I didn’t go. I didn’t go. I had—I arrived on campus on the day I had to arrive on campus [chuckles] to register.
My first roommate was from Syracuse, New York, and he flunked out. He flunked out freshman year. He spent—he spent all of his time getting drunk and never going to class, as far as I could tell, so he didn’t [cross-talk; unintelligible; 146:43]—
STERN: Not the best of roommates.
BROWN: Sorry?
STERN: Not the best of roommates.
BROWN: Well, you know, I studied. I don’t know about him.
STERN: [Laughs.]
BROWN: But I ended up—I ended up, you know, just watching this kid just every night come in drunk and get up in the morning. I’d go off to class; he’d be in bed. I’d come back; he was still in bed. [Chuckles.] But he ended up going to Syracuse University. [Chuckles.]
STERN: So he went back home.
BROWN: Yeah, so he went back home.
My—my second year, I got another—well, in my second year, another—I got another roommate, and he did the same thing. He ended up partying and drinking. He got in a fraternity and was partying and drinking and playing in a band. And next thing I knew, he flunked out. So I [cross-talk; unintelligible; 12:47:45]—
STERN: Was this common or these were just the people you were stuck with?
BROWN: Well, this is the—this is—the funny thing was I got—I got labeled in the dormitory, “the kiss of death.” I mean, people said, “You don’t want to room with Ron—
STERN: [Chuckles.]
BROWN: —or you won’t be here the next year.”
STERN: [Chuckles.]
BROWN: My junior year—my junior year, I had a double all to myself [chuckles], which—which worked out really nicely for me. But, yeah, it was quite funny. But my—my senior year, I ended up having—having two roommates, who were fraternity brothers. And we lived New Hampshire Hall the whole—I lived in New Hampshire Hall the whole four years.
STERN: Oh, wow. So did everybody live in the same dormitory for all four years?
BROWN: Most—most people did. Most people did. They—they usually—the dorm they started in—four years later, they were still there. It was—I honestly don’t know—other than the guys who would move into the fraternity house, I don’t know many people who actually moved, moved around dorms.
STERN: And so you were involved [in a? 1:49:03] fraternity? You were a member of Sigma Theta Epsilon [now Sigma Phi Epsilon]?
BROWN: Sigma Theta Epsilon. It was Sigma Phi Epsilon, became Sigma Theta Epsilon when we went local. I don’t know if they’re back to Sigma Phi Epsilon. I’m not sure. [Transcriber's note: It became Sigma Phi Epsilon again in 1981.]
STERN: I’m not sure.
BROWN: I though I heard somewhere they—they were.
So, yeah, that was funny. My—one of my best friends at Dartmouth was a guy who lived on—on the same floor as I. And he and I became—I mean, we did everything together. You know, we just bonded really—really quickly. And he was on the football team. And the football team manager lived on our floor. And one of the star running backs was his roommate. And they were in two different fraternities. And both of them wanted to get my buddy to go to their fraternity. And I ended up going to the fraternity that the football manager was in, which was Sigma Epsi- —Sigma Phi Epsilon. And it was—it was really funny because the two guys knew that Charlie and I would go together. Whatever fraternity got us would get both of us. And I felt badly only because they ended up—they ended up pledging me first. And then—and then they used me to [chuckles]—to get him to join the same fraternity.
STERN: To lure him.
BROWN: But it was—it was funny because he was really torn between the two fraternities. He was going to go with the one that—that the other—the football player belonged to. And I—I had—I had to do a big sales job to get—to get him [chuckles] to come over. But—
STERN: Do you remember what the other fraternity was?
BROWN: The other one was Kappa Sig[ma, now Chi Gamma Epsilon], Kappa Sigma.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: Yeah. They were right [cross-talk; unintelligible; 1:51:24].
STERN: I don’t think that still exists here.
BROWN: Ah, okay. I didn’t realize—yeah.
STERN: Yeah.
BROWN: But, yeah, [cross-talk; unintelligible; 1:51:32].
STERN: And so you said your friend—
BROWN: Sorry?
STERN: You said your friend’s name was Charlie?
BROWN: Yeah, [Charles T.] “Charlie” Grad [Class of 1968].
STERN: Okay, and he was also Class of ’68?
BROWN: He was Class of ’68. He is—he is now a—an internist up in—oh, God, I don’t remember the name; it’s outside Scranton, Pennsylvania. I should remember. I went up there to visit him about five years ago.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: Anyway, yeah, so he and his wife were living up in northwestern Pennsylvania. He’s got a medical practice up there. Doing well. Doing well.
STERN: And so what was your experience like with Greek life on campus?
BROWN: You know, back then it was—I guess it was typical—you know, you partied [chuckles]—you partied on the weekends. What more can I say? It wasn’t a whole lot—it was a lot—literally a whole lot of fraternizing, because you—you did the typical—typical—you know, go downstairs in the basement and sit at the bar and drink beer and play pool and Ping-Pong and just shoot the shit with all the brothers.
STERN: [Chuckles.]
BROWN: I don’t know how much of that, if any, has changed. Let’s put it this way—
STERN: And so—
BROWN: —there wasn’t a whole lot of highly intellectual conversation going on.
STERN: So that’s what I picture. But why—what drew you to Sigma Phi Epsilon? Was there a reputation of the fraternity?
BROWN: Oh, no, no, no. They were not known as a [unintelligible; 1:53:31] fraternity. The big party fraternity was Alpha Phi Alpha, Alpha Delt[a], and [Dartmouth] Beta. Beta was a big jock fraternity. SAE was a big—Sigma Alpha Epsilon was a big jock fraternity. And—no, Sigma Phi Epsilon was sort of a combina- —was more of a—I won’t say intellectual, but it was not—not a hard-drinking, hard-partying, athletic oriented—although we had our share of college athletes in the—in the—in the—in the fraternity. No, we were probably sort of a middle-of-the-road fraternity.
We—we got a bit of a reputation my senior year because we had a lot of—we actually had a lot of ex-football players in the fraternity, and my senior year, we won the college intramural championship in football, and—and it shocked a lot of people because we beat both Beta and SAE, that were—that were [cross-talk; unintelligible; 1:54:39]—
STERN: Which had a lot of athletes.
BROWN: —athletic—they were huge jock fraternities, so we were—we were quite proud of having done that.
STERN: And what was your experience like academically at Dartmouth? So did you decide upon your history major when you came in freshman year, or later on?
BROWN: No, actually, I was one of those idiots who comes in thinking he’s going to do pre-med. My—my first year, I thought I was going to be pre-med. Charlie—Charlie was doing pre-med. And we sat in the auditorium—you’ve probably heard this story a million times—and I forgot who the professor was. He said, “Look to your right, look to your left. One of those guys is not gonna be pre-med after freshman year.” And Charlie was on my right, so [chuckles] it turned out—
STERN: He was.
BROWN: [cross-talk; unintelligible; 1:55:36] to. Yeah, I was not pre-med—well, I knew I was in trouble when our chemistry class started and the textbook—the professor told us what textbook we were going to use, and Charlie says, “Oh, I had that textbook in high school.” [Laughter.] Yeah, I said, No, no, no. This is not gonna work.
But I—I made my decision on spring term in biology class. We were doing—we were doing dissections. I can’t remember if it was the frog or the—or the earthworm. And it was a nice spring day, and the windows were open in Dartmouth Hall, and the lab happened to look out on the [Dartmouth] Green, and I saw these students sitting out under the tree, having their classes. And at that point, I said, I don’t think I wanna be a doctor. I’m a person who wants to be outside with the trees and not inside in the lab. So that was—that was sort of the turning point for me. But I [cross-talk; unintelligible; 1:56:43]—
STERN: But why had you wanted to be pre-med?
BROWN: Hmm?
STERN: Why had you wanted—
BROWN: I’m sorry?
STERN: —to be pre-med when you entered? What interested you about medicine when you entered?
BROWN: Well, that’s a good question. From the time—I guess from the time I was in—in—in grammar—
[Call disconnects.]
STERN: Hello? [Silence.] Hello? [Silence.] Hello? [Silence.]
[Call reconnects.]
BROWN: Hello?
STERN: Mr. Brown?
BROWN: Oh.
STERN: Hi. I think we got cut off, yeah.
BROWN: Yeah, I’m not sure what—what occurred. Anyway, when I was growing up, my aunt, one of my mother’s sisters, and my mother had worked for our family—our family physician. My aunt was a nurse, so she was his nurse, and then my mom—after she wasn’t teaching, she was a receptionist/secretary. And so I became close with Doc- —you know, the family doctor. And his son and I—he had a son who was about a year younger than I. And we just became best friends and did everything together. And as a role model, you look around and you say, Well, I know I’m not gonna be an engineer. [Chuckles.] And, you know, the only perception that you were at least aware of, where you could make a living, a decent living and contribute to society were a doctor or a lawyer. And at the time, I didn’t know any lawyers, so I decided, I’ll be doc- —be a doctor.
And there was nothing more than that. I had never, you know, sat up and spent time as a kid doing biology or dissecting [unintelligible; 1:58:56] kids who end up being physicians, too, but it was really just because of our family physician.
So when I realized that was not going to happen my sophomore year, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, and because I liked history, I had actually thought I was going to end up becoming a history professor. And so when I went into history in my sophomore year, I—I had actually done it with the idea that eventually I would probably end up teaching. And, you know, whether I’d get in a university or a boarding school environment, I hadn’t really focused on. I think it was not until my junior year that I decided, Why not—and—and there wasn’t any real reason for it. Even to this day, I don’t know why I chose it, but I said, Oh, maybe I should be a lawyer.
And literally, that was how I chose. I mean, it was nothing well thought out, well thought through, which [cross-talk; unintelligible; 2:00:05].
STERN: Was there any pressure?
BROWN: To be a doctor?
STERN: Was there any pressure from your—yeah, from your parents?
BROWN: Oh, no, no, no. No, not at all, not at all.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: No, you know, they were, like, “What do you want to do?” “I think I want to be a doctor.” “All right.” [Chuckles.] And then I came home and said, “I’m not gonna be a doctor.” It was, like, “All right.” [Chuckles.] I really—my parents never pressured me to do anything. The only thing that they emphasized was, “Do well academically.” And—and that was it. So that—that was quite—that was quite fortunate, you know, not having pressure like that on you to—to do anything in particular.
And so then I—you know, junior and senior year was really just focused on taking government and history courses and—and then eventually deciding to apply to law school.
STERN: Are there any courses or professors that you recall?
BROWN: Ah, “the Zinger.” I don’t know—well, he’s obviously not there now. [Vincent E.] “Vince” Starzinger taught constitutional law, and we—we used to call him the Zinger for obvious reasons. He could—he could zing you on those exams in his [unintelligible; 2:-1:39] class. But, yeah, Starzinger was—was a favorite.
And I really—I had—I had a history class with another professor named Jere [R.] Daniell [Class of 1955], who I think is no long- —I don’t think he’s there any longer, either. And I—I really enjoyed that.
And Arthur [M.] Wilson, whom I know is deceased—Arthur Wilson—I took a course in—in the his- —well, it was—I want to say it was philosophical history, if you will. But we—we studied a lot of the French—like [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau and—and some of the—some of the writings in the 1800s.
But those are the three professors who stood out. I had a—I had—there was a professor [John W.] Zarker, who used to teach the classics. He was a Latin—my Latin professor my first year. And it was quite funny. First day in class, he—he asked to do a sight translation. You know what a sight translation is, right?
STERN: A translation, you said?
BROWN: Yeah, a sight—a sight translation. In other words, it’s not something you’ve studied the night before and prepared. It’s just—
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: —he’ll pick it—he’ll pick it out and just say, “Can you—can you do this translation?” Anyway, he called on me, and I started doing my translation, and I had just got into the translation, and he stops me, and he said, “Excuse me.” he said, “Mr. Brown, where did you learn to translate your Latin?” And I was sitting there, thinking, Oh, my God, what have I done wrong? You know, [cross-talk; unintelligible; 2:03:24].
STERN: Yeah.
BROWN: I was, like, What—
STERN: Mortified.
BROWN: And I said—yeah, and I said, “In high school?” [Chuckles.] And he went, “Uh.” He said, “It is superb.” He said, “That is classical translation.” And what I—what I didn’t know until later on [unintelligible; 2:03:49], the way Latin normally had been taught in public school—they taught it in more of a, if you will, local or updated language. For example—did you—you never took Latin.
STERN: I took it for maybe a few terms in middle school, but that’s it.
BROWN: Okay. Well, because I was going to—the example was in—in the—it was Caesar’s- Caesar’s wars in Gaul. And they open—the first chapter, the first book opens with a Latin sentence, which, if you read it in sort of, if you will, a modern form, you’d say, “All of Gaul is divided into three parts.” If you do a classical Latin translation, you would read it according to how the words are written, in the order, and you’d say, “All Gaul into three parts is divided.” And that’s what I had done.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: And he almost—I mean, he almost had a heart attack. So he said, “Uh!” So he was a classics guy. And he went, “Uh, uh!” I mean, he was—it was embarrassing to me because he was so effusive about the translation, the way I translated. And after that, he would—if he had special things he wanted translated, he’d call on me to translate, which drove me crazy. But he wanted me to be a—he asked—he wanted me to be a classics major, and I—I just couldn’t see myself doing Greek, Greek and Latin, because everybody—you know, [says Latin is a dead language?; 3:05:28]. But [cross-talk; unintelligible; 2:05:36]—
STERN: Was Latin—was it mandatory, or was your choice of language?
BROWN: We had a first year—you had—you had a foreign language requirement, and—and [unintelligible; 2:05:48] my SATs—I don’t know what they call them now, but we had SATs, and then you had achievements—an achievement test.
STERN: Yeah. They’re called subject tests now, but same thing.
BROWN: Oh, okay, yeah. So in my achievement, I scored high enough that they allowed me to skip—they allow you to skip sort of the basic Latin, and you go into an advanced Latin—
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: —for freshman year, so I ended up—I ended up doing that.
The background, though, real quick: The only reason I even got into Latin was I was an altar boy. Back then, the Catholic church still did every—did all the masses in Latin. And as an alter boy, you had to—to respond when you were required to, and to do so in Latin. And I remember—you know, I’m 10 or 11 years old, and I said, I don’t even know what I’m saying. And [unintelligible; 2:06:51] I was anxious to try and learn what it was I was actually saying in Latin, so when I got to the Grant Foundation, it was really great because they were—they were teaching Latin, so that’s when I got my first exposure to it. And then it was great when I was an altar boy because I knew what I was saying. But that’s how—that’s how long I had taken Latin before—before high sc- —before college, even.
STERN: Okay.
And did you study abroad at all while you were here?
BROWN: You know, I know Dartmouth had a foreign study abroad, but I don’t think it was anywhere near as—as expansive as it is now.
STERN: [unintelligible; 2:07:34].
BROWN: I don’t even know of anyone—yeah, I don’t even know of anyone who went abroad, so—I know they did, but it—it wasn’t anything that was high on the list, if you will. I wish I had, but it’s too late—too late now.
STERN: Had you traveled at all with your family, growing up?
BROWN: Not outside the United States. We—we did not—no, we did not travel outside the United States. Matter of fact, the only travel that we did was in New England. We’d go down to Virginia or New Jersey, and then also in the summer we’d go up to Hyannis Port [Massachusetts] and—and spend a week up there.
STERN: Okay, so visiting family.
BROWN: Pardon?
STERN: So visiting family when you went to Atlantic Beach in Virginia, and then Hyannis was just your immediate family?
BROWN: No, no, it was just—that was just a vacation. My dad—my mom and dad—and I don’t know how they met these people, but there was a family who—who lived up in Hyannis Port that my parents knew, and so we would go up there for a week every summer and stay—stay at a house up there.
STERN: Okay.
So getting back to campus life, do you remember any notable speakers coming to visit during your time here?
BROWN: Yeah. I—I remember two very—three very specific speakers. And I won’t do them in the order because I can’t remember, but Stokely Carmichael came up my senior year, and George [C.] Wallace [Jr.] came up my senior year. And the—the foreign minister—he might have been the ambassador—I’m not sure—from South Africa came to speak. Those were the only three that I remember.
STERN: And you attended those? Were they lectures?
BROWN: Well, Stokely—Stokely—George Wallace—George Wallace was campaigning for president then.
STERN: Right.
BROWN: And Stoke- Stokely Carmichael came up to give a talk on his—his organization. And then—I can’t remember why the South African—and I don’t know whether he was an ambassador or a [councilor? counselor? 2:10:14], but I—I—I don’t know why he came up. But he was giving a lecture on South Africa.
STERN: Okay. And do you remember anything about what was said or the student reaction?
BROWN: Well, that was easy. Yeah, with George Wallace—the year before, in 19- —I want to say it was 1967—Dartmouth had the first large, relatively speaking, large class of--of black students. For example, my freshman year, there were 14 out of a class of 820. And at the end of the freshman year only six came back.
STERN: Wow.
BROWN: So we were very small. And in the classes before us, there were only three: one junior and two seniors. So—so following [cross-talk; unintelligible; 2:11:18] ‘69—
STERN: [unintelligible; 2:11:18]—
BROWN: —the ’69—sorry?
STERN: In the entire junior class?
BROWN: Yeah, Edgar [M.] Holley [Class of 1966], the football player.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: And Edgar was the only—only black in the junior class, and then [Oliver O.] “Tripp” Miller [III] and—I forget the other guy’s name, Charles something or other. They were the only two in the senior class.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: But all that’s to say the year—the year the ’69s came in, there was a large contingent, probably, I want to say, somewhere around 20 to 30. And they were—there was a large number from Chicago, and all that’s to say that was when the [Dartmouth] Afro-American Society was formed. And as a result, there was a lot more discussion of issues that affected us, not only on campus but generally. And so when—when the gentleman from South Africa came up, there was a silent protest planned, where we went into the lecture and we stood in the back, and when he started speaking, everybody just got up and left. I mean, nobody disrupted him or said anything; everybody just got up and left.
And it was the same when George Wallace came. The idea was to spread out among the—the audience, and I can’t remember which building—which building it was in—
STERN: I don’t know. I know that was May 1967, but I’m not sure what building it was.
BROWN: Yeah, yeah. It was—it’s a big hall right at the end of the Green next to Baker [Fisher Ames Baker Memorial Library, now Baker-Berry Library]. I can’t remember. Anyway, so what we did was—as you can spread 30 guys around, we sort of sat in different areas in the—in the auditorium, and then there was a huge crowd outside because there were so many people they couldn’t fit everybody in. I think only about four or five hundred got in.
So when he first came out and started speaking, all the black students simply stood up and then silently walked out of the lecture hall. There was no disruption, no comments, no anything, just silent protest. And then all the—then the activists [grew up? 2:14:03] outside when he finished, which you probably [unintelligible; 3:14:05]. And that was quite—that was quite interesting, quite interesting. [unintelligible; 2:14:13]—
STERN: And so what was your invol- —no, please continue, sorry.
BROWN: What was my involvement in—pardon?
STERN: In the Afro-American Society.
BROWN: Oh, I was just—I was a member.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: Yeah. Not an officer or anything. I hate to say it, because it was only a year difference, but the younger guys sort of handled all of that.
STERN: And so what would you do kind of as a member? Did you have weekly meetings?
BROWN: Yeah, yeah, we had weekly meetings. We talked about different issues, issues on campus, issues that were facing students, relationships on campus, things like that. But everything was quite new then. The college still wasn’t quite sure what to do with us. And—and—and also there was—even within just this small group, there were already not divisions in the sense of ideological, but there were divisions in terms of socioeconomics, because there were—there were guys who were literally from low-income families, there were guys who were from middle-class families, and there were a couple of guys whose fathers were doctors, and those were issue as well that were discussed, which was quite interesting from—from my perspective. You know, you had issues within—they say first among equals. But you had issues within issues.
STERN: And did the Afro-American Society have a view at the time towards the Vietnam War?
BROWN: No, because this was—you know, the Vietnam War—other than the [Gulf of] Tonkin Resolution getting passed where I—I was—you know, I—I have to go back when I said—when I told you I hadn’t visited the campus. I actually forgot: In August of—of sixty- of ’64, my parents and I did go up to Hanover to look at the campus because I remember we were in a mo[tel] outside of Hanover when President Johnson came on and announced the—Tonkin Resolution, so—
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: So I take it back. I did see the ca- —but I’d already been accepted.
STERN: A month before, yeah.
BROWN: Yeah, yeah. I don’t even—
But the Vietnam War was not something that was—at that point, at least, I don’t recall it even being on anyone’s agenda. We were aware of it, and we were aware of protests. You know, and [unintelligible; 2:17:10] protests and things, but no one—no one, to my—to my remembrance, had any particular issue that we were, as an organization, addressing. There was—
STERN: Right.
BROWN: —a member of the Class of ’67 who had already—no, wait. I can’t remember if he was ’66 or ’67, but we were already aware that a guy named [William S.] “Bill” Smoyer [Class of 1967] had already been killed in Vietnam. He was—I think he was Class of ’67.
STERN: Yeah, I think he was the—was he the first Dartmouth alum to be killed in combat?
BROWN: No, there was a guy named [W.] Bruce Nickerson [Class of 1964], who I think was ’64.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: I think he was the first casualty. And then there was a—there was another guy after him. And then Bill Smoyer—Bill Smoyer had been a big athlete. He was captain of the soccer and hockey teams, so, you know, he was obviously someone that everyone knew, a name on campus, so he—when he graduated he went into the [U.S.] Marine Corps, and then he was—he was killed shortly after he got to Vietnam.
But I don’t—yeah, I don’t recall anything in particular other than in 19- —once you turned 18, you had to register for the draft, which I did. And then in my senior year, in the fall, I had to go for my pre-induction physical over in—I can’t remember if it was Dover? Somewhere in New Hampshire. It might have been Dover. But that was—that was sort of my first awakening, like, Uh-oh.
You know, we still had the student deferment, though, back then, so, you know, we figured, okay, you go, you do your pre-induction physical, you get a 1-A [Selective Service classification meaning “Available for unrestricted military service”]. Okay, big deal. I’m gonna get a 2-S [Selective Service classification meaning “Registrant deferred because of collegiate study] deferment anyway.
STERN: Right.
BROWN: We hope. And then, of course, [cross-talk; unintelligible; 2:19:20]—
STERN: We’ll get to that.
BROWN: [unintelligible; 2:19:21[ ’68. Yeah.
STERN: Right.
What were your personal feelings on the war while you were at Dartmouth? Did you think a lot about it?
BROWN: I did I my senior year because, as I said, I had gone for my pre-induction physical, and there had been a lot of antiwar protests around on campus as well. ROTC [pronouncing it ROT-cee; Reserve Officers’ Training Corps] was under—under attack or criticism, if you will. And nothing—I don’t recall anything violent or too outrageous. You know, it’s just that were a few students who were very SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] types. Steven Miller I think was the guy who headed up to start SDS.
And I remember when I went for my pre-induction physical, there were a bunch of us from Dartmouth who—who were I the room, in the classroom, and they handed out a manila folder for each of us, and I’m sitting there, and my folder is as thin as one sheet of paper. It had my name and, you know, particulars. Sitting—sitting immediately to my right—I can’t remember his name. He was in my class, but he had been a big antiwar protester up to that point. And when they put his folder on his desk, I swear that folder was a half inch or an inch thick.
STERN: [Chuckles.]
BROWN: And—and he—oh, he went—he went completely white when he—when he opened it because it had all the newspaper articles where his name either appeared, or his picture. And that’s how much information they had accumulated on him.
STERN: What was the purpose of the folder?
BROWN: Well, it was your folder. It was—it was your personnel folder, and—and it was information that the Army had on you that they wanted you to just verify: you know, name, age, you know, religion—you know, the usual.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: But it was—for him, they just happened to have all this other extraneous stuff, and I—I’ll never forget the look on his face when he opened that thing. And he looked—he looked over at me, and he said, “Holy shit.” [Chuckles.] It turned out the guy ended up getting a 4-F [Selective Service classification meaning “Registrant not acceptable for military service”]. He was—he had a—I forget what it was. He had a physical deficiency or something. He ended up getting a 4-F anyway.
STERN: Okay. And that was a—that was a deferment or an exemption?
BROWN: Yeah, yeah, a 4-F—yeah, 4-F means you don’t get called up except in a dire, dire national emergency.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: And that may be enemies off the shoreline. [Chuckles.] But I—my—my biggest—my biggest experience, though, or my most intense experience was—was senior year, talking to a freshman, who was in the dorm, by the name of [Robert E.] “Rob” Smith [Class of 1972]. [Transcriber's note: I am hearing Rod, not Rob, so please verify his class and his middle initial.] And Rob was from San Luis Obispo, California, and he lived on—in New Hamp, on my floor. And so I got to know him fairly well.
And one—one—one evening he came into my room, and he said, “Ron,” he said, “can I talk to you?” And he said, “I’m leaving—I’m leaving school, and I’m joining the Marines.” And he and I sat on the floor in the hall, on New Hampshire fourth floor, for—I don’t even know, two, three hours, just talking about what he was doing, why he was doing it, the rights and the wrongs, as we understood them, of the war. And that was my first sort of, you know, in-your-face moment about Vietnam.
And then after that, I tried to—to get as much information as I could on it—you know, reading—reading whatever I could get my hands on and reading both pro and con arguments. And unfortunately, having done that, I—I came away not knowing anything more than I did before, because the people who were making the pro arguments made good arguments; the people who were making the contra arguments were making good arguments. And so you were left to just: Okay, I’ve read everything. I still don’t know what’s right or wrong.
STERN: So you kind of fell in the middle on the spectrum.
BROWN: At that time, yeah, because you—you have the obvious—the threat of communism, the domino theory—you know, the red scare. That was in play. Which, under the—in terms of what information we were getting, seemed plausible at the time, because you had Red China, you had North Korea, and then you had all these other little countries that we knew were fairly unstable politically, and they were all in Southeast Asia. And—and so the domino theory seemed to be a valid theory at the time.
And then, on the other hand, you said that why is it that American men and women should be going 12,000 miles away to fight a war for someone else? That—that didn’t quite compute. And—and it was even more of an issue because as a black person in the United States, you’re sitting there saying, Why are black people fighting in this war? Because—
STERN: Right.
BROWN: —World War II was supposed to—yeah, World War II was supposed to free the world for democracy [unintelligible; 2:25:32], and that was in 1945 that ended, and in 1954 you have to have the Supreme Court [of the U.S.] decide to desegregate public schools in the United States. You had to boycott the buses in Montgomery [Alabama] because a black person couldn’t sit anywhere they wanted on the bus. And—and yet ten years after that, 1965, you’re sending young black men to fight a war to free the Vietnamese people? [Chuckles.] Okay?
STERN: Right. That’s why I was wondering if the Afro-American Society took a stance just t- [unintelligible; 2:26:14].
BROWN: Yeah. I mean—well, you know, because it hadn’t affected students at the time, no one—and I may—I may have missed the meeting, but I honestly do not ever recall Vietnam being discussed in that context, in the African-American—in the Afro-Am.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: —in the context of why are any—why are any young black people going? I think it was something that was already in the general discussions—you know, with Muhammad Ali refusing the draft and all that, and Martin Luther King talking about it as well, so I suspect there was no need to have a separate—you know, a separate organization discussion on it.
STERN: Do you recall general conversations on campus about the war, and did you sense that there was a high level of activism, maybe compared to other schools where your friends attended?
BROWN: No, and only because I—I honestly don’t recall any—any discussions other than the general discussion that there’s a war. Are we going to—you know, are we going to get drafted? Nobody was really sure one way or the other what was happening. But, again, at that particular time, the 2-S deferment was still in effect, and so I suspect a lot of people— although they were aware of the war and what was going on, they didn’t really feel it was going to affect them personally, so [cross-talk; unintelligible; 2:27:54].
STERN: I’m sorry. You just said—
BROWN: [unintelligible; 2:27:57].
STERN: And you said 2-S deferment? Can you just clarify what that means?
BROWN: Oh, sorry. A 2-S deferment was deferments given to students, graduate students.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: So if you were in college, you had a student deferment. If you then went on to graduate school you had—got a 2-S, which was also a student deferment for graduate studies.
STERN: Okay. And—
BROWN: They rescinded that in 1968.
STERN: Okay.
And
so I know that many Dartmouth students were involved in the New Hampshire
Democratic primary campaign for Senator [Eugene J.] McCarthy. Do you remember
this, and were you involved at all with politics, political mobilization on
campus?
BROWN: No, I wasn’t at all, not at all.
STERN: Okay. Were you in either Young Democrats or [Young] Republicans during your time here?
BROWN: I think my freshman year I might have signed up for the Young Democrats, but I don’t honestly recall doing anything with it.
STERN: [Chuckles.] Okay.
BROWN: I was not a very politically oriented person at the time.
STERN: Okay. And did that later change?
BROWN: I wouldn’t say I’m overly politically active. I’m very opinionated but not very active.
STERN: Okay.
So just shifting focus for a moment, I just wanted to talk briefly about coeducation. I know that there was a lot—there were a lot of discussions during your time here about whether women should be allowed to attend Dartmouth. Do you remember these discussions, and where did you fall on the issue?
BROWN: I remember—I remember the issue coming up, but, again, it wasn’t—it wasn’t anything that was of—sort of at a high priority. I mean, I know among my friends, people were in favor of it. But then when you’re in a school 5,000 miles from the nearest girls’ school, you’re happy to have coeducation. [Both chuckle.]
We had—we had—the road trip was sort of the signature event in your Dartmouth career, and—and guys were getting cars on a Friday or Thursday night if they didn’t have classes, and off they’d go to wherever—you know, Wellesley [College], Radcliffe [College, now Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University], Smith [College], Skidmore [College],—
STERN: Yup.
BROWN: —Mount Holyoke [College]. Yeah. They couldn’t wait to get out. So, yeah, coeducation was—yeah, we were all for it. [Chuckles.] [unintelligible; 2:30:50].
STERN: And zooming out a minute to consider some of the national events that occurred during your college years, do you recall what you were doing when MLK’s assassination kind of in April of 1968 and what impact it had, both on you and on campus?
BROWN: Well, we had—I’m trying to remember. I can’t remember the exact moment, but when we heard about it, there was a general—just shock again. Again, it’s the unknown. You know, who did this? Why? Are they going to catch the person who did it? All sorts of hostility and anger was surfacing. And in the Afro-Am organization, there were some—some real concerns about just generally the national politics and—and what was happening because it was also after the summer of riots that had occurred in Detroit and other cities. And—and so you—you all of sudden were starting to feel your world falling apart, and—and you’re not being involved or—or having any say in the result or the outcome.
There was—there was a memorial service at Rollins [Chapel], and one of the—one of the members of the Afro-Am gave a—a very emotional—emotional speech about it. And Stokely—I’m not sure if Stokely Carmichael’s visit was after Dr. King or before Dr. King. [cross-talk; unintelligible; 2:32:48].
STERN: I believe it was before.
BROWN: Yeah. But I—I do remember the—when Stokely came up, the Afro-Am students—again, there were only about 20 or 30 of us—those front two rows of—of the hall, we sat in the [unintelligible; 2:33:08] three rows—I think there were three sets of rows, two on the side, one in the middle. We took up the first two rows of the mid- —two rows of seats in the middle section. And at—at a point in his speech, after he had finished, one of the white students asked the question, “How is it that—that we here at Dartmouth, white students, are supposed to get to know—or how can we get to know”—and I’m using the term at the time—“how are we supposed to get to know the Negro students? Because if you look,” he said—and then he said, “Look at the front two rows. Everybody’s sitting together.”
And Stokely was about to give a response, and then [William] “Bill” McCurine [Jr.], who was Class of ’69, on the [unintelligible; 2:34:03] of the Afro-Am at the time —he raised his hand and—and asked Stokely, “Can I respond?” And Stokely said, “Yeah.” And Bill got up and took the microphone, and he turned—turned around and he faced the audience, and he said, “I’m gonna answer your question by—by asking you a question.” And he said, “You have asked why it is that we, the black students, do not offer ourselves to integrate and why we’re all sitting in the front two rows.” He said, “But as I look back beyond those two rows, all I see are white faces.” He said, “It would seem to me that in terms of pure numbers, the effort to get to know us should come from you rather than from us to you.”
STERN: Mm-hm.
BROWN: And it—it was a very—it was a very telling moment because I think it—it made the white students realize: Oh, yeah, there are 3,200 of us, and there are only 30 of them. I guess we should be the ones who should be making the effort. We shouldn’t be sitting back and having these guys come to us and say, “Hey, let’s get to know one another.” And that was probably a very—I think a very important—a very important time.
But the whole Dr. King assassination led to a lot of hand wringing and—and emotional discussion on campus. My—my roommate and I, whom I mentioned, Charlie—he and I had a very long talk that night, walking across campus from—from our fraternity house. And even though we had—we had known each other and been good buds for four years and roomed together for a year, it was interesting—Charlie was a Polish Catholic from western Pennsylvania, coal country. And it was—it was interesting because all of a sudden he was asking me questions about being—being black [chuckles] because he had never looked at me that way before.
STERN: Mm-hm.
BROWN: He—he had just accepted me as his—one of his best friends. And yet all of a sudden he realized there were things in my life that affected me that he didn’t have any knowledge of. And so that was a quite—that was a quite educational moment, I think, for both of us.
STERN: And did you ever feel any kind of racial segregation or instances of racism on campus, or would you say you didn’t have to make that effort to get to know what white students?
BROWN: Yeah. I—I don’t recall—I don’t recall anything other than—and I wouldn’t call it racist; I would call it ignorance—but there was a—there was a freshman who came in in sixty- —’66. He was Class of ’70. And he was a—he was recruited to play basketball. Came from Chicago. And Henry [C. Tyson, Jr.] was in my—in my dorm in New Hamp, on the—on the top floor as well, so I—I took Henry—sort of became his big brother so to speak and sort of gave him the lay of the land during the initial weeks of school.
And one of the things he said to me, because we were talking about what it was like with—dealing with classmates, and he—he had a job in the dining hall, and he said his first night working in the dining hall—you know, you’re sort of meeting the other guys working, and you’re introducing yourself. “Where are you from?” And he said that one of the guys that he introduced himself to [chuckles]—the first thing he asked was, “So what sports do you play?” [Chuckles.] And it was—it was—it was unfortunately something that shouldn’t have been asked, but I’m sure the guy who asked it didn’t mean it in any—
STERN: Right.
BROWN: [cross-talk; unintelligible; 2:38:34] way. But, again, it was inappropriate. It was like me being asked, “So how do you like the United States?”
STERN: [Chuckles.]
BROWN: There’s—there’s an assumption being made. And, you know,—and it turned out Henry—as it turned out, Henry did play—play basketball. He ended up—he ended up being All Ivy and a very successful basketball player at Dartmouth, but it was—it made him laugh. Let’s put it this way.
STERN: The same reaction you had when you had been at Gunnery.
BROWN: Yeah, because you just sort of—you take it, and you just file it away and say, “Ignorance is bliss.” It—it’s not a—it’s not an intentional, harmful question or statement, but it is something that shouldn’t have happened, shouldn’t be done, shouldn’t be said.
STERN: Definitely.
BROWN: Yeah. So I—I don’t know. I imagine those types of things may still occur. I—to just sort of give you an example, I had already graduated Dartmouth. I was in law school, and a member—I was telling you when I was in boarding school, there were people from all different parts of the country, and one of the—one of my classmates lived in Maine, and I was dating a—I was dating a young lady at the time from Maine, and I went up to her parents’ house for—for the New Year, and they had—she had a big party, where she invited all her, you know, friends from college, you know.
And one of—and my classmate from—from boarding school showed up, and—and I hadn’t seen him in three or four years, and it turned out they had grown up together, and I didn’t even realize they’d known each other. But while I was there, one of the people that I had—one of the—her—her friends [unintelligible; 2:40:48] introduced around, and this guy looked at me and—“You’re from Maine.” He looked at me, and he said, “So what’s it like to be a Negro?”
STERN: Straight out.
BROWN: [unintelligible; 2:41:03] idea. I mean,—and I looked at him, and I said, “I imagine just what it’s like to be a white person.” [Laughs.]
STERN: Good response.
BROWN: What the hell kind of question is—I mean, what kind of question is that? And, of course, he didn’t catch the sarcasm. [Laughter.] I don’t think he even understood what I was saying. But it just—I just—I was speechless. I mean, what can you say to a question like that? But—but—but it was—it was an eye-opening experience because I had not run into people until I had got into those environments, like boarding school and—and into college and all. I had never run into people who had never seen a black person before in person.
STERN: Mm-hm.
BROWN: And—and—and the young lady I was dating—you know, she said to me—when we started dating, she said, “You know, I—I had never met a Negro before I got to college.” She went to Colby Junior [College for Women, now Colby-Sawyer College]. And one of her classmates was—was a black—a young black girl from—I forget where she was from, but that was the first—she said that was first Negro she had ever met. And she said, “The only other Negro that I’ve ever seen were on television.”
STERN: Wow.
BROWN: And—and you realized just thousands of people live in that same bubble. And—and so the images portrayed in the media are very important to them because it shapes their—their image.
STERN: Mm-hm.
BROWN: And—and so that’s why getting out and sort of meeting people is very important.
STERN: And so we talked about Dr. King’s assassination. Do you remember any other key national or international events from your years at Dartmouth?
BROWN: Well, I mean, there was—there were the riots—I mean, all the riots that were occurring in the summers while I was at Dartmouth. The King assassination. The Kennedy assassination, of Robert Kennedy. You had Muhammad Ali and the Supreme Court fight. There were—offhand, I—you know, I—I don’t—I don’t recall any other—other items other than, you know, when President Johnson said he wasn’t going to run for reelection. That was a bit of a shock. But I—I don’t—I don’t, off the top, recall too many.
I mean, you know, you had the—you had the—the Chicago—the [1968] Democratic [National] Convention, the riots protesting in Chicago. And [cross-talk; unintelligible; 2:43:56]—
STERN: And that was the summer after you graduated?
BROWN: Yeah. But, I mean, you know, these were building up because these were things that were coming out of Berkeley, where you had the Students for a Democratic Society, you had the—who was it? I want to say the Weathermen [Weather Underground]? But you had all these groups that were starting to create a bit of civil disturbance in the United States because of the war, mainly. But those events were happening around the country, and so everybody was aware—aware of what was—what was going on and—and the divisiveness that was—that was creeping in.
STERN: And did you vote in the 1968 presidential election?
BROWN: I did not vote, and, to be honest, I only voted—my first election was when I turned- I can’t remember back then if you had to be 21. I don’t know if you could vote at 18 then. I honestly can’t remember. I just remember registering as a Democrat when I was in New Haven, so I must have been at least 18. And that was my—that was my first vote, and that was my only vote—that was my only vote till the last election.
STERN: Oh. Only vote ever in the United States until the last election?
BROWN: Only vote ever until the last election.
STERN: And what’s the reason for that? Or is there one?
BROWN: Well,—and, you know, in retrospect I can say it wasn’t—the right—the best thing to do, but I had never felt that our system of government has been a truly democratic system of government for years, and it sounds—I know it sounds very silly to say this, but when you think of your vote and whether it really counts or makes a difference, I didn’t believe it did, and so I never voted. Whether it was a silent protest or laziness or what, I don’t really have an explanation other than I just never felt that it made a difference whether I did vote or not.
STERN: So you didn’t vote, but did you favor one candidate or another?
BROWN: Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, and my—my historical affiliation was Democrat. So in every election, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert [H.] Humphrey [Jr.], right on down the line, it was always Democrats.
STERN: Okay.
So if you don’t mind, I think this is a good place just to take a five- or ten-minute break?
BROWN: Okay.
STERN: And then could I call you—could I call you back and we can get on to Vietnam?
BROWN: Yeah, no problem.
STERN: Okay, great. So I will speak to you in a few minutes.
BROWN: Okay.
[Recording interruption.]
STERN: So we have been talking about the elections of 1968. So you graduate Dartmouth and then in 1969 you entered Harvard Law School, so I guess my first question would be: Was your decision to apply to law school strategic in any way to avoid the draft, or it was an actual interest-driven desire?
BROWN: Oh, no. As I said before, my junior year,—well, maybe I didn’t, but my junior year I decided I was going to apply to law school, so I had made that decision independent of—of anything that had to do with the draft or anything else. As I said, back then the 2-S deferments were still in place, so I never really thought much about—about the draft, given that I did want to go to law school.
STERN: And—
BROWN: So that was not—that was not a decision maker.
STERN: Did you apply to multiple law schools?
BROWN: Yeah, I applied to Harvard, Columbia [Law School], New York University [School of Law] and there was one other which I can’t remember. It might have been Georgetown [University Law Center] or Boston University [School of Law]. I can’t remember.
STERN: Okay. And were accepted to a few of them? How did you decide on Harvard?
BROWN: Oh, yeah, I was accepted at all of them, and the funny thing was I was dating—I was dating a young lady who went to Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York, and she was a junior, so she was about to—to go a senior, and so Columbia was on my list. Obviously, you should never—never apply to a school based on a relationship, but—
STERN: [Chuckles.]
BROWN: —but I—but I did. And so when I got accepted at Columbia, the decision—the decision I made was, Well, I’m going to Columbia. So I had literally spent [unintelligible; 2:49:55]—you know, I think you—you hear about your acceptances in April. So, you know, I accepted Columbia, and everything [unintelligible; 2:50:04] had gone to Columbia. And then I heard—and then I heard from Harvard, and I decided, I’m gonna go with Harvard. She—she can wait. It’s a good thing, too, because we broke up the following year.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: Yeah. It worked out for the best, but—yeah, so, right, I actually started Harvard in ’68, the fall. And—not—not ’69.
STERN: Oh, I’m sorry, okay. And then you were drafted,—
BROWN: Yeah.
STERN: —drafted in—
BROWN: I was drafted out of Harvard, right. I actually got drafted—it was funny. I was—started law school in September of ’68, and in November I got my draft notice. And it was to report—I forget—I forget what they give you. I don’t know if they give you two weeks—they don’t give you a whole lot of time. And I immediately wrote the draft board and said, “Hey, guys, I’m in—I’m in school.” And even though the graduated deferment had been lifted, they allowed you to finish your first—they allowed you to finish the semester that you were in before you had to report, which if you think about it, that’s silly because if you’re going in the Army, what difference does it make whether you finish the semester or not?
STERN: Right.
BROWN: Yeah. But in any event, they—they wrote me back, and they said, “Okay, you can report in January.” And I said, “Really?” I said, “Harvard, unlike [unintelligible; 2:51:54]”—and I don’t know why, but unlike all other law schools—Harvard only had a one-year semester. They did not break it up into two semesters. So I wrote the draft board that, saying, you know, “Look, Harvard doesn’t have semesters, and my semester is the end of the year, which will be in May or June,” to which the draft board wrote back and said, “Thank you very much. Show up in February.” [Chuckles.] So I ended up [cross-talk; unintelligible; 2:52:26]—
STERN: So that’s what you did.
BROWN: Yeah, so I ended up reporting—reporting in February, which is not the best time of year to be going to Fort Dix, New Jersey, especially if you’re going to go fight a war in a jungle environment.
STERN: [Chuckles.] Pretty cold in New Jersey?
BROWN: Oh, for God’s sake! Better New Hampshire [unintelligible; 2:52:54].
STERN: That’s true. I don’t know if anything compares.
BROWN: Yeah.
STERN: So were many of your peers drafted from Harvard Law?
BROWN: You know, I—I don’t know of anyone else from—I don’t know of anyone else from Harvard Law School that was drafted when I was, because when I got draf- —I got my draft notice in November. I essentially stopped going to class. Look, I—I—and I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on campus anymore. I literally just sort of screwed around for a couple or three months. But I—I honestly don’t know if anyone got drafted.
When I got back in 1970, when I got back to law school, the guys I started law school with were now in their third year, third and final year. So none of them, to my knowledge, had gotten drafted. And I don’t know—I don’t think—I don’t think anyone even went into military service, much less getting drafted.
When I got—when I got back to Harvard Law School—and—and there may have been more, but I was only aware of two—two other guys who had been in the military. And, like said, there may have been more, but I was only aware of two other guys.
STERN: And so what was the timeline of events like? You get your—you got your draft notice, you said, in what month?
BROWN: Well, I got the first one in November.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: And then got it postponed, obviously, until—until February.
STERN: February?
BROWN: And—yeah. And then I reported—I reported in February and was officially inducted. And they announced to our group—because the war had been taking a toll—normally, the Marines and the Navy count on volunteer enlistments. [unintelligible; 2:55:15] drafted in the Marines and the Navy. And because of the war, the—the obvious volunteer component of the Navy and Marines was down drastically. So they actually would take draftees, some of the draftees and—and allocate them to the—to the Marines.
And I remember standing in the room with about 30 other guys, and this sergeant walks in, and he says, “Well, gentlemen,” he says, “you’ll be happy to hear that this month the Marines met their quota, so none of you are going to the Marines.” But I wasn’t too worried, anyway, because being at college graduate is not something the Marines want, so I didn’t think I’d have to worry anyway.
STERN: So you did not want to be in the Marines.
BROWN: I did not think I wanted to be in the Marine Corps, no, no. Those guys were a bit too gung-ho. But, you know, the other side of it is if you’re going to be in the military, you might as well train with the best.
STERN: That’s true.
BROWN: That was—that was—that was a consideration as well. Also, you have to remember, I was—at that time, I was 22 years old, and, you know, the Marines like them young—you know, 17, 18, 19. So I—I thought I might have been too old to be a Marine.
STERN: So what choice, if any, did you have in your specialization kind of within the Army?
BROWN: Well, if you’re a draftee, you don’t have a choice. You—you essentially go where they tell you. You’re—you’re assigned where they assign you. And they have a very bizarre method of deciding what people do, because as with college, when you get into the Army, you take a—what’s a military intelligence test. And based on the results of that test, they will then try to weed people out and assign them in—in skills that are obviously relevant to their backgrounds.
But, of course, if you just got a college degree in history and you’re in law school, there’s not a whole lot [chuckles]—there’s not a whole lot of options. When I got to basic training, one of the—obviously, one of the things they—they do do is they talk to you and try to get you to go to OCS, Officer Candidate School. And—and I said, “Thanks, but no thanks.”
And then after I had finished my basic training, they try—I was in advanced training, and they tried to get me to go to a noncommissioned officer school. And, again, I said, “Thanks, but no thanks.” So I just sort of stuck it out as a lowly—a lowly private.
And when I finished my—we took basic infantry training, so when I finished my basic infantry and advanced infantry, I was assigned as a—as an infantryman, a combat infantryman.
STERN: So can you tell me a little bit about what the training, both classroom and field training, was like at Fort Di- —at Fort Dix?
BROWN: It was—basic training is literally that. It’s basic training in—in Army life, military protocol, rules, regulations, weaponry, self-defense, tactics. And because it’s basic training, we were still being taught as if we were going to fight a war on continental Europe because that was still the Cold War mentality, that the next war was going to be fought against the Soviet Union, and it would be on the plains of Europe, which were conditions similar to what you found in Fort Dix, New Jersey. So that was basic training.
When—when we got into in- —advanced training, that was also at Fort Dix. And that would have been a bit of a problem because you’re still training in a—in terrain that has nothing to do with jungle and—weather wise or —or in terms of topography. So it was a little bit difficult to get your mind wrapped around to how is this really relevant to what I’m about to be doing? Because you had people coming in from other basic training areas, where they were actually doing basic training in a jungle environment, like the guys who came in from—from Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana. They all had jungle—at least jungle type exposure.
But to be honest, after going through all that training and going to Vietnam, I don’t think it made a damn bit of difference anyway, because I didn’t learn anything in training that I could use in Vietnam. [cross-talk; unintelligible; 3:00:41] basic.
STERN: And what was—what was your initial impression of the Army?
BROWN: Oh [chuckles], the Army is a bit of a joke. It—it—it’s—as we used to say, it was all about hurry up and wait. You were—you were on the go 24/7, and nine times out of ten, you ended up standing in line, waiting for something to happen. So that’s why we said it was hurry up and wait.
But it was also—over time, it was a great experience because you got to meet people from all over the country and from all walks of life, whom you never would have met in any other environment. If you had—if I continued on my academic career, I never would have met 99 percent of the people that I met in the military. And I don’t mean that in terms of persons, but I mean in terms of where they were from and what they did, the education levels, et cetera. And so the Army was great at being, if you will, a common denominator,—
STERN: Mm-hm.
BROWN: —because everyone was stripped of their individuality. You had to—you had to learn to work as a team and—and to look out for one another. And—and that’s a very important life lesson generally, that—you know, they always say a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and that—that was very, very obvious in the military.
STERN: And was both basic and advanced training at Fort Dix?
BROWN: Correct, correct.
STERN: And so how long were you in training?
BROWN: It’s eight weeks of basic and eight weeks of advanced, so we had a total of 16 weeks.
STERN: What would a daily routine be like?
BROWN: It depended on the day. I mean, you would—you would get up at different times. It was never—it wasn’t, like, every day you got up at seven o’clock. Some days you get up at eight; sometime you get up at four in the morning; sometime you get up at ten. It just varied as to the day and what it was you were going to be doing for the rest of the day and whether other training companies—because there were so many training—training companies involved, they had to obviously rotate and—and schedule them at different times.
So your routine was essentially you got up. You obviously had to make up your—your bed, your cot. You went and—and ate. And then you went to class. And—and classes were an hour or a couple of hours. And you’d learn about literally just Army basics. You had certain general rules, as we called them. You had to memorize your general rules. You had to understand Army protocol. You drilled a lot, drilling meaning you marched in formation. You learned how to—you learned about your weapons: how to take apart and clean a weapon, how to maintain a weapon, how to fire it.
And then there was a lot of physical training. I mean, we—we probably did more physical training than anything else, because whether you were going to a class or coming from a class, going to eat or coming from eating, or just standing around because you were waiting in line, you did PT, physical training. [Chuckles.] They always had a movement, which was great. It was great to get in shape. I was in the best shape of my life.
STERN: And so you—what was morale like kind of during training?
BROWN: That’s an interesting—that’s interesting. Everyone—you know, I won’t say it was low; it wasn’t as if everyone [was] depressed and “Oh, my God, what’s gonna happen?” I think everybody accepted the fact that we’re now in the Army, and we’re going through training, and the training is going to help us wherever we end up, with the reality that most of us are going to go to Vietnam. But no one was depressed. It wasn’t, like, a pall hanging over the group. Everybody accepted what was happening and just, to the best of their ability, did what they could to—to cope.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: And so morale was—what happens—I think the—and this is, I think, what the military tries to do even today. They try to break everybody down so they become a unit rather than a bunch of individuals. And once you get people to think collectively, people end up being mutually supportive of one another, and—and they won’t allow or let any one member of the group go—get—get, if you will, depressed or down in the dumps or have low morale, because it brings everybody down. And so the idea is you want to keep everybody buoyant in spirit and attitude. So I think to that extent, they accomplished that, you know, quite well.
What was ironic for me was in my—in my training company, the poor—the poor guys that I—the three other guys that I ended up bunking with—we were all college graduates [chuckles], which—I think we were the only college graduates in our training company. But one of the guys actually had graduated Dartmouth in ’65.
STERN: Do you remember his name?
BROWN: [Jonathan E.] “Jon” Silbert.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: Jonathan Silbert. Jonathan—after we finished basic training—Jonathan had already—he went to Harvard Law School as well. And I don’t—Jon—I remember he didn’t know how he got drafted or why, and we couldn’t figure it out because he had already graduated from law school. But Jonathan ended up, I believe, going to JAG [Judge Advocate General’s Corps], so he never—I don’t think he ever went to Vietnam. Yeah, I think he was stateside.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: And I never saw him after basic training. And he ended up moving back—he was also—to tell you how small the world is—he was also from Connecticut. And I—I looked him up a while back, and he ended up going back to New Haven, going into law practice and actually became a judge, Superior Court, I think, judge.
STERN: Small world.
BROWN: Yeah, yeah. And I—I haven’t been back to New Haven in years, but I keep saying I’m going to get in touch with him when I go back.
But the other guy—I forget—he had gone to Middlebury, Middlebury College, I believe, and then the other guy had gone to King’s College in New York.
STERN: Okay. So mainly not college educated.
BROWN: Oh, no, the vast majority were high school kids. I mean, they were 18—17, 18 years old.
STERN: And so can you walk me through—so you finish training, and then you’re deployed to Vietnam. So just literally how did you get there, where did you stop along the way, and then what was it like getting off the plane in Vietnam?
BROWN: Ah. Well, I left the East Coast. After you finish your infantry, your advanced, you get a 30-day leave. So I had my 30-day leave, and then I—my parents drove me down to New York, to [John F.] Kennedy [International Airport, previously Idlewild Airport until 1963], and got on my—at the age of 22, I had my first airplane trip, and I flew from New York City to Oakland [California]—to San Francisco.
And there were three—three or four of my training buddies on the same flight, and so we sat together. And when we landed in San Francisco, it was early in the morning, and we were supposed to report to Oakland Army Base because all the guys we had trained with were—were all coming in together to Oakland for processing to Vietnam.
So when our plane was landing in San Francisco or we were getting ready to land, I asked the guys who were with me—I said, “Has anyone ever been to San Francisco?” And nobody had. So I said, “Well, look, neither have I.” I said, “Instead of going right to Oakland Army Base and reporting, let’s go into San Francisco and see what it’s like.” I said, “We may ne- —we may never get to see it again.”
And—and it was funny because one of the guys said, “Oh, but won’t we get in trouble because we’re supposed to report”—and I said, “What are they gonna do, send us to Vietnam?”
STERN: [Laughs.] Yes!
BROWN: “We’re already going to”—
STERN: [Laughs.]
BROWN: So—so we—and this is—this is interesting only because I—I—I always wonder about the so-called urban myth. This was July of 1969. The war was—was—you know, [unintelligible; 3:11:05] went along. The Tet Offensive had happened the year before. The antiwar movement was—was gaining a lot more ground. And you have four Army guys, in uniform, take a bus from San Francisco International [Airport] into downtown San Francisco. And we got out, and we had no idea where we were, maps or anything. And—and now that I live in San Francisco, I know where we were. But we were on Market Street, which is literally a main—a main thoroughfare.
We walked up and down Market Street, broad daylight, in uniform. Nobody said a word. And I mean that in that nobody spat on us, nobody said “warmongers,” “baby [killers]”—nobody said anything. Unfortunately, they didn’t also say, you know, “Thank you for your service.” But there was absolutely no negative at all. And—and I always wonder, when I hear these stories of people saying they came back—because they always mention San Francisco. And they said, “Oh, you know, I was wearing my uniform, and somebody spat on me, and somebody called me a baby killer.”
And—and my experience, both going and coming back—because I came back through San Francisco—I was in uniform, in the airport. Never had bad words said. So that’s just an aside, my own personal—personal view on urban myth of what—what happened to some guys when they came back.
But anyway, so we spent the day at San Francisco and then made our way over to the Army base. And the only downside—the only downside to it was because we came in late, we got separated from our training unit, and because of that, we got assigned a different transport to Vietnam. So all the guys we had trained with for the last 16 mo- —16 weeks were on a Braniff [Airways]—back then, the—the Army—military was using commercial aircraft, charter. So all of the guys that we knew were on a Braniff—a Braniff chartered jet, and we ended up on this World Airways jet. World Airways doesn’t exist anymore, but it made all this money during the Vietnam War.
And we flew from—from Oakland, we flew up to Anchorage, Alaska, and refueled. And from Anchorage we went to—to a base—I don’t even know where it was because they wouldn’t let us off the plane, but I think it was in Japan or somewhere else, and refueled again.
But the worst thing about it was when we were in Anchorage getting refueled, we went into this huge hangar, and the four of us walked over to where all of our friends were, and the first thing they said was, “Oh, man, you should have been on that Braniff—that Braniff flight.” They said, “The stewardesses gave us a bathing suit—a bathing suit modeling. [Chuckles.]
STERN: [Laughs.]
BROWN: Which I thought was the cruelest thing you could do to a bunch of young guys headed to Vietnam. But—but I remember it because I—because they said, “Well, what about—what about your flight?” And I said—I said, “Our flight attendants flew World War II.” [Chuckles.] [cross-talk; unintelligible; 3;14:54]
STERN: Okay. And so what were your thoughts like on the flight over?
BROWN: Oh, you know, it was—it was quiet, because we—we now realized, you know, we were headed somewhere and had absolutely no idea what awaited us, so it was—it was a quiet flight. It was obviously very quite, not a whole lot of talk, and a lot of sleeping.
And then we got—we got into the air space over Vietnam. And as—as you’re flying down the coast of—of South Vietnam, you—you look down—you could look down, and you could actually see the landscape as the plane started down into its descent into Tan Son Nhut [Air Base]. You could see the—the bunkers—you know, the perimeter bunkers. You started to realize that this is really it. You know, this is a war zone, and bad things could happen very quickly.
And, of course, you’re also aware—it’s broad daylight, and this plane is about to land on a runway that is subject to being [chuckles]—to being rocketed. And so what they do is they tell you ahead of time—they said, you know, “As soon as the plane lands, the plane will not—will not say. They will—you know, they’ll land, open the doors, everyone get out, get into the reception hut, and ru- —you know, double time. Don’t walk.” [Chuckles.] You never know. And they tell you to be prepared: the plane may have to take off if—if there was incoming.
So, you know, you—the door opens, and that—that hot, thick, humid air just hits you like a wet blanket. Nothing—nothing that you’ve ever experienced before. And, of course, you’re scared as hell, and—and you’re double-timing across this open tarmac to a Quonset hut. And you got your duffel bag, lugging it along. And you just—you don’t know what’s happening. You don’t know what’s happening. And as you’re along with, you know, thousands of—thousands of other guys in the same predicament.
And then you—then you get on a bus, and the bus drove up into—from Tan Son Nhut airport, you go to a place called Long Binh [Post], which is the processing in country and out of country center outside Saigon. And the thing I remember about the bus: It was an old Army bus, school bus type. And you got on the bus, and there was mesh wire around the windows, around the side. And the sergeant on the—when you get on the bus, he says, “We’re gonna be headed to Long Binh. We’re going to not go through Saigon; we’re gonna go on the outskirts of Saigon. But the reason why we have the wire mesh up is in—in earlier days they’d throw grenades into the buses.” [Chuckles.] So you’re already going, Oh, great.
STERN: Uh-huh.
BROWN: I’m in—yeah, I’m driving a bus through an area with no armaments. I don’t have a rifle. I’m totally unarmed. And they’re telling me people are throwing grenades at the buses.
STERN: Reality was setting in.
BROWN: So the worst thing—well, it got worse because you’re looking at the wire mesh, and—and while the bus is going along and the sergeant tells you that, he then says, “The only problem we have now is they’ve learned to hang satchel charges on the wire.” So, you know, you just take a hook, and—with an explosive, and hang it on the wire. Man! So he said, “[unintelligible; 3:19:07]—
STERN: Not encouraging.
BROWN: —the only other thing.” Yeah. “That’s the only other thing to worry about.”
But anyway, then you get to Long Binh, and then you process in. And, again, unfortunately,—well, I don’t know. Fortunately, unfortunately, as fate would have it. Because the guys—the four guys I had started with—one of the guys never made it out of Oakland Army Base because he was—he was—something had happened with his physical, and it turned out that he was judged to be physically unfit for active duty, so he stayed stateside, and—and it ended up only three of us going over.
And because we got there late from our other guys, all the other guys got their orders and were assigned to a different division. They were assigned to the 1st Infantry Division, whose primary area of operations was Saigon itself, what we called the IV [pronounced Four Corps], Mekong Delta area. And—and that’s where all—all— [unintelligible; 3:20:21] all the guys I knew went.
And then I and another friend of mine, from Pennsylvania,—he and I were sort of left behind, and we were literally sitting around for about three or four days, and we didn’t know what was going on because there was no paperwork for us or anything.
And then one day I got called up to interview with this captain, who was in Awards and Decorations Section, and he had my file, and he said—he said, “I’ve been asked to interview you for a position here in Awards and Decorations.” And I looked at him, and I was, like, “Why is that?” And he said, “Well, I’m not sure,” he said, “but obviously someone in your family has some pull because a congressman has reco- —brought this up.” Somehow it got through a congressman, and it got through—I found out after, my mom—our family physician had talked to the congressman in our—of our district, and—and he, the congressman, had written to the Army, and however these things worked, they basically said, “Give this guy a job in the rear.” And so that’s what this captain was offering me.
STERN: Wow.
BROWN: And he said, “Well,” he said, “I see”—he said, “I see you went to Dartmouth College, and, you know, obviously you would fit right in here.” And I said, “Well, what exactly do you do here?” And he said, “Well, Awards and Decorations writes up all the—the language, if you will, for literally every award and decoration that’s issued.” And I’ll never forget: I looked at him. I said, “That’s it?” And he said, “Yeah.” And I said, “Well, with all due respect, sir, no thanks.” And he looked at me. He said, “Soldier, do you know what your MOS [Military Occupational Specialty] is?” And I said, “It’s 11 Bravo.” He said, “That’s combat infantry.” I said, “I know.” He said, “If you don’t take this job, you’re going to the bush.” And I said, “I know.” [Chuckles.] And with that, he closed the file, and he said, “All I can say is good luck.” [Chuckles.]
STERN: And was your response because you wanted to be on the front lines or just because you didn’t want a job like the one he was offering you?
BROWN: I—you know, to go back, when I said I had read all I could and—and still had not been able to discern rights and wrongs, and when I got drafted, I said to myself, Well, the only way you’re gonna be able to know or hopefully find out is to actually experience it yourself and to be there. And if I was going to be there, I figured I might as well go all in. And so when he—you know, when he offered me that position, I just decided, Nope, I don’t want the easy way out. Privilege—there’s a point at which you say, Why should I be lucky because of contacts and privilege when—and I had just trained with all these other guys through high school. They would never have that opportunity. And I just didn’t think it was fair that I would have it just because somebody in my family knew somebody. So—so I told him, “No. No thanks.” And my orders came the next day [chuckles], so that’s why they had held me up.
But the other guy who was with me got assigned to the same—the same division and the same—the same company, as it turned out. And so he and I were the only two out of our whole class who literally served our time together.
STERN: And so you had mentioned at the beginning that your dad served in World War II. What was his reaction and your mom’s reaction to your being drafted?
BROWN: Oh, my mom was beside herself. I mean, she [chuckles]—she—she—I mean, she didn’t just sort of break down in a heap, but she was clearly, visibly upset and very concerned. My dad—because he was a very quiet man, he never said anything to me, but I could tell—now, he was concerned because my mom was concerned. And I was trying to be buoyant for both of them. You know, I—I acted like it was no big deal. And I—I was going to do my two years and then come back and finish law school. I mean, that was literally my—my mantra. Ah, don’t worry about it. You know, I’m gonna do my tour, come back, finish law school.
I never even conceived that anything would happen to me. And when I—when I got on the plane in New York, it was—it was a quiet ride down to the airport from New Haven, but when the time came—it came time to board the plane, I remember—I remember hugging my mom, hugging my dad, shaking my dad’s hand, and I turned around and I just walked off. I didn’t look back. I just kept walking.
And it wasn’t until I got home, you know, 14 months later that my mom—my dad and mom said, “You know, when you turned and walked off,”—my mom said, “I thought you’d at least look back.” [Chuckles.] And I said, “No, because,” I said, “I know you were crying.” And she said, “Yeah, I was.” And—and that’s why [unintelligible; 3:26:19]. I couldn’t handle that. But she—she was—yeah, they were—I mean, they were upset.
My—my dad wrote me a letter after I had been in country about a month, and it was quite funny because he—he started it off with, “Well, I guess you’ve seen combat by now.” And then it sort of went from there. And I laughed because I hadn’t. Even though I had already been out in the field for a month, literally nothing had happened. And we—we had gone out on patrol, but nothing else. So I laughed. I [went? 3:26:59], Well, he got that wrong. [Chuckles.] Nothing had happened, you know?
STERN: So what were the orders you got that next day after you declined the offer for Awards and Decorations?
BROWN: Oh, they assigned me to my unit.
STERN: And so did you go right from there to another base, the one at Quần Lợi [Base Camp]?
BROWN: Oh. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, what happened was from—from—from Long Binh we went to Quần Lợi, which was our brigade headquarters, and then—and we flew on a [Lockheed] C-130 [Hercules] transport, which is sort of a big cargo plane. And the from Quần Lợi we got on a Huey [Bell UH-1 Iroquois], which was the old UH-1 helicopters, the troop carriers, and we got on that, and then they took us out to our company, which was out in the field.
STERN: Okay, so you were always based on in the field, not on Quần Lợi.
BROWN: Oh, no, no, no, no, no. No, the way our division operated was the infantry companies were out in—we had an area of operation, and we would go out for 30 days or so at a time. So you’d be out—you’d be out doing your patrols every day for a month. And then at the end of the month, at 30 to 40 days you would come back to a fire base, not— Quần Lợi [was? 3:28:41] brigades, so we’d go to a small fire base. And then we would have what they called green line duty, which just meant that the infantry company—a fire base is a very small base with a couple of artillery pieces on it. But the infantry company would then take the perimeter guard on the fire base. So we would do that for about two days to four days. And there, you were able to get a hot meal, take a shower, that kind of thing. But then you went out—
STERN: So what were you doing?
BROWN: —for another 30 days.
STERN: And what were you doing on an everyday basis during those 30-day periods?
BROWN: Patrolling. You go out on patrols. Every day you had a different area that you had to search, and you’d—you’d just be out walking in the jungle, trying to—trying to make contact, trying to find the enemy or whatever you—whatever happened while you were in that area.
STERN: And did you make contact with the enemy?
BROWN: Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, a few times. Nothing sustained. Small—small contacts, where mostly it was because you walked into an area that you shouldn’t have been in [chuckles]—well, you didn’t want to be in. You know, they—there were—there were always reports of enemy activity in—in areas, so you’d send an outfit into that area to see if you could flush them out or make contact and draw, if you will, a larger force into—into combat so you could then call in your aircraft—your, you know, your areal and—and artillery to help you in the fight, if you will.
But a lot of times, you just sort of stumble on things. I mean, we—we’d walk into—you’d literally walk into a bunker complex because it was so well camouflaged, you didn’t know. And so all of a sudden you walk into it. And sometime they’d be empty. Sometime there’d be, you know, NVA [North Vietnamese Army] there, and they didn’t like you coming to visit, so they would try and send you off on your way.
But—but that didn’t happen on—it wasn’t like that on a daily basis. You would—more often than not, it was just the boredom of just walking around. You’d walk one or two clicks —sorry, a click is a thousand—a thousand yards. You’d walk one or two or three a day, but it’s mostly through thick jungle, so, you know, it’s quite tiring, quite strenuous, and it was hot as hell. And, you know, you’re carrying—you’re carrying your whole life on your back, so it—it’s a bit of a slog.
STERN: Did you ever fear that you wouldn’t make it out alive?
BROWN: A good question. You know, asking me now, I would say no, because I always believed—and I did say this while I was there, because you’d have these conversations [with? 3:32:24] yourself, and I used to say, You know, I believe that the people who make it are the people who have a positive attitude, and my positive attitude was nothing was going to happen to me; I was going to make it. And, fact is, that was me. And I—I said the people who don’t make it are the people who worry about making it or don’t think they are.
Now, I’m sure a lot of that back then was just a bit of trying to convince myself that nothing was going to happen, but I also think there is a bit of truth to it, because I do think that people get careless sometime, that they’re worried that something is going to happen, and—and I do believe that you can attract negativity to yourself.
So it’s—yeah, it’s—it’s a good question because I don’t recall—I don’t even recall, except one incident, where I thought something might happen. And—and we were just fortunate that a couple of rounds that came in didn’t go off. They—they were duds. But they landed close enough that we heard them, and if they had exploded, you know, you don’t know what—what would have happened. But that was the only [cross-talk; unintelligible; 3:33:54]/
STERN: Did you witness any casualties?
BROWN: Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Early on, we lost a guy who was doing his second tour, and he was doing a second tour because he had already done a tour, and his younger brother had got drafted and was in the Army in Germany, but he was afraid that if he then rotated back to the States, his younger brother would get called to come over—have to go to Vietnam. So he re-enlisted and re-enlisted for a second tour of Vietnam, and unfortunately he was killed two months into it.
And unfor- —what was even more unfortunate, he was killed but it was someone else’s carelessness, even though he was—you know, he had already been in country for over a year. So that was—that was the first—first—first [unintelligible; 3:35:01]. And then there was a few other—
STERN: What toll did that take on you?
BROWN: The first one—because—because I just had met him—I mean, it had only been a couple of months, so it wasn’t—it wasn’t like we were all buddy-buddy. You know, you sort of meet people and they’re in your company, in your platoon, but you don’t get to know them really, really well, so it—it was—it was more of a shock that everything that you’ve now heard about is real. Real people are dying. And that—that hits you like a cold, wet blanket.
But there is an old saying among people who have gone through situations where other people die and other people survive, and there’s something called survivor’s guilt, and that clearly happens, because you’re looking at this—well, you’re looking at this body of a guy you knew just a day before, and your—your first reaction is, Wow, he’s—he’s dead. Your second reaction is, I’m glad it wasn’t me. And—and you—you do that almost instinctively. It’s not you’re, like, Oh, wow, I’m really glad he’s dead and I’m not, but you’re looking at him and your first reaction is a gut reaction: Boy, I’m glad that’s not me. And—and you feel guilty as soon as you feel that, because you say, This guy used to be alive, and now he’s dead, and you’re alive, so don’t feel fortunate, because you could be the next guy there.
And—and I think a lot of people go through that, because for a lot of us, it was the first—a—a company—a company is a hundred guys, so you have a hundred guys out there, and I would say of the—when—when I got out there, I would say there were probably only maybe—maybe six to eight of us who were brand new. Everyone else had already been there and in combat and all that. So for us I think it was a bigger—a bigger hit, because—and I haven’t thought about it until you just asked that question, but it just occurred to me, now that I’m thinking back on it, I think the guys—the guys who were standing around initially when they brought him in were the—were the new guys. Very few—very few—it wasn’t, like, a hundred guys standing around. I think the other guys had experienced it before and they didn’t want to experience it again, so they didn’t even—and it wasn’t disrespect, but they just didn’t want to have to deal with—you know, with [unintelligible; 3:38:22]. So I think it was mainly newer people who—who, for them, it was the first time having—having—lost somebody there.
STERN: So how long were you in this company doing your 30-day periods and then the green line tours?
BROWN: I was in my—I was in—I was in my company for six months, and then I got transferred out to what’s called a headquarters division security platoon, which was based at division headquarters, which is, like, almost being in—in a city, because division headquarters was huge. And so I then spent the next—the rest of my tour in the security platoon.
STERN: And why did you get transferred?
BROWN: Because Ron was a very bad boy. I—I took it upon myself early on to question authority on a very frequent basis, and when you are a lowly [chuckles] noncommissioned officer, you’re not supposed to do that. You know, you’re supposed to take orders and not question them. And I had a—I had a running—I had a running issue with my platoon lieutenant, who was a [U.S. Military Academy at] West Point graduate, and he used to—he used to sort of make comments about me having gone to Dartmouth—you know, being college educated. And I couldn’t let it go, so I would have—take shots back at him.
For example, we had—malaria was a problem, so they would issue you mosquito nets that you were supposed to use every night when you set up your tent. Well, a mosquito net is just bit and bulky, and it’s just another piece of weight to add to your pack, and we decided very quickly that since three of us or four of us sleep in a tent together, you only need one net for four people. You didn’t need four different nets. So we buried these nets, and one night we were setting up, and we were right in front of where the lieutenant was—was staking out.
And we couldn’t avoid it because we’re right in front of him, and we’re setting up our tent, and we’re sort of taking our time because we didn’t have the mosquito net. And he realized—he said—he says, “Where’s your mosquito net?” [Chuckles.] And we’re looking around and go, “Oh, gee, I don’t know. I thought it was here.” He said—he said, “You guys don’t have your mosquito net?” So we managed to scrounge one, and, “Well, here it is.”
And we start putting it up, and we’re—we’re obviously having kind of a bit of a joke, so we’re fumbling around, and he says to me—he says, “What’s the matter, Brown, you don’t know how to put up a mosquito net?” He says, “You went to college.” And I turned around, I looked at him, and I said, “Yeah, [unintelligible; 3:42:00],” I said, “but I didn’t go to a good college like West Point, where I could have learned how to put up mosquito nets.” And it was like you could hear a pin drop. And it would go on—like, it went on like that for the whole, like, three, four months before he left. And he would have me walk point. I mean, he would have me do things like—I knew he was just—he was egging me on.
So he left, and we got a new lieutenant in, who was a ROTC guy from God knows where, and he was bloody awful. He was totally incompetent. Got us lost. Couldn’t read a map. So they got rid of him after about a month.
And then we got another ROTC guy from—I’ll never forget—University of Indiana [sic; Indiana University]. And his first day with our—with our platoon—the routine was in a—in a infantry company, you have three rifle platoons and what we call a heavy weapons platoon, which is mortars and things. And the three rifle platoons would rotate going on patrol every day, so the first platoon would go out, do a patrol, then the next day, the second platoon and then the third platoon and then the first platoon again.
Well, the day this new guy showed up, our first platoon had already done a—a patrol the day before. So we’re thinking we’re going to be able to relax that day, so we’re sitting around after eating, and the lieutenant comes over, and he says, “Okay, 1st Platoon, saddle up.” And everybody’s looking around, like, “What—what’s goin’ on?” And he says, “Saddle up.” And I say, “Why are we saddling up?” And he said, “We’re going on patrol.”
And that did it. I got in his face, and I said, “Why are we goin’ on patrol? We were on patrol yesterday.” And I gave him the routine: you know, 1st Platoon yesterday, 2nd Platoon today, 3rd Platoon. The next [unintelligible; 3:44:24] on the fourth day. And I said, “We’ve already done our patrol. It’s not our turn.”
And he’s looking at me like, I’m the officer here. Why are—why am I getting this grief from these guys? And I just wouldn’t leave it. And, you know, he said, “Look,” he said, “I’m new,” he said, “and I want the experience. That’s why we’re going on patrol.” And I said, “Well, if you want the experience, go on patrol with 2nd Platoon today.” [Chuckles.] And the captain—the captain overheard this, and then the captain—
And meanwhile, the whole platoon is sort of circled around, so I’m standing in the middle, talking to the lieutenant. And the rest of the platoon is standing around in a circle, trying to figure out what’s going on. And I—I just kept going. You know, I said, “Look, you know, all these guys here?” I said, “These—these are high school graduates, 18, 19 years old.” I said “You’ve gone to college.” I said, “These guys won’t say anything, but I know better. I’m talking”—I said, “I’m gonna say it for everybody. You know, we’re all here to do our job and only our jobs.” I said, “We all want to go home, and our job is to do our job the best we can, but don’t do”—and the mistake I made was I said, “Not to do anything more.”
And, of course, you’re talking to an officer, right? So—
STERN: Right.
BROWN: —they’re obviously—they’re obviously taking that as “you’re slackin’ off.” So the next thing I know—we ended up going on patrol, obviously very disgruntled. And then the next day, we got logged in, and I got orders to—to go to in-country R&R [rest and recreation, or rest and recuperation] for three days. And so I didn’t even question. I said, Ah, you’re gonna give me a three-day R&R, I’m takin’ it. So I jump on the chopper, and they fly me back to Bien Hoa [Air Base], and then I go down to Vũng Tàu for a three-day R&R, in country.
STERN: I’m sorry, can you just tell me what is R&R?
BROWN: Oh, rest and recreation.
STERN: Okay, thank you.
BROWN: So you—yeah, you get your R&R—everybody gets an R&R seven days out of country, so people would either go to Hong Kong, Bangkok [Thailand]; a lot of married people would go to Hawaii. And then later on, in the later years of the war, they even went to Australia. But in-country R&R was just a three-day rest and recreation at Vũng Tàu, which was a beach resort south of Saigon.
And it was sort of a neutral area. There were VC [Viet Cong] in the area, but it was sort of hands off because they—they did their R&R down there as well. [Chuckles.] So nobody was allowed to carried weapons, and it was sort of a neutral zone. There was no—you know, no fighting or anything.
But anyway, I take my three-day R&R, and I don’t think anything of it. I just think, I’ve been in country six months. They’re givin’ me an R&R. And then I came back, and when I came back [chuckles], they told me I—I was being transferred to—to division headquarters. And I didn’t even—I didn’t even bat an eyelash. I was out of it. They didn’t want me around because I was a troublemaker, and I guess this lieutenant decided he needed to be in charge, and he—he couldn’t have someone else—someone else running the platoon as well.
STERN: Do you remember the lieutenant’s name?
BROWN: Oh, no, I have—I have no idea. I literally met him one day, and then I was gone, so—
STERN: All right.
BROWN: So I have no idea. All I remember is University of Indiana. And he was green. I mean, it was is first day out in the field. He—he didn’t know from anything. The most dangerous—the most dangerous person in Vietnam or in any combat situation is a brand-new officer who doesn’t know anything, but they can get people killed.
STERN: So you had mentioned, in the information you had given us in advance, that on one of your green line patrols you had come across Captain [Thomas C.] “Rom” Loomis [Jr., Class of 1966], who was also a Dartmouth alum. When did that happen? What was your reaction upon meeting a former Dartmouth acquaintance, now in a war zone?
BROWN: Yeah, it was—it was actually quite funny. We were actually back at brigade, pulling green lines. And we had been there maybe a day or two—I can’t remember—but we had gotten showered up and got to go to the PX [post exchange], and it was all, you know, quite nice and cozy. And I was out walking in the morning, and it was a wire—concertina wire fence surrounding this—this area. But as I was walking down the road, I looked to my right, and I—I saw this guy standing with his back to me, and I can’t remember if he was talking to anybody else.
But anyway, I saw him with his back to me, and then he did a slight turn, and as soon as he did—Loomis had also lived in New Hamp, so that’s how knew him, quite well. And so as—as I saw his profile, I stopped, and I yelled out—I said, “Loomis, Tom Loomis!” And he turned, and he saw me, and he said, “Ron!” And he started walking toward me. And simultaneously, while he was doing this, I said, “Loomis,”—I said, “Tom Loomis!” I said, “What are you doin’ here, you asshole?”
STERN: [Laughs.]
BROWN: And as he got close to me—well, as he got close to me, I saw he was wearing captain’s bars. And—and I said—I said, “You asshole,” and then I immediately saluted him and said, “Sir.” [Chuckles.] And he laughed. I mean, he laughed. He said, “Cut it out.” But it was—it was a sergeant major walking along the road right behind me when I did that, and he gave me a look—and sergeant majors are, like, the career guys. You know, you don’t mess with them. And I tell you, this guy gave me a look. I thought I was—I thought I was in big trouble. But—because Loomis—because the captain had okayed it, he didn’t say anything, kept walking.
But, yeah, so Tom and I had a—had a nice catch-up. He had enlisted. He enlisted in the Army, and Tom was a very athletic guy. Although he didn’t play varsity, he—he—he was very athletic in high school. So he volunteered, and then he—he went to OCS, Officer Candidate School. Then he became—he went to Am- —he went Airborne [to the U.S. Army Airborne School], took airborne training. Then he went to [U.S. Army] Ranger School, and then, on top of Airborne Ranger, he went to Green Berets and [the U.S. Army] Special Forces.
So he had all these patches [chuckles] all over, and I’m—I was sitting there. I said, “Jeez, Airborne, Ranger, Green Beret. What are you doin’ in a grunt outfit?” And they had made him the commanding officer of one of the companies in—in—in our—in our brigade. So he was quite unhappy, actually, because he—he had been looking forward to using his Special Forces training. [cross-talk; unintelligible; 3:52:35].
STERN: And did you ever see him—
BROWN: [cross-talk; unintelligible; 3:52:37].
STERN: Did you ever seen him after that one?
BROWN: No, that was the one day, and it was only because our unit was literally passing in brigade, so I didn’t see him again after that. But, to show you how small the world is, when I—when I got to division headquarters and my security platoon, after—after a month or two—I can’t remember—a new guy was assigned to the—to the platoon. And, you know, everybody’s meeting everybody and talking, and he told me what company he was in, and I said, “Was Captain Loomis your commanding officer?” And he was, “Oh, yeah! Yeah,” he said, “he was a real great guy.” [Chuckles.] So, yeah—so it was a small world. You know, so I know he—he was okay because the guy said, “Yeah, yeah, I know him. He was okay.” He had rotated back. So as far as I know, you know, he made it—he made it out.
STERN: Okay.
And so you’re transferred to the headquarters, to the security platoon, and what were you doing there for the rest of your time in Vietnam?
BROWN: Oh, God, lucky me. I got to—I got to stand guard for generals and officers who thought they were really important stuff. We pulled—we pulled perimeter duty at night. Around the perimeter, you have towers, observation towers, so we pulled perimeter duty at night in the observation towers. And prior to that, we would walk foot patrol around the base, sometime officers’ quarters, general quarters, whatever. But basically it was provide security around—around division headquarters. So we—
But then we got to see what the rear—what the rear was like—you know, what—what people in the rear were—were going through. And the generals had these huge, double-wide trailers, house trailers that were, you know, air conditioned and—and stocked with food and booze, and they would have parties every night. They’d get drunk, you know, and act total—like total fools they were. And then the nurses would join the party, so they had the nurses, the Red Cross nurses who—who’d be on base as well, so they see a lot partying going on.
STERN: And what was your feeling about all these festivities happening?
BROWN: Well, you know, you’re a lowly—you’re a lowly enlisted man, and you’re seeing these—these officers get—having a great time. You know, they’re in a war zone, but they’re not really experiencing a war or combat. They have a quite cushy—quite cushy existence.
Something—I don’t know—I don’t know how well known it—it is, but in Vietnam, the enlisted man served a 12-month tour of duty, even if you were in the field in combat situations. Officers only served six months. And the reason was the military—career military people needed to have combat experience in order to get on fast-track promotions, and as the officers would say, “Vietnam is the only war we have.” So there was a real—a real push to rotate as many officers, particularly infantry and artillery officers, through combat as possible, so they would only do six-month tours of duty rather than 12.
STERN: Okay. So then they could advance in their careers?
BROWN: Yeah, yeah. Most of them, yeah, were West Point guys, so the Army was their career, so they wanted—they wanted combat. They wanted combat experience.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: The problem was, they wanted their experience at the expense of their men, so that was—
STERN: Yeah.
BROWN: —not always—that didn’t always sit well.
STERN: And what were some of the stereotypes or descriptions of both the North and South Vietnamese that you heard and encountered while you were there?
BROWN: Descriptions? Well,—
STERN: Just were there—
BROWN: I mean—well, for the North—I mean, obviously we didn’t have direct contact, so all we got was the propaganda, and, of course, the propaganda was all negative and, you know, the stereotype that went with the negative propaganda. So it—it’s a—it’s a part of your training. If the military is going to send somebody out to kill somebody else, they obviously have to demonize the enemy. You—you can’t—you obviously can’t consider your enemy to be human or, if human, worthy of, if you will, staying alive, because your job is to eliminate the enemy. So, yeah, we had all the negative stereotypes of the NVA, the North Vietnamese soldiers, the VC.
And, of course, the ubiquitous terms that were thrown around at the time were used by everybody—you know, gook and chink and slant-eyes and whatever, whatever the slur-of-the-day was.
But there was a respect, however,—and a lot of it was tongue in cheek. You know, I mean, people—they knew it was Army propaganda, and they’d sort of repeat it. But, on the other hand, there was a lot of—of—of real deep respect for the enemy because they were fighting on a—on a very unequal basis. They had no air force to speak of. They had not artillery to speak of, no tanks to speak of, not in the same quantity, and yet they were fighting and fighting well and, you know, had been fighting the French before the Americans and then were fighting the Americans. So you—you had a healthy respect to your opponent because he’d been at it, some of them for 20 years.
STERN: And did you collaborate or meet or engage at all with the South Vietnamese Army?
BROWN: Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, the ARVNs [pronounced AR-vins; Army of the Republic of Vietnam]—the ARVNs were around. Sometime they’d be attached to one of our units. Often—often, we were passing by. We would secure an area, and then you’d have an ARVN unit come in and replace us.
And I remember one time we—we were leaving an area, and they brought in an ARVN unit, and there was a military adviser with them, who happened to know our platoon—our company commander. They had gone to West Point together. And I remember standing [chuckles]—standing nearby, and—and when the two of them met, our captain—you know, “Uh, how are ya,” blah, blah, blah, and he says, “So how are these ARVN troops?” You know, “How--how did they perform in—in combat?”
And the other—the adviser says, “Well,” he says, “let’s put it this way: I think I’m assigned to the—to the South Vietnamese Olympic track team. When the fighting and the shooting starts, they run the other way.” [Both chuckle.] And our cap- —and our captain laughed. He said, “Well, what do you do?” He said, “I run right with ’em.” [Laughter.]
STERN: Yeah, that’s what I thought you’d say. And what about civilians? Did you ever interact with Vietnamese civilians?
BROWN: Actually, I did. And there’s a great story where—where—we--we were living in division. You have people come in on the base, clean up—they’ll clean the—when you live in an area, you have a hooch, and It’s—it’s like your barracks. And it’s sandbags, and you have separate quarters, usually two men to a—to a—to a room.
Anyway, you’d have the locals come in and clean, and on—on days when you didn’t have anything to do, you know, you’d sit around and talk. And I remember there was one girl who used to come in and—and clean, and I remember talking to her one day because she was asking me about America and what it was like, and I asked her what she missed most, because she was living in a village, and I said, “Well, what do you miss most about home?” And she said, “I miss the snow.” [Chuckles.] And I looked at her. I said—I said, “Snow?” I said, “We’re in South Vietnam.” I said, “There’s no snow in South Vietnam.” And she—and she deadpanned. She looked right back at me. She said, “Oh, no,” she said, “I’m from North Vietnam.” [Laughs.] And—and my immediate reaction was, “Wait a minute. Aren’t we fighting the North Vietnamese?”
STERN: Right.
BROWN: She said, “Yeah.” But she then gave me a very quick education, and I had not even realized it. What happened—and I said to her—I said, “You’re from North Vietnam.” I said, “Where?” And she said she was from outside Huế, which—which was the capital. And I said, “How did you end up here?” She said, “When they partitioned the country” after—what was it?—nineteen sixty—’56, I think it was, or ’54, after the French were kicked out. After they partitioned Vietnam North and South, the North was communist, and as you know, communism does not allow religion. The North Vietnamese were large numbers of Catholics, so what happened was they all had to leave. And so there was a huge migration of Catholics out of North Vietnam into South Vietnam. And that’s how she and her family ended up South Vietnam.
STERN: Fascinating.
BROWN: And I was just getting a kick—I remember getting a kick out of that because I said, “Wow.” I said, “We’re here, told we’re fighting the North Vietnamese,” I said, “and yet it’s not really the North Vietnamese,” I said, “it’s the communists [chuckles] in North Vietnam.” But, yeah, that was—that was a good history lesson for me. But that’s why—
STERN: So—
BROWN: —you have problems in the South. Sorry?
STERN: No, continue.
BROWN: No, I said that’s why they were having—that put in perspective to me why they were having the political problems in the south, because you may—you may or may not know: In 1963, Kennedy had been backing the former president—
STERN: Right.
BROWN: —of South Vietnam, [Ngô Đình] Diệm.
STERN: Diệm.
BROWN: And Diệm— Diệm was Catholic. And Diệm was from North Vietnam. And his family were all Catholics, and they basically were running the country, but they were only doing it for the benefit of the Catholics and their money, whereas the country is a Buddhist country, and that’s why in the south you had the Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire, because they objected to the Catholics who were running the country and who were just blatantly corrupt. So that’s why you had a real problem with—with the—with the South Vietnamese Army showing any kind of allegiance to the government that—that it felt was just a corrupt government.
STERN: So it has been a pleasure talking over the past few hours. Thank you so much. I actually have a meeting in ten minutes.
BROWN: Okay. That’s all right.
STERN: So I was wondering if it’s okay with you—I definitely want to talk about the end of your time in Vietnam and then the postwar period. Would it be okay to schedule another day to continue?
BROWN: Oh, sure, no problem, no problem. Do you have to run?
STERN: No. it’s okay.
BROWN: Okay, real quick: And this was something I—I—when talk- —talking to people now about Vietnam, I’ve mentioned it, and I don’t think anyone ever knew this or heard about it in the paper, but when [President Richard M.] Nixon was elected, he announced he had a plan to end the war. [Transcriber’s note: He announced that during his campaign.] And Nixon announced the first troop withdrawals when he first got in office, and—and the—the unit he brought back was the 173rd Airborne Brigade [Combat Team].
And he—the smoking mirrors were one day, when this was—after this was announced, we had these new guys show up in our—in our company, and they were wearing 173rd Airborne patches. And I remember there was one guy—two guys. I said, “Wait a minute.” I said, “I thought you guys were going home.” And the guy looked at me, and he laughed. He said, “No, no, no.” He said, “We’ve only been in country a month or two. What they’ve done is they’ve taken all the guys who have a lot of—basically ten months or whatever in country—and they transferred them into the 173rd,” so if you had already done ten, 11 months or even were in your 12th month and were getting ready to leave anyway, they transferred them into the 173rd.
They took the guys from the 173rd and then put them into the other units, who were staying in Vietnam. So when he announced he was bringing the brigade home, he really wasn’t bringing anybody home; he was bringing home guys who were [cross-talk; unintelligible; 4:07:54].
STERN: Not the troops he said. Okay. When did you learn that?
BROWN: While I was there. [Chuckles.] This happened while I was there, because the 173rd Infantry [sic] guys showed up in my company—in my platoon.
STERN: Okay. Wow.
BROWN: But no—
[Abrupt end of August 10, 2017, interview. Begin August 15, 2017 interview.]
STERN: This is Sam Stern. It is Tuesday, August 15th, 2017. I’m in the Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, and I’m speaking to Mr. Ronald Brown, Class of ’68, who is right now in Phuket, Thailand.
So I think we’re just going to pick up where we left off last time. So you had ended by telling me this anecdote about Nixon and the 173rd Airborne Brigade and his little game of smoke and mirrors [chuckles], if you recall.
BROWN: Oh, great, great.
STERN: So I was just curious. I know you had said that before going to Vietnam, you were fairly apolitical, and I was just wondering what your feelings were kind of towards Nixon and his attitude towards the war, and then what you encountered in terms of others who had been there under Johnson. Now we’re there under the Nixon administration—what their feelings were.
BROWN: I’ll—I’ll preface my response by saying it’s—it’s a bit difficult because I’m—you know, you’re going back 40 years—40-some years, and trying to separate what I actually thought at that time versus what I thought after may be a bit confusing.
STERN: Of course.
BROWN: But in—in—and I guess in the year or two before I went over, I think I told you I had had a long conversation with a freshman—
STERN: Right.
BROWN: —Rob [Rod? 4:09:55] Smith, who—who had dropped out of Dartmouth and enlisted in the Marines. And it was probably around that time that I started doing the reading about the war, and as I said, I tried to read everything I could get my hands on, and quite frankly, both sides were making persuasive arguments back then, so I had come to the conclusion that the only way you ever get to really know what’s going on is to actually be on the ground, so to speak, which was one of the reasons why, when I got my classification, I didn’t really fight it or try to avoid—avoid going over.
But once I was there, the general sense that I got from people—from other guys in my unit, at the time, anyway, was simply one of we were over there to do a job, and—and the job primarily was to come home safely. There—there was not this grand plan of fighting communism and all of that—
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: —that everybody seems to think is—is predominant among the—among the troops when they’re over fighting in any kind of war. It may start out that way, but I think after the ups and downs and the fact that this—that war had been going on, by then, for, you know, four or five years, I think the enthusiasm had waned, and it was more I’m over here to do my tour, and when my tour is up, I wanna go home. And that—that was reflected in that other anecdote I told you about the—the ROTC lieutenant from Indiana University, who came into our platoon and—and [chuckles] wanted us to go on extra patrols.
STERN: Right.
BROWN: And I even—yeah, I mean, essentially, in a nutshell, I said, “Look, you know, we’re here to do our job, and we’ll do our job well, but we’re not volunteering for any”—[Chuckles.] Obviously, it doesn’t sit well with an officer.
But anyway, I—I—I—it’s funny you asked that question because I—I’ve been reading—I just finished Professor [Edward G.] Miller’s book last week—
STERN: Oh, really?
BROWN: —and I’ve started—yeah, and I’ve started into Professor [James E.] Wright’s book, and I’m—I’m about two-thirds of the way through that. And one of the sections that I was reading—they were—he was talking about soldiers’ attitudes in 1969, and he quoted a couple of people I guess with whom he had spoken, who said, “Well, it wasn’t like we were sitting around every night talking about the politics of the war. It was more just keep your head down and stay alive.” And—
STERN: So you agree with that assessment?
BROWN: Yeah, pretty much, although we—we did have this—and I won’t say discussion in the sense that they were long, intellectual discussions, but we did talk about generally the war, in that “Why are we over here? You know, we’re just walkin’ around every day doing nothing, and people are dying, and you don’t really see any progress.”
And I think the biggest—the biggest concern that we had at that time was if you’re in a war, then you should be in a war to win it, in the sense that the military should be allowed to do whatever it has to do to win, and we never felt that that was the situation. We—we always felt that our hands were tied, and we—we couldn’t do everything that we—we should have been able to do to win. And—and that includes—Nixon eventually did, going into Cambodia or going into Laos or, you know, wherever the supplies were coming down the Hồ Chí Minh trail. And—and we felt that our hands were tied, and we—we were like the boxer in the boxing ring who had one hand tied behind his back while his opponent was unfettered.
And—and—and, again, it had nothing to do with beating back communism or saving the world for democracy; it was just that you’re in a war with somebody who’s trying to kill you, and you should be able to do whatever you need to do to protect yourself.
STERN: Right.
BROWN: And—and I—I do—I do recall conversations like that.
And also, you know, most of the guys were in favor of just an all-out bombing campaign in North Vietnam, and—and essentially it was: Look, if you knock out North Vietnam, they’ll either capitulate, come to the table and talk, or they’ll lose, and if you’re restricting your—your strategic bombing, then you’re not—you’re not accomplishing anything.
I mean, you can imagine if in World War II, the—the powers that be said, “Well, we’ve now—we’ve now landed in Europe after D-Day, but you can’t bomb any villages or places where there are civilian centers because you might accidentally kill somebody.”
STERN: Right.
BROWN: I mean, that war might have gone on for another five years,—
STERN: Right.
BROWN: —without any—yeah, without any, you know, necessarily the result that did happen.
STERN: So would you say that—
BROWN: I do—it—
STERN: No, what were you saying? I was going to say do you think that—
BROWN: I [cross-talk; unintelligible; 4:16:12]. I was going to say I do remember, towards about halfway through my tour, we had a—we had a 19-year-old show up who—and I remember him very—very clearly. He was from—from Washington, the state of Washington. Nineteen years old, just graduated high school. And when new guys come in, everybody sort of gets to know them and, “Where are you from, and what do you do?” And he had now—he asked, “Why’d you end up here?” And he said, well, he volunteered. And—and virtually everyone sitting around started laughing at him, and they said, “You volunteered? What did you—what did you volunteer for?” And he looked at us with a perfectly straight face and said, “To fight communism.” And, again, there was a sort of a—people laughed, you know, and, “Are you kidding me?” [Chuckles.] “Is that what you really believe?” But, you know, he—he was a 19-year-old out of high school from the state of Washington, and that’s what he believed.
But it was unusual in the group of guys that I was with that that was the attitude or—or the reasoning, if you will. A lot of guys are in the Army because it was either the Army or jail. You know, they were juveniles, got caught doing something stupid, and the judge said, “Here’s your—here are your options.”
STERN: Oh.
BROWN: So they [cross-talk; unintelligible; 4:17:44].
STERN: Really?
BROWN: They certainly weren’t over there fighting for any great cause of democracy and liberty unless, of course, their own liberty [chuckles], in that sense.
STERN: Yeah.
BROWN: But—
STERN: So do—do you think the sentiment of feeling that your hands were tied—was that shared by both comrades and your superiors?
BROWN: I—it—it—the guys that—yeah, the guys that—that my—if you will, when—the guys in my—in my outfit, yes. We—we didn’t really have conversations with our officers. [Chuckles.] It wasn’t like you sat down on a regular basis and chatted with the officers—
STERN: [Chuckles.]
BROWN: —about how the war was being prosecuted. I mean, there are two rules of—of—of I guess combat leadership. One is you never get too close to your men. And the other is you get close to your men. [Both chuckle.] So it—yeah. I mean, it was—it was really more a question of the personality of the particular officer whether you felt, you know, you could have those kinds of discussions with him.
And our first—our first officer was a West Point graduate and a career military guy, so, you know, he—he was rotating through on the basis that this is the quickest way to get promoted, was to have combat experience. And I may have mentioned this before, but the rotation for your average Army person was—enlisted—was 12 months, and for officers it was only six months. [A background noise has begun.]
STERN: Right.
BROWN: And the reason was—the reason was they wanted to get as many officers exposed to combat as they could, so we—we resented that a bit. [Chuckles.]
STERN: I can imagine.
BROWN: Yeah, they were—they were only doing six-month tours. But—yeah, I—I only mention this—and I know you have nothing to do with it, but I found it interesting, in reading Professor Miller’s book—have you read it at all, or are familiar with it?
STERN: I have not yet.
BROWN: Okay. It’s—it’s a collection of—of—of contributions made by members of the Class of 1964, who had served in some fashion in the military. And one of the things that struck me when I was reading it: I think—I may be wrong, but I would say virtually 99 percent of all the people who responded were officers, whether it was Navy, Air Force or Army. I don’t recall anyone who was just a plain old enlisted person, if you will.
But it was interesting to me because out of the—the respondents, I would say about—it seemed like maybe 10 to 20 percent had actual combat experience, either in—in—as pilots or on the ground in infantry. And I—and I did find it interesting that virtually every one of the responses from the people who were officers—they mentioned medals that they had been awarded. You know, they got a commendation medal or—or something of that sort. And I found it—I found it very interesting that people were talking about medals they had been awarded when the reality in the military, at least my experience in the Army—you got medals according to your rank, so as most of these guys were officers, they would automatically be getting certain medals anyway, just by virtue of being officers, whether they were exposed to combat or not.
And I—I—maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I—I got the impression, from reading some of what they were saying when they got to the part about being awarded medals for this and that—I almost got the feeling it was somehow they’re trying to justify the fact they were not in combat, but I was—
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: —“Well, I got a medal for doing this, this and this.” And I found that—I found that very [chuckles]—I found that very interesting.
STERN: And so they would have gotten medals regardless, you’re saying, of where they were stationed, even if they weren’t in Vietnam?
BROWN: Oh, yeah, yeah. For example, in the Army, we—we found out that when officers come out—for example, in—in our situation, when an officer came out to the field as a—as a second lieutenant, they would do their six months, and then they would get promoted to first lieutenant, and that was almost an automatic because they had done six months.
Upon completing their six months and then rotating back to the States, they were awarded a Silver Star. And the medal hierarchy is such that, you know, you have obviously the Medal of Honor, which is the highest, and then you had other—Distinguished Service Cross, all the way down to Bronze Stars, for example.
And we found that the first lieutenant would automatically—regardless of what he did—would get a Silver Star when he left Vietnam. And to anyone who’s been in the service, if you hear somebody got a Silver Star, you think, Oh, they—they must have done something really brave or heroic to get that. And—and yet the reality was, no, they—they just spent six months [chuckles] and got a Silver Star. So we were—we were a bit jaded by the way awards were—were being handed out. [Chuckles.]
STERN: And these are awards that you would have handed out had you taken the job up in the Awards and Decorations office, correct?
BROWN: [Laughs.] Exactly, exactly.
STERN: [Chuckles.]
BROWN: Yeah, you would have had to basically write fiction in a lot of cases, you know, because there’s a standard, a boilerplate, if you will, that that is used, and if you read awards, recommendations through several wars, not just Vietnam, you’ll—you’ll see things like “exhibited extraordinary bravery in the face of heavy enemy fire, exposing himself to the enemy to protect or save and lead his men” or “protect or save wounded men.” You just sort of sit there and say, That’s—that’s pretty standard. I mean, how many times does that actually happen? [Chuckles.]
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: But so be it.
STERN: So you doubt those descriptions.
BROWN: Pardon?
STERN: So you would doubt those descriptions, or the accuracy of them.
BROWN: Y—well, some of them, some of them, yeah.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: Yeah. But—
STERN: So you had met—
BROWN: But it’s true that—
STERN: No, it’s true that—?
BROWN: No, I was just saying it’s true that you got awards sometime based simply upon being in the position you were in for a certain period of time. For example, as an infantryman, you got an award—you got awarded a Combat Infantry Badge, either because you were in a combat zone for 30 days or you, within that first 30 days before automatically qualifying, you were in a combat situation or you experienced a firefight or something like that. So by just sitting around for 30 days, you—you got a Combat Infantry Badge.
And then, because ours was an air mobile unit, we—we did a lot of helicopter emplacements in areas, and if it was an area that was suspected enemy—there was suspected enemy activity, they would treat it as we call a combat assault, and you would then get awarded an Air Medal for the number of combat assaults you made, and then, depending again on how many, you get a—what they call a V for Valor or an Oak Leaf Cluster.
And it was all pretty much a joke because you may never have encountered any kind of [chuckles]—any kind of fire or anything when you came in, and yet, you know, you got the medal. So, yeah, it’s a bit questionable, is all I—is all I’d say.
STERN: So you received that initial badge for being in the field for 30 days, I assume?
BROWN: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
STERN: And then any other awards, decorations?
BROWN: Oh, yeah. I mean, there were—as I said, there are several medals that you get for being where you are and doing what you’re doing. But none of them would I ever, in the wildest—my wildest dreams say were a result of any act of heroism or bravery. It was just—
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: —I was here. Yeah, I was here for X period of time [chuckles], and I got—I got an award, so—it’s like getting an attendance award if you’re in school. [Both chuckle.] You know [chuckles], a teacher puts a gold star on your paper—you know, perfect attendance this week.
STERN: Exactly.
Could you elaborate little bit on what you mean by an air mobile division? So you said that there were helicopter emplacements. What exactly do you mean by that?
BROWN: Oh. Oh. The division—the division I was in was the 1st Cavalry [which he pronounces as Calvary] Division, and it was—it was put together back in the early ’60s by the Army to introduce a new technology which was—was air mobility. And the concept was to use helicopters, small, troop-carrying helicopters, which were the UH-1s, the Huey, to bring troops into a battle quickly and before the enemy could react or escape and—and try to get enough troops on the ground to turn the tide of any particular conflict.
The idea was you—you would have companies out doing patrols in certain sectors, and they were small. Companies were only about 100 to 110 or 120 men, at the most. And the idea was if they made contact with an enemy contingent, the helicopter mobility would allow support troops to come in quickly and help—help fight the enemy or outnumber the enemy and produce a victory, if you will. So the—the 1st Cavalry Division was the first division that used helicopters on a large scale to—to move us around—around the area we were operating in.
The other—there were other helicopters in other units. The 101st Airborne, for example, had helicopters, and the Marines had helicopters, but the 1st Cavalry was the first division that used it on a—on a large scale.
Have you—I don’t know how—how much of this you—you would have done, but if you’ve ever wa- —have you ever watched any of the Vietnam war movies?
STERN: None of the movies, I believe.
BROWN: Okay, because there’s—there’s one that Mel Gibson did a few years ago We Were—We Were—We Were Soldiers Once…And Young. And it was written—the book upon which it was based was written by a lieutenant colonel who had been in the 1st Cavalry Division and had led the first—at that time first combat assault into—into an area where the enemy was concentrated. And so it was the first time the concept of air mobility was actually put into practice in a real- —in a real-life situation. And the movie talks about that initial—that initial contact and the initial battle.
STERN: Okay. So you had interactions with pilots?
BROWN: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
STERN: And did you—
BROWN: Well, interaction: They flew it, and you—you were riding. [Chuckles.]
STERN: Okay. Did you ever talk to them when back on base?
BROWN: No, no, no, because we—we were out in the field most of the time, so, you know, we—we would do our patr- —our 30-day patrols, and then, if anything, would go back to a firebase. But we never—we were never anyplace where we were around—first of all, pilots are officers, so it’s—it’s very rare you would interact with them [anyway? 4:31:24].
But the only thing—the only thing that I was, if you will, fortunate enough to do—there was a pilot in Vietnam who had earned a reputation for being willing to take chances and—and do a lot of what people would have thought were crazy things in a war. And he had—I don’t know—you wouldn’t know this, but when I was—when I was—well, in college, there was a radio program, and it was [chuckles]—the character was Chickenman, and Chickenman was a [chaste? 4:32:09] crusader who fought crime. [Transcriber's note: Chickenman was the name of the radio series, not the name of any character in it. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chickenman_(radio_series)]
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: [Hysterically? 4:32:07]. And this—this is on the radio, and this was during the ’60s, and everybody knew who Chickenman was. [Chuckles.] Well, when I got to Vietnam, there was a pilot who had been nicknamed Chickenman, and you could tell him, because he had a big chicken head on his—painted on his helmet. And so you were—you were considered blessed if you got to fly with Chickenman at some point. [Chuckles.]
STERN: And do you know what Ch- —
BROWN: And I [cross-talk; unintelligible; 4:32:39] got to do that.
STERN: Do you know what Chickenman’s real name was?
BROWN: Oh, I—I have no idea. I have no idea.
STERN: [Chuckles.]
BROWN: We—we just knew him as Chickenman. I—I’m sure there’s stories somewhere about him. But it could be an urban legend, but I—we were actually—we actually did a chopper ride once and looked up and the pilot had the—the chicken head on his helmet. [Both chuckle.]
STERN: What was the troops’ reaction to that?
BROWN: Oh, no, it was a morale lifter—you know, just hearing stories about people who do crazy things. His was—his was probably the only one that I recall. There may have been others similar, but his—his was the only one that I recall.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: Yeah.
STERN: So you had mentioned in our last conversation an encounter with a Catholic girl from North Vietnam when you at the security platoon—
BROWN: Yeah.
STERN: —headquarters?
BROWN: Yeah.
STERN: And I was just wondering if you recall any other notable interactions with either North or South Vietnamese.
BROWN: The people who worked on base, you know, came from the local village, so we—you know, we would have conversations with them about a lot of different things. They—they would ask about what it was like in the U.S., and, you know, what do you miss? There were—I had discussions that were—with this—for one, with this young lady. She was in—in the villages, they had something called a regional—a regional defense force, which were just, like, militia to protect the local villages because they didn’t always have Army units around. And she was actually in one of these units. And because she was a woman, I’m—I’m—I was surprised that—you know, when she told me she was in the unit, I said, “What do you mean you’re in the unit?” She said, “Oh, no,” she said, “I’m in—you know, I’m in this provincial unit,” which was—you know, it was interesting that you had women who were actually carrying weapons and—and doing—doing some of the fighting.
But the one conversation I did have with a—with a few others—because the question came up, because there were some incidents involving—well, there were some racial incidents, and they—you know, some of the villagers that were working—I remember having a conversation, like, “Well, why—why do the white soldiers and the black soldiers not like each other? Why are they fighting?” And because they were Vietnamese, they had no concept of U.S. history, so, you know, I gave them a short, if you will, history lesson on—in the beginning, the United States and slavery—you know, bringing people over to work on—in plantations and all, and they were—I mean, they were just shocked, first of all, that that went on.
And—and I said, “Well, but, you know, it ended, like a hundred years ago. There was a big war in the Uni- —similar to the North and South Vietnam civil war—
STERN: Right.
BROWN: —and there was a big war, and the slaves were free.” I said, “However, they were freed in name only. There was still a lot of discrimination and prejudice against them, and that’s why coming over to Vietnam, a lot of that carried over.” And—and there were—there were a lot of—there were a lot of incidents that I’m sure never got reported back in the States because it would have made bad press. But—but there were—there were several incidents where—where those kinds of things happened.
And so—so, yeah, in talking to the Vietnamese, they were—you know, they were surprised that yet we were all over there, fighting together [chuckles] as well as fighting each other.
STERN: Could you describe some of those incidents? Do you remember any specifically?
BROWN: Oh, yeah, yeah. There was a—there was an actual, well, shooting incident involving black and white soldiers who had-who had come back on green line duty, which was companies would rotate in from their time out in the field, and then they’d have three to five days pulling perimeter guard. And there was an incident on—on the division base where—and I don’t know what caused it, but there was actual shooting between two groups of—of soldiers in—in adjoining bunkers, I might add. They were shooting at each other.
STERN: At each other.
BROWN: Yeah, they were shooting at- —somebody got mad. Somebody said something, did something, and they started shooting at each other. It didn’t last very long, and I—I remember talking to the CID [U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division] officer who was doing the investigation. They had a—CID is Criminal Investigation Department, or Division. And they had—they had a Criminal Investigation Division officer on the scene who was investigating what happened and was writing up the report. And—and he was just saying, you know, the guys come back, they’re fenced in or they’re drinking—you know, get a little drunk, somebody says something that somebody doesn’t like, and the shooting starts.
There was another incident where I was walking—I was walking on the base with some of my buddies and we—and we—we looked up, and some APCs [armored personnel carriers] were coming along the road, and one of them was flying a Confederate flag. And, yeah, everybody just got upset and started yelling at them. Fortunately, people didn’t have access to weapons, because I honestly think there would have been some shooting if—if—if people would have had weapons.
STERN: What are APCs?
BROWN: Oh, sorry, armored personnel carrier.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: Yeah, they’re similar to—you know, even in the Iran and Afghanistan war, they—they carry APCs. They’re—they’re—they look like mini-tanks but without the—the cannon on the front.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: But they’re troop carriers. And so anyway, yeah, so, you know, one of those went by with a Confederate flag. And, of course, the reaction of the black soldiers was, you know, “We’re over here fighting supposedly for freedom and democracy, and these idiots are driving around with a Confederate flag—
STERN: Mm-hm.
BROWN: —which tells you what’s goin’ on back home.” So that didn’t go over well.
And then there was a —there was a big fight with a—with the engineer battal- —engineer battal- —one of the engineering companies, and I honestly don’t even know what caused it; it just all of a sudden flared up. And so, you know, that carried on for a while. But, you know, it happens. It happens.
STERN: Did you ever report any incidents?
BROWN: Report them? To whom?
STERN: Yeah. I thought you had mentioned that they were sometimes reported but never made it back to the States. Did—would you ever tell a superior officer?
BROWN: No. Oh, no, I’m sorry. What—what I meant was they were never reported on back in the news—
STERN: Oh. Oh, oh, oh.
BROWN: —in the States.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: Yeah.
STERN: I’m sorry. I misunderstood that.
BROWN: Yeah. No, no, that’s all right, yeah. I mean, when people are shooting at each other or fighting on the base, it becomes—the MPs [U.S. Army Military Police Corps] hear about it quite quickly, the Military Police, so they show up [cross-talk; unintelligible; 4:41:15].
STERN: Were there any more under the radar, kind of racist slurs or bias?
BROWN: Oh, yeah. Yeah, in my—in my platoon, we had a couple of incidences where the Vietnamese—the Vietnamese who were working on the base had told us that one of the sergeants who was from—he was from the South; I can’t remember where. It might be Tennessee. But he had told them that the black guys had tails and the girls were—I mean, they were curious. You know, they said, “Oh,” they said, “is it true?” You know, they wanted to see if it was true or not.
STERN: That’s incredible.
BROWN: Well, not really. I mean, that’s—you know, there are people, unfortunately, who believe that. Not—not believe the tails, but they’re—they’re willing to—to use it because they think it’s funny or whatever, or insulting. But, you know, you tell—the Vietnamese don’t know, and they’re—they’re being told this, and then, of course, they’re: “Is that really true?” You know, that kind of thing. So there was—there was a bit of a confrontation with the sergeant, who, of course, denied it. But—but that went on. That went on.
STERN: And what would you say was the percentage of blacks serving with you? Was it high or fairly low?
BROWN: In—in my own plat- —in my own company, you mean?
STERN: Right.
BROWN: Or—oh.
STERN: No, in your company.
BROWN: Oh, in—in my company, it was probably the average, which I think the numbers—I think the numbers said that blacks made up about 15 percent of all combat units, so I would say in my company of a hundred or so there were probably—I’m doing a quick, off-the-top-of-my head—four, five, six—maybe—probably 10 to 15.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: So that’s probably—yeah, it’s close. It was close.
STERN: And any other encounters with Vietnamese? Did you ever interact with prisoners of war?
BROWN: Oh, no, no. Any—any prisoners of war would have been handled directly by the intelligence people.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: We—we—yeah, no, I—trust me when I say I was a lowly grunt. [Chuckles.] We did—we didn’t inter- —we didn’t get close to anybody.
STERN: So I’m curious about the women on base. So you obviously said there weren’t [American] women fighting at the time, but were there nurses besides the Vietnamese women who were helping to clean and take care of the base?
BROWN: Yeah.
STERN: Were there American women?
BROWN: Yeah, there were. There were Red Cross—Red Cross personnel on—on the base. They were affectionately known as Donut Dollies. But they—they’d come around—you know, literally come around and bring donuts and coffee. [Chuckles.] And I don’t know what else they were there—I mean, I know what else they were there for, but, you know, they were—they were basically like the—the USO [United Service Organization, Inc.] but in Vietnam.
STERN: But those were all Red Cross.
BROWN: Pardon?
STERN: They were all in the Red Cross?
BROWN: Yeah, the ones—the ones that came over—I never—I never knew of or met any actual Army nurses because they would be over in the medical—in the medical section. But the Donut Dollies were non- —non-nurses; they were—like I said, they’re more like USO—you know, morale boosters and come and talk to the guys, “Where are you from?”
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: “I’m from here. Here’s what’s goin’ on.” You know, that’s—that’s really all that was—that they were doing. They were doing other things, but I—that’s for somebody else to talk about. [Both chuckle.] They—they partied hard. No, I mean, they partied hard with the officers. The officers [cross-talk; unintelligible; 4:45:53]—
STERN: I’m sure they got spirits up.
BROWN: Yeah, I mean, the officers’ area was—I think I told you: The generals—it worked its way down in size, but the generals had double-wide trailers,—
STERN: Yeah.
BROWN: —and then it went down, depending on your officer status, to the lieutenants. But when I was in the security platoon, we had to pull—pull guard duty around the perimeter of the—of the trailers where the officers were, and there’d be wild parties going on at night. I mean, seriously wild parties. [Chuckles.] So—not everybody was worried about being in a combat zone.
STERN: Clearly.
BROWN: Not these guys. They were—they were partying,—
STERN: Right.
BROWN: —drinking [cross-talk; unintelligible; 4:46:36]—
STERN: No, it sounds like it.
BROWN: Yeah. Yeah.
STERN: So you had tried to read everything you could get your hands on kind of about Vietnam before going over. Do you think that the media representation was accurate, based on your time there?
BROWN: See, that’s one’s—that one’s a tough one because when I’m in Vietnam, I don’t know what’s going on in the States, what they were reporting, so it’s hard to say one way or the other when I was there.
STERN: Mm-hm.
BROWN: And before I went over, I didn’t really have anything to compare it with on the ground, so, you know,—
STERN: Right.
BROWN: —you’d watch the news—yeah, you watched the news, but, quite frankly, I don’t recall anything specific. It was more: Here’s the news. It was only after Tet, when [CBS broadcast journalist] Walter [L.] Cronkite [Jr.] came out with that famous comment, where essentially he said, “It appears to this reporter that the best that can be done is a negotiated peace.” And—and—and that was sort of the turning point, I think, from the standpoint of public support. And that was in ’68, so I had not yet—had not yet gone over. So that was my first awareness that this thing was a stalemate and we weren’t going anywhere.
And so when I then got drafted, of course, the negatives was, Well, it sounds like we’re just over here biding time until we can leave. And that’s why I said there’s this perception of fighting with your hand tied behind your back, because the original military concept had been, quote, “search and destroy,” where combat units could go out to an area where the enemy was, try to find them and then make contact and, you know, eliminate them.
That changed when I got over because Nixon announced that he had this grand plan to end the war, and then he proceeded to, you know, announce, as I said, the withdrawal of the—of the—of combat troops. And then the—the word came down that we were no longer doing search and destroy. In a sense, we were then told we were doing only defensive reaction. The reality was we were doing the exact same thing we were doing when I first got there. Nothing changed. They—they changed the name, but the actual concept was the same,—
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: —that was being implemented on the ground.
One thing that—I think it’s been made known, but one of the things that—that sometimes is not understood by people who hear about the war—and we did hear this before hand: People said, “Well,”—you had at one point—I think at the height of the war, there was something like 600,000—600,000 American troops in Vietnam. And, you know, people were like, “Well, yeah, 600,000 troops. How could you not win?” And the reality was that the bulk of the troops over there were support troops, so for every—every troop in the field, for every one soldier actually in the field doing combat, you had six or seven support troops, so at its height, even though there were 600,000 troops, less than 100,000 were actually doing what I was doing: actually out in the field, fighting.
STERN: Interesting.
BROWN: And sometime people don’t realize that. Yeah, people don’t—they say, “Well, how come you couldn’t win with 600,000?” You say, “Yeah, but there were only about 75,000 who were actually fighting, and you’re fighting in a—in a country that’s the size of Florida.” [Chuckles.] I mean, you can’t be everywhere. You can’t be [unintelligible; 4:50:52] and do everything. So that—that’s sometimes I think a misconception a lot of people just never understood.
STERN: So I’d like to shift topics just for a minute to your communications. You said you were never the best letter writer.
BROWN: Right.
STERN: But you also mentioned that your dad had written you at one point, assuming you had been in combat. You said you hadn’t. But were you back and forth with your parents a lot? Did you write letters to friends back home?
BROWN: Yeah. My—my mother actually did all the writing. My mother wrote a lot, and I answered all the letters, and the one—the only one—one other time—the only other person that I wrote to, not on a regular basis but I had written to him, was a buddy of mine that I had grown up with, and he had gone in the Peace Corps. But I had—I had written to him on one particular occasion. He had—he had written me and—you know, “How are things goin’? What’s goin’ on?”
And when I wrote to him, I sort of laid it all out as to what was really—what was really going on, as it happened, right before—around Thanksgiving. And we had had a week of heavy—relatively heavy engagement with the enemy. And so, you know, I wrote him and said, “It’s really—yeah, it’s really bad out here,” and sort of laid my soul out to him.
Well, the problem was every time I wrote my mother, it was all about the weather—you know, “It’s hot. It’s raining. It’s this”—and I never mentioned anything about combat to her.
STERN: Intentionally.
BROWN: Well, it turned out that—oh, yeah, yeah. Well, it turned out that my buddy and his wife went over to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving. [Both chuckle.] He wrote me—he wrote—he wrote me a letter after, and he said, “Uh-oh,” he said, “I—I need to apologize because I did something I [unintelligible; 4:53:03].” And apparently, when they were at the house, they were talking, and my mom was, like, “Oh, have you heard from—have you heard from Ron?” [Both chuckle.] And he said—he came out—he says, “Oh, yeah, he sent me that letter about Thanksgiving. He said it was really bad.” [Chuckles.]
STERN: Oh!
BROWN: Yeah. And he said my mother almost died. I mean, she was, like, “What?” [Chuckles.] She said, “Every time he writes me, he only talks about the weather.” [Chuckles.] So she—she was—she was quite taken aback.
STERN: [Chuckles.]
BROWN: So, yeah, I had a little fun with that one.
STERN: And did you correspond with your siblings? What were they doing at the time?
BROWN: No, they were too young, I think. And when I say “too young,”—I mean, they were teenager—you know, my middle sister was about 14, 15, and the other one was only about 1—10 or 11. But they—they sent some tapes, you know, from the family, that kind of thing, so—so I—you know, I did hear from everybody.
STERN: And did you look forward to receiving those letters?
BROWN: Well, you—you’re always—you’re always glad to hear, you know, from home. Letters—you know, letters were always welcome. We used to get care packages from home, and those—those were even more welcome—you know, because the food you got from the Army was just pretty basic stuff. So we would get—my—my mother, my aunts—mean, they would—you know, they’d say, “What do you need?” or “What do you want?” And you’d send them—tell them, “You could send me this, this and this.” And mostly it was food.
But I remember around—I can’t remember—it was sometime around Thanksgiving, maybe even Christmas. I couldn’t believe this, but I got a package and I opened it, and my—they had sent me a Virginia ham.
STERN: Wow.
BROWN: I don’t know if you’ve ever—yeah, Virginia hams are pretty big. And I—I—I pulled this out, and I said, For God’s sakes, I’m not carryin’ this.
STERN: [Chuckles.]
BROWN: So what we—what we did was basically I invited the whole squad, the whole platoon over, and—and we cooked—we cooked the ham, and everybody—we ate the ham. [Chuckles.] But that was sort of the highlight of the care packages that we got. [cross-talk; unintelligible; 4:55:56].
STERN: So then you were the most popular one from that point forward.
BROWN: Well, for that particular night, anyway.
STERN: [Laughs.]
BROWN: Because normally—yeah, normally you were eating C- Rations, out of a can, and they weren’t very tasty. Probably had the barest of nutritional value. So, yeah, having a big Virginia ham was—was—was really good, really good. It’s amazing how—how you can learn to cook and—and do things with virtually no—no utilities, but you make—you make do. You make do.
STERN: What did you request from home? Do you remember?
BROWN: Well, I—I do remember—I—I had a thing for pudding, so I used to get—they used to send—I don’t even know if they still make them, but—and I don’t even remember the particular brand, but I used to get these things of six packages of six, and they’d have—I love butterscotch and—and rice pudding, so those were my two favorite treats that they would send over.
STERN: That’s nice.
BROWN: Yeah. I didn’t get books from home, but guys in the outfit—you’d sort of—some guys read, so you passed books around. You know, when somebody finished, you’d pass it around, so I—I—I read a number of books, just to take the boredom away.
STERN: So I do want to move on to your trip back home and then what you did after the war, but I wanted to know if there’s anything else you wanted to mention from your year in Vietnam.
BROWN: Nothing that I can—nothing I can think of off the top of my head that—oh, this is—this is really—this is very bizarre, but it is not anything to do with what you just asked me, but a couple of days ago, I was reading through Professor Wright’s book, and—and there was an incident that he covered in the book, and I went on the Internet to—to read up on it. And while I was on the Internet, I saw a website, and I clicked on it, and it was a Vietnam war veteran’s website. And I was just sort of scrolling through it to see what was there, because there were books that people had written and all. And there were pictures. And I started scrolling down the pictures, and I actually saw a picture of my—my outfit. And I—I don’t know who took it or how it got in there, but there was an actual picture of—of part of my squad.
STERN: Wow.
BROWN: And I knew—I mean—yeah, I knew the guys. I was looking right at these guys that I knew in the picture. It was a bit mind blowing.
STERN: Yeah, surreal.
BROWN: Yeah. Now,—
STERN: Do you want to walk me through those—I guess your last few days in Vietnam and then the trip back home?
BROWN: My last few days. Well, they were no different from the other. I mean, you have—when you first arrive in country, you get a calendar. It’s a Gregorian calendar. And on one side it’s—it’s got 360—one to 365. And—and everybody takes out their little pencil, and every day you mark off—you mark off the day [chuckles], starting at 365, and you work all the way down to one. And as—as you get within three months of coming home, you’re designated as “short,” and people run around all the time, you know, “I’m short. I’m ready to get home.”
So when I—when I was ready leave, it simply was, you know, packing up your stuff and saying goodbye to everybody and getting on a plane and flying from division headquarters back to Saigon, where—where we first came in.
My—my—my only concern on leaving was when we got to the base to leave, there’s an Army transport, a C-130 cargo transport plane, and we got on it. There were about 30—it holds about 30 or 60 guys. And we got on the plane and sat at the end of the runway. He revved up his motor, his engine, and he starts down the runway, and he’s building up speed, and we’re waiting to take off, and all of a sudden he stops, slows down and he turns around. And everybody is wondering what’s going on. And he taxies back to the other end of the runway, and he repeats this. He revs up the engines, and he shoots down the runway, and he doesn’t take off. So we’re sitting there, thinking, What the heck?
STERN: Uh-huh.
BROWN: So then he comes on. He said, “Everybody get off the plane.” So we get off the plane, and then they announce they had—they had engine trouble. They said one of the engines didn’t seem to be—didn’t seem to be performing the way it should. So we’re standing out on the tarmac, and the guy—it was a Royal Thai Air Force place, even though it was an American plane. And they had a crew that were all Thai, and I had never seen or met any Thais before, but they’re very small. And they were—we saw these Thai guys come out, and they climb up into the cowling of the engine. And they were so small, they were almost standing up in it. And they were in there for a half hour and whatever, whatever. And finally they finish, and everybody: “So what was wrong?” Oh, they couldn’t find anything wrong. [Chuckles.] And the pilot is saying he couldn’t get any power to take off. So we get back on this plane.
STERN: The same plane.
BROWN: Now we’re all [cross-talk; unintelligible; 5:02:18] worried—well, yeah, same plane. We’re all, like, Hold on. There’s a problem with this sucker.
STERN: [Chuckles.]
BROWN: So the plane—we sit down, and we’re revving it up again, and now we’re all literally white knuckled because, Hey, I’m ready to go home. I can’t have anything happen to this stupid plane.
STERN: [Chuckles.]
BROWN: And he takes off, and the whole flight—it’s about an hour flight—and he flew quite low, and—and I had been on these before, and they never flew that low before. But it seemed like he was flying kind of low because he kept looking out the window at this—at this engine. And it just had us worried all the way there. But we finally got there, so, you know, that was great.
And then that was—you go though a processing, which takes about 24 hours to 48 hours. You pick up your—the stuff you brought in. It’s in a storage warehouse, so you go pick that up, and then you go and you do your paperwork to—to get out, to get out from Vietnam into the States. They—you know, they’re doing your pay, how much pay you get and all sorts of other things. And then you get a big—you get your—your uniform for travel, and you go have a big steak dinner in a big dining hall.
And there—there are a bunch of new guys who were just coming in country, and I remember on the reverse, when I first got in country, a buddy of mine and I were in the mess hall, and there was a guy who was going home. He had already done his 12 months. And he was, like, “Oh, you’re the new guys. What are ya doin’? Where are ya goin?” And we told him, and he said, “Well, you know,” he said—and he starts telling stories about his year.
And one of the things he said, which I’ll always remember—he said, “You know, some nights it’ll get so dark, when there’s no moon, you hold your hand up in front of your face and you can’t see it.” And I remember hearing that, and I was, like, Yeah, right. You know, do I look like I was born yesterday? And my buddy and I just—we laughed. We didn’t say anything. We laughed. And I just never believed this guy until I actually got out in the field. And sure enough, the first moonless night, I couldn’t see. I mean, I held my hand up in front of my [chuckles]—I could not see my hand. And it was quite disorienting because you’re out in the jungle, and you can’t see anybody. [Chuckles.] So, you know, it’s a bit unnerving.
But all that to say 14 months later, when I was ready to leave, we’re in—I’m in the dining hall with a guy that I’d met from Pennsylvania, and we just sort of hooked up, and we got together and went to dinner. The same thing happened. You know, we had these new guys come in, and they—“So what’s it like?” And I told the same story.
STERN: Same one.
BROWN: I said, “Well,”—yeah. I said, “You know, it’s gonna get so dark out there, you hold your hand up in front of you, you can’t see.” [Laughs.] So I—I laughed.
But, yeah, then you get on a—get on a World Airways charter flight, fly back to Oakland Army Base, and we landed in San Francisco Airport early in the morning, probably two or three in the morning. There was nobody in the airport. I mean, it was deserted. And I didn’t have a—we had a flight back to the East Coast in the morning, so we had about, you know, six, seven hours to kill. And so we were just walking around the empty airport.
And I actually ran into a guy that I had gone through basic training with a year earlier. And he was—he was coming home at the same time, so we talked, you know. He—he had gone into a unit with all the other guys we had trained with, whereas I went—I went to a different unit. And so we were just catching up—you know, what happened to So-and-so and, you know, we were running through names and—and all the people we knew, so—
STERN: Right.
BROWN: —that was—yeah, that was—that was interesting, given a year had passed. And then—
STERN: And so—
BROWN: —I flew back—pardon?
STERN: Where had he ended up?
BROWN: He—you mean division?
STERN: Yeah.
BROWN: Oh. He was in the 1st Division.
STERN: Located?
BROWN: Because all the guys I had trained with—hmm?
STERN: Were they located near where you were?
BROWN: Oh, no, no. First Division was in—there were four—the Army—the military divided Vietnam into four areas of operations. There was I [pronounced eye] Corps, II Corps, III Corps and IV Corps [pronounced as the numbers two, three and four, respectively]. And the 1st Division was down in—in—in IV Corps, which is the Mekong Delta, around Saigon and south.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: And I was in—I was in an area called III Corps, and our particular area for our division was along the Cambodian border. There were three areas—if you look at a map, you’ll see three areas where Cambodia actually comes into Vi- —into Vietnam. And they were nicknamed the Parrot [sic; Parrot’s] Beak, the Fish Hook, and the Angel’s Wing, and—just because of the shape of the three intrusions. And so my division operated in those three areas, because that’s where the heaviest concentration of NVA regular troops was.
STERN: Okay. Okay, so you saw him at the airport in California?
BROWN: Yeah, yeah, in San Francisco.
STERN: And
then seven hours later, boarded a flight back east?
BROWN: Yeah, got on a flight headed back to New York. We landed in—I remember we landed in Pittsburgh [Pennsylvania], I think, because that’s where the guy that I had met—literally, I met him when we were leaving Vietnam, and then we just sort of hung out. And I remember—it was funny—he was—he was 18 at the time or might have been 19, but I think he was—well, he was either 18 or 19.
And when we were in San Francisco Airport, we walked into the bar. In the morning, bar open, even though it was early in the morning. And I’m not a big drinker, but I said, “We need to go in there and get a drink.” And we went in, and we sat at the bar, and we were in uniform, and I ordered a drink, and—and I forget this kid’s name, but anyway, he ordered a drink, and the bartender looks at us, and he says, “I gotta ask for some ID.” And I didn’t know how old this guy was at the time. I was 22, but I didn’t know how old this guy was. So I looked at the bartender, and I said, “Are you kidding me?” And he said, “Hey, guys, I’m really sorry, but it’s the law. I gotta—I gotta have ID.”
So I pull out my ID. Yeah, fine. Well, my buddy, very sheepishly, says, “I’m only 18”—or 19. And the drinking age in California was 21 at the time. And the bartender looks, and he says, “I’m sorry,” he says, “I can’t serve you. And I looked at him, and I said, “You have got to be kidding me.” I said, “He’s old enough to go and fight and maybe die, and you won’t serve him a drink.” And the guy—you know, the guy—I mean, he said, “Hey, look, I’m—I’m really sorry,” he said, “but it’s the law.” And so we got up and left. It’s sort of ridiculous.
STERN: [unintelligible; 6:10:25].
BROWN: We got off at—he got off—he got off in Pittsburgh, and I flew on to New York. And then I got a bus to New Haven. [Chuckles.] Which I missed, because I was asleep, and the bus—for some reason—I don’t know why they didn’t, but I slept right on through New Haven, and when I woke up, we were in Hartford [Connecticut].
STERN: [Chuckles.]
BROWN: And that was the end of the line, so the b- —you know, all of a sudden, I’m waking up, and I look around, and I don’t recognize it, and I say, “Where are we?” And he says, “Hartford.” And I said, “I was supposed to get off in New Haven.” He said, “Well, you were asleep and I didn’t want to wake you.” [Chuckles.] I was in Hartford [cross-talk; unintelligible; 5:11:12].
STERN: So you took a bus back?
BROWN: Pardon?
STERN: Did you take a bus back from Hartford?
BROWN: No, no, because what happened—I had an uncle who lived in Hartford, so—one of my mother’s brothers, so I called him up, and I said, “Hey, look, I just got back, and I missed getting off in New Haven.” I said, “Could you—could you drive me back?” You know, it’s only—what?—40 minutes, 45 minutes. So he came—he came around and picked me up and—and drove me—drove me back—drove me back home. It was funny.
STERN: And what was the first thing you wanted to do, a person you wanted to see when you got back to the States?
BROWN: First thing, first thing? I—I don’t know. You know, I wanted to get home and get out of my uniform, because I walked in the door, and my mom—first thing she said was, “Lemme get a picture of you before you take off that uniform.” [Both chuckle.] That was—that was—that was the one thing she wanted to do before I—before I took that off. But—but that—I arrived back on Thursday, and that Monday—or that Sunday I drove up to—to Cambridge [Massachusetts] to go back to law school.
STERN: And so had you communicated with the law school in that period in between, or it was just automatically said you were going back as soon as you got home?
BROWN: Yeah. Yeah. When—when I got my draft notice, I went into the dean and explained, “I got drafted. I’m, you know, withdrawing from school.” And, of course, you know, “Okay, no problem.” And I said, “But, you know, what do I do about coming back?” And they said, “Well, you just write us when you’re—when you’re—when you want to come back, and, you know, then we’ll handle it then.”
So when I was in Vietnam and I had—I forget when it was; it was probably sometime in June—I wrote and said, you know, “I’m gonna get out in September, and I want to come back and get back in the Class of seventy- —’73,” as it were.” And they wrote me back, and they said, “Well, we think you might be better if you just wait and come back the fol- ”—you know, the next year. You know, “Essentially give yourself time to come back and get adjusted.” And I wrote him back, and I said, “Thanks, but no thanks. I want to come back this September.” And since I was already in school, they—they couldn’t really say no, and so I showed up—I showed up on that Sunday.
My roommates—my roommates from when I left—we still had the same apartment, and one of my roommates was—was now a third-year student, so he had saved—he had saved the place for me, so I had an apartment. And on—on Monday, I went into my first class, and it was a contracts class, and I was two weeks late. Classes had already been going on for two weeks. And I walk in, and I sat down, and because my—my initial [unintelligible; 5:14:42]—I was in the front row of contracts class. [Both chuckle.] And when I walked in and sat down, there were two—two other classmates were sitting, you know, on the two seats beside me. And I came in. I put my books down. I sat down, and—and the one guy looked at me, and he said, “Nice of you to come to class.” [Both chuckle.] And I looked back at him, and I said, “Oh, I was just giving you a two weeks’ head start.” And so that was my—that was my sort of initial foray into—back into the law school. And [cross-talk; unintelligible; 5:15:21].
STERN: And did you talk about your time in Vietnam?
BROWN: Well, I—I went up to my professors after my first class, each class, and, you know, waited till everybody else had gone, and I said, “I just want to let you know that, you know, I’ve just come back. It’s not like I skipped the first two weeks.” But I said, “I just want you to know, you know, I just came back from Vietnam last week, and I’m starting classes this week.” And with one exception, they all—I sort of got this look like they didn’t know what was—they didn’t know what to say or how to say it or—other than, “Oh, okay.” And literally that’s what happened. It was, like, “Oh, okay.” Not “How was it?” or “How are you?” Nothing. Just “Oh, okay.”
And only one professor invited me back to his office to talk—to talk about it. You know, and then he asked—he said, “What were you doin’?” You know, “Did you”—and he went through the whole thing. “Were you combat?” “Did you—you know, did you experience combat?” “Did you lose any friends?” That kind of thing. Which I thought was, you know, the right thing to do,—
STERN: Right.
BROWN: —to—to at least make an effort. But nobody else [chuckles] —nobody else had anything to say or anything, so it was—and then, of course, you’re on campus, and I—I didn’t even know if there were any other students who had been in Vietnam. There was—there was one guy I saw walking around with an Army jacket on, but it didn’t necessarily mean he was in Vietnam. And—and I honestly—I remember—well, I take it back. One classmate of mine had been in the Marine Corps, as an officer. But his first month in Vietnam, he had contracted malaria, so he got sent back home. And he was very disappointed that [chuckles]—he was very disappointed. And I told him—I said, “No don’t be disappointed. You didn’t miss a thing.” But—
STERN: [Chuckles.] And so you said most professors didn’t really talk to you about it. What about other students?
BROWN: My roommates—my roommates sort of—nobody—well, I think part of it is back then, nobody really knew how to interact with a returning veteran, because there was such controversy and there were stories about how crazy we all were, and I think there was a reluctance to say anything or bring anything up because I think there might have been some reluctance and they thought maybe you’ll snap [chuckles] or maybe they’ll drive you into depression [chuckles] or something bizarre. So I—they never—we never really talked about it. And I was—I don’t think I was really anxious to talk about it. You know, it was Put it behind you and move on with life.
The only—the only time that—that things did happen was I had—I had nightmares when I first came back, so a couple—on a couple of occasions, they [chuckles]—they told me that they had heard me obviously having, you know, bad dreams, so they—they were just, like, “What’s”—“What was going on? What happened?” And, you know, I told them—I told them what the dreams were. But that was—that was—that was about the extent of any conversation.
STERN: And the nightmares were about Vietnam?
BROWN: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I still re- —I mean, here it is, 40 years later. I remember them very—very vividly. But—and—and it was just—you know, they say your dreams are your subconscious, whatever that—whatever. And—and so it is interesting to have—to have gone through that. But I don’t recall having a long—a long aftereffect of nightmares. I remember the first maybe month or so. You know, I had—I had these nightmares, but that was it, and nothing after—nothing after that.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: Or at least nothing I remember. [cross-talk; unintelligible; 5:19:58]—
STERN: And how about—no, please continue.
BROWN: Oh, no, I was saying they were—they were—they were just—they were bizarre nightmares because what—what I dreamed in the nightmares never happened, so it—it was quite—it was quite bizarre, because in—in one—we were on—we were on a firebase that we actually had been on, and we got attacked at night, and we got overrun. And that’s all I remember about the dream. And then you wake up because you’re in the middle of [chuckles]—of getting overrun.
STERN: Right.
BROWN: But—and then the other one is just—it’s just some sort of a bizarre—I was walking through a dark—it was dark, and I was walking through I guess woods or the jungle, and I came up on a trench, and as I got to the trench and looked down, there were just bodies—bodies in the—in the trench. And that was—that was it. But those will—those will wake you up. Those will wake you up, for sure.
STERN: Yeah. And did you ever talk to anyone other than your roommates about them?
BROWN: Did I? I may have. I don’t remember. And I say I may have because about ten years later, I went to—my—my doctor advised that I go see a—I don’t know if he—he was a psychiatrist, basically. And so I may have had that discussion with him. I just don’t remember if I did or not.
STERN: Okay. But that was ten years after?
BROWN: Yeah, that was my—what happened was my—actually, no, it was five years. My dad had died in 1976. He died young. He was only 56.
STERN: Uch.
BROWN: And he had died in ’76, and I went to have a physical because my dad had died of—of Hodgkin’s disease, and at that time, I wasn’t familiar enough with it, so I didn’t know whether it was hereditary or anything like that, and I wanted to get a—get a checkup because they said normally it strikes people in their 20s, and—and yet my dad was 56, so they said it had been dormant in him all those years. And so I wanted to get checked out, and I went for a physical. I was 30—I remember I was 30 years old at the time. And I went for a physical, and during the physical, my doctor also noticed that I had a—I—I have a functional heart murmur that I’ve had my whole life. I mean, it wasn’t news to me. But apparently it’s rare enough that doctors are sort of shocked when they first hear it, and they’re almost like little kids in a candy store. “Ooh, ooh, ooh. They told us about these. Oh, yes, they told us about this in med school, but I never heard one.”
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: And so he was concerned, when he first heard it, that I had a heart condition that was similar to that of two—University of Maryland that same year had had two of their basketball players die within months of one another, about three months. One was 19 years old, and the other was 22. And—and he said they had had a similar heart condition to mine. So he was—he was a bit concerned that I might have something similar, and I was still—at that age, I was still playing—playing basketball in a league. And so he—you know, he wanted to check me out.
And when—when he got all through with it and he told me all of this, and he knew my father had died, and he was giving me the results, and I was sitting in the office, and it was, like, Yeah, okay. And he looked at me, and he said, “I’m concerned about you.” [Chuckles.] And I said, “What for?” And he said, “You’re not acting like a 30-year-old who has a heart condition that might kill him and has just lost his father to Hodgkin’s.” And I looked at him, and I said, “And exactly how does a 30-year-old with those conditions act?” [Chuckles.] And [cross-talk; unintelligible; 5:24:40].
STERN: [High? 5:24:40] function.
BROWN: Yeah. I mean, I’m, like, “What do you mean, I’m not acting like”—and at that, he said, “I’d like to have you go see this—this psychiatrist.” [Both chuckle.] As if there was something wrong with—that’s how I ended up—ended up with the psychiatrist. So I may or may not have told him about it or not. I don’t know.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: We had a—yeah, we had several sessions and—him trying to sort me out, what he thought I needed sorted out. But that was it, yeah. So anyway, that’s—yeah, that’s it with the—with the nightmares. [Chuckles.] But the rest of—
STERN: Did your experience in Viet- —
BROWN: —[cross-talk; unintelligible; 5:25:21] year was the same. Hmm?
STERN: Yeah. Did your experience in Vietnam shape kind of your understanding of the law or ethics in any particular way?
BROWN: I don’t think it changed—when you say—what do you mean? Ethics in terms of morality, fighting, or what?
STERN: Yeah, I think morality.
BROWN: No, it didn’t change. I mean, I—I’m—I’m not a—I’m not a violent-prone person, and I’m—I’m fairly even keel, and—and, you know, violence and killing is not something I was brought up to believe in. But, of course, you have to defend yourself, and if you’re put in a situation—even though, from the standpoint of, for example, the antiwar groups saying, “Well, this is an immoral war; we shouldn’t be over there.” That’s all well and good when you’re outside looking in. But when you’re there on the ground and somebody is shooting at you, you’re not—
STERN: Yeah.
BROWN: —thinking about the morality of the situation you’re in. You’re just defending yourself. And in that context, I will mention—I told you I used to—I was raised Roman Catholic, and although I had not been practicing for a number of years, I’ll never forget: When I got to Vietnam, we had a—an operation that was being planned, because no one knows, you know, what’s going to happen. You’re going to make contact with the enemy or what. They had the chaplains come out, and the chaplains held these big prayers that, you know, if you were Catholic or Jewish or whatever. And so all the Catholics gathered around a—a chaplain, who then said a Mass. And when he got through with the Mass—and—and, of course, he absolved everyone. He didn’t have time to do individual confession. If you’re—you’re not Catholic, but you know what confessions are, right?
STERN: Yes.
BROWN: Okay. So he didn’t have time to do individuals, so what he did was what he called general absolution. So when he first did it, I was standing there, and I went, Oh, this is great. I haven’t been to confession in God knows how long,—
STERN: [Chuckles.]
BROWN: —and he just absolved me of all my sins. [Both chuckle.] If something—if something happens to me, I’m gonna be okay. But all of a sudden, at the end of the Mass, he then said a prayer, and the gist of the prayer was—and I obviously don’t remember it all, but the gist of it was, “Dear God, please look after these young men and—and protect them as they go into battle with the enemy.” And the thing that got me was something along the lines of: “And—and help them to—to—to—essentially to win—you know, conquer the enemy.” And as soon as he said that, the first reaction I had was: And somewhere out there in the jungle, the North Vietnamese soldiers are getting the same story from their equivalent religious guy, telling them, you know, may their God be with them and may they be victorious over the enemy. And I remember saying, This is ridiculous. [Chuckles.] You’re telling me there’s a God up there who actually decides who’s gonna win and lose? And at that point, I—I just gave up on all religion. At that very moment, I said, That’s it. No more. So—
STERN: So you think that was the decisive moment.
BROWN: Oh, yeah. No, I—that’s clearly—clearly for me, that was the moment when I just said, Religion is BS, because this is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. You know, we’re over here being blessed and told somebody’s looking out for us, and the guys on the other side I’m sure are getting the same spiel. And you’re gonna have us believe there’s a—an omnipresent force up in the heaven somewhere who’s manipulating everybody? You know, it just—it totally made no sense to me at all. So that was the end of religion for me. I’ve not been in a church since except for funerals and weddings.
STERN: Okay.
So returning to time at law school, do you remember, did you have any particular highlights? What were some of your favorite classes? And then what type of law did you end up specializing in?
BROWN: Well, before—before we go there, one thing I will say: The antiwar movement had picked up tremendous momentum by 1970 and—because Nixon had just been sworn in. And in Cambridge, there was a huge antiwar movement. And I remember walking by the Cambridge Common one day when they were having this big antiwar protest rally. And my first reaction was I saw they were waving—and there was a chant that people had, and it was—I can’t remember the exact chant, but it was “Hey, hey, NVA” or whatever. But they basically were chanting things that would have been supportive of the NVA, the VC, whatever.
And I remember seeing and NVA flag. Somebody actually—I don’t know how they got it, but somebody had this big NVA flag. And that—I got—I got mad—I got mad because the antiwar protests I had no problem with. I had no problem with “End the war. Get the troops home.” But for people to be waving the flag of your enemy and giving them moral support versus supporting your own troops was—was just not—not going to pass in my—pass muster in my book. And—and I was—I got quite—I got quite upset when I saw that. And—and I also had lost—I’d also lost friends, and—and, you know, that’s what the NVA flag was. I mean, that’s why they were dead. So that—that bothered me. That was really something that turned—turned me off. But—
STERN: Did you approach—
BROWN: —anyway—oh, God. No, this was a rally. I mean, there must have been 500, 1,000 people.
STERN: Oh.
BROWN: They were in the middle of Cambridge Common. I was—
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: —I was walking around along the outside. And, to be honest, at that point it wouldn't have made any difference because nobody’s listening to you, so it wasn’t—it wasn’t anything that I was—that I was, you know, going to—going to get involved in.
Ironically, though, years later, when I was working in San Francisco, Bank of America [Corp.], one of my—one of the lawyers in my section had gone to UC Berkeley [University of California, Berkeley], and I don’t know how we got on the subject, but it came up that he had been antiwar protester back during Vietnam, and he had had really, you know, shoulder-length hair. And he then told me about going to all the rallies in Berkeley and all that. And at that point, I said, “Well,” I said, “I was actually in Vietnam at the time you were doing all that.” And he—he was like, “Oh, really?”
And then I told him this story about the NVA flag and all and how I—you know, and I said that bothered me because, you know, I had lost friends. And—and I didn’t mean it to criticize him, but I said it, and I could just tell by the look on his face—I mean, he was—Oh, my God, have I screwed up this. But that was the only other time it—it came up.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: But to go back to law school, when I—when I left—when I got back to law school, I had decided I wanted to get into international law somehow because my time spent in Asia—I went to Hong Kong on my R&R, for my seven- —seven-day R&R, and that was the first time I had—I had been there, and I thought that was a fantastic place. And so I decided one way or the other I wanted to get back into Asia.
And so when I started taking law school classes, I started trying to take classes that would have given me a—a grounding in doing international law. And so that’s how—you know, I—I had sort of at that point established my goal as to—as to wanting to get back eventually somehow to Asia.
And—and—and it was—it was somewhat of a—it was just coincidental that after my second year, I—I interviewed with First National Bank of Chicago [now First Chicago Bank], and they had a law department, and they hired me as a summer clerk. And that was my first expo- —I’d never thought about banking before. I had always thought in terms of corporate law. And—and so I went, and I really enjoyed it.
And so when I got back to law school, I decided I would look at banking opportunities, and I looked for bank- —only banks that had law firms and had international offices. And back then, there were only three. There was Citibank [N.A.] in New York, there was First National Chicago, there was Bank of America in San Francisco. And—and so those were the three that I—I said, Okay, I’m gonna focus there.
And so after law school, I went and worked in—in D.C. for the Federal Reserve Board [of Governors] and got my banking regulatory experience, and then from there, you know, as they say, the rest is history. I ended up getting a job at Bank of America and then used that to end up getting assigned or transferred to Hong Kong. So—so everything sort of worked out for me the way I wanted, although it took a bit longer than I had thought it would.
STERN: Okay.
And then on the CV [curriculum vitae] you had sent me, I believe it said that you pursued a master’s [degree] as well? Is that correct?
BROWN: At the [John F.] Kennedy School [of Government at Harvard University]. Yeah, the Kennedy School—
STERN: At what point was that?
BROWN: —of Government. That was—yeah, it was a master’s in public administration. And—and, to be honest, that was—it sounds horrible in retrospect—but when I told you I went to Chicago after my second year, it was only because I was getting married in Chicago. [Chuckles.] My—my then wife was from Chicago, so, you know, I said, Let me find a job in Chicago, and it just so happened that that bank had come to interview at the law school, and they were—they were from Chicago, and that’s—that was—
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: —[cross-talk; the reason? 5:37:12] I ended up there.
STERN: So it ended up working out well for you.
BROWN: Well, it did, because it sort of fell into my lap, and I had not thought about it as a—you know, as an opportunity before. And even third year, when—when I was graduating, they came back to the law school, and they made me an offer to come back and join the bank on a permanent basis, given—as I said, they had—they had an international section as well. But my wife, then wife, was finishing up her last year of college, and so the reason I went and did the master’s program was she was finishing her senior year in college, and I didn’t want to—I didn’t want to get a job working in Massachusetts because I wanted to go down to Washington, D.C., afterward, so getting the master’s degree was really just a way of wiling away the extra year while she got her degree.
STERN: So the master’s was right after law school.
BROWN: Yeah, yeah, that was in ’74—’73, ’74.
STERN: And where had you met your then wife?
BROWN: She was my roommate’s sister, one of his sisters, and so I met her my first year back, when she came over to the apartment one day.
STERN: And then you got married, you said, after law school, or during?
BROWN: We got married second year, the summer of my second year, between second and third year.
STERN: Okay. And have you been—so you said “then wife.” Have you been remarried since?
BROWN: Yeah. We—we got divorced in ’76, four—four years later. We had moved down to Washington, D.C., at that point, and then I moved out to California in ’78, and then I got married a second time in nineteen eighty— ’81. And that only lasted three years, to ’84. But that—that was a bicoastal relationship, so it was somewhat doomed to failure. She was actually going to law school at Georgetown at the time, and I—I was in San Francisco, so it was really—it was a bicoastal relationship that probably would have done well if it had just sort of let the law school and—and the distance resolve itself first. But—but it didn’t, and so—no, I’ve been single ever since eighty- —’84.
STERN: Okay. So any children?
BROWN: I have one son, who’s 27, and he’s living in Bangkok now.
STERN: Okay.
And so when you were working in San Francisco, what company were you working for?
BROWN: I was at Bank of America.
STERN: Okay. And stayed with Bank of America for a while?
BROWN: I was with them for six years, from—no, ’78—yeah, ’78 to ’86. I was with them in San Francisco from ’78 to ’84, and then they transferred me to Hong Kong to become head of the Hong Kong—the Asia division—legal division for Asia in—in 1984, and I did that for two years.
STERN: And then can you walk me briefly through kind of what you did from that point on?
BROWN: [No audible response.]
STERN: Hello? Hello?
BROWN: I’m sorry, after Bank of America?
STERN: I’m sorry, yeah.
BROWN: [unintelligible; 5:41:24] Bank of America, yeah. After Bank of—well, the—the reason I left Bank of America—I had been transferred to Hong Kong in—in December of—of ’84, and in July or August of ’85—and I had been transferred on the understanding that I’d be there from—anywhere from two to five years, which—which was fine with me because I—I just wanted to be over there for a long time.
And yet nine months—eight or nine months later, I get a—a memo from my boss saying—the bank was going through some financial difficulties in the late- —mid to late ’80s. A number of them were. And they decided they needed to cut expenses. And one of the places they wanted to cut was the legal department. So—so they got in touch with me, and they said, “We’re going to close your office and bring you back to San Francisco.” [Chuckles.] And that was the absolute last thing I wanted to do.
So I immediately started looking around for other opportunities in Hong Kong, which I frankly I thought was like looking for a needle in a haystack, given my background. But surprisingly, there was a company that owned two banks in San Francisco, and because of that, they came under federal—U.S. federal banking regulation, as holding companies. But they didn’t have any concept of holding companies or whatever, and this was a totally foreign company. And—and so they were looking for a lawyer who had essentially my background.
And it took—it took a while and a few interviews, but eventually they hired me in August of ’86, and so I left the bank at that point and—and went over and joined First Pacific Company [Limited]. And I stayed there for 17 years.
STERN: In Hong Kong.
BROWN: In Hong Kong. Yeah, Hong Kong. I—I—I traveled all over the—all over Asia, though, with them, because I was their general counsel. And we had offices—or we had operations, subsidiaries in several countries. So I—I was traveling all throughout Asia during that time.
STERN: Did you ever return to Vietnam?
BROWN: No, I’ve never been back. One of the—one of the funny stories is in—the company in Hong Kong—we had a license or we—we had had a license to operate one of the cellular phone companies when cellular phones first became available back in 19- —in 1988, I think, in Hong Kong. And we had one of the four licenses in Hong Kong.
And so the company wanted to expand and get licenses in other countries, so we went to Indonesia, we went to Taiwan [China]. We tried in the Philippines. And we ended up having a guy get in touch with us who actually had the cell- —one of the cellular licenses for Vietnam. And [chuckles]—and so because I was the lawyer, I was tasked with working with him on putting together the application to apply for the license in Vietnam. And—and I spent a lot of time with him, and he went to Vietnam, North Vietnam, because that’s where the capital, Hanoi, is. He went to—to North Vietnam on—on quite a few trips in connection with the application. And although he tried to get me to go a couple of times, I always came up with reasons why I couldn’t. So I—I never—I never went. [Chuckles.] Never went. And I haven’t been—haven’t been back since.
STERN: Do you have any desire to return?
BROWN: Well, the reason—the reason is a fairly simple one, because everyone—you know, everyone who asks me about going back—they said, “Well, you know, would you go back?” “Do you want to go back?” And I said, “Look, first of all, I was out in the jungle.” I wasn’t stationed in Saigon or Cam Ranh Bay, Da Nang, any of the big cities, where you could actually go back now and spend time and see things that had changed. I said, “I was out in the jungle, so if I went to Vietnam, there would be no way for me to see where I was and know whether it had changed or not,” because unless I had an old Army map, I probably couldn’t even find any of the places. Literally. So, yeah, so I—I haven’t really thought about going back, mainly because of that. But I—I’ve had a couple of—you know, a couple of opportunities with other friends who—who’ve—who’ve gone and asked me if I want to go with them, and I haven’t.
One—one funny story occurred when I was in Hong Kong. I don’t know if you remember when [William J.] “Bill” Clinton was president, he had a secretary of commerce whose name was “Ronald H.] “Ron” Brown.
STERN: [Chuckles.]
BROWN: Are you—you—I don’t know if you—
STERN: I’m not familiar with him, no.
BROWN: Okay, okay. Well, Ron was—he was head of the Democratic National Committee and was very instrumental in getting Bill Clinton elected. So after Bill became president he chose Ron to be secretary of commerce. And when I was living in Washington, D.C., I knew Ron. [Chuckles.] It was just a small world. And it was quite funny because we have the same name, and people would, you know: “Ha-ha, very funny.”
STERN: Yeah.
BROWN: And he was obviously a more—a more high-profile person than I was at the time, but he ended up as commerce secretary, and—and I didn’t—I don’t know the whole story, but there were some rumors running around that there were some perhaps dealings going on with the Vietnamese at the time, and he was involved. And these were—the innuendo was that these were questionable dealings. And so at the time he was commerce secretary, he was on a trip to eastern Europe, and there was a plane crash. And all the—everyone on board was killed, including him.
And one of the reasons—although they have been totally ridiculous on my part—when—when I was being asked whether I wanted to go to Vietnam, I said, “Look, my name is Ron Brown. I’m black, like he was.” And we literally—we almost look alike. I mean, you know, we had moustache and—and I just said, “Look, these Vietnamese may or may not have something that was going on with him, and they may or may not be upset. I don’t want to go over there and have any confusions about who I am. [Chuckles.] I don’t want to get stuck over there in some sort of diplomatic incident.” [Both chuckle.] Because, you know, misunderstanding. So that was—that was a big reason why I didn’t go. And—and I think people—you know, people knew about it, so they couldn’t say, “No, that’s ridiculous.” But I just figured, Nope, nope, not something I wanna get involved in at this time.
STERN: And so how did you end up in Thailand?
BROWN: Oh. When I was in Hong Kong, a friend of mine from San Francisco came out to Thailand on a business trip, and he was up in northern Thailand, in Chiang Mai. And he called me, and he said, “Hey,” he said, “I’m up here in Chiang Mai in Thailand, and when the business—when the conference is over, I’m—I’m gonna stay. I don’t wanna—you know, I don’t wanna go back right away. I wanna go somewhere and find a—you know, an island and just lay out on the beach.” He said, “What’s a good place?”
And he was in Thailand. He said, “I’ve heard Thailand has some nice places.” And he said, “There’s a place called Phuket.” And I said, “I’ve never heard of it, never been there.” So he said, “Well, why don’t you meet me there?” And so I flew over to Bangkok. I had been to Bangkok before, on business. So I met him in Bangkok, and then we got on a plane, and we flew over to Phuket.
And it was the first time I’d been here. And Phuket was nothing. I mean, it was just a little sleepy village. No paved roads to speak of or anything. But we laid out—we laid out on the beach for a few days and just had a great time. It was around Easter, so we had a great time. And then I—I went back to Hong Kong.
And I met a—another guy from Hong Kong, who was an American. Happened to also be from San Francisco. And he told me about—he found out I had been to Phuket and really liked it, and he liked it. And he said, “Oh,” he said, “you know, they’re building some condominiums on this beach, Headlands.” And he said, “In case you’re interested,” he gave me the information. So I—I came down, and I looked at it. I met the developer, who was an English guy, and I bought a condominium. And so that was back in ’88, and so once the condominium was finished, you know, every time I had a holiday I’d fly down to—to Thailand, fly down to Phuket.
And, you know, back then it was—it was a great little place because not a whole lot of people knew about it, and so I ended up staying there for—you know, going back and forth. And the when I got ready to retire, I decided I needed to get a house rather than—because the condominium was, you know, smaller, and if I was going to be living there on a permanent basis, I wanted something a little bit larger. So—so I ended up buying a house in—in another part of Phuket. That’s how I’ve ended up, you know, being down here for all these—all these many years.
STERN: And what year did you retire?
BROWN: Two thousand three.
STERN: Okay. And what have you been doing ever since?
BROWN: Absolutely nothing. [Laughs.]
STERN: Loving life?
BROWN: People—pardon?
STERN: I said, “Loving life.”
BROWN: Oh, no, there’s a—there’s a story I tell because obviously, you know, people ask about what do you do in retirement, and I had—I had got this several years ago, and I don’t remember the source, but it basically goes like this: When—a guy retired and he said, “People ask me all the time what do I do, and here’s what I tell them: People say, ‘What do you do when you’re retired?’” He says, “Well, from Monday through Saturday I don’t do anything, and on Sunday I rest.”
STERN: [Laughs.]
BROWN: “And—and then if people say, ‘Well, wait a minute. Why are you resting on Sunday if you haven’t done anything Monday through Saturday?’” And he said, “Oh, because I’m not finished doing nothing.”
STERN: [Chuckles.]
BROWN: And I always thought that was—always thought that was the perfect—the perfect answer. [Chuckles.] And I hate to say it, but it’s true. You know, people say—a lot of people are afraid of retirement because they say they’d get bored. And my response is you only get bored if you allow yourself to get bored, because you’re responsible for your own happiness. And, sure, if you retire and then just sit around and do nothing, you’re going to get bored. But if you find things to do, then, you know, your day—it’s amazing, somewhat frightening, actually, how fast the—the time goes by, because, I mean, you literally—I—because I don’t have to work anymore.
I get up six o’clock in the morning. I go out for a two-hour, you know, walk or run. You come back. You do some exercises, take a shower, breakfast, maybe do some e-mails or do some other reading, and then it’s lunch. [Chuckles.] If I’m playing golf—I play golf, and the I come back, and it’s dinner. So the day actually gets taken care of pretty—pretty quickly. And the time goes by. As a matter of fact, it’s hard for me to realize it’s already been—you know, 2003—you know, 14 years.
STERN: Right.
BROWN: It doesn’t seem that long.
STERN: Do you travel a lot through Asia still?
BROWN: I—I have done—I have done quite a bit, not as much as I did back when I was working, because there was a time when I just didn’t want to get on an airplane, because when I was working, I was on airplanes every week, and that gets—that’s pretty tiring after a while, so I’ve done—I’ve done a bit of traveling, but not as much. And I was—I had a—I had also bought a house in Bali, and so I would split my time between Phuket and—and Bali. And I love Bali. It’s absolutely stunning. But that—that was sort of the traveling I was doing.
And then I still go up to Hong Kong every—every three months or so because I still have friends up there. So, you know, it kept me—kept me from getting too island bound here. And then I—I go back to the States every year and spend at least a month or two there. And then four—about four or five years ago, I decided I was going to make a move back to the States, which is why I, you know, have been splitting my time now between Phuket and San Francisco, started—starting about four years ago. I bought a place in San Francisco.
STERN: And now you’re planning on making that move full time?
BROWN: Yeah, yeah. As I said, I’m trying to sell the house here in Phuket and then go back to San Francisco. The reality is there’s no point in spending the kind of money that you need to just maintain a place for six months when you’re not here.
STERN: Right.
BROWN: It just—it doesn’t make any kind of sense anymore. And, you know, even if I came back over here every year, it—I’d be—I’d be better off just renting something for the time I was actually here than—than having an ongoing—you know, every month I got to pay utility bills, I got to pay salaries and [chuckles] it gets pretty—it’s gets expensive.
STERN: [unintelligible; 5:57:31].
So what’s your experience been—
BROWN: [cross-talk; unintelligible; 5:57:32] is not cheap, either. Sorry?
STERN: That’s true. What has your experience been like, living as a veteran abroad? Have you found—do you ever discuss your time in Vietnam, and what have you found kind of Southeast Asian perceptions of the U.S. or of the military to be like?
BROWN: Not—not anything that I can think of out of the ordinary. When I was—when I was working at First Pacific, it just so happened that the—the guys who were there—it was a mixed international group, so we had people from Hong Kong, people from the Philippines, Indonesians, Americans, English, Irish, Scottish, Australian. So, you know, in the course of just sort of talking, you—you exchange a lot of views: politics, countries. But nothing—nothing particular. I mean, people—they knew I was in Vietnam. Mostly the—the response I get when people hear I was in Vietnam, number one, and then when I was in combat is just basically one of—I guess they’re shocked. You know, like, “How did you—how did you get into that?” and “How did that happen?” Because they just—if they knew anyone who was in Viet- —in the Army or the military, they always knew—they either didn’t go to Vietnam or they were in a non-combat situation. So—so that sort of always raises a few eyebrows.
But one—one funny story was in—toward the end of my time in Hong Kong, we had an investment bank that was a Dutch investment bank, and one of the managing directors was an Englishman, and—a young guy. He was about my age. I’m sorry, he was probably a little younger. Anyway, it turned out that he had been a captain in the British SAS [Special Air Service], and I don’t know if you know the SAS, but they’re, like, their elite commando outfit. And I—I was impressed that Rory—Rory was a captain in the SAS. And he had also been in the Falklands war. You know about the Falklands?
STERN: Yeah, I lived it—I was actually studying abroad in Argentina last term.
BROWN: Oh. Oh! Okay. So Rory had actually gone with his SAS unit to—to the Falkland Islands, and I was—I mean, I was impressed because, you know, anybody who goes into Special Forces type units, I think—you know, they get the ultimate accolade.
Well, we had a deal that we closed with them, and we were having a celebratory lunch—a dinner one night after, and, you know, there were a bunch—a bunch of guys from the office and from the investment bank, probably about 20 or 30 of us. And we got to the—got to the restaurant, and the guys—my guys said—because they were—you know, the English guys knew—had known Rory, and they said, “Oh, Rory wants you to sit next to him.” And I went, “Oh, okay.” And I didn’t think anything of it.
And they said, “We told Rory that you had been at Vietnam,” and it was funny to me because they said he was im- —he was really impressed. [Chuckles.] And I laughed, and I said, “Well, actually, I was—I was impressed with the fact he was [cross-talk; unintelligible; 6:01:27]—
STERN: [unintelligible; 6:01:27]
BROWN: —in the SAS. Yeah. So they had a chuckle. So Rory and I sat next to one another, and then he was asking me about, you know, my experience in Vietnam, and I said, “Well, you know, to be honest,” I said, “I’m—in fact, you were a captain in the SAS.” I said, “You were in the Falklands.” And then he said, “Yeah, but I never saw any action.” [Chuckles.] So he felt, through all that he had accomplished, he had not actually been able to fulfill his—you know, what he wanted—because this is why some of these guys go into some of these outfits, because they want to experience combat, they want to test themselves and see how they’ll react under pressure and all that, so he was actually disappointed that he had never got that exposure. So that’s why he—he was quizzing me. But I always—I always thought that was kind of funny.
STERN: So you mentioned—
BROWN: Other than that, no. Huh?
STERN: No. Otherwise no?
BROWN: Oh, no, I was going to say other than that—you know, being—being—being in Vietnam was never something that was a real point of discussion. You know, by that point—quite frankly, you know, the Vietnam War was more of an American occupy—occupation. You know, the rest of Asia—I mean, I never—I never really had discussions with people where they said, “Oh, yeah, we were watchin’ what was goin’ on because we were worried about it” or anything like that. So that was never—that was never a topic of discussion in—in other countries.
And I think mostly what people were curious about in America was just about our government, because, you know, right around the time that I was there, Bill Clinton had all these scandals, and, you know, he got impeached. They issued articles of impeachment.
STERN: Right.
BROWN: And I remember my—I remember one of my British friends—actually, several guys were laughing, and they said—they said, “What is it with you Americans? Why are you so caught up on what this guy’s been doin’?” And I said, “Well,” I said, “this is the United States.” I said, “You know, we were founded by the Puritans, the Pilgrims.”
STERN: [Chuckles.]
BROWN: And I said, “You know, we still have this very puritanical approach to certain things, like sex scandals of married men. And—and they laughed. And I’ll never forget. One—one guy laughed, and he said, “You know, in Europe that’s all our politicians do: They have sex scandals.”
STERN: [Laughs.]
BROWN: “Everybody’s used to it.” “Well, yeah.” They said, “Everybody’s used to it,” and they said that the—the funny thing about the—the Americans is we’re all wondering why they’re so con- —why they’re so upset about what happens.” He said, “In Europe, we would worry if our leaders didn’t have sex scandals.” [Both chuckle.] So that just shows the mind-set, all right?
STERN: So do you—
BROWN: But, no,—that—
STERN: Yeah, I’m sorry.
BROWN: No, go ahead.
STERN: Do you consider your year in Vietnam to be a crucial part of your identify?
BROWN: Not my—not my identity, but it was—it was a very important part of my life, of whom I’ve become. And I—and I say that because prior to going into the Army,—as you are—as you’re growing up, you know, and you’re just becoming an adult, if you will, a young adult, you wonder, or at least I wondered what I was capable of doing or what I was capable of—of surviving in terms of physical competition, because clearly the academic side, you’ve already—you know, you’ve already accomplished a lot.
But then you—you have this situation where people are going into—into military—into the military. They’re going through physical training. And you just wonder, Could I do that? How would I fare in—in—in competing with other young guys? And so the bit of a personal challenge to—to go through training and to—and to do so—and to do well enough in training that you were, you know, at the top or near the top of your—of your class. And that was a sense of accomplishment for me on just a personal level because I—I—
[Call is dropped, then reconnected.]
BROWN: Hello?
STERN: Mr. Brown. Yeah, I think we got cut off.
BROWN: Oh, yeah. Maybe we’ve overrun our time. [Both chuckle.]
But what I was going to say was—so from a personal standpoint, it was a sense of accomplishment and a self-confidence that, Yeah. You know, physically I can do this. And—and that makes you feel, you know, better as a person.
And then, of course, going to Vietnam and being in combat and—you know, when I turned down the job in Awards and Decorations, part of my doing that was I wanted to test myself in the elements, if you will. And, of course, in retrospect it sounds pretty crazy, because as people said to me, “You could have got killed.” And I go, “Yeah, but I didn’t.” [Chuckles.] And so—at the time, yeah, it may have seemed crazy to them, but I—and I always say to people, “I never went into Vietnam, into combat thinking something was going to happen to me.”
And I said, “I don’t know whether it has any bearing on what actually does happen to people.” You know, power of positive thinking. Whether you’re thinking something’s going to happen to you causes something to happen to you, or if you’re afraid something is going to happen you somehow attract negativity to yourself. I was always positive. You know, my attitude was, I’m gonna go over, I’m gonna do my tour, and I’m gonna go back to law school and live my life.
And—and I never thought anything other than that. And—and so part of going actually into a combat situation for me was another opportunity that, if you will, test yourself. And—and I did it. I survived situations that never in a lifetime I would have ever come across if I had not been in that situation. And I mean you imagine the worst possible things, you know, in terms of living conditions. Well, no, there were no living conditions; you were out in the jungle. It rained. You know, you slept in mud. You got 30 days of just dirt and grime on you, sweat. You ate crap food. You had no—no air conditioning. There was no—all the conveniences you were used to were not around. And you—
I remember we’d sit around sometime, and guys—you know, you’d laugh and say, “Boy, you know, if I were home right now I’d get up and go to the refrigerator and get a beer.” Right? [Chuckles.] And, you know—and everybody would laugh. But you—you couldn’t do that. And you know, so—yeah, from a—from a personal standpoint, I felt that it helped me as an individual to grow and to learn how to deal with hardships.
And also I take a lot more in stride now. I—I don’t get as upset by things because when I first came back (not so much now), but when I first came back, if there was some adverse stuff going on or deadlines to meet or whatever, I—I would sort of look and just say, Hey, you know, I’ve—I’ve—I’ve been in situations where I could have been killed, and I’m still here. This is—I’m not gonna sweat this. And so that’s, I think, been a very positive aspect.
And matter of fact, when I was working in First Pacific, it was a very—it was a very difficult time and very stressful time because of the company and—and—there were a lot of young guys in there trying to do a lot of things, so there was a lot of—a lot of pressure. And I remember on one occasion stuff was not going the way people wanted it to go. We were in this big meeting. And one of the directors—we were having a conversation around the table, and this one director looked at me, and he said [chuckles], “How is that you can remain so calm when everybody else in this room is going crazy?” [Chuckles.] And I looked at him, and I said, “Because somebody has to be calm.” And he just smiled.
STERN: Yeah.
BROWN: But I think that—I think that was a result of what I had said earlier, that, Look, I’ve been through life and death. This is nothing, so nothing to get upset or—or concerned about. They say, “This too shall pass.”
On the negative side, and I will say this only because when I told you I went to see the psychiatrist, he—you know, psychiatrists have a funny way of trying to get more out of you than I think you even realize you have inside, but the—the—the upshot of it was—and this was probably why I ended up being divorced twice—I have very—I had a lot of difficulty committing to people, being close to people. And that was a direct result of—in Vietnam, you—although you did make friends, you also ran the risk of losing—losing a friend and then having to deal with that loss. And that was something that you tried to shield yourself from.
So probably a lot of the relationships were—you say they were friendships, but they were probably superficial friendships. There were things you talked about and shared simply because it was something to do, but not with any sort of, you know, “You’re my best buddy forever” kind of stuff. it was more like, “You’re my best friend right now because you’re the only guy I got to talk to.”
Yeah, and you’d talk about all sorts of things with people. It was quite interesting. You know, people would share their life stories. And—and yet I had not spoken a word to anyone since I left who was in any of my outfits. Everybody—you know, when it was time to leave, people just: “I’m outta here. Bye.” And they were gone. You know, it wasn’t like, “Here’s my address. When I get home, gimme a call or write or come visit” or anything like that.
STERN: So you never spoke to anyone or happened to bump into somebody.
BROWN: Well, I—did. Not in my—not in my actual company or outfit. I—I think I told you Rod Smith, who had graduated—who left Dartmouth—I did run into him, because he—when I was at Harvard Law School, Rod was at Boston University Law School. And he found me and called me up one day, and we got together and sort of caught up on old times. But, again, he was—he was actually in Vietnam with the Marines before me. But we chatted.
And then—funny thing: My first year back to law school. One of my roommates—we were talking one day, and—and he said, “Oh,” he said, “you were in Vietnam.” He said, “Oh,” he said—he said, “I have a nephew who was in Vietnam.” And I said, “Oh.” And then he said, you know, “What—what outfit or what—what did you do?” And I said, “Well, I was, you know, infantry, combat.” And I told him I was in the 1st Cavalry Division. And he looked at me, and he said, “Wow!” He said, “I think that was the same division my nephew was in.” And I said, “You’re kidding!” I said, “Well, when was he there?” And he told me. I said, “Well, we overlapped.” I said, “You know, do you know what company”—you know, and I went through the—what detail. And he said, “I don’t know. I’ll talk to my sister.” So he—he called his sister, and he—and he came—came back later, and he said, “Okay,” he said—and he named—it turned out his nephew was in my platoon. So—
STERN: Did you know him?
BROWN: —that’s how small—oh, yeah. No, he was in my platoon. He was in my platoon. I remember when he came over. He came over about two, two or three months after I had been there. And, yeah, no, I know him—I knew him. [Chuckles.] So when I told my—I told my roommate. I said, “Yeah,” I said, “your nephew was in my platoon.” I said, “Yeah, I know him.” So he—he couldn’t believe it. And he said, “Wow.” But I never—you know, I never made contact with his nephew or whatever, so—but that—that was funny. That was funny.
STERN: And what about friends from Dartmouth? Have you come back to Dartmouth since graduating or spoken to anyone from your time here?
BROWN: I’ve not been back to Dartmouth. The only people whom I’ve spoken with—when I was down—when I was working in Washington, D.C., there were two classmates, one a fraternity brother, who also—both lawyers, who were working for law firms down in Washington, D.C. And so I—I was in contact with them.
And then I—one of my roommates from college, I’ve been in touch with on and off for all—over the years. We sort of lost tough for a while, and then he—he tracked me down, actually, through the college, and so we correspond.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: And then we were—we were trying to track down the third—our third roommate, and I finally managed to—to locate him, but unfortunately, he had passed away two years ago.
STERN: Sorry.
BROWN: Oh, yeah. No, I mean, it was a bit of a surprise because I—you know, it’s a surprise when somebody has died because you’re the same age, so that’s a bit of a surprise. But, yeah, he—he just sort of dropped out of sight, though, when he left college. I mean, he—he never I think made any attempt to keep in touch. So my other roommate, you know, would ask me, “Have you heard from him?” And I said, “No,” I said, “I don’t even know where he is.” And then I managed to—you know, with the Internet nowadays, you can find anything. Unfortunately, by the time I located him on the Internet he had—he had already passed away. And I—
STERN: And who were the two roommates?
BROWN: Oh. What do you mean? Who were they?
STERN: Sorry. What were their names?
BROWN: Oh, sorry. Charles [T.] Grad [Class of 1968], who’s now living in Pennsylvania, western Pennsylvania. He’s a—he’s a—
STERN: He’s a doctor?
BROWN: He’s a doctor in—
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: —up in Pennsylvania, an internist. And the other was James [B.] Davis [Jr., Class of 1968], who lived in—and he went back home to Charles Town, West Virginia, where he was from. And I have to—and—and I’ve—I’ve put it off. I’ve been meaning to do it. But I need to get in touch with his widow because I found out he was married and had two children, and, although I haven’t a picture or anything, his widow’s name [chuckles] is—and—and I may be wrong, but his widow’s name is the exact same name of—of a woman—of a young lady at the time whom he was dating senior year,—
STERN: Wow.
BROWN: —because she was a classmate of—well, she was a classmate of—of my girlfriend. And—and my girlfriend had introduced them. And—and her name was Eileen [Taylor Davis]. And when I saw the obit notice, I saw that he was survived by his wife, and then it said “Eileen.” So [cross-talk; unintelligible; 6:19:22].
STERN: Probably the same one.
BROWN: Yeah, I’m sure it’s the same woman. So I—I need to—I need to chase her up. But, yeah, that—that’s small world stuff again.
STERN: And what about your family? Where did your sisters end up? And then I’m curious if you could also just tell me a bit about your relationship with your son.
BROWN: My sisters. One still lives in Connecticut, in the family home. She never left. And she’s a—a teacher, or she’s retired now, but she was a teacher in the New Haven School District. She taught special ed, special education—you know, kids with autism and learning disability. And then my youngest sister is married and living in Wisconsin, and her husband is a lawyer, a former Navy guy. And that’s—that’s—that’s it. The rest of the family—I—I—to be honest, I’ve lost touch with all my cousins. I have no idea where—where most of them are. They’re scattered all over the place. My—my youngest sister seems to be the one who—who’s trying to a family tree or—or keep track of everybody, and she’s made contact with some of the cousins, but nothing—nothing on a regular basis. And so that’s—that’s the extent of, if you will, contact with the family. But when I go back to the States, you know, I’m—I’m in touch with my sisters.
STERN: And what about your son?
BROWN: What about my son?
STERN: What is his name, first of all?
BROWN: Christopher [Brown?].
STERN: Okay. And Christopher is now 27. He was born—he was born here in Thailand and spent his first—his first 13 years, he was here in Thailand. And he was—I had him in boarding school in—in Phuket for—he was there for four years, from—from about seventh grade [or eight? 6:22:00], so he was through his freshman year of high school. Yeah, seventh grade through freshman, so four years. And then he asked if he—because he had friends who—it was an international school here in Phuket, so, you know, there were kids from all over.
And after—when he was finishing his freshman year in high school, he came to me, and he said, “Can I go to school in the States?” And I was surprised. I was, like, “Well, why do you want to do that?” And he said, “Oh, you know, I’ve got some friends that are going to school,” blah, blah, blah. So I ended up enrolling him in Northfield Mount Hermon School, which is in Northfield, Massachusetts, western Massachusetts. And so he—he spent his next three years of high school there. And then matriculated at Northeastern [University] and then did—did his undergraduate at—at Northeastern.
STERN: And then came back to Thailand?
BROWN: Yeah, and then came back to Thailand. It’s been two years now.
STERN: Okay. And was his mother—
BROWN: He’s living in Bangkok. Pardon?
STERN: Was his mother—is his mother one of your past wives or somebody else?
BROWN: No, no, no. His mother is—
STERN: I mean—sorry.
BROWN: —we are no longer—we are no longer, but she was—she—yeah, she was my girlfriend in Hong Kong.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: She lived with me in Hong Kong for a while, and then—
STERN: And was she American or—
BROWN: No, no, she was Thai. She was Thai.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: Yeah. But she was in Hong Kong with me, and then she—we—well, I was still working Hong Kong, so she came back to Thailand with him, and so he grew up—he actually grew up living with her in Thailand while I was in Hong Kong. And then I—when I came down here in 2003, when—when he was—put him in—put him in the boarding school, and he came over and—and he spent time with me while he was doing that.
STERN: And so you mentioned that you recently read Professor Ed Miller’s book and President Wright’s book about Vietnam. Do you tend to read a lot about the war, or has that just been with- —within the past few months?
BROWN: No, I—I do. I’ve read a number of novels or books that have been on Vietnam. I haven’t even touched the surface because there’s so many of them. But some of the—some of the novels that have come out—and I’ve pretty much watched or tried to watch every movie [chuckles]—every movie that’s ever been made on Vietnam. And then documentaries. PBS [Public Broadcasting Service], you know, The History Channel [now History] have documentaries on—on Vietnam, and I’ve watched those.
I—I—I actually—a funny incident: When I was at Bank of America, Robert [S.] McNamara, who is the former secretary of defense, during the Vietnam War was on the board of directors of the bank, and I—I had been in Washington, D.C., on a—on a business trip. And I got on the plane to fly back to San Francisco one morning, and Robert McNamara was sitting right there in first class. And I walked by him, and I looked. You know, Whoa! I need to talk to him!
But I went back and sat in my seat. I was in—I was in first class as well. I was only about three or four rows behind him. But when I had come on, I saw he had all these board—because he was going to a board meeting, so he had all these board papers spread around. And I—and I sat in that plane for five and a half hours on that flight, and I kept thinking, I’d really like to go up and talk to him. But then I said, Well, what’s the point, you know? I mean, he—at that time, he had not yet come out and done the documentary, [The] Fog of War. I don’t know if you’ve seen it. But he hadn’t yet come out done his sort of mea culpa, mea culpa about his part in the Vietnam War at that time. So I—I don’t know—
STERN: So you never did talk to him.
BROWN: No, no, I decided, you know, Leave the past. I’m sure he’s got his—you know, he’s got his own burdens. I don’t want to give him ano- —I mean, I wasn’t—it wasn’t going to be confrontational, but it was more, “I’m just curious. What was it you were really thinking?” [Both chuckle.] You know, “How did you come to the conclusions you came to?” Because he was a numbers guy from General Motors [Company]. And, you know, numbers don’t tell the whole story.
STERN: So I guess in that vein, what feelings do you harbor now towards the war, towards U.S. policy, towards your own contributions to the U.S. mission?
BROWN: Well, my—I mean, I still view my contribution as simply having done my part. You know, at the time I could not honestly say I was one side or the other, whether the war was right or wrong. And in fact, I don’t think many people—although, with the benefit of hindsight, a lot of people would like to think they knew at the time. But I don’t think I knew enough at the time to make a decision on the rightness or the wrongness until I actually got there and then experienced the—the stalemate. But nonetheless, I—I—I did feel that I did my part. You know, I didn’t—I didn’t try and avoid it. And that makes me feel a lot more at ease with—or at peace with myself.
There are any number of friends that I have my age who did not go in the military and—and avoided service, either through deferments or, you know, other ways. Matter of fact, I don’t know—I don’t know of many who even were in the military, and I’m—I’m not quite sure how they managed to do that, although the lottery came along, and, you know, a lot of people just were fortunate to have high lottery numbers.
But one—one thing that did strike me just a year ago: I’d been—I met—I met someone. It was a friend of a friend. And somehow we were talking, and the subject of Vietnam came up, and my—my friend, who had introduced us, said something about my being in Vietnam, to which this other guy looked at me, and he said, “[unintelligible; 6:29:18] you were in Vietnam”—he said, “How did that happen?” And I didn’t go through the whole—whole explanation, but I just said, “Well, if I didn’t go, some other, less fortunate, less privileged young kid would have gone in my place.” And, you know, I said, “I—I can rest easily at night because I can go to the Vietnam [Veterans] Memorial and look at the Wall and know that there’s nobody’s name up there of someone who may have taken a bullet for me.”
To which—to which this guy said, “Better him than me.” And I—I was totally shocked by that attitude, because that was, I realized in retrospect, the attitude of a lot of people who were well off—you know, had the opportunity to go to university, had parents who had pull or influence and could get them—you know, get them out of—out of military service. And—and I’ve always felt strongly that everyone should do their part. And I’m not saying blindly do what the government tells you, but if more people were obligated to serve, their parents, who would be old enough and have the influence, would do more to influence the government officials who were making these decisions to put young people’s lives at risk, and I—I think they’d make more sensible decisions than they do now.
STERN: Okay.
BROWN: And I—I was dead set against Nixon abolishing the draft and establishing an all-volunteer Army. And—and—every—every opportunity I get, I—I tell people I think—I think there should be universal service required of every—every person out of high school. And men and women. And I don’t—when I say “universal service,” I don’t mean military.
[Call is disconnected, then reestablished.]
BROWN: Oh, I don’t know what happened.
STERN: I’m back. [Chuckles.]
BROWN: Yeah. Sorry about that.
STERN: No.
BROWN: But—but what I was—what I was saying was I believe in a—in a universal—in a government service for all—all kids—not kids, all people 17. And the reason is we live in a—we live in a world that as it has become more global, unfortunately we’re seeing more and more tension and—and conflicts crop up. And we in America do not always appreciate or understand how truly lucky we are to live in America with—with the freedoms and liberties that we have. We take a lot of that for granted, and a lot of the young people nowadays, I think, are dismissive of the government. And rightly so. I mean, there are some idiots now in Congress. They’re just idiots.
But people, instead of being engaged, are disengaged, and—and they’re critical, but either they don’t know what to do or they don’t know how to do it. And I think if you had more people, more young people who were given an opportunity to actually serve the country, number one, they’d get exposed to a broad section of society that they otherwise would not—would not know, and—
For example, in—in the military, I was with 17-, 18-, 19-year old kids who graduated high school. Some of them didn’t graduate high school. Some of them, as I said, were juvenile delinquents who would have gone to jail if not for the Army. They were from, you know, cities, states—South Dakota, North Dakota. They were from all over. There was a Hell’s Angel in my outfit from Buffalo, New York. I never would have met these people, and I never would have actually got to sit down and converse with them on a peer-to-peer level, because if I had continued in my privileged life, they would have never existed for me. And I wouldn’t have had a clue what they thought or what they cared about, what was important to them in life.
And I—and I really think everyone needs to know as many other people as they can. You know, you hear now about the bubble. Everybody says, “Oh, everybody’s living in their own little bubble.” Well, you need to bust those bubbles.
STERN: Mm-hm.
BROWN: And the people who are in those bubbles need to—need to sit down and just have a conversation. You know, the guys I’m talking about—I mean, first of all, you can imagine, you know, here’s a guy from, you know, Harvard graduate, Harvard Law School, and I’m sitting in the jungle with a guy who’s 18, 19 years old. He’s a Hell’s Angel. [Both chuckle.] I’m looking at this kid like, “How the hell did you—did you get into the Hell’s Angels, a gang?” But a perfectly nice guy. You know, I mean, he didn’t have horns; he didn’t have, you know, evil eyes or claws or anything. He was a human being.
And I never would have got to meet these guys. I met farmers from South Dakota, North Dakota. [Chuckles.] And they were great guys. But it just shows you if you have the opportunity to mix and mingle people, the country would be a lot better off because you wouldn’t have this East Coast, West Coast, Iron Belt, Bible Belt, Rust Belt—yes, you’d have them, but people in all the other areas of the country would at least say, “Oh, yeah, well, I know people—I know people who live there. I—I understand what they’re saying. I understand how they feel.” I can understand there’s disaffection right now. I may not agree with them, but I can understand it. And—and I think that’s the most important thing that mandatory or universal government service would—would provide.
And—and it would also—it would also give the young—young people—you know, coming out of high school—it gives them a real sense of what the country’s about and a greater appreciation of what they have. Right now, I— doubt if—if kids coming out of these schools—not, obviously, all of them, but a large number of them—I mean, they don’t have a clue—first of all, they probably—a lot of them don’t have a clue of history. You know, they’ve—they’ve done these surveys where huge numbers of these kids coming out of high school can’t even name the capital of their own state.
STERN: [Chuckles.]
BROWN: They can’t name—they can’t name the states of the—of the United States. [Chuckles.] If you give them a map, they couldn’t point out where they live on the map. [Chuckles.]
STERN: Yeah, it’s frightening.
BROWN: And it’s—it’s sad. It’s scary. And—and then if you talk about—I think—what was it? They did a survey I saw, and I don’t know who did it, so you can always question it, but they asked them about the—the Constitution, what’s in the Bill of Rights, what’s the Constitution, what was the American Rev- —or what was the War of Independence? They cou- —the vast majority could not—could not tell you what the War of Independence was or when it was fought. And that’s just—that’s unforgiveable.
STERN: Right.
BROWN: So, you know, I think universal service would allow people the opportunity to learn more about the country, outside their own area, and—and allow them to meet and mingle with other people they’d never otherwise meet and mingle with and—and hopefully give them a bit of an education and realize, you know, how fortunate you are, because I’ll tell you, if—if I had never gone to Vietnam, I would not have walked through jungles and paddy fields and seen people who literally are living hand to mouth, in a mud hut with—with three walls, no indoor plumbing, no electricity, no refrigeration. And they’re doing this 12 hours a day. And just to provide food on the—on the table for their family. And that opened my eyes to—to a lot that I would not have seen otherwise.
STERN: I think that’s a really valuable, eye-opening perspective.
BROWN: Yeah. Yeah. So it’s—but sadly, what I just said will never happen, I guess. [Chuckles.]
STERN: Well, thank you so much for your service and for taking the time to speak with me. I really, really appreciate it.
BROWN: Yeah, it’s been enjoyable.
STERN: And if you’re ever back east, I would definitely love to meet—or if you come to campus, so stay in touch.
BROWN: Yeah, campus. You know, being in Phuket, campus is a long way.
STERN: I know, I know.
BROWN: [Laughs.]
STERN: But if you do make it back—
BROWN: Pardon?
STERN: If you do make it back.
BROWN: Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I—I—I definitely—let me say, since I’ve been in touch with—with Professor Wright, and he and I exchanged a number of e-mails, and I was surprised when he and Professor Miller had said how—because to me it was a surprise, how popular the course—the courses they teach on the Vietnam War are. And I just found that—I found that interesting, that young people were concerned about something that happened 40 years ago. So—I’m still surprised. [Chuckles.]
STERN: Well, we definitely are fascinated. So thank you, and have a great rest of your day.
BROWN: Thank you. Okay, well, thank you very much, and if I can do anything to help or try and put you in touch with other people or names, do not hesitate to let me know.
STERN: Oh, I’ll definitely be in touch. Thanks.
BROWN: Yeah. All right. Have fun. [Chuckles.]
[End of interview.]