Allan R. Campbell ’64

Dartmouth College Oral History Project

The Dartmouth Vietnam Project

February 13, 2025

Transcribed by Joanna Jou ‘26

JOU	This is Joanna Jou. Today is February 13, 2025, and I am conducting this oral history interview for the Dartmouth Vietnam Project. I am conducting this interview with Mr. Allan [R.] Campbell. This interview is taking place in person in the history hub of Carson Hall on campus of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Mr. Campbell, thank you for speaking to me today.
CAMPBELL	It's my pleasure, Joanna.
JOU	All right, well, I wanted to get started with asking if you can tell me where and when you were born.
CAMPBELL	I was born January 30, 1942 in Bronxville, New York—not the Bronx, but Bronxville, which is a small town just north of New York City. Actual town itself is one square mile in the middle of a lot of, sort of, suburbans. That's where my grandparents lived, and it was 1942—just at the beginning of Second World War, and my father [John C. Campbell] was in New York at the time, so that's where I was born.
JOU	And did your grandparents or your parents serve in either World War One or World War Two?
CAMPBELL	No, neither of them—none of them. I don't know why. I was always kind of wondering about that. My father was the absolute perfect age. My grandfather [Allen R. Campbell] would have been too old for World War Two. My father, I always wondered, why didn't my dad serve? And because he wasn't, you know, any kind of conscientious objector or anything like that at the time. But I subsequently, as I grew older, ‘cause he never talked about it very much, that he worked for the government in a so-called critical position. He was with the State Department on a project that ultimately turned into kind of a what-if project. By that, I mean, they were doing gaming as to, what if the Germans won the war? or the Axis powers won the war? or if the US won the war? What about the Russians? Where they come into the picture at that time. Remember the early war, part of the war, I think the Russians were part of the Axis, ultimately turned their backs on Hitler, but that's what he was doing—and that was considered critical to the war effort, and that's why he never served. All my friends’ fathers had either been volunteered or drafted and served in some form of one or another, either in the Pacific or in Europe.
JOU	Right, yeah. It sounds like he served more on the back end, like he was watching everything play out. And did you have any siblings? Or what was your childhood like?
CAMPBELL	Well I have one brother [Alexander B. Campbell]. He's three years younger than I am. Born in 1945, so he was a end-of-the-war baby, and that's my only sibling. And he now lives in Denver. He was a federal judge. He's now retired.
JOU	Great, awesome. I am curious about what brought you to Dartmouth, or why did you end up picking Dartmouth, or if you remember your college decision journey.
CAMPBELL	My father went to Harvard. My grandfather went to Harvard. My grandfather went to Harvard. My grandfather and great grandfather [Walter L. Campbell] went to Harvard Law School. My father went to Harvard Law School for one year and couldn't stand it, and then ultimately got his PhD in history, specializing in the Balkans—ultimately specialized in the Middle East, but I guess it was expected that I would go to Harvard.
	I went to a suburban New York high school where ninety plus percent of the kids that graduated went to college of one kind or another. Was kind of expected that I would go to a northeastern Ivy League type college. I used to get dragged to Harvard reunions and events and football games and things like that, but I hated Harvard. It seemed to me a bunch of effete guys, and it was a city school, and I didn't want anything to do with a city school. Those days, graduating seniors, unlike today—I guess—didn't apply. Today, I guess you apply to a dozen or so schools covering all your bases. In those days, the norm was to apply to a school that you thought was a stretch, another school, and then a so-called safety school, so I only applied to three schools. Dartmouth was my number one choice, Hamilton College in Clinton, New York was number two choice, and Colgate University was my so-called safety school. And I got into all three. I was a so-called high school well-rounded student in those days. Sort of president of the class, an athlete in the sense that I played on teams—but wasn't a superstar—had good grades, all that stuff, so I was pretty sure that I could get to wherever I wanted to go. As a kid, I had gone to my grandparents’ house in a summer place in a lake in Southern New Hampshire. I really liked New Hampshire. It was kind of in the woods, and when I came up to do college visits, I went to Dartmouth, and was all, all male, of course, in those days, but I thought it was so cool. I mean, everyone you know was walking around those days with Dartmouth jackets on, and cheering at sports events, and participating in all kinds of activities—and that was where I was sure I wanted to go, and so that's why I ended up here.
JOU	Awesome. And what did you study at Dartmouth?
CAMPBELL	History.
JOU	Oh! Did you have a specialized interest in a specific region?
CAMPBELL	Well, in those days, you usually just took American history or European history. Started out in a couple of American history introductory courses, and then sort of branched out to there, and I just stuck with American history. There were some really great professors in those days. I don't even know if they're even remembered now, but there was a guy named Lou Stillwell [Lewis D. Stillwell]. Once a week, he used to do what he would call battle nights, and he'd give a lecture to anyone who wanted to come. And they used to pack the big room in Dartmouth Hall there with people who would just come and hear him talk about some of the famous battles of history, both ancient history as well as modern history. And it was just, you know, going to a movie almost. It was so interesting. And then there were guys like Al Foley [Allen R. Foley ‘20]. Does that name ring any bells? He taught cowboys and Indians, History 42 or something—the history of the American West. And he was a great lecturer, and it was an easy course, so lots of people took it—not just history majors. And then, sort of the star of the department was a guy named John [C.] Adams, who taught modern European history. He was a no nonsense guy, but his lectures were also spellbinding, and his courses were really hard, but everybody loved to take the courses, so that's where I ended up.
JOU	Would you say that history was like a popular major back then?
CAMPBELL	Yeah, it was pretty easy [laughter], probably not that way anymore. And you sort of focused on what you enjoyed as a freshman, and just say, geez, you know, I think I got to pick a major occasionally, at some point, eventually. And so, I picked history, a lot of people did. I was a pre-med, a lot of people thought they wanted to be, you know, go into medicine. So I was taking the pre-med courses, which were chemistry, life sciences, all that sort of thing, math—and that was way more cutthroat than other things, so I kind of shifted away from that after sometime during my sophomore year, and just became straight old history major.
JOU	Yeah. I also came into Dartmouth intending on studying something biology related on the pre-med track, but you made it way farther than me. I went through like my freshman fall, and I was like, oh, it's okay—I'll think of something different. So yeah, I guess we have that similar arc [laughter]. And were there any notable extracurricular activities or organizations that you were involved in?
CAMPBELL	I played football and wrestled in high school, and I had one of my classmate’s father went to Dartmouth, and he was a big Dartmouth football player. I mean, in a sense of he played on—he was captain of the team, and he played the first time Dartmouth ever beat Yale at football, that was his team. He was Mr. Dartmouth, and I idolized him. He was one of the reasons also why I wanted to go to Dartmouth. And in those days, there was really hardly any recruiting for any sports. If you were a good athlete, there was a freshman—all sports had freshman teams, so you could come and play at a level with other freshmen. You didn't immediately have to be a varsity athlete. Recruiting was mainly done by alumni who would pick somebody in wherever they lived, and call the coach or the athletic department and say, hey look at so and so. He's really good, and he's a great kid, or she—wasn't any she’s back then. This friend's father, his name was Carl [P.] Ray [‘37], R-A-Y, who was known as “Mutt” Ray. That was his football nickname because he was so vicious, like a vicious dog. He had called then Coach [Robert L.] Blackman [‘37a] and said, “Got to look at him for football”. I went down to freshman football practice for one day and just watched, and I said, “If I do this, I'm going to get killed ‘cause all these guys were way bigger, way faster, and way more athletic than I was.” So I said, “Well, I love sports, so what could I do?” Said I know how to row a boat, so there was some sort of program or day or evening where you went around and talked to all these various teams, and so I decided I would row. I ended up rowing what was then The Dartmouth Rowing Club. It was a club sport rather than—although it competed nationally with all the big crews, but it was not a fully sponsored course by the college, I mean sport by the college, so I ended up on the crew.
JOU	So Coach Blackman, he was the head coach for Dartmouth football?
CAMPBELL	Yes
JOU	Back then. Okay. And do you remember your coach's name for crew?
CAMPBELL	He was a junior.
JOU	Oh, a junior in college?
CAMPBELL	In Dartmouth.
JOU	Oh! Okay.
CAMPBELL	‘Cause it was a club. They had a varsity coach. I think the boathouse is probably named after him—the Gardner Boathouse? You've probably never been down there in your life.
JOU	No. [laughter]
CAMPBELL	He was a big time, big deal, rowing coach. But for less than varsity, they had a JV [junior varsity] and then probably a second boat after the JV; and a freshman first boat, and then a freshman second boat. And the JVs and the freshman crews were coached by students—former oarsmen who decided that rather than row they'd rather coach. So our coach was a guy named Steve Martindale [Stephen A. Martindale ‘62], who had been an oarsman, and you know now he was coaching the freshman crew. Then it grew into the sport that it is today—some Olympians and you know, big deal sport.
JOU	Was there a distinction—because I know now there's lightweight crew and then heavyweight. Was there also that distinction?
CAMPBELL	Yes. Lightweights, I think the boat—there are eight people in the shell and the shell had to average 150, 155, or 160 pounds, or something like that per oarsman. So there were some that were 165 or something like that. And there were others that were smaller, and then anything above that was heavyweight.
JOU	Oh okay, awesome. And was there anything else you're involved in such as Greek life?
CAMPBELL	I don't know what it is now, but as an all male school, the social life year consisted of big weekends or freshman mixers. You don't even know what a mixer is.
JOU	[Laughter]. Is it like a dorm party?
CAMPBELL	Well no, but they literally bus in women from all over. From Colby, Colby Junior—now it's Colby Sawyer [Colby-Sawyer College]—from Skidmore [College], from Smith [College], from Wellesley [College]. Bus them up here, and there'd be a big dance, and it was mainly for freshmen. Of course, what would happen is that the upperclassmen—you had to be at least a sophomore to be in a fraternity. There were no freshmen in fraternities; they weren't even allowed anywhere near them. And the fraternity guys would show up when the buses showed up and cull the group [laughter], taking what they considered to be the best looking ones. Said, “You don't want to go to that stupid mixer with a bunch of freshmen. We're having a party over the such and such house. Why don't you come over there?” So that's basically what the social life was.
	And then so-called road trips, where you just pile into a car and head out of town either to Colby, or Skidmore, or Smith, or Green Mountain [College]—which I don't even know if it exists anymore—in Poultney, Vermont. Its benefit was that it was on the Vermont-New York border; and the drinking age in New York was then 18 years old, and that's why Green Mountain held such an attraction—not necessarily because of all the beautiful young ladies, but because you could get a date and then go across the state line into New York and legally drink in a bar there. And the bars, you know, catered to that sort of activity. They had bands and music and all that.
JOU	And what was it like going to like an all male institution?
CAMPBELL	We thought we were the greatest: Dartmouth men. Why would anyone want to go to school elsewhere? You didn't have to shave in the morning. You’d get up and wear your rotten old clothes from the day before. No one cared what you looked like. You didn't have to worry about the hassle of having a girlfriend or date or anything like that. It was just a good place to be. There's a lot of people that were upset about the fact that it became co-ed—because I saw the history thing over there about the female integration of Dartmouth College. It was slightly after my time, but I was close enough to it to know that those women who came as pioneers to Dartmouth had, in some cases, a rough time.
JOU	And kind of going back to the rowing team, did you enjoy rowing and the team, or like the social dynamic among that?
CAMPBELL	Yeah, I really liked rowing. Problem was, I was a heavyweight because I started weighing at about 210 pounds at the time. Way above lightweight, but a lot of—I never rowed competitively before, so yeah basically had to teach us. They had a fall season, which was informal. And then the spring season started the Monday after Winter Carnival, usually first week in February. And that started with the traditional running of the stadium steps; so probably still do down there. You had to start at the bottom and run all the way up to the top and then go over section and run down, and then go next section to the top, and just do that over and over again until you dropped. It was brutal. Brutal. Crew was a brutal sport. Anyway, I was on the first boat, the best boat. But after the season was over, the coach—[Peter V.] Gardner—called me in and says, “We'd love to see—want to see you come out as a sophomore, but what I'd like you to do is lose 25 pounds and row a lightweight, run as a lightweight.” And the reason was that most of the guys, I don't know if you see any crew guys, most of them are six [foot]-four. They have arms that come down below their knees. They've got muscles all over them. And the idea is you can reach out as far—longer you keep your oar in the water, the more power you can get. I was six feet tall by that time. The season was over. I weighed down—I weighed 185, down from 210—and they said, “If you want to come back, we want you to row lightweight. I said, “There's no way I can do that, just no way.” So that was the end of my crew career.
JOU	So you rowed your first—
CAMPBELL	My freshman year. Right. Then I became a degenerate frat boy.
JOU	[Laughter]. What frat were you at?
CAMPBELL	Psi U [Psi Upsilon]
JOU	Wait, no way. Do you go back often?
CAMPBELL	Occasionally, yeah. Why? Do you have any affiliation with Psi U?
JOU	I have a few friends there right now. It’s still very well known on campus.
CAMPBELL	It was a crew house. It was known as a lot of kids that had gone to prep school. Probably still likely. Had a lot of sports that were prep school sports. High schools didn't necessarily have teams like lacrosse, ice hockey, swimming, racket sports—tennis and squash—and sort of the preppy approach to the world. [laughter].
JOU	And you didn't do ROTC [Reserve Officers’ Training Corps], correct?
CAMPBELL	No. Everybody avoided it, who could. Although, you could get an ROTC scholarship. And you know, a lot of guys did it because if they stuck with it, they would get some tuition assistance as a result of it. And they would, I don't know, it was just there. My best friend from high school also went to Dartmouth. He got a Navy ROTC scholarship where they paid his full tuition. And it was with the stipulation that he would owe the Navy six years after college when he graduated. And he, one of the smartest guys I knew ever, but he had some real problems with, I don't know, mental discipline and things like that; stick-to-itiveness whatever. He flunked out his sophomore year. The theory was, if you flunked out of regular NROTC and they had paid for your scholarship, you would have to go into the Navy as an enlisted person. Somehow he wiggled out of that. To this day, I don't know how. Ended up—he transferred to Hamilton College, eventually got his PhD in Spanish at the University of Wisconsin, and ended up as the head of romance language department [laughter] at the University of Wisconsin.
JOU	Wow, I guess he was very passionate about language [laughter]. Was ROTC—how was that viewed on campus in the early ‘60s?
CAMPBELL	It was, sort of like, “Oh, poor guy. He's got to go to drill and take a couple stupid classes in military science or something like that”. But it wasn't scorned or it was like, that's what you want to do, fine; wear your uniform and march around. You know, it was just part of the landscape. No one thought any worse or better of people that were in ROTC. Now as that evolved and Vietnam came about, all that sort of thing that changed—radically and quickly. Everything changed radically and quickly in the late ‘60s. Everything. The whole world changed. Not just because of Vietnam and other things, but when I was an undergraduate, drugs other than alcohol, were virtually non-existent. There were some rumors that guys that were in the theater group and artsy type people smoked pot occasionally, but nobody I knew, or that the most—I'd say ninety percent of maybe more—even would consider it. Just wasn't existent. In 1966—I’d say ‘65, ‘66—there was a, basically a revolution. Pot became prevalent. Other drugs became prevalent. Not really—not hard drugs. But at Harvard, they were rumored to smoke or doing LSD. And the music scene changed radically. Went from sort of Motown and funky rock and roll to the Beatles and The Rolling Stones, and it got more—even the lyrics to songs became more drug related. I had three brother-in-laws; my wife's three younger brothers. They went to college in the late ‘60s, and they were so spaced out most of the time that it was hard—I just couldn't imagine it. I was in the Navy at the time, and the Navy was kicking guys out for pot use. It was just not a factor in my college tenure.
JOU	And why do you think weed became so prevalent?
CAMPBELL	I don't know. You know if someone could do a real study on that, I'm sure. I don't know. It all of a sudden, it was there. I mean, it was non—literally nonexistent. My senior year, 1964, maybe I was naive, but nobody in my fraternity, at least, openly smoked it—any kind of drugs other than lots and lots of beer. Even hard alcohol was not even used that much. It was occasionally for like a—Psi U was known for having a jazz band on Sunday mornings of big weekends; of Dixieland jazz, where people would basically sit around and listen to sort of nice jazz Dixieland. It wasn't even funky jazz. There's just a change of pace in the music, and that there would probably be gin and juice, and Bloody Marys and that sort of thing, or some stupid punch. But hard alcohol was almost too expensive at the time. Beer was the drug of choice. I don't know, probably changed.
JOU	[Laughter]. Well beer is still very popular on campus.
CAMPBELL	Do you socialize in fraternities or sororities, or are you in a—
JOU	I'm not in a sorority, but I have many friends who are. And then also fraternities are very well—I guess Greek life is very prevalent on campus still.
CAMPBELL	Yeah. I was starting to say I think that probably sixty—there were no freshmen in fraternities. There were twenty-four fraternities on campus, and probably some unknown secret clubs and things like that. But twenty-four recognized fraternities on campus, no sororities of course. You couldn't join until you were a sophomore. The first rush was before classes started your sophomore year, just added another amount of pressure to college life before you even started the academic year. But sixty plus percent of upperclassmen—upper three classes—were in a fraternity. That basically was the form of social life. There were some fraternities that I've never been into to this day, and others that you had friends that were in and you would just—they were hardly ever a closed door. I mean, theoretically, you could go in any fraternity that you wanted to, I mean for a party or visit, or just sit around and talk, drink, whatever.
JOU	Yeah, well 24 is a lot. I don't even think fraternities and sororities combined make 24 so yeah. Wow, I'm kind of shocked by that number.
CAMPBELL	They had just—not long before I started—I forget what it’s called, but it was the year that Dartmouth said that you cannot exist as a fraternity on Dartmouth—at Dartmouth—if your fraternity, either locally or nationally, has some form of discrimination clause in your bylaws or charter or your governing documents. And not that there was any kind of open discrimination at Dartmouth, but some of the fraternities, particularly ones that had southern origins, had White only, or sort of silly things in their charter, so some of the national fraternities had to change their name. For example, Tabard, does Tabard still exist?
JOU	Yes.
CAMPBELL	Tabard used to be Sigma Chi. Back in THE day, they had—Sigma Chi—was basically a southern fraternity. They had some kind of discrimination clause in there, so they became—they just thought, “We don't want to affiliate with Sigma Chi anymore. We're going to call ourselves ‘The Tabard.’” Bones Gate was Delta Tau Delta. Sigma Nu was, is now Sigma Nu Delta?
JOU	Oh I think it's still Sig Nu.
CAMPBELL	Okay. Whatever, that was another one that had to change. Theta Chi, which is now, became Alpha Theta. Some of these probably don't even exist anymore. Maybe they've gone the way of defunct organizations or whatever.
JOU	Wow, so Dartmouth—the College—said that if these frats had discrimination clauses, they would have to be unrecognized or they just couldn't exist at Dartmouth?
CAMPBELL	Unless they got rid of—they changed their name, had no affiliation with the national, or became known as something else and had their acceptable governance documents where there was no discrimination.
JOU	Well that’s interesting. I didn’t know that.
CAMPBELL	Yeah. Pretty forward looking for the 1960s.
JOU	[Laughter]. We kind of touched on this, but the political climate during the early ‘60s. Do you still remember any significant political events or moments that happened at this time like the assassination of JFK [John F. Kennedy] or the Cuban Missile Crisis?
CAMPBELL	Yeah I remember all that really well. Start with one that had a huge impact on basically everybody I knew, and that was the Cuban Missile Crisis. I think it was 1962 when Kennedy was president. And they discovered that there were nuclear missiles in Cuba. I can remember back to when Castro was viewed as kind of a hero because he was this revolutionary that started up against the Cuban dictatorship of Batista [Fulgencio Batista] that had gone on for years. And Cuba used to be a vacation spot for US citizens—it was casinos, and it's kind of a wild time. And there were the big hotels; it was a resort. When Castro and his revolutionaries took up in one of the, what's called Oriente Province. I don't know, you know whether it was eastern Cuba or whatever. I assume it was because it was of Oriente; that's in the mountains where he gathered all his—ultimately, the Cuban Revolution took place, and Castro was in charge; and kind of turned out to be more of a communist [laughter] than the US had bargained for, and had developed ties with the Soviet. Next thing you know—nobody paid that much attention to it around here—but next thing you know, well I can't remember where the Bay of Pigs Invasion took place. Are you familiar with the Bay of Pigs?
JOU	Um, I've heard of it.
CAMPBELL	Supposedly, it’s a—CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] trained a bunch of soldiers of fortune that were gonna go into Cuba and overthrow Castro. It’s gonna turn into be a disaster. It's one of the first things that the Kennedy Administration undertook. And apparently Kennedy claimed at least that he was hoodwinked by all these CIA characters. Be interesting to see if, when the Kennedy documents are released, the Kennedy Assassination documents, whether there really was some CIA plot to—whether it was conspiracy theory or whatever.
	Anyway, discovered that there were nuclear missiles in Cuba, 90 miles off the coast of the United States, and that was a big deal. I mean, supposedly we were on the brink of nuclear war. Whether that was what we were supposed to think or not, who knows. But I can remember sitting around in the living room of Psi U with a bunch of guys watching the only television. Basically the televisions were few and far between, watching Kennedy give a speech about this—what was going on in Cuba. And we all literally felt—and never felt that way before—that we might be in uniform before the end of the school year. It was a pretty scary thought. We had all been registered for the draft, which is what you did when you turned eighteen, and had been living on student deferments throughout that time; and almost everybody considered that likelihood of you ever getting drafted was next to nothing because I think you had to make it to age twenty-six with a deferment, and then you were free—the likelihood of ever getting drafted was almost non-existent. So draft wasn't particularly—if you came from an area where your draft board, which is a bunch of local citizens, could fulfill their quotas from a lower socioeconomic city, for example. Where I grew up in Southern Westchester, New York, just out of New York City, the draft board was in Peekskill, New York, which was sort of a city on the Hudson River, kind of nothing city. And then was the city of White Plains [NY], which was pretty big town, but they could fulfill their draft quotas from there. The kids that went to Dartmouth from Chappaqua [NY] didn't really have to worry too much about getting drafted, But sitting around thinking, “My God, we could be in a war before I finished this school year!” And then we could all be drafted. It was a shock, and that was like 1962 but it wore off, the missile crisis was resolved. The Russians turned their ships around because of the blockade. Incidentally, the USS Essex—the ship I was on in the Navy—participated in that blockade in 1962; off the coast of Cuba, keeping the Russians from sending their ships that were bearing their missiles in any more of them into Cuba. Anyway, forgot where were we.
JOU	We talked about the Cuban Missile Crisis, and then I asked you about the assassination of JFK.
CAMPBELL	Oh yeah. I can remember the day it happened. I was a senior. It was 1963. It was November 23rd I think, right before Thanksgiving. Guy I had lived with for three years in Middle Mass [Hall] was in Tabard. We were both living in our fraternity houses for our senior year. I was a first year—first time I'd ever had a car up here; my grandfather couldn't drive anymore, so I had his car up here, and finally, just took it home because it was expensive to have a car up here. Anyway, we were sneaking home early for Thanksgiving break on Friday—that Friday. And I was sitting in the car outside Tabard, waiting for my friend to come out. We were gonna head for New York, which was a seven hour drive. And I was listening to the radio in the car, and the only station you could get around here was then WDCR [Web Dartmouth College Radio]—the college radio station, was an AM station. And somebody came on and said, “We've just received word from Dallas [TX] that the President has been shot.” And it was like, can you imagine that? I mean, your whole world just went poof like that. I mean, it was stunning, so we ended up listening to the car radio. I'm trying to tune in stations all the way down, driving from Hanover to basically New York City listening to that, to what was going on. And it was basically a play by play. Somehow the station got tuned in to CBS and Walter Cronkite, and so we listened to this thing for seven hours in the car, and then all people did for the remaining week plus was watch TV—glued to the television because all the crazy things that were happening: Kennedy dying, Lyndon [B] Johnson getting sworn in, the grieving widow Jackie [Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis]. I witnessed it live, but live TV of Lee Harvey Oswald getting shot in the Dallas Police Department by Jack Ruby. Do you remember that at all?
JOU	No, I don’t.
CAMPBELL	He was a—sort of a—nightclub owner in Dallas, sort of a cop hanger-on. You know one of these cop—people that loves cops and hangs around police stations all the time. And he somehow had a gun, walked right in when they were transferring Oswald from one place to another; walked right up to him, shot him. It was on TV. I mean, it was like you're sitting there with your eyes bugging out of your heads. You know all this was going on again, like you thought your world was coming down around your ears.
	Then the whole state funeral—and the lying and state, and the little JFK Jr. holding his mother's hand as she was standing in the rotunda of the Capitol with the president lying in state there. I mean, Kennedy, turns out that he was kind of a bounder. He was a terrible womanizer, and some of the things he did were not really admirable, but he was young and charismatic. And you know the whole business about the young, beautiful wife and the Camelot. He was closer to our generation than any of these old men that have been president right up to that time. So it was just—made your world kind of just fall apart. I mean you sort of wonder what's going on here? I mean, everything was so, sort of fun and games, drinking beer and going on road trips and being a college guy—going to football games, and frat parties and all that stuff.
	Suddenly, the world just turned upside down. Lyndon Johnson. Damn, it was like who is this guy? Knew him as a sort of a blowhard Texas Congressman, Speaker of the House. But nevertheless, not somebody who was admirable. And then, with the evolution of, that I mentioned earlier, with the world going to hell in a handbasket—with the introduction of some sort of social revolution that just no one could imagine—three or four years prior to that. The pot world and whole change in music, and the onset of Vietnam, and it really made our world change radically from what we had sort of been used to; for growing up in basically fairyland during high school and the change that took place during college.
JOU	Yeah. I can't imagine all of that—like I can't imagine myself living in such a period marked by so much.
CAMPBELL	It was a really radical change. There was even a kind of a polarization of people. I mean, we’re polarized now. This wasn’t something that—you sort of tolerated alternative points of view. There were some peaceniks that were called during the early 60s; the guys that would lie down in front of the ROTC parade as a protest, mainly protesting nuclear arms and atom bomb, war—although there really wasn't much going on in the way of wars at that time, but that was radical thinking at those days. Everybody was sort of middle of the road. There were a couple of radical—I say radical, but arch conservative groups. There was a guy that lived next to me in my dorm, who was the president of Y-A-F. Ever heard of that one?
JOU	No, what's Y-A-F?
CAMPBELL	Young Americans for Freedom. Their hero was Barry Goldwater. That name mean anything to you?
JOU	Yes—
CAMPBELL	He was a senator from Arizona who was an arch conservative, and he was considered a warmonger, and he was an ultra-right Republican at the time. Arizona was kind of a ultra-right state [laughter] in those days anyways. But that was really the extent of it, and then all these things started happening like the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Kennedy assassination. And the draft became more of a concern. People were getting—I don't even, if you’re aware of this, but if you were having academic difficulties at Dartmouth, you would usually get a invitation to visit the dean and be told that, “Son, I think you've got something growing up to do. It is time, I think, for you to rethink what you want to do in life, and perhaps you should go to your draft board and get yourself drafted.” Difference being that if you enlisted voluntarily, I think you had a three year obligation. If you got drafted, you had a two year obligation.
JOU	Right. And was the dean at this time Thaddeus Seymour?
CAMPBELL	Yes. And there was a freshman dean—Dean of Freshman—I think his name was Albert [I.] Dickerson [‘30], or Dickinson or something like that, but it was Dean Thad. He was kind of like everybody's sort of hero. I mean, he was a great big guy. He was an oarsman. And kind of a good guy. Anyway, they would say, “Go to your draft board, get yourself drafted. When you've finished, come back and talk to us, and see if you really want to continue at Dartmouth.” That was a way of like, “Go grow up for a couple of years”. So a number of friends took that route. And usually because they were either smart, or smarter than the average draftee, they would end up in a reasonably safe haven like as a clerk or a secretary, or on somebody's staff, where whatever they did was none too dangerous. It was just more of a way of finding out that this isn't what you wanted to do for the rest of your life, and that maybe Dartmouth—going to school wasn't all that bad. And a lot of them came back and got married, or came back with wives and graduated just two years late. Did just fine.
JOU	So you had classmates that also took this route during this time?
CAMPBELL	Yeah.
JOU	Wow. And that kind of brings me to my—
CAMPBELL	Not a whole lot. In those days, I think sort of the gentleman C was an acceptable grade. There were some of the smartest people I ever knew here that just goofed their way through college. Didn't take advantage of all the spectacular opportunities that there are here—myself maybe being one of them. I ended up probably doing the minimum, not proud of it, but that's just the way things were. You could get a fabulous education. You could do some really interesting courses and classes. You could get to know—you didn't want to get to know a professor too well because then it's hard to keep a low profile. But I think in your, I don't know—the people that kind of just coast their way through these days, or does everybody really get into it?
JOU	I feel like there are definitely those who are super dedicated to their academics. So they're probably, as you said, some of the smartest people, and they'll showcase it. But I think people have a really great balance between the academic part of Dartmouth, and then also like the social life—and then, just being involved in various things.
CAMPBELL	I think that's sort of what my—I don't know, crazy question: has there been grade inflation do you think?
JOU	I don't think so. I know for like the econ and gov departments, they have the enforced median. But I don't think any of my classes have been inflated.
CAMPBELL	Means you have to work to get your A minus or—
JOU	Yeah, and I think most of the time, it's reflected on like how much effort I'm putting in.
CAMPBELL	Yeah, well I'll tell you what. I drank a lot of beer, watched a lot of television while I was here. But I got a great education. I really loved some of those classes I were in. I thought I was really inspired by some of the professors, but I kept as low a profile as I possibly could. And then, in a lot of ways, I regret it, ‘cause I squandered fantastic resources and opportunities that are presented by a place like Dartmouth.
	My grandson, who's now 24, graduated from Colgate [University] two years ago. He wanted to go to Dartmouth in the worst way. He didn't get in. I think a lot of it was because he didn't really stand out. He was an athlete, but not a great athlete. He was smart, but probably so were a lot of other kids—and he came from the Boston area. And Dartmouth, looking a lot more for national and international representation. So he was just one of a lot of really well qualified kids that didn't get into Dartmouth. Went to Colgate, did great. Majored in mathematical economics. I don't even understand half the stuff that he was doing. Now he's in private equity, which they all want to be in—probably end up making a ton of money. You know, he got a great education, and it was the philosophy—at least at that school was work hard and play hard.
JOU	Wait, did your kids come to Dartmouth too?
CAMPBELL	No. I did so poorly—well I didn’t do that poorly, but I think I ruined my chances. My son, I have one son, he applied, wanted the worst way to go to Dartmouth. My brother applied to Dartmouth—didn't get in. Went to University of Colorado; did great out there—tried to transfer to Dartmouth, didn't get in. Both of my grandsons applied. They’re both from outside Boston—have the same sort of pedigree—they didn't get in. Every person I've ever written a letter of recommendation for has been rejected.
JOU	What! [laughter]. No! What—that’s insane. Oh my gosh, it's okay, your legacy will carry on.
CAMPBELL	Well, you know I still love Dartmouth either way. Wonderful friends that I've made here, wonderful classmates, wonderful people I've met over the years from different classes. People like yourself are so unique and special at Dartmouth. So I don't hold it against Dartmouth or anyone else for whatever. Great things evolved. I wouldn't be here. I wouldn't have contacts or friends like Ed Miller [Edward G. Miller ‘64a] if I had anything against Dartmouth.
JOU	Yeah, facts. And kind of going back to thinking about the draft, I was wondering what influenced your decision to serve in the military right after college? You mentioned that you had until you were like, you could keep deferring—
CAMPBELL	You could keep getting deferments until you were twenty-six. And most people—I was twenty-two when I graduated, just ‘cause I was born in January. So you know, 22 was what—to the June of my senior year, I was 22 years old, so I'd have to make it that much further. They were still giving graduate school deferments, but things were evolving to the point where deferments were getting more and more difficult. They were called a 2-S deferment; it's basically a student deferment. There were other kinds, like if you were married. Or a 4-F—the famous 4-F—it was a medical either deferment or disqualification. Just the fact that you wanted to continue your education ultimately became non-deferrable. You were subject to the draft. You had to get married. Then it became you had to have a dependent—a minor dependent—like a kid [laughter]. It really became serious. Things like, “Well I'm not quite ready for that.” And so, it was a combination of—I have had enough of school. The last thing I wanted to do was continue on going to school at that time. I was pretty sure I wanted to go to law school at some point, but not then. I know I didn't want to get married. I know I didn't want to have a kid. So the alternative was either get a job that was a critical job where that was a form of deferment. Well, I was with an undergraduate degree that was not really a viable alternative.
	So what it came down to was I had seen a bunch of guys who had graduated the year before me—fraternity brothers and friends—and the like who were in the same situation I was, and they joined or applied for, and got into Navy Officer Candidate program—and that was a volunteer program. I thought—it sounded like a lot more fun than going into the Army, where the chances were that you were going to at least, even through basic training, gonna have to crawl around in the mud and carry a rifle and not even in a war situation, but even go through basic training. Sleeping outdoors didn't really appeal to me very much. And these guys who had gone into Navy OCS [Officer Candidate School] the year prior to my graduation, they were talking about how much—how cool it was, and that the Navy uniforms were really sharp, and they were on board a ship, which had a lot more appeal to me ‘cause I had grown up around boats and things like that and the water. I knew I would feel really comfortable, so I said to a friend of mine, or he said to me—I can't remember—“Let's go down to Boston and check out this OCS bit.” So we went down to Boston for a weekend. I think it was maybe a long weekend, and went to the recruiting station on Summer Street in Boston—Navy recruiting station said, “What's this OCS?” The guy was a really good salesman, and by the time we left, both of us had signed up [laughter] to go to OCS. They even said—I had to take an aptitude test or something like that; it was not that challenging, sort of like a junior PSAT [Preliminary Scholar Aptitude Test] or something like that, like about the eighth grade level. And they even let you choose when you wanted to go in. Say, “Okay, well how about September of 1964 where I’d graduated in June of 1964?” Give me a chance to goof around and have a little fun during the summertime. So I went home and ended up driving a grocery delivery truck for a local market. Do you know who Sidney Poitier is?
JOU	No.
CAMPBELL	He was an actor. He was an African American—was one of the first big Hollywood stars who was African American. He played on Broadway, as well as in the movies. And I used to deliver Sidney’s groceries [laughter]. That’s my claim to fame. He was basically a New Yorker. But his love was Broadway, and he lived outside New York City; and he and his wife, I guess, shopped at this little grocery store—wasn't a supermarket, but they used to deliver people's groceries, and I was the delivery guy. Dartmouth graduate grocery delivery waiting to go into Navy OCS, delivering Sydney's Poitiers groceries. So anyway, that's what I did that summer, and then reported to Newport, Rhode Island on September 19, 1964.
JOU	And talking about OCS, were there any memorable events or takeaways from your training that you particularly remember? Or what was your experience like?
CAMPBELL	First of all, I really liked it. It’s almost like going to camp. First time they presented me with a paycheck—I couldn't believe it. I guess I’m getting paid for this? Wasn't much, because you were a sort of a unique individual. You weren't an officer and you weren't a enlisted man. You're what was called an OCUI2—Officer Candidate Under Instruction Second Class, which was kind of equivalent to a Naval Academy midshipman or a West Point cadet; both in terms of pay grade and prestige, which was zero, but it was like almost going to summer camp as a kid. Like you got to shoot a gun and you got to go to take classes. It's a fairly intense program, but it wasn't all that difficult. Someone who might have a Dartmouth education was reasonably intelligent anyway could pretty well breeze through it, especially since they made you study; there was no opportunity to goof off. You had to wear a uniform. You had to stand inspections. You had to march. You had to do all this sort of military stuff. And it lasted sixteen weeks with some time off in between there for Christmas and breaks and everything. So you’re looking, I don’t know, twenty weeks of living in a barracks with a bunch of guys, getting up at 5 am, marching to breakfast, going to class, having four study hours in the evening, playing intramural sports—minimum of physical stuff, no crawling around in the mud or the dirt. It was enjoyable, and then you got your commission.
JOU	Right. And how did your parents feel about you deciding to serve?
CAMPBELL	They were shocked that I wasn't going to law school ‘cause I had kind of told them all along that I was—that was my plan to go to law school. I think I mentioned that to you before. Said, “Well, have you heard from any law schools yet?” And I said, “Well, you know, I think we should talk about that. I'm really not going to law school. I've already listed in Naval Officer Candidate School.” They were like stunned. And I don't think my father said anything for like two or three days; wasn't like—he was just shocked. I think they were disappointed because I thought I’m gonna be the lawyer. But, my grandmother, who I mentioned—I think—was a Quaker.
JOU	You didn't mention that.
CAMPBELL	Yeah, Quakers—anti violence, no fighting, that kind of stuff. They were the original people who developed the conscientious objector program. You know, if you didn't believe in war or serving in the military, it gives you religion. My grandmother was, I think, a long time ago, an Episcopalian. Then she just grew as she got older and older. She was a friend, American—a Quaker. She was more supportive than just about you know anybody, not that anybody weren't supportive. But she was like, “Okay, that's what you've chosen you’re gonna do. I'm proud of you. I mean let me know how it goes.” My other grandparents, I think probably both of them died by that time. It was a very—they were very different families. My father, Harvard educated, Harvard PhD. My maternal grandmother came from a old New England seafaring family. I think they always said they could trace their lineage back to the Mayflower. I have my doubts, but who knows? It wasn't a big deal. My grandfather [Alexander Hillis] was an Irish immigrant who came over as a young adult from Ireland because his brother had come over first. And father says, “Alec, you've got to come over here! This is a great country.” He had a job as a chauffeur for some rich woman on the north shore of Boston [MA]. And my grandfather came over—he hated it; he went back to Ireland, and then he was brow-beaten by his brother to get back over here. You know, this is a land of opportunity, but he grew up and he was a very simple man. He was the coachman and a gardener for a wealthy family on the south shore of Boston, a little snotty—little town called Cohasset [MA]. And he grew his own garden vegetables and berries and sold them; and he worked for this family. And just have a very strong suspicion that when he came over, a lot of these old Yankee families would take in roomers—boarders—to make a little extra money. So when he first came over, he needed a place to live. He lived with my grandmother’s family, I believe. To put this delicately, got her with child prior to their entering into the holy matrimony. So that's my mother's side of the family. And that was kind of a shock to my Bronxville father's side—you know Harvard educated for generations. And my father's father was a big lawyer in New York City and had a very lucrative and established law practice—law firm, a Wall Street law firm, that kind of thing. Where their son Johnny married a gardener's son from Cohasset. It’s interesting, but they were all supportive. In a way, we were pretty good kids. I mean, we could do no wrong, even though they were surprised that I was going into the service. At that point, Vietnam was not a big issue. It was like, well why would you want to go into the service? Well, seemed like the thing to do at the time. That's why.
JOU	Right. And wasn't there speculation? You mentioned during like the Bay of Pigs, when people were already starting to think about the draft.
CAMPBELL	Yeah, it became more and more of an issue. As I said—that deferments were disappearing; and I didn't want to get married, I didn't want to go to school anymore. So I more than likely, after graduation from Dartmouth—by the way, this grandmother came to my graduation at age 89 or something like that. She wanted to come to my graduation. If I hadn't gone to OCS or done something like that, I probably would have been drafted. So it was an alternative to just be vacuumed up into the lower ends of the military.
JOU	And how relevant was your training to your military occupational specialty?
CAMPBELL	OCS training? Or—
JOU	Yes
CAMPBELL	It was more—it was very relevant. It was teaching more of, I don’t know, discipline. And some of these people who came into OCS had no more business being military. I mean, they were like—there was a saying there called “go along to get along, get along to go along” as everybody's in this together. If some guy is stumbling, pick him up; make sure he gets through because if you don't, he's going to drag you down. That was kind of the attitude. There were plenty of guys that were—my roommates at OCS were a guy that went to Yale, another guy who went to Georgetown, and another guy who went to Auburn in Alabama. And these were sharp people, but if you didn't help the people who were less able—either academically or couldn't seem to get the uniforms straight—or were just kind of hopeless goofs. If you didn't shape them up, they were going to drag you down and make life miserable for you. So that was sort of the attitude there, “go along to get along, get along to go along.” And I made some really good friends there. I mean, some very sharp individuals. There were a bunch of Dartmouth people that started in Class 7-11, September 19, 1964 of that class that were there because for various reasons, but most of them, a lot similar to mine. And it was an orientation program really. They taught you a lot of stuff that was sort of semi useful, but in terms of doing your job as a—whatever your job might have been in—when you actually got on active duty; it wasn't that helpful. But you know the discipline, the teamwork, the sense of building a unit, which is what the Armed Forces—it was all, that was all part of it.
JOU	And before we get into your time serving on the boat—
CAMPBELL	Ship.
JOU	Oh sorry, on the ship. Sorry, my bad [laughter]. Your commitment to the Navy was around four years, correct?
CAMPBELL	It was—they kind of tell you white lies along the way. Anyway, it's a three year commitment. Well, they don't tell you that. That doesn't count twenty weeks at OCS. So basically six months. The commitment was three years of commissioned service, and plus however long it takes to get that commission. There are four levels. They modeled Officer Candidate School, like on the Naval Academy, so there was like four classes: plebe, third classman, second classman, and first classman. A lot of the curriculum was modeled on the Naval Academy. The uniforms were the exact same as the Naval Academy—different from enlisted, different from officers, but same as Annapolis [MD]. A lot of the traditions and the drills and all that stuff was similar to the Naval Academy. Now if you ever said to a Naval Academy person that an OCS commissioned officer was the same as somebody that had spent four years at “Canoe U” as it was derogatorily referred to, they would look at you like you were crazy. That's what OCS was all about.
JOU	So it was OCS school, and then—
CAMPBELL	Then three years, but mine ended up being four years because I wanted to get off the ship and go to shore duty ‘cause I was married during most of the whole time I was on the ship; and the ship had this habit of leaving [laughter] for extended periods of time. And turns out, you know, I had a son and a wife when I was telling you earlier on that—that was my idea of how to continue getting a draft deferment [laughter].
JOU	So it was two years on land, and in two years on the ship.
CAMPBELL	Yeah.
JOU	And you were married during—
CAMPBELL	I was married in the end of 1965. I started OCS in September of 1964, commissioned in February of 1965. I was married in December of 1965, and had a son in December of 1966.
JOU	Okay, and how did your wife feel about you extending your service?
CAMPBELL	She didn't have any choice [laughter]. I mean we were in love. I had met her—she was the roommate at Wellesley of a girl I had gone to high school with, class behind me in high school. My wife was a class behind me in college. She was a graduate from Wellesley in 1965. When I was in OCS, I had dated her a couple of times. We sort of thought both of us were jerks, but funny how things changed. When I was at OCS, my wife's roommate’s stepbrother was OCS at the same time, and we were friends from high school. And we said, “Let's go up to Wellesley.” Jane, his stepsister, and my to-be wife, Martha—the two roommates; maybe Jane can fix us up. So I got fixed up with Martha, and it was like, “Hm, I had met her before, and didn’t think all that much of her, and she didn’t think all that much of me.” [laughter]. As it turns out, I said, “What are you doing the next weekend? Because they will let you out of OCS for the weekend. Most people just went down to downtown Newport to a bar and spent their weekend drinking beer. You know, I went up to Wellesley and had a date. By New Year's Eve in 1966, we decided we were going to get married. So we had met in October—really started seeing each other in October. She came down and stayed with her roommate in the town; I was home from OCS for the Christmas leave break. On New Year's Eve, we stayed up all night and just talked, and by 5 o'clock in the morning, we decided we were going to get married.
JOU	Aw, and you guys have been together since.
CAMPBELL	Yeah, sixty-some years. So we got engaged in June when she graduated from college, and married the next December.
JOU	Wow. And how was your time abroad on the ship? I'm curious about your role and your duties on the ship. You mentioned that you were a legal officer? So I was wondering what that entailed.
CAMPBELL	Usually they would assign you to where you were going to end up based upon, obviously, the needs of the service. And OCS was kind of modeled around a small combatant ship called a destroyer—so about 350 feet long; it's sort of the quintessential Navy surface ship. Everybody wanted to go to the destroyer, so I put in on my dream sheet, as they called it, where you wanted to go when you graduated from OCS; I put in a small combatant destroyer, east coast, at some school where they teach you some sort of skill, technical skill, something like that. They call it a dream sheet for reason; it ends up mainly being a dream. I got a large combatant, which people say, “Ah, you don't want to go on a large combatant” which means the aircraft carrier or cruiser—mega ship because you'll just get lost in the shuffle on a ship that size. Its got 200 officers and 2500, 3000 men on board. You'll get some menial assignment on there and spend two years doing nothing. So turns out, I get the large combatant. I get assigned to Navy Justice School, which is sort of fitting thinking—you know once upon a time, I wanted to go to law school. And at least I got the coast that I asked for ‘cause everything I knew was on the East Coast. I did not want to go to the West Coast, not because of—people there were ending up going to this place called Western Pacific; and ultimately, off the coast of Vietnam. But that wasn’t really an issue, just because I met this woman, and she was from the East Coast, and she's still in school, so that's why I asked for East Coast. Anyway, turns out it was just a great matter of good luck and fate that I got what I got.
	Justice School, you learn in eight weeks everything you never need to know about the Uniform Code of Military Justice and how to run a court martial, and how to run a navy investigation, and all this kind of stuff. And usually it was for bright young men to be—there were two lawyers in the legal department for a whole aircraft carrier: one lawyer, one legal officer, and one the assistant legal officer. I went on as the assistant legal officer, ultimately to be the legal officer after he got transferred off or finished his commitment. And there were three enlisted guys that worked in it who were—in our case—guys that had been to college and had to see the dean and told; they're actually smart young men. Their enlisted rating was called yeoman, which is like a secretary, or a clerk type thing—smart, smart young men. So it was unlike a lot of junior officers that ended up being—working in the deck department, which means they supervised guys chipping paint and sanding and painting things; and then re-chipping them and painting them again, and that kind of stuff. And there's a lot of technical things that go on a ship too, but that was the example. Or an engineer meeting down in the boiler room, where it's about 115 degrees all the time, and they're—it's nasty.
	Being in the legal department was absolutely the best place you could have ended up. Instead of being one of—I think there are about 120 officers on board the Essex, and 2500 enlisted men or thereabouts—if you were in a deck division, you could have ended up spending your whole tour on board that ship, never having met the captain or had really any interaction with the captain. Whereas, as a legal guy, every single week, I would have interaction with the captain and the executive officer. And because my job was basically discipline, running court martials, and doing investigations, there was also lots of interaction with the captain and the executive officer. I don't know if you know the command structure on the ship, but there's a captain, an executive officer who's sort of the administrative head of all the ships, and then departments like weapons, air, engineering—each one has a department head, who all report to the captain and the executive officer. But as legal officer, you're sort of superseded all that infrastructure and your relationship was daily or weekly; almost daily, if not weekly basis with the guy that was in charge—of the two guys that were in charge of the whole ship. As a result, I had really only these three enlisted guys under me where, if you were in the weapons department or the deck department or the engineering department, you had a whole division that they call it—of sailors that were under you that had these various sort of levels of very menial to not so menial jobs on board the ship that made the ship run.
JOU	And did you encounter any hierarchical attitudes from the Navy on the ship? Professor Miller had mentioned to me that on the carrier, the top of the status pyramid are the naval aviators and they're reputed to look down on everyone else, so I was curious if you've had experiences like this.
CAMPBELL	The Navy's divided into, at least in the—there's a naval air, naval surface, subsurface, submarines, and some various other specialties; staff specialties like supply, medical, dental, clergy, chaplains, various other staff people. The ultimate and pure Navy officership is the so-called line officer. It goes back to ancient naval history like the British Navy particularly since the American Navy is modeled on the British Navy. A line officer is a person who runs a ship. And your ultimate goal there is to be a senior line officer, like captain of a ship or admiral that runs a bunch of ships; just in charge of a bunch of ships and fighting—actually waging warfare; that's a line officer. There are airline officers, and there are surface line officers and there are sub-surface line officers. Everything else is a staff position. They're considered, almost by definition, to be staff people lower than line officers; rank wise and pay grade wise and all that stuff, it's the same, but the real Navy is a line officer. Annapolis primarily trains line officers; OCS primarily trains line officers. There are people that are going to be supply officers or other staff positions, and they'll go to some other school to learn more about their particular specialty—but the fighting part of the Navy are line officers.
	Each one considers themselves superior to the other. Naval aviators probably think they're at the high end of the categories. Surface line officers—they're all super skilled, but they're all focused on fighting a ship. I was a line officer candidate. That's what we went in for—although I was designated; each person has a designator, a four digit number. 1100 is the pure line officer. I was an 1105 that meant I was a reserve line officer. That means I wasn't—there's a sort of this fake distinction between line officers that are 1100s which are Naval Academy graduates, versus a lower level of human being, which was like a reserve officer. Now, I think virtually everyone that goes that route is an 1100 because sources of commission are fewer than they used to be. There is really no Naval Reserve anymore except I guess sometimes you get an ROTC commission, you get a reserve commission. Reservists, 1105s—this is way too technical [laughter], but they consider themselves in a sense, “I'm a civilian first, and then I'm a naval officer.” 1100s, pure line officers consider themselves better. Anyway, aviators think they're better. Surface officers think better. Submariners think they're more skilled and better, but that's the distinction.
	Oftentimes on a aircraft carrier, the captain is an aviator, and he's come up through naval aviation through flying in various squadrons of aircraft that have different duties—but if he ever wants to make it as an admiral—as a flag officer—he's got to go up and he has to have command of a deep draft ship—a big ship, a capital ship—like an aircraft carrier. There's so many captains that—I mean, there's another distinction that's maybe more, just a sort of, but anyone who's in command of a ship is called Captain [laughter], even though he may not be a captain. He might be a lieutenant or a lieutenant commander, or a commander or a captain; if he's running a ship, if he's the captain of the ship, he's called Captain even though his rank might be commander. In order to be an admiral—ultimately make it to admiral—anyone has to have a deep draft command. So these guys who were naval aviators and they had to get a deep draft command, but they'd never been to sea before, running a ship. So they would, the Navy would give them command of a auxiliary type deep draft command like a oiler or a supply ship, or some big lumbering thing where they could learn how to be a sea captain rather than an aviator. But that would, they would only—there were so many of them; they would only get this command of a deep draft non-capital ship for a year. And then they would only get a captaincy of a aircraft carrier, for example, for another year; and then they were either promoted into flag rank as an admiral or retired. So that's why there's this sort of differential between aviators and surface officers and Submariners, and the like—each one of them thinks they're better than the other. But if you're—mainly if you're captain of a aircraft carrier, you will have been trained as a pilot or aviator. Now that's all somewhat confusing and hard to comprehend—all this silliness—but that's the way it is.
JOU	Yeah. So after four years in the Navy, you came back to—no, you were already in the US, right? Because you did your last few months—
CAMPBELL	The first two years, on the ship. Ship was home ported in Rhode Island. That's because it was home ported at a Naval Air Station in Quonset Point, Rhode Island on Narragansett Bay—and there were two carriers there: the Essex and the USS [Lake] Champlain. The Essex was a World War Two vintage carrier; was an attack carrier in the biggest and baddest of them all in World War Two. But over time, it had been converted. So when I came aboard, it was an anti-submarine warfare carrier. In other words, it was specifically designated to hunt and kill enemy submarines—which meant it had certain specific type of aircraft, and operated mainly in the Atlantic and the Caribbean and the Mediterranean and the Baltic Sea because that's where the Russians were; and they were the submarine threat at the time—the Soviets actually, not the Russians, and they had the only real other nuclear Navy. There were a few naval, nuclear-powered surface ships, but primarily starting with the USS Nautilus. The Submarine Force was primarily building up into a large nuclear force, culminating with the big ballistic missile submarines that they used to call them “boomers”; they're the ones that can, like the Polaris submarines that carried sixteen nuclear-tipped missiles as opposed to an attack submarine—which was nuclear-powered, but its job was to hunt and kill other submarines. The ballistic missile submarines were designed to be a deterrent because they could go to sea and not be found and just lurk somewhere; and if necessary, shoot off a nuclear missile. So if the Russians knew that we had nuclear missile subs somewhere off their coast, they would be theoretically hesitant to do anything untoward towards the US or its allies because they could easily get nuked. And then the aircraft carrier in the anti-submarine warfare was designed to also hunt out and hopefully kill the bad guys.
JOU	So after you were done with the Navy, you attended law school from 1968 to 1971.
CAMPBELL	Correct.
JOU	And how was your transition from the Navy back to like?
CAMPBELL	It was in a lot of ways really weird. First of all, a lot of guys were still able—because of the draft lottery, to figure out that they weren't going to get drafted. I don't know if you’re familiar with the fact that at some point, they put in a draft lottery; so you could know pretty much—for sure—whether you were gonna get drafted or not once your deferment was up. So every year they would have, literally a lottery with the ping pong balls and everything. And based upon what your birthday was, you would know the likelihood of whether you would get drafted. So that gave some level of certainty to people graduating from college. They could go on with their lives by either going to grad school or getting married or whatever because now—I think it was Nixon, that put in the draft lottery, but that was a huge, huge difference. There was no lottery, but if you knew—I forget—if you were number 200 and something out of 365, your likelihood of having to go in the military was pretty small. So you could go to law school right out of college. So there was a lot of guys, who and all—there were twelve people—twelve women in my law school class out of 250 or something like that.
JOU	Wow. Did you apply to law school while you were still in the Navy?
CAMPBELL	Yeah. I took the LSAT [Law School Admissions Test] my senior year. They still have house party weekend up here in the fall? That's the big social weekend,
JOU	I think so, yes.
CAMPBELL	Yeah, okay. Took the LSAT my senior year on Saturday of house party weekends, and I was terribly hungover [laughter] from the night before, and I don't think I did too well. That was another reason why law school was not in the future, at least the immediate future. And while I was in the Navy, I decided, yeah, I was going to go to law school, so I retook the LSAT— actually studied for it this time. And went up to Brown University, from where we were stationed in Rhode Island, took the LSAT at Brown on some—whenever they gave it, and did a lot better. And by that time—and that was while I was still on the ship, so I had plans to go to law school. And I also had a lot of people who would serve as my superiors on the ship, and at OCS I could use as references. You know, “Lieutenant Campbell was a really great officer, etcetera, etcetera. He'd make a great whatever.” So I started law school basically a week after I got out of the Navy, but I had been admitted well before that. So I was admitted while it was still in the Navy, but my plan was to get out and start law school.
JOU	So you had already known—
CAMPBELL	Yeah.
JOU	That it was something like you were planning on doing right after.
CAMPBELL	Yeah, yeah.
JOU	Awesome. And which law school did you attend and why?
CAMPBELL	I applied to Harvard. I was rejected in 18 days.
JOU	No! [laughter]. Even though like—
CAMPBELL	Even though I had all these relatives that had gone to Harvard beforehand. Harvard didn't mess around. I think they saw through my poise [laughter]. Anyway, their application was the simplest application I've ever—it was one page like fill it out; what's your name, address, authorize us to look at your LSATs and send a send a transcript of your grades, and don't bother to get any recommendations from judges or anybody else because we know they'll all be baloney anyway because no one's going to write a bad recommendation for anybody. So from the time I sent it in, 18 days later, I got a rejection letter.
JOU	Wow.
CAMPBELL	Even though my great grandfather had been the first blind man to graduate from Harvard Law School.
JOU	Yeah. [laughter] How did your dad and your grandpa feel?
CAMPBELL	I don't think—I think [laughter]. Anyway, I applied to University of Virginia, Cornell, Boston College, and Boston University. And I got into all of them and just decided to go to Boston College ‘cause my father-in-law—who was a fairly prominent lawyer in Boston—said, “If you're ever going to practice in Boston, of the schools you've chosen, there'll be more judges and other lawyers practicing law in Boston that had gone to Boston College Law School than any of the other schools that you've gotten into.” And said, “I would recommend you go there.” And another reason I elected to go there was because the dean at that time was a guy named Father Robert Drinan, D-R-I-N-A-N. I don’t know if you ever heard that name; he was a Jesuit priest and one of the first clergyman priests that ever run for Congress—and he ran for Congress on a decidedly anti-Vietnam War platform. But he also, at that point, was the dean of the law school, and he was absolutely one thousand percent in support of people who had—of veterans, and particularly people who had served during the Vietnam War. So he lobbied very hard for people who were veterans, who had applied to BC Law to come there and told them how much support they would get, and that was their support. And he’s just no nonsense. You're in; if you want to come to BC Law School, you're a veteran, you're in. So I said, “With somebody like that who's gonna stand up for you. That's where I want to go.”
JOU	Wait, what was his name again? Father—
CAMPBELL	Robert Drinan, D-R-I-N-A-N. You might Google him. He was a very interesting guy. He used to march in anti-war demonstrations, but his support of Vietnam veterans was unbelievable. He's a brilliant man. He also was a law professor at BC as well.
JOU	And how was law school? Like that experience.
CAMPBELL	It's funny. You know, I was saying that the people who went straight from law school and hadn't been in the military or done some other sort of service before the law school; put it another way, the people who were veterans hung together, and felt much more mature and grown up than these kids who were just starting law school. We'd been through a lot—some of us had been through actual combat. Some of us had real world responsibilities, onboard ship or in some other form of service. Some of—veterans, particularly, hung together. I mean we sat together in the classes. We would sit together in the cafeteria. Our study groups that we had would be together. We became close friends, ‘cause we'd had similar lifestyles and experiences up to that point; wasn't that we were disdaining of people who were there, but we just had some so much in common that the others didn't have. That was a big difference. There was a lot of—a lot of kids were there who were very serious outlooks on things, but the veterans knew that they were there by the grace of somebody that was over and above—had experience way over and above what the younger students had in their backgrounds and their experiences
JOU	And would you say there were a lot of veterans in your class at law school?
CAMPBELL	Numbers wise, it's probably 25 or 30; maybe not that many, but it was obvious who—some of us still stayed in the reserve. I stayed in the reserves, which meant that once, I can’t remember if it was once a week or once a month, I would go to a Reserve meeting in downtown Boston—I think it was once, I don't remember whether once a week or once a month—but a lot of us were stayed in reserve. We got paid. It was money. I mean, if you’re married and young and had a kid, and you were in law school—it's also an excuse to not have to study that night, because you—I put, unlike Dartmouth, I put aside one day a week for doing nothing but enjoying things. I mean, I would spend every night till midnight, either in the library or in one extra bedroom we had, studying. And Saturday night, we usually get a bottle of cheap wine and watch TV or something like that. And then Sunday morning, I'd get up and start studying again.
JOU	So true. And were there any hostility towards veterans during your time at law school? Like from your classmates or your professors?
CAMPBELL	I wouldn’t say they were hostile, but it was almost like there were some people—I say guys because literally there were only like ten or twelve women in my whole class. It was still an oddity for women to go to law school at that time. Amazingly as that may sound. It was almost like, “[inaudible]. You had to go to the military where I didn't.” There were some jerks like that—but for the most part, the common foe was your classwork, and everybody trying to do it. And in law school, there was—the likelihood of getting called on in class and teaching by the Socratic method, where you had to get up and defend hypotheticals and things like that. And the fright of having that happen to you, whereas the vets seem to be much more less intimidated than somebody who—was still a pretty scary experience to be called on and have to defend your position and attempt to not make a fool of yourself, but we'd been through a lot. I mean, I'd run a ship aground. I had run a legal office. I had stood deck watches in the middle of exercises with 60 ships surrounding me with all, with their lights out and tried to avoid having a collision. There were guys who had fought in the Battle of Hue, and who'd led patrols through the jungle. So they were a little bit more mature, I'd say, than the just the regular people that were starting right from the outset. We had—we felt like we had accomplished something.
JOU	Yeah. And was there any anti-war sentiment during this time?
CAMPBELL	There were, well, the Kent State situation took place. You aware of Kent State?
JOU	Yes
CAMPBELL	Where the National Guard, I think it was the National Guard—
JOU	Yes
CAMPBELL	Lord knows how they ended up with loaded weapons. But, you know, there was a demonstration at Kent State University; I think it was in the spring, and some of these guardsmen ended up opening fire on the crowds of students. And I frankly, don't remember whether anyone died or not, but there were certainly—it was a shocking situation. There were big demonstrations that went on—big. I mean demands that exams be canceled; that classes be canceled. That we—the world, there were way more important things going on than law school. Funny thing was, almost to a person, the veterans insisted that exams not be canceled and that classes not be canceled; that people were free to demonstrate and do whatever they wanted to, but we had worked hard enough to get to where we were that—and we may have been sympathetic to what was happening in the world, and particularly in light of Kent State, but we felt, we wanted—we had gotten to the point where we wanted to take our exams. So the law school ultimately said, “All right, if you want to take your exams, you can take them. If you want to take them for pass/fail, you can do that. Or if you want a grade, you can do that.” I would say that almost all the people I knew that were in my category said, “Look, I've worked this hard. I'm not taking—I'm prepared. I want to take my exam as pass/fail.” Wasn't that we had any disdain for people who felt that they wanted to demonstrate or cancel classes, or any of that kind of thing. But it was somewhat polarizing.
JOU	Yeah. And can you tell me about your summers in between law school? You mentioned that you taught at OCS as an instructor?
CAMPBELL	Yeah. Sort of the—well, during my first year in law school, the New York City Wall Street type firms, which always set the sort of the salary levels for the country, announced that they were going to pay $15,000 a year for incoming hires, new lawyers. That figure blew people away—you can imagine that. I don’t know what my grandson’s expectation is for a starting salary, but it's an awful lot more than $15,000 a year.
	As a junior naval officer, I think I was making 5 or $6,000 a year, but I had a sign in green above my desk in this bedroom I used to study—said $15,000 up there; that was sort of the motivator, not that—your outlooks changed, but that's what they announced what they're paying, which meant the Boston firms were probably paying six or seven at the time and they would go up to probably $12,000 a year—but New York set the standard.
	So the track was to—after your first year, you would get a clerkship in some law firm; and do the same thing after your second year, and then get hired by that firm or a similar firm when you graduated at this lofty level. For various reasons, I decided that I just didn't want to do that, sort of partly through—and then this opportunity came up too. Because of the fact that OCS was in need of a whole bunch more of new officers because the war was really ramping up right in ‘67, ‘68, ‘69, they asked if people—who knew I was needed [laughter]? They asked people who had experience teaching at OCS if they would consider coming back into the Navy for 90 days at—I don't even know if they paid us a bonus or not, but it's your old, at your then rank and salary and teach at OCS, because there were so many people going through; they needed new officers. ‘Cause a lot of the people that have had gone in earlier, they were getting the hell out because things were getting dicey. So that went on for two summers. So we packed up and moved down to Newport, Rhode Island; and with our young infant son and a cat, and got an apartment in Newport—and had a great summer down there doing what I'd done for two years previously, before law school. And it was even more interesting because there was a program that had just started there to give commission as officers to really highly skilled and motivated enlisted guys, who the Navy had chosen to send to four years of college—and basically then give them eight weeks of orientation at OCS on sort of officer indoctrination called the NESEP program. And they wanted me to teach that, so I did that for two years. These guys were unbelievable. They were really, really sharp people. They were the best of the best of the Navy enlisted people. Many of them ended up in the Admiral Rickover’s [Hyman G. Rickover] nuclear power program—the submarine program ‘cause they were engineers, scientifically educated, unbelievably motivated, natural leaders, just amazing young men.
JOU	And what does NESEP stand for again?
CAMPBELL	Naval Enlisted Scientific Education Program. The only stipulation was that they owe the Navy six years after they get their commission, and that they go to a school that gives us—they major in some scientific or engineering program like a lot went to MIT, some serious engineering schools.
JOU	So they were enlisted men?
CAMPBELL	Yes
JOU	So they served for a bit, and then they went to—
CAMPBELL	Yeah, they were fairly high ranking. There were nine levels of enlisted rankings in the Navy. No need to name them all, but it goes from the lowest of the low—seamen recruit, which is, you get sent to some training command; and the biggest one was either in San Diego or in Chicago, and it's called Great Lakes. All the way up to E-9—Enlisted Nine—which is Master Chief Petty Officer, which is the highest enlisted rank there is. To get that, not only do you have to have a specialty in a particular area, but you have to demonstrate longevity in the service, as well as leadership capabilities and technical capabilities. So most of these people were E-5 or 6s; goes Seaman, Recruited Seaman, Apprentice Seamen, Third Class, Second Class, First Class, Chief, Senior Chief, Master Chief. And there aren't many, like Master Chiefs in the whole Navy.
JOU	Right. And did you have any experience teaching before OCS?
CAMPBELL	No formal experience other than, I don't know, I can't even think of anything specifically. No, the Navy has a school for everything. I think I mentioned it to you that they send you to instructor school in Norfolk Virginia; in four weeks you become a skilled teacher [laughter]. Some people have the knack for it; and you were teaching things that you knew backward and forward, and had lived for least two years and had been trained in before you were living it. And you can't really—you can't teach leadership, but they didn't just pick anybody to be an OCS instructor. They picked people they thought had some sort of leadership or inspirational characteristics and were smart enough to convey their experiences to people who had never experienced anything like this before their lives. There were like four different categories of classwork at OCS. One of them was military, which is just sort of military; learn the structure of the military, the ranks, what they are, what the traditions, all that kind of stuff. Then there was something called organization, which is how the military is organized—and again, more traditions and things like that. And there was the navigation department, which taught navigation, seamanship, how to actually navigate a ship, celestial navigation, a lot of technical stuff. And then there was something called tactical, which is what I taught; which is basically the skills of being a naval officer—from radio telephone procedure, more navigation, higher ends of navigation, how to be an officer of the deck. The Officer of the Deck is an uniquely naval concept that doesn't exist quite the same way in any other branch except possibly the Coast Guard, but it puts you in charge of a ship at sea—shipper or submarine—fully responsible for what goes on there. Of course, the Captain is ultimately responsible. But there's times when you are the only one there on the bridge that's running the whole show.
JOU	Right. And why did you decide to come back the second summer to teach?
CAMPBELL	It was another summer in Newport [laughter]. And—
JOU	Did you enjoy—
CAMPBELL	Yeah, I loved it. There were guys there that had—I ran into a lot of the Navy guys that had done service in Vietnam, either a number of them on Swift boats. Are you familiar with the Swift Boat Navy?
JOU	Yes, I believe one of the ‘64s was on the Swift boat.
CAMPBELL	Those were relatively small river craft; 60 to 80 feet long, pretty big—they had a crew of like six people: an officer, a senior petty officer, and some others. And they patrol the rivers, mainly in the Mekong Delta, in that area. And saw a lot of nasty, nasty action. That’s what John Kerry, Senator Kerry?
JOU	Yes
CAMPBELL	Controversial service as a Swift boat commander was all about.
JOU	He was the Secretary of—
CAMPBELL	Secretary of State, as well as a senator and a Navy officer. He went to OCS, I believe, went through OCS. Maybe it was ROTC at Yale, I don't know. But to many of us, he was one of the biggest phonies of the face of the earth. Some people detest him because he's such a—a number of my colleagues and friends at OCS were Swift boat commanders who served concurrently with Kerry while he was there. He only lasted three months until he got transferred off, mainly because he claimed he had two wounds. And then these guys would debate whether his wounds were genuine or not. There's a whole story—I don’t know, probably something that might or might not interest you—but there's a book called “Not Unfit to Serve.”^[1] It's written by a couple of guys who were Swift Boat commanders; who had, at the same time Kerry was, who say he was a big fake. That he would endanger his crew for sake of his own reputation. That he would—he only served three months when the actual tour is a year.
	I was offered Swift boat command. I said, “No thank you.” When you get out of the Navy, they have a release interview when they try—if you’re well thought of, try and get you to stay in, make a career of it. And they said—in mine, they offered me Swift boat command or command of a coastal minesweeper; saying, “You make a great career Naval officer.” Said, “Well, I have plans. I've had my plans for a long time to go to law school, and really don't want to stay in the Navy. I love the Navy, and it's been very good to me, but I don't want to stay in.” Said, “If you stay in, here's what we'll do for you. We'll send you to a—if you're going to make it a career, you need some combat experience. You need to get a medal or two.” Sounds silly, but this is a lot of the way of the military thinking. And then when—unsaid, “If you survive [laughter], we will send you to any school that you want to go to”; Navy has some great schools, like postgraduate school in Monterey, California—the language school [Defense Language School]—where you can take a career path. Send you to flight school if you wanted to go. Anyway, I said, “Thanks, but no thanks.” But a lot of the guys that I served with in the summers of OCS had been in country, in Vietnam—and most of them in Swift boats, and some of them with Kerry at the same time. It's a small—you can imagine a small group of people, and they had no use for him.
JOU	Wow, I didn't know that. I'll have to check out that book
CAMPBELL	I mean just—you can flip through parts of it, but “Unfit for Command.”
JOU	Awesome. And—
CAMPBELL	That's when he was running for president.
JOU	Oh, okay. But yeah, he never was president.
CAMPBELL	No, thank god.
JOU	[Laughter]. Do you remember your reaction to hearing about the first Tet Offensive in ‘68?
CAMPBELL	[Pause]. One of my best friends in law school was involved in Tet. It's literally street to street fighting and shooting, and all that stuff. When we went to Vietnam with Ed, we went to Hue, and you can still see the bullet pockmarks on the palace there. Did you go to Vietnam with him?^[2]
JOU	Yes, I did.
CAMPBELL	Yeah. Did you get to Hue?
JOU	No, we were only in Ho Chi Minh City, so we were there.
CAMPBELL	We went all the way from Hanoi, further north even Ha Long Bay, down through Hanoi—visited the Hanoi Hilton. Went from there to Da Nang, to Hue when Lee [A.] Chilcote [‘64 Th ‘65]—one of my classmates—was on the trip. He was a platoon commander inland and near Que Son [district]. We went to Que Son. We saw the hills that he had actually—was in combat on; he was, as you can possibly imagine, he was just, he was—so emotional for him and for all of us, for that matter, to actually see how stupid some of this stuff was. The stupidity of lots of things that went on there was astonishing, but no one really knew about it until you heard people coming back right, who had been there. And we would sit, particularly in these groups in law school, sit around and talk about—a lot of them would only talk about it with people that had some military kinship with them. In a sense, it was so strange, so weird, so nonsensical. The longer time went on, the time passed from starting in ‘68 say, the more outrageous the whole situation began to seem like why are we still there? And the anti-war movement gathered more and more steam. Not that I or any of my compatriots felt compelled to—participated, but we all just like, “Isn't there a way to bring an end to this?” It was so dumb. And then the stories of the atrocities that took place. We went to My Lai on our trip. No concept of how just bizarre that whole situation was other than what you read about it, except having been there. Have to keep in mind that everything we saw historically from the war's point of view, was written and created by the guys who won the war, the North Vietnamese. But it was like “the evil Americans did this and all that kind of stuff.” But there was so much, so many stupidity involved. I don’t know, I never felt compelled to demonstrate or anything, but I certainly felt a feeling of why are we there? I mean, I know why we're there, but why are we there? You know that kind of thing. Can't we get out of this? There was so much since that—and more came out as time passed about how corrupt the South Vietnamese government was—about all this Madame Nhu stuff, and her husband. I forget what his name is; you might know it.
JOU	Ngo Dinh Nhu
CAMPBELL	Yeah. Nguyen Cao Ky was the president. I don't know the position of a means—to see this sort of evolve from US advisors in the country, to the CIA and what it was doing there, and the evolution of the Viet Cong and how they became—I mean one of the places we went, I think was a place called Ap Bac. Did you go there by any chance?
JOU	No we didn't.
CAMPBELL	I think I have the name right.
Jou	Yes
CAMPBELL	Where it’s the first time the Viet Cong stood and [laughter] fired back, didn't run into the jungle and basically put up a fight. And South Vietnamese regulars kind of just refused to fight, and the advisors were yelling and screaming. And I don't know, it was just like an eye opener, in a sense. We all did a lot of reading by people—writing by people who had been there and were ultra critical of the whole situation, and people who were writing to try to justify the situation; and it was, tell you, a tremendous eye opener. I mean, we were—those of us who were in Vietnam War era, but didn’t go, really had no idea how screwed up the whole situation was until maybe I got into law school, and hung around with a group of guys that had been there and seen what a mess things were. And then you started to know, or know of people who were killed there. I was just thinking, before you know, last week about. I think the first Dartmouth guy that was killed in Vietnam was a classmate of mine. His name was Bruce Nickerson [William B. Nickerson ‘64]. I don't know if you've ever heard that name. He was a Psi U. He was—we used to call him “The Reverend” because he was the straightest arrow. Everyone was absolutely sure he was going to be a minister. The last place—an Episcopal minister; the last place he was going to end up would be in the military. Next thing I know, I hear that Bruce is in naval aviation training and ended up as a bombardier navigator in a squadron. And the reason he wasn't a pilot, because they found some physical disability that disqualified him from being an actual pilot—but he flew in A-6s, which were a bomb fighter bomber plane, and as the Bombardier Navigator. And after 88 missions, or something like that, was crashed in the Gulf of Tonkin, and it was never recovered. But to hear that Bruce Nickerson had died as a naval aviator was a stunner—a stunner!
JOU	Wow. Do you think that—looking back—your perspective on the war had changed? Was there at any point where you thought the war was a justified cause?
CAMPBELL	Well I certainly did at the outset because we were told that. And we believed our leaders. But then, you started hearing things like the Gulf of Tonkin situation. It's like, you kind of knew after a while—that's when Lyndon Johnson got us into the war. Congress passed the Gulf Tonkin Resolution which justified, I think, sending actual troops over there. I mean, I don't know the precise history of this situation. You probably do, but I think the fact that the [USS] Turner Joy and the [USS] Maddox were attacked by some North Vietnamese torpedo boats, which may or may not have existed—may or may not have been on somebody's radar—was basically used as a justification for sending lots of people over there and getting much more involved in the situation. I was never anti-war. I mean ‘cause it was contemporaries of mine that were there. And, in a sense, I think all of us who served and didn't go, had a little bit of so-called survivor's guilt, you know? While they were there and they got shot at. I did my job, I did my duty. I did it well—and it wasn't always pleasant, but they did a lot more than I did.
JOU	Yeah. I want to talk a little bit more about your visit to Vietnam towards the end, but I wanted to go back and discuss your time living in Harvard Square. Was it when you were still serving in the Navy, or when you were an instructor?
CAMPBELL	No, I was actually on board the ship. Every new ship gets scheduled for some time in a shipyard every so often—every three years, or whatever. It turned out, there were four to six months that the Essex was up for a yard period where they fix all the things that are broken and put new things in the ship and that sort of thing. So, it took—our yard period was scheduled for very early 1966. I had just been married in September—December of 1965, the darkest day of the year—December 21. We were supposed to go into the Boston Navy Yard, which was located in Charlestown—a section of Boston—and spend a month or so in Charlestown, and then in South Boston, where there was a dry dock, where we're supposed to go into the dry dock; we could get at the underside of the ship. And that was supposed to take place in like January of 1966; I had just been married like a month beforehand. What a boon to new newlyweds. You know that the ship was not going to go to sea, because prior to that time, I mean, the ship was in and out, in and out, in and out; would spend time in the Caribbean, time in Guantanamo. We would go out when we weren't on some exercise or in some special training. We would just go out and run the ship around off the Atlantic coast and let airplanes land and take off as carrier landing and take off training, which is, in and of itself, a fairly unique—if you can imagine landing multi-ton vehicle on a moving ship; these pilots have to keep their qualifications up. Anyway, we were scheduled to go on the yard, so we were in—ship was in Boston, and it wasn't going to go to sea for pretty long stretch of time. I was just married, and my wife had a job as a provisional teacher in the Boston school systems; she taught in Dorchester. This is right around the time that—I think it was a little bit later—of the whole bussing thing took place. You remember that at all?
JOU	No
CAMPBELL	The court decreed—the Federal Court decreed that separated but equal schools would not work in Boston. They had to bus Black students to white schools and white students to black schools. And there were riots in Boston. Anyway, she was teacher of Dorchester—provisional teacher. She taught sixth grade. My wife's a woman about your size, about five foot two, and weighs then probably 110 pounds. She was a provisional teacher, which meant that the regular teacher, some guy who'd been teaching for a zillion years in the system, said, “Aha! I've got one of those provisionals. Means I can spend the entire day in the teacher's lounge and she can teach these sixth graders” Who, most of them, were taller than she was. Anyway, the first day she was on the job in Dorchester, she got a bullet hole in my windshield of my car. Just a random bullet hole ended up in the car when she went out after her first day on the job.
	Anyway, we got offered an apartment in Harvard Square by my new father in law's cousin, who was a real estate investor, and he owned an apartment building right on the edge of Harvard Yard—street called Prescott Street, which was right across from the Fogg Art Museum, if you're familiar with that at all, and right across from the Broadway supermarket where Julia Child did her shopping when she lived in Cambridge; used to see her in the supermarket. Anyway, it was diagonally across Harvard Yard from the subway station at Harvard Square, and I would have to take the subway to downtown, make a change, and then take train—the subway—to Charlestown, and then walk from city square Charlestown through the Navy Yard down to the ship, which was at the big pier at the far end of the Navy Yard. But to get across Harvard Yard, I would—every morning in my Navy uniform—would have to walk across with all these Harvard students around. So, okay, this is ‘66. Things are starting to get, sort of like, “What are we doing over here?” That kind of thing. And I never got accosted, but I felt very uncomfortable walking across the yard. I would reasonably frequently get comments from college kids. I was a full blown college graduate at that time. ‘Cause here I was, walking across in my navy blue dress-blue uniform, got gold stripes around the sleeves, beautiful white hat with an eagle on it, and that kind of stuff. And obviously, I'm in the service—and you get wise cracks. So some of it was just Harvard jerks being Harvard jerks. But some of it, a little bit nasty; never enough to—always had enough brains to like whatever you do, don't react. You're doing some discredit to what you stand for if you get wound up in this thing. So you know, that would happen. That was the beginning of—I think, I mean, Harvard's been always sort of known as a very liberal place. And if there was gonna be any sort of dissent or demonstrations or anything like that, it would be there. Keep in mind that Harvard Yard’s basically where the freshmen hang out. So these kids were even younger. It never bothered me. It was just like— being a jerk kid, you know, that kind of thing. And I never got tied up with—I never got spit on or anything like that, but it was certainly something you were aware of, anywhere in public almost, especially in downtown Boston. Became much more prevalent, anti-war, post 1968 and into the 70s.
JOU	Yeah. Were these comments made because they just saw someone who was in the military? Or do you think these were made specifically because of the Vietnam War? And they just had the assumption?
CAMPBELL	Oh, I think it was Vietnam War related. I mean, for years, college campuses have been crawling with like every Wednesday with ROTC. People go to their classes and drills and have to wear their uniforms. That's not unusual to see somebody in a uniform. I think it was clearly Vietnam War related. I think things were starting to change—evolve sensitivity of, I mean more and more stories were coming out of. When did My Lai take place? Do you know?
JOU	Not on top of my head.
CAMPBELL	I think it was probably late 60s, or maybe it was even later, I don't know. But they were, I don't know, Lyndon Johnson was a very unpopular president. The draft was very active. People didn't want to serve, you know, in the jungle on the other side of the world—so there was much more, I think, sensitivity to the fact that you might end up in the military if you couldn't—it's hard to put a timeline on all of this, but there were those who said, “I'm never gonna—I'm not gonna get drafted. I'm gonna go to Canada.” You know that was around then. “I'm not gonna, if I have to, I'll be a conscientious objector.” Or “I'll do some sort of alternative service.” I was familiar with American friends and Quakers of the somewhat anti-war movement going back to when I was a junior in high school. Maybe I mentioned to you that I did a American Friends Service Committee work camp in Kentucky, in the mountains of Kentucky, between my junior and senior year in high school. I think my parents thought, “Well, you should do some service. It'll look good on your college record.” So, I don't go to Kentucky. No idea even where Kentucky was. Eastern Kentucky was the coal country. It's basically where JD Vance came from—before his family moved out of basically hillbilly country. They didn't like to be called hillbillies. They were mountaineers, but there were people that were there that we encountered that had never been further away than their next door neighbor's porches. They lived up in these hollers in the mountains—these valleys that go up into the mountains, they spoke a form of almost Old English. There's a strife. This is getting a little off the subject. A strife among union mines and non union mines. Occasionally you'd either hear a dynamite blast, and it was somebody dynamiting the mine tipple, which is where the coal comes out of the ground, and they dump it into trucks, and truck it off to wherever they're going with it. Somebody would be dynamiting either a unionized tippler or non unionized tippler, anyway.
JOU	And during around, yeah, I guess around this time, there was a Dartmouth Parkhurst takeover in 1969, and I was wondering if you had any reactions to that?
CAMPBELL	What are these idiots? My reaction was, I remember—I mean, I wasn't here, but I remember it certainly got a lot of press, particularly in New York Times, and Boston Globe—and the cities of the Northeast. It's just like, get these kids and get them the hell out of there! They don't belong there. If they want to have a meeting or something like that, fine, let's have some discourse. It's sort of the same way I still feel with all the Palestinian, anti-Jewish, all that kind of stuff that was going on this past year or so. We used to—there used to be civil discourse among people. My attitude was, get them the hell out! And then, you know, if they want to talk, you can talk. That's funny you should mention, I didn't even thought about that in a long time.
JOU	And kind of along those lines, did you have any feelings towards the phasing out of the ROTC program, which was completed by ‘73?
CAMPBELL	Yes, I thought that a lot of for the same reasons that there were USNR [United States Navy Reserve] officers and USN [United States Navy] officers, Naval Academy, people versus civilian officers that have made to be an awful lot of sense to have people at the officer level in the Navy, or the armed services for that matter that were not career—that were basically going to be civilians at some point. I, and I know a lot of the people, my contemporaries, felt that guys who were not career officers had a sort of a different outlook on things, as so far as, not that we were anti discipline, but we brought a sort of a civilian outlook and reality to things. And I thought that the ROTC was a really good source of that form of non-military and totally military-indoctrinated people that could serve honorably, and efficiently, and bravely in every other way in the military. And then, it was been phased out. I thought that was a mistake.
JOU	Yeah
CAMPBELL	Does Dartmouth have ROTC now?
JOU	Yes. I don't know when they brought it back, but it's a very small part of campus. But the students don't have to take like military science or any of the courses that were required before. I believe this year, the Class of 2028s, they said that ROTC—I guess the number of students in ROTC—doubled or tripled compared to before. But I believe like for my class—the Class of 2026—I think there's only like two or three.
CAMPBELL	I wonder what’s the motivation to be in ROTC now? Is it a duty to serve? Or is it you get paid? Or I don’t know, it’s a—
JOU	I think you get a scholarship [laughter], so—
CAMPBELL	Okay, so somewhat financial
JOU	Yeah, or I guess, like some people do it for the discipline?
CAMPBELL	Yeah
JOU	But I know it's a very minor part of campus, and not a lot of people know that.
CAMPBELL	It was pretty—it was clearly noticeable. I mean, it was substantial. I mean, everybody knew somebody that was in ROTC—one way or another, they were there because they got some kind of financial stipend, or they got a scholarship, or maybe they came from a military family, or maybe they thought it was good discipline, I don’t know. When they decided to get rid of it, I thought it was really stupid, frankly. I mean, that's just me, mainly for my rationale was there needs to be a civilian element to the military. In other words, somebody who's not—doesn't want to be a general or an admiral, or is so totally focused on, I mean, I think going to an all-volunteer military, in a way, was a similar—not a good thing.
JOU	Yeah, and why do you think there was so much polarization in the US over the Vietnam War?
CAMPBELL	I think probably would the rationale for the war sort of began to sink in on people who maybe had half a brain that it didn't really truly make sense; the domino theory that we're doing this to combat communism. That if we don't stand up now, then the next to go will be Laos, and the next one will be Cambodia, and then it'll be Thailand before we know it—it'll all be gone. A lot of people didn't, especially after a while, didn't buy into that, I don't think. Then you started hearing more and more sort of injustices. Some Buddhist across the world sets himself on fire. I mean, why? That doesn't make sense. So many people must really feel strongly about this. I mean, this is sort of stream of consciousness thinking. Some of this—when your friends started, or the people you knew in high school or something like that, started not coming home. And I don't know, the rationale—the governmental rationale—for what was happening kind of didn't ring totally true or less and less so. And it seemed to be, “Well, if we're so good, how come we aren't beating the bejesus out of these people?” How come they seem to be winning a lot of these battles?” And I mean, we've got all this weaponry and bombers and everything else, and we're at a stalemate with guys that seem to disappear into the jungle? And a lot of crazy stuff like, “Well, you can't cross that border because that's [laughter] not Vietnam anymore.” And then, like I said, you start hearing stories, maybe some atrocities and some friends—or at least people you do or knew in high school—are not coming home anymore because they're dead. But if you're totally conflicted, I think it was a generation that was totally conflicted by—it's our government; we must be doing the right thing. Yet some of it doesn't make sense. You know that that's kind of—that's how things evolved. And then you felt like, all right, well I know my friend John Doherty, who went to Harvard and fought in the streets of Hue as a first lieutenant—and had people of his that he was in charge of getting killed; yet he came home and he was still a believer. I mean, I don't know, it was just a weird, weird, weird time.
JOU	Right, yeah. You had mentioned that there was a socioeconomic element to the polarization in America regarding like lower class individuals being served to Vietnam while many more wealthier individuals could get out of Vietnam?
CAMPBELL	I think there just was a sense that if you wanted to not go, for whatever your reason might have been, that you could—if you were either smart enough, or connected enough, or wealthy enough, or that you could find a way out. My brother never served, he went straight from undergraduate to law school. And he was classified for 4-F. You familiar with what 4-F is? There was 1-A, which was, you're going—you're draftable. This was pre lottery. Then there was a couple other levels there. 2-S was a student deferment; don't know why it was Roman numeral two. Then there were various physical disabilities that would get you out. If you had depend—before the physical disabilities, if you had a dependent, if you had elderly parents, or something like that, or there were so many of them. Then the 4-F was like you were physically unable; and that's where a lot of the really goofy abuses took place, where people would hear rumors that if they got called for their draft physical, which was pretty much a sure thing that you were going to be drafted—you got your physical notice. You know, “Show up at such and such a place, such and such time for your physical”, they would eat crazy stuff. Like there was something like if you ate fifteen bananas, or something like that, your potassium level on the blood test you got would be so high that you'd be 4-F-ed.
JOU	What! That’s insane.
CAMPBELL	Yeah, all this nutty stuff. Or I had a friend who played football with me, and he got his—he broke his wrist; somebody stepped on his wrist so that he claimed he couldn't turn his hand over like that. You know what you have to do to turn your hand over like that? Hold a rifle. So he claimed, “My bones never healed.” So he got classified 4-F. My brother got 4-F because he hurt his knee playing football. If you went and pretended you were nuts, that was a ploy to try to get classified for 4-F. You could choose to be a conscientious objector, and say, “I don't believe in killing them. I don't believe in the war.” But a lot of people who—there was a program in the National Guard that you could do six months active duty and then have an obligation for four years, or something like that to get called to military service. Well, that filled up so fast that there was a waiting list to get into that one because you'd go to some—favorite place was Camp Drum in upstate New York. You go to Camp Drum for six months and play soldier, and then you be in the reserve, and you'd have to go to a meeting once a month, or something like that for x number of years—but you avoided getting drafted, and sending into combat. So there were lots of ways—the people who didn't have the ways, there were people that either didn't want to bother with them, or they got drafted because they were, you know “I've run afoul of some—the law or the disciplinary process” or that it was a job. Keep in mind, this whole thing sort of crept along, just getting more and more intensified—that getting drafted meant that you were going to end up getting sent to a jungle somewhere. A lot of times, early stages of things, getting drafted meant you were probably going to go to Germany as a clerk, especially if you had half a brain. Or if your family had some—knew somebody somewhere, that you end up on some officer staff somewhere, or something like that, without going to any place that was dangerous. But as looking for more and more so-called cannon fodder for Vietnam, a lot of the draftees came from lower socioeconomic groups—inner city kids, whatever disciplinary issues; “either you get drafted kid or you're going into the juvenile detention center” or something like that.
JOU	Yeah, that's interesting to think about. Okay, so upon graduating law school, what did you do after?
CAMPBELL	Law school is funny. I don't know if it still is or not, but there were times when the job market was such that everybody had a job by January and it was a good job. And there were years where it was like, accordioned the other direction, where nobody had a job by April or May, and they were really sweaty what they were gonna do next year, and especially if they paid some of their own tuition. You know, “Where am I going to—what am I going to do? I mean, I feed my family, and I really need a job. And what happened to this raging job market?” Anyway, my senior—third year in law school, it was one of those tight job market things. And I got to—late in my third year, and I didn't have a job. In fact, more than half the kids in the class didn't have a job, and a lot of it was because a lot of them did some things like I did, like not go to work as a clerk in some law firm. So I had one long since—sometime in my third year, interviewed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. And lo and behold, sometime in April, I got a letter or phone call saying we've had some openings, if you consider coming and interviewing with us again; I've got the interview, got the job and work—that was my first job. And it was really interesting. I ended up in the—for whatever reason—maybe it's because of the Navy service and having been the legal officer, whatever. I worked on a task force that—I ended up in what was called enforcement at the task force that was trying to root out organized crime in the securities industry. And so I spent three plus years there, basically chasing possible mafiosi [laughter] who had— were using the financial markets to basically launder money and stuff like that. And then I've said, like the government in a lot of ways, and in some ways, like the military, but the government is I think even worse—even in a blue ribbon agency like the SEC, Securities and Exchange Commission. There's a lot of featherbedding that goes on, in the sense that a lot of these people would go out on a investigation or a job and end up drinking the afternoon away in the local pub, not work; “Well I've done enough for work for the day” kind of attitude. And I said, “This is great. This is really interesting, what I'm doing, but I'm not going to make a career out of this. I might get the government mentality if I.” So, I started floating my resume around and lo and behold, got a job in a corporate law department—and have been in that form of corporate law ever since, moving up and up and out. Now worked first for a chemical company called W.R. Grace—familiar with them at all?
JOU	No
CAMPBELL	Remember a movie called, I forget, but it was starring John Travolta, where W.R. Grace and several other companies polluted the drinking water supply—the number of the towns surrounding Boston, and they got royally sued. Well, that was my employer [laughter].
JOU	Wow! [laughter] Oh my god.
CAMPBELL	“A Civil Action.” That was the name of the movie.
JOU	No, I have not seen that.
CAMPBELL	You can get it on Netflix.
JOU	Yes, I totally will!
CAMPBELL	It's a good movie—actually, it’s a very good movie. Anyway, then the technology boom hit. I went to work for a high tech company, and then another high tech company, and then another high tech company, and then retired.
JOU	So you practice like tech corporate law?
CAMPBELL	I was at the ultimate—and I was in charge of all legal affairs for the company. I was Senior Vice President and General Counsel, secretary of the company—and basically part of a team that would go into companies and that were sick and try to turn them around.
JOU	Did you enjoy—
CAMPBELL	Yes, I loved it. It was like, I worked with great people, great leaders, people of the highest integrity—smart, smart, smart people; talented, and it was a dream job.
JOU	Wow. I'm glad to hear you loved the work that you were doing.
CAMPBELL	Yeah. You know what? A lot of people can't say that they really enjoyed what they're doing for their whole careers. I had the good fortune of working for a guy—the same guy for—he was the CEO of the company for twenty-some years—25 years—and he was an amazing man; great, great human being.
JOU	Yeah. And thinking about the last few years, we kind of talked about your trip to Vietnam in 2015. But now I'd like to hear a lot more about that experience. Did you have any particular takeaways from the visit?
CAMPBELL	Yeah, a lot. First of all, your guy here is fantastic. What he's doing, and the way he does it is unique I think—I don't know if other people doing similar type projects around the country, but he's amazing. That is a really nice guy. And he's the perfect person to do this trip. Our class has always had an adopted number of class members, and you know, he's one of them. And our class has the, I'd say good fortune, to live through a lot of eras and sort of changes and just changes right on themselves. But we lived through World War Two—although I have some very vague memories of rationing and living under those circumstances; but really not a lot. More so the Korean War, because I had more—my own contemporaries, classmates in elementary school, who had fathers who served in the Korean War. And then having lived through Vietnam and the massive changes that—some of which we've talked about—you know, the whole evolution of, sort of the drug culture, which I think is still huge part of our society, unfortunately; a whole other subject about the whole legalization of marijuana is one of the dumbest things that’s ever happened. I think its dumbed down the country. But so many things have changed so rapidly in my lifetime. And then to be able to go to, with a bunch of people and wives, to a trip to sort of, kind of get a retrospective on a lot of those changes. I mean, Vietnam being one of the biggest changes in my contemporaries' lifetime. With Ed Miller's connections, and interests, and outlooks, and insights, was an amazing, amazing, amazing experience—and the wives who went along with it, I think, felt the same way. Made a lot of reacquaintances and good friends during that trip. It was way more than just a vacation type trip, where we've been on those and those have been fun too, but this was just eye opening, and emotional, and tears were shed and friendships were made and kept, and empathy for some of the people— what they had individually, specifically gone through; there were people that had seen actual combat and responsible for people dying. There were also people who served on staffs that did nothing but stupid stuff. Not that, that—but that's the lot they were given to do, and they did it. I was given my lot. I mean, I spent time doing what probably turned out to be important stuff—learning how human beings sort of interact with one another, both in terms of the military life and in what our mission was, which was finding ways to potentially combat enemy submarines that could—in the world, to teaching some amazing young men. They had no idea what my level of experience was, but I could—I was a really good teacher; I could teach them my experiences. We didn't get into my grounding of the aircraft carrier. Did you know that?
JOU	No, I didn't.
CAMPBELL	One of my experiences when I was on the aircraft carrier was as an officer of the deck. We've mentioned a little bit about the unique capability of what an OOD is in the Navy. It's a person who, generally fairly junior, but sort of earmarked as somebody who has responsibility, judgment, training, skills, whatever—to be in charge of that whole ship. Captain isn't on the bridge of the ship at all times. He has to sleep. Sometimes he has other duties. But an OOD is there one hundred percent of the time when the ship’s underway. We're responsible for the safety of the ship, the safety of the people in the ship, the wellbeing of the ship, in terms of, that it doesn't have a collision with, or you know that's what an OOD does. The ultimate aim of a line officer is to qualify as an officer on the deck. There are only, like some cases, four of them on the whole ship—four to six—depending on who's on board at any given time; what people's skill levels are, what their desires are, what the Navy's needs are, on and on—so I was one of those guys. The worst thing that could ever possibly happen to an OOD is to have the ship get in some sort of accident, or somebody die. When I was an OOD, on one particular occasion, the ship ran aground. Somebody else's fault, but I had the real responsibility for—and to do things, to give orders to people who are driving the ship—literally, steering it, and telling the engine room how fast to go. He doesn't drive the ship. He gives orders to people who are steering it, or telling me how many fast the engine should go, and that sort of thing. But anyway, the captain lost his ship because the ship ran aground. It was his ultimate responsibility. He was removed from command within two weeks after that thing happened. I was scheduled to leave within the month. I had to go through a board of inquiry, which is basically like not a court martial, but it's similar like that. So some Admiral comes down and says, “Well, okay, let's figure out what happened here.” Anyway, that experience gave me some unique perspectives on how to teach these officer candidates—both from the dumbest, lowest one who I knew would make a horrible officer, to these NESEPs that were going to make fantastic officers, so. Forget what your question was, but—
JOU	Um, I forgot what my question was too [laughter]. We were talking about your trip to—
CAMPBELL	Oh, yeah, the trip. Yeah.
JOU	How do you think the Battle of Ap Bac kind of—why was it significant to you, shaping your opinion on the war?
CAMPBELL	Well, it made me more attuned and alert to how messed up the Army of the Republic of Vietnam [ARVN] was. And that there was a lot of total misinformation that was passed everywhere in those circumstances. As broad as the type of information that was being told to the American people through the news media and the government, to the type of information that was relayed from the field; the actual on the ground war to the people running the war from the higher echelons in the military. And it seemed to me that, that situation brought out the problems in spades to the point where it was so bizarre—the way things came about there, and it gave, it’s significant in the sense that it gave confidence to the Viet Cong, for example, as the “We can win. We can beat these people.” I think people were at all levels, covering their own rear ends; everywhere, whether it was the government reporting to the American public, to the military reporting to civilian authorities, to McNamara [Robert S. McNamara] and Defense Department bs-ing Lyndon Johnson, to Lyndon Johnson doing that to somebody else, to the levels of command in Vietnam itself—be the liaisons between ARVN and US. The real assessment of body counts, this were total baloney. Everyone—lots of people knew that! They just knew it. It doesn't make me an anti-war person, anti-war activist, but it got worse and worse as things went on, where you knew that that this wasn't going to end well, and it didn't. In 1975, when they evacuated the US Embassy, that was the least—the most apparent events that saw where this was all going. I don't know, sort of those bogus Paris Peace talks that took place during this whole thing. People knew they were being, excuse me, bullshit-ed, during all this—and they put up with it for a long, long time. I don't know how much my prejudices are coming through, and your—what your study of the situation; are they connecting at all?
JOU	Totally. And I think whatever you said, like Professor Miller would also echo because that's exactly when we had these discussions in our Vietnam War class last fall. So I also totally agree with everything that was just said.
CAMPBELL	You know I was really proud of what I did in the military. I saw a lot of dumb stuff, but that just happens with a large, sort of autocratic, slash bureaucratic organization. I saw some amazing things too. I did some amazing things. I saw Guantanamo [Bay Naval Base] before it was a, you know, prison. When we were in Guantanamo, we were—every time a ship goes into the Navy Yard, has to go through what's called retraining exercises. And Guantanamo was what's called a fleet training center; so if you come out—remember I said we were in the shipyard in Boston when the ship came out? Had to go to Guantanamo for like three months or something like that for retraining because, for one reason, ships are always turning over their crews. So three months in a yard, you get a whole new crew that may have never been to sea or a lot of them haven't. So you need to take your ship down and put it through what's called fleet training center and learn how to shoot the guns, and fly the airplanes, and drive the ship and all that kind of stuff. But it was Guantanamo during a really weird time. Cubans—Castro had shut off all the water to the Guantanamo naval base, so there was no fresh water there. For a time, ships that were sent down there for stationing had to go to Jamaica over a weekend to load up on beer and soft drinks to bring them back, to have liquid to drink. There are tons of people that are stationed to live down there in Guantanamo. Prison is just some part out in the wilds of nowhere; the rest of it is a regular Navy base. We used to go fishing at night down here, and it was the weirdest thing—you weren't allowed to fraternize at all with the Cubans. But where we would find Cubans who lived all around the outside of the base, and probably 25,000 of them came into the base during the day to mow the lawns and clean the houses and do janitorial work, and then that kind of thing. We would, for recreation, we would get boats down at the dock and paddle around in these boats and catch rock lobsters and take them back to the ship and eat them. Well, just like every other boat down, there was some Cuban. So the ones you weren't supposed to fraternize with. People would call out like you were, “Hey, how you doing?” Bueno, bueno. [laughter] When the ship was out anchored in the middle of Guantanamo Bay—the bay itself, the harbor—part of one's duties might be to ride it; can be in a launch a motor boat, armed to the teeth with some machine guns, and hand grenades, and shotguns, and things pistols strapped to your to your hip. Circle round around the ship to prevent a Cuban frog man from swimming up to attach a limpet mine to the bottom of the ship. The likelihood of that happening was probably like one in about a zillion, but we did it nonetheless; throwing a hand grenade over the side, sort of randomly, so the would break the swimmer's eardrums if they were trying to sneak up on the ship. So that's crazy. Going in and drinking twenty-five cent rum drinks every night till you were silly, you know, drunk—and then going back to the ship. It's the Navy, you know, the military. It's nuts, but it's not. It's, you know, it's a way to grow up.
JOU	Totally. Is there anything that I didn't ask you today that you'd like me—
CAMPBELL	Probably, and I'll probably think of it. But I don't think so, no [laughter]. You did great.
JOU	Well, thank you so much again. It was so lovely—
CAMPBELL	I don’t know whether this would be helpful or interesting.
JOU	It’s so—your life is full of so many different interesting experiences. And like you said, your class had gone through so many different periods in history, which really makes it very unique and remarkable. So yeah. I'll go ahead and stop the recording.

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^[1] Campbell later references the correct title “Unfit For Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry” by John E. O’Neill and Jerome R. Corsi.

^[2] Referring to Class of ’64 trip to Vietnam with Professor Edward G. Miller in 2015.