Stephen Hallam  ‘73

Dartmouth College Oral History Program

Dartmouth Vietnam Project

May 8, 2018

Transcribed by Karen Navarro

STERN:                       Today is Tuesday, May 8^th, 2018. This is Sam Stern (’19) and I am speaking with Steve Hallam, who’s Dartmouth Class of 1973, over the phone from the Jones Media Center at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. And Mr. Hallam is currently at his home in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. Is that correct?

HALLAM:                   That’s correct.

STERN:                       Okay. So I want to just begin by thanking you again for your participation today in the Dartmouth Vietnam Project. I’m really looking forward to our conversation.

HALLAM:                   Very good. Me, too.

STERN:                       So, if we can begin a little bit with your early life. So just for starters, when and where were you born?

HALLAM:                   I was born in Waltham, Massachusetts, the Army Hospital there in Waltham.

STERN:                       Okay, and what year?

HALLAM:                   1951.

STERN:                       And can you tell me a bit about… Yeah, I’m sorry.

HALLAM:                   Go ahead. I’ll let you start with the questions first and then I’m sure the conversation will kind of take its own direction as we move forward.

STERN:                       Sure. So, could you tell me a bit about your family? Do you have any siblings? What was your relationship like with your parents?

HALLAM:                   Okay, I’m going to give you a little background. I think it will probably be of value to this conversation. Okay, so, my grandfather, my paternal grandfather, worked for Hood Milk in Boston, and he was a son of Irish immigrants, and he started as a delivery man, a milk man literally with a horse and buggy delivering milk in Boston, and ended up being the CEO [Chief Executive Officer] of the company. The chairman of the company, oh, and interestingly as part of the conversation is that my paternal grandfather’s side of the family is Irish Protestant Ulster Orange conservative Republican. My mom’s side of the family is Irish Catholic Boston Democrat liberal.

STERN:                       Interesting.

HALLAM:                   And it was a very contentious issue going further. But, in any event, back to my grandfather, so the chairman of Hood Milk was Harvey P. Hood. So I’m sure you’re familiar with him if you’ve been to the museum there.

STERN:                       I have not been to the museum, but…

HALLAM:                   Okay, so the H.P. Hood Museum at Dartmouth College is…

STERN:                       Oh, the Hood [Museum of Art] at Dartmouth. I’m sorry. Of course, of course.

HALLAM:                   Correct. That was H.P. Hood’s contribution to the college, on top of with all his other money. So, he obviously liked my grandfather, and my grandfather was not college educated, but he moved up the ranks when my dad approached graduation from high school, Harvey said to my grandfather that “your son’s going to go to Dartmouth.” And my grandfather said, “Well, no, he’s not, because it’s certainly nothing we can afford, and so that’s not gonna happen. And in any event, he hasn’t gotten the necessary background and training to do so.” And Harvey P. Hood said, “Don’t worry about it, because I’ll send him to prep school to prepare him for his education at Dartmouth.” So, that’s our Dartmouth connection. So, he went to Heven Academy for a year, and then he went to Dartmouth and graduated the class of ’41. So, and so, interesting part about that is, of course, my dad was part of the Greatest Generation. There were 415 students in his class at Dartmouth ’41, and 275 were killed in action in World War II.

STERN:                       And did your dad serve?

HALLAM:                   Oh, absolutely. He spent—he completed—when he graduated he wanted to be a meteorologist, and because his friend wanted to be a meteorologist and it seemed like a safe and easy job to do in the military during the war, and he took an aptitude test to be a pilot. He was asked to do that and he scored extremely high on it, so they said, “No, you’re not gonna be a meteorologist. You’re gonna be a pilot.” So, he said, “Well, I don’t know anything about flying.” They said, “Well, we’re gonna teach you how to fly.” So, they sent him down to Texas to learn how to fly, and in short order he was sent out to the Pacific, and flew in New Guinea outside of Port Moresby, for pretty much the remainder of the year, I mean, remainder of the war. So he was there almost five years.

And they flew C-47s. which was a DC-3, and I’m not sure if you’re familiar with them, but it’s a cargo aircraft, and they supported the war effort with, there were 80,000 British and Australian troops defending the army in New Guinea. If you know your geography, then the distance from New Guinea, Port Moresby, to the northern tip of Australia, I think it’s less than 200 miles. I’m not sure exactly of the distance. So, and you also may be aware that the population of Australia was about 5 million people at the time, or less. And the intent was that the Japanese were going to take over the Australian subcontinent, you know, continent, and make it a colony of Japan and make it a Japanese country. So, but the British Air Force was so stretched thin because of the Battle of Britain, and of course at colonies throughout the world that they didn’t have the air support to support the campaign there in New Guinea.

So, it’s an unknown part of the world and most people don’t know that there was such a big battle involved in this. It ended up being a stalemate between the two sides because of the terrain and the massive logistics problems with both sides. There was no major artillery. The topography of New Guinea is extremely—you know, it’s jungle. So, all they had was small arms. So the group of pilots used to fly about 135 hours a month between Australia and New Guinea bringing munitions to defend the island from the Japanese. So that’s… [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       So, was there an air…

HALLAM:                   Well, like I said, the Japanese didn’t have enough fighter airplanes really to try to shoot down the transports. They were stretched pretty thin at that point, as well. But, you know, when they took off, they were always getting small arms fire from the Japanese. But, it was a pretty interesting campaign.

STERN:                       Yeah, the sea war, as well, or mainly… [both talk at the same time] I’m sorry. Was it mainly air and land, or was there a sea battle, as well, around New Guinea?

HALLAM:                   Oh, well, Leyte Gulf, which was one of the largest Pacific wars, was very near New Guinea, all areas part of [Admiral] Chester Nimitz’s island hopping.

STERN:                       Right.

HALLAM:                   Okay. So, you’re familiar with that. The island hopping also included avoiding islands—in fact, the real strategy was not hopping island to island; he was hopping from easy targets where the Japanese were not well entrenched to get… [sound goes mute]

STERN:                       Hello? Hello? Hello? [Audio stops while she tries to contact him again.] So I think we were talking about the island hopping campaign. [both talk at the same time]

HALLAM:                   Oh, yeah, and all that stuff. Well, like I said, the principal view of island hopping is to reduce casualties by getting to striking distance of Japan, which ultimately happened in Guam, so that they could launch B-29 attacks on Japan. So, they tactically or strategically avoided New Guinea because of the presence of the Japanese because they knew it’d be massive casualties if they tried to take that on directly. So, that’s kind of a little background of that.

So anyways, so fast forwarding, my dad spent five years in New Guinea, came back from war, tried to figure out what his career path might be, then ended up being part of the founding group for the United States Air Force, and ultimately he ended up taking several assignments after the war. He got his master’s degree at Trinity College in [Hartford] Connecticut, and, you know, obviously it was the Cold War, things were a little bit slower in terms of his flying jobs. But, then in the… Because, for example, he made lieutenant colonel by the time he was 26 years old, when he was made lieutenant colonel. He didn’t make full colonel until like 1963 or ’64, so that shows you how things had slowed down considerably in the military post-war, which you’d expect when you have a stand down. But, he ended up being, he was the chief of staff for General Monteith, who was head of the Tactical Air Command in San Antonio. And, of course, his competitor was [General] Curtis LeMay, who did the strategic bombing campaign in Japan, so that was a battle he wasn’t going to win. But, you know, that’s just an interesting aside. But after that time my dad… [both talk at the same time] What was that?

STERN:                       So you grew up in a military family.

HALLAM:                   Yep, sure did. So, my dad… Go ahead.

STERN:                       So, were these stories… [both talk at the same time]

HALLAM:                   28 years. My dad spent 28 years in the Air Force, between the Army Air Corps and the Air Force. And I never lived anywhere more than three years until I went to college. I went to Dartmouth. That was the longest I’d been in one place in my life, so… That’s kind of an interesting aside. And, so I… [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       So you grew up with these stories about your dad having flown in the Air Force. And I guess he was still flying when you grew up?

HALLAM:                   Well, not the stories. I was around, yeah, I was around flying in airplanes my whole life. So, I had three brothers and one sister. My sister’s the oldest. I’m the youngest. My oldest brother, Phil, is the class of ’69, and they probably would want to talk to him. He lives up there near Hanover. He’s in Meriden [NH] down by, I don’t know if you know where Kimball Union [Academy] is. That’s where, he lives right above Kimball Union. But, he was in ROTC, as well. And so, kind of how that happened is my dad was stationed in Greece for one of his final assignments, working with NATO with the Greek military, and he was trying to figure out how he could send five kids to college, because officers in the military didn’t make that much money back then. So, obviously he was interested in ROTC, but the Air Force, because of its popularity, was very competitive and difficult to achieve. So, my oldest brother…

Well, to make a story short is the naval attaché in Greece was a close personal friend of my dad’s, and he said, “Well, why doesn’t your son apply to go into the Navy ROTC?” He said, “There’s a lot more positions. We’d probably give him a scholarship.” So, that’s what my brother did. He didn’t get a four-year scholarship, but he did get a three-year scholarship to Dartmouth. He was in naval ROTC there and graduated in ’69. So, he ended up going through flight training and flew A-7 Corsair 2, which is a light attack aircraft, and did 125 combat missions in Vietnam.

STERN:                       Wow, so he paves the way kind of for you, in some sense.

HALLAM:                   Yeah, well, it’s a different world we live in. This is something people say, “Oh, it’s logical that all of you went into the military,” because all four of us went in the military. But it’s not logical at all. It’s called a draft. Everybody’s going in the military.

STERN:                       That’s true.

HALLAM:                   So if you’re going to go in, you might as well get something out of it. So, you might as well get your college paid for and go in as an officer and maybe get a job skill. So, I don’t think really, it was only one of the four of us who intended or had an interest in making Navy a career. I certainly had no intention of going in the military. But, I mean, I wasn’t opposed to it, but that wasn’t something I planned to do. I said, Well, I can do that for a few years because I’m gonna have to go in the military anyway, so… Anyway, my brother did get a naval ROTC scholarship, and after we were in Greece we transferred to, believe it or not, Montgomery, Alabama, in 1969. So I graduated from high school in Alabama, which was a trip.

STERN:                       So, I just want to… [both talk at the same time]

HALLAM:                   What’s that?

STERN:                       I’m sorry. I just want to go back for a minute, if you don’t mind.

HALLAM:                   No, that’s fine.

STERN:                       So you said that you were living in Greece, it sounds like in your high school years. Can we go back just starting to kind of… You’re born in Waltham. What were some of the places you lived in between?

HALLAM:                   Born in Waltham, then we… I was only born in Waltham because my parents had an Rh problem, okay, and they expected I was going to be a blue baby. So, most of the military hospitals are not equipped to do that, so my mom’s family still lived up in the Boston area, so Waltham’s the closest Army hospital that was equipped, not quite like Bethesda Military Hospital, but certainly better than the average military hospital to deal with the possibility of transfusions due to Rh problems. So, that’s the only reason I was born there.

And then, so, let’s see, I was born in ’51. We lived in—I can’t remember where my dad went. I don’t even remember exactly where he was stationed at the time. I think he might have been stationed down in Alabama—or Panama City [FL] at the time. But the bottom line was that we went to Japan in 1954, and we lived in Japan for like four-and-a-half years. So, we lived in Nagoya for three years, and then we lived in Tokyo for a year-and-a-half. And then from there we went to Virginia, where my dad went to the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia. And that was an interesting time, too, because that was during the desegregation crisis in Norfolk, and so they closed down all the civilian schools, and the only schools that were open were religious schools. So I went to a Catholic school in Virginia for six months while my dad was going to war college, and there were like 70 students in the classroom. That was a pretty interesting thing. [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       Did you have a religious upbringing aside from that?

HALLAM:                   Oh, yeah, yeah, we were raised Catholic. That’s an interesting issue, too, because that was the precondition for my mom to get married was because she didn’t want her family to be excommunicated or her to be excommunicated for not raising her kids Catholic, so my dad signed documents to give up any role in our religious upbringing, and they got married in a Catholic church annex. So, that’s an interesting little aside there, too. But, like I said, it was pretty contentious on both sides of the family that they felt equally badly about it, as I said before, about my dad marrying, as an Irish Protestant, marrying a Catholic, and my mom’s family who were staunchly Catholic that she was marrying a Protestant, and certainly one who was opposed to Irish independence. So… [laughter] [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       So, was there always tension between the two sides of the family?

HALLAM:                   No, no, no. I mean, everybody got along.

STERN:                       Okay, they got over it.

HALLAM:                   Nobody really after a while really cared that much about the issue. That’s why we were raised Catholic. So, I mean, not that that’s—again, that’s not a… It just was interesting that’s why I went to Catholic school in Norfolk, Virginia, because that was pretty much all that was available at the time because the schools were all shut down. So, then we moved from there to, in 1959 I think—does that sound about right?—we moved from there to Randolph Air Force Base, which is in basically one of the main headquarter bases in the Air Force, one of the oldest Air Force bases, and that’s when my dad was the chief of staff to the head of the Tactical Air Command. And I was there from basically second grade until the middle of my fifth grade. And then we moved from there. My dad got a reassignment in 19… [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       I’m sorry. Where was Randolph?

HALLAM:                   Randolph Air Force Base is in San Antonio, Texas. All right, so I went from there to Vance Air Force Base in Enid, Oklahoma, another garden spot. Enid was in rural Oklahoma, and my dad was—that’s the major training base for the Air Force. It still is today. So, that’s where new students learning to fly for the first time begin their flight training. And so, he was the wing commander there. It was basically, he was the head of all the flying at Vance Air Force Base, and that was from, that would be from ’61 to ’64. Okay, and then from ’64 we get transferred to Greece, and we lived in Greece from 1964 to 1967, so I went to high school there between 8^th grade and the end of my 10^th grade. And then we went from there to Montgomery, Alabama, where I spent my last two years of high school in Montgomery, Alabama, and then graduated from high school there in 1969. So, how’s that?

STERN:                       All over the place. Impressive.

HALLAM:                   No, I would say it is what it is.

STERN:                       So, did you learn any other languages? Do you speak Japanese or Greek?

HALLAM:                   I spoke fluent Japanese as a child. I speak a little bit of Greek. I studied Spanish. I studied, later on you’ll see I was in the first group of students to study in Romania since World War II while I was at Dartmouth.

STERN:                       I saw that.

HALLAM:                   And I speak Romanian. And, so I do speak a little Italian and a little Portuguese, a little French. Most of the Romance languages, that’s about all I can handle. My daughter [Molly Hallam (’09)] is a graduate, she’s a French major, and she studied under John Rassias, and she’s totally fluent in French. She works for a French producer in Hollywood. So, that’s…

STERN:                       Oh, multilingual.

HALLAM:                   So, not really as good as I’d like to be. My Spanish is very strong. But the rest are—and my Romanian was strong while I was there, but it’s kind of when you start mixing the languages you don’t… [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       Multiple languages, yeah.

HALLAM:                   Yeah, I can make myself understood. I can read all of them pretty easily, but it’s when you start trying to communicate. So, that’s how I got to Dartmouth. So, now my senior year in high school, same dilemma: What am I gonna do? How am I gonna pay for this? And so I did the same thing, Navy ROTC. And, of course, that was during the problems at Dartmouth over the students taking over the administration building [Parkhurst Hall], blah, blah blah, blah. Okay.

So, but I had already applied for early decision at Dartmouth. So I already knew that I had an ROTC scholarship back in my junior year in high school, all right, and then I also, I got accepted to early decision at Dartmouth, so I already knew by December. So they had a dilemma. They had to decide, well, what are you gonna do? Because let’s just be real candid. You know, the element of money is always a factor when you’re talking about Dartmouth College, so, you know, principle may be important, but not to the exclusion of money. So, and you have 28, you know, 26, 28 students that have full scholarships paid for by the government, and they say, “Well, how can we keep that money, but still get rid of ROTC?” Now, I’m injecting my political bias on this, my cynicism at this point, because it really was a very cynical decision on their part, basically, “Well, we’ll get rid of it, but we’re not really gonna get rid of it until these last students… We really just care about these students. We really want to make sure that they don’t get deprived of the opportunity.” No, the issue is they didn’t want to have to fork out money if they had to, to support these kids financially, so since they already had—you know, my entire education was paid for by the government. So…

STERN:                       So, sorry to do this again. I just want to pull you back for another second.

HALLAM:                   All right, I’m listening.

STERN:                       Would you mind just talking a little bit about, I guess, during primary and high school, what subjects peaked your interest? Did you have any sort of early career aspirations? What did you do socially?

HALLAM:                   Yeah, yeah. Of course, we moved around a lot. I was very interested in travel, and because we lived in Greece, I liked foreign languages. My career aspirations, probably not really. At the time I thought maybe I was going to be an engineer. I was really pretty good at—I was decent at most subjects, not great at any. How’s that? I mean, that’s me being honest.

STERN:                       [laughter] Yeah. Be candid.

HALLAM:                   Yeah, so, you know, I mean, I was… I was basically a big fish in a little pond. Now, I should share with you that my education in Athens, Greece, was comparable to being at Dartmouth, because all the teachers there were sabbatical professors teaching the high school students. And those were the good old days when you could separate students, so all the students who we studied with were what would be like I.B. students, you know, International Baccalaureate students today. So they were all the advanced students. So, I remember my big surprise coming out of Oklahoma was, they put me in advanced studies in the middle of the year because we arrived in Greece in December of 1964, so just in time to start a second semester, and I’d already missed the first semester of algebra in 8^th grade. So all my classmates had already had algebra for six months, or you know, for the first semester, and I show up and I hadn’t even, we hadn’t even started algebra. We were just doing like pre-algebra stuff. And I go—and I had been studying Spanish. They stuck me in French because that’s what the advanced students were studying.

STERN:                       [laughter] So you were reporting to the deep end.

HALLAM:                   So I’m going like, I’m going, Oh, my God. I was in like a total state of panic for the first month or so. But, you know, I did well.

STERN:                       Was it an American school? Was it mainly the children of military?

HALLAM:                   Yeah, it was American. The American community school is basically military and diplomatic people. So, really a very elite group of students, I’ll be honest. Okay, you didn’t have—you know, they’re all self-motivated families, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Usually pretty smart and average. And as I said, most of the teachers were full-blown professors from a university that gives a sabbatical to go over there and teach so they can have some income while they’re studying while they’re overseas in Athens. So, it was a pretty good deal.

STERN:                       So, your most rigorous education was definitely that time in Athens?

HALLAM:                   Yes.

STERN:                       Before coming here, I meant. And were you on any [both talk at the same time]

HALLAM:                   Then, the last two years… Go ahead.

STERN:                       No, proceed.

HALLAM:                   No, no, you were going to ask a question. Go ahead.

STERN:                       Yeah, I was just going to say, were you involved with any extracurriculars or athletics?

HALLAM:                   Well, they only had intramurals, so I did the intramural stuff like a lot of people did. They had very limited athletics and stuff like that. So, that was a period of time which was kind of a… And I did a lot of traveling. But, you know, as far as the school activities, you know, it was an hour bus ride to get there, an hour ride to get back, you know, so most of the stuff occurred there. I was in some school plays and other stuff, but, you know, I would not say anything particularly remarkable, you know. I’m not trying to downplay it, but it was just being a regular student. But, you know, we used that as an opportunity. I did take advantage of the opportunity and I probably saw every piece of rock and classical architecture and historical site in Greece while I was there. We went to all of Greece, went to all of the islands.

STERN:                       As a family?

HALLAM:                   No, whether I did individually or as a family, yep. So, like the American community used to rent a cruise ship every summer and tour the Greek islands for two weeks. So we did that every summer. So, that was… I used to sleep on the beach there in Mykonos and you could do that. You know, a pension there on the beach at Mykonos used to be 50 drachma, which was $1.50 at the time. So, it was pretty…

STERN:                       Sounds fantastic.

HALLAM:                   Yeah. So, I was pretty spoiled to be there, and then go back to Montgomery, Alabama, I’ll have to say. [laughter] It did have a profound impact. Go ahead.

STERN:                       So, where did most of your friends from childhood come from? Did you stay in touch with people that you met in Japan, Oklahoma, Greece?

HALLAM:                   No, no. This is something that’s the kind of lifestyle of people who grew up like my—you knew you were going to have friends for three years, and you were going to go your separate ways and probably never see or hear from them ever again. That was just the way it was. And you didn’t worry about it because, you know, you’re going to make new friends elsewhere. Like for me the transition to Dartmouth was not traumatic at all.

STERN:                       So you weren’t bitter at all about the moves?

HALLAM:                   No, not at all. I kind of liked it. Because it’s the yin and the yang of all this stuff. The advantage was, you know—the disadvantage was you’re going to lose this friend that you made and stuff like that. But the advantage was is that you’re going to make new friends, and if you get kind of tired of being pigeonholed in whatever you’re doing—and I’m not saying that I was, but I’m saying for those people who did feel pigeonholed, because you know how it is in high school, everybody gets stereotyped and stuck in a box, you’re gone. By the time you’re sick of it, you’re gone. So, I did feel a lot more of that in Alabama when I got there, and it’s not—I want to make sure this is clear—it’s not because the people weren’t nice or anything like that. It’s just more that they couldn’t be bothered because they knew you were outsiders, they knew it’d be Air Force dependents who were going to school there would probably move on and parents would probably get another assignment and, you know, so why bother? You know, so they didn’t. So, it was very difficult there to make friends, compared to what it was in Greece. In Greece you kind of…

Well, let me give you a funny story on that as an example. There’s no drinking age in Greece and never was. All right, so all my friends and I started drinking in the 8^th grade. And, you know, but not like you would think. It’s not like… If you wanted to have a beer or a glass of wine, you’d just order a beer or a glass of wine. And I remember you could always tell the new kids in Greece because they’d spend the first five weeks binge drinking. And finally we’d come up to them and say, “Look, dude, why don’t you grow up? Because no one’s gonna say no to you. There’s no limit to what you can drink and just grow up and act like an adult.” And that’s the way it was.

STERN:                       Yeah, they weren’t used to that.

HALLAM:                   Yeah, they weren’t used to that at all. It was quite the shock to go back to Alabama after, you know, literally, like I said, I had been drinking since I arrived in Greece. And, you know, I’m just talking about social drinking like you would say, okay, you go out to dinner and you have a glass of wine and you have a beer and like that and you didn’t even think about it. And then you go back to Alabama where everybody’s running around with, you know, a case of beer in the trunk of the car so they’re driving to get shit faced because there’s such… [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       Couldn’t otherwise.

HALLAM:                   Or, and it had some relevance to kind of the way, some of the issues Dartmouth has about binge drinking, or has had. Okay, so it’s just immaturity. Go ahead.

STERN:                       Do you think the frequent moves had an impact on your relationship with your siblings and your parents? Were you fairly close with them?

HALLAM:                   Yes, we were very close as a result, and with our parents because pretty much that’s all you had. And, so, you know, that has… Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a true statement. Although I would say, counter to what you might expect is that all four boys became military pilots and commercial airline pilots, so by your reckoning, you would assume that all of us are very similar. In some ways you’d probably say we are very similar, but I would argue that we couldn’t be more different. We’re not anything alike.

STERN:                       In what sense? Personality wise? Interests?

HALLAM:                   Everything. Interests, personalities, lifestyle, everything. Not very much alike at all. For example, two of us have wanderlust and two of my brothers have no wanderlust whatsoever. So, for example, as a retired airline pilot, I could fly anywhere in the world essentially for free, continuously for the rest of my life. So, you would think, for example, that, as an example, my daughter also gets to enjoy pass privileges because one of my daughters, you know, the one who graduated in ’09, because I’m allowed to designate two people who can continue to get passes as if they were my children, okay, even though they’re adults. So, she’s going to Geneva tonight to go to the Cannes film festival for a week.

STERN:                       Fantastic.

HALLAM:                   Yeah, right, right.

STERN:                       This is your daughter who works in film?

HALLAM:                   Yeah. She’s a producer for—an assistant producer for Alain Goldman, who did La Vie en Rose, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film back in the ‘90s. And, so she just produced her first film. It’s call Mustang. It did not, unfortunately, get selected to be presented at Cannes, but it hasn’t been released yet either, but that’s okay. I mean, it’s all good.

STERN:                       Still an accomplishment, yeah.

HALLAM:                   Yeah. So, but what I was getting back to is that I’ve got two of my brothers who since they’ve retired have traveled nowhere, and don’t plan to and don’t have any interest in traveling anywhere. Their attitude was that hey, you know, I spent a whole lifetime, a whole career, traveling when I didn’t really care to travel all the time, and now I’m done traveling. I want to be a homebody. And, so that would be, kind of like you said, for the experience maybe they felt like that they missed out on something because they didn’t establish roots. And then, one of my other brothers has quite a bit of wanderlust, and because of circumstances with the airlines and his job choices, blah, blah, blah, he was with Delta Airlines. He ended up going to Delta Airlines, flew for Ethiopian Airlines out of Addis Ababa for three years, then he flew for Aristanis for three years, and Almad in Kazakhstan, then right now he went into management and now he’s a CEO of a small airline in Tajikistan. So…

STERN:                       So you have two adventurous ones and two not as much.

HALLAM:                   Two homebodies. Just call it that way.

STERN:                       And your sister is younger?

HALLAM:                   No, she’s the oldest and she is a schoolteacher. And she, you know, what can I say? She’s very bright, very, you know, very sweet. She kind of lived under my mom’s shadow, so that’s not important to this story, but my mom was kind of a difficult person to grow up as, I’m sure especially as a woman, in the sense that my mom was a narcissist, and pretty unrealistic expectations. She lived in a different era, blah, blah, blah, you know, stuff that you probably… If you have at all a conflicted relationship with your mom, then you would understand what I’m talking about.

STERN:                       Were her expectations difficult for you and your brothers, as well, or mainly your sister?

HALLAM:                   I think my sister really felt it a lot because she was the only girl. I think my oldest brother felt it a lot because he was the oldest boy. You know. I was very, very lucky of all the kids because by the time I came along, my mom was really not interested in parenting any more. So, and that sounds terrible. She would be really angry for me to say that. She [inaudible]. But, for example, when I was in Japan, I was raised by a Japanese nanny. We had a full-time live-in nanny, so we had live-ins during the era where in Japan you could have, it’d be like living in the Philippines today. We had three maids and a gardener, because labor was nothing in Japan when we lived there. We lived on a dirt road in Nagoya, Japan. You can’t even imagine that. And we lived in the only concrete home in the city at the time, and it used to be the former whorehouse there in Nagoya, so it was a concrete home, had nine urinals in the bathroom. Well, you can imagine. [laughter]

STERN:                       Interesting, yeah. And so…

HALLAM:                   And so, my point… So, my sister did live under her shadow, and had high expectations for her. And, you know, in the end I don’t think she wanted to try to compete with that. So, she married a very loving guy who was a terrific human being who had some issues, a lot of physical issues. So she was widowed in her 50s. He had heart problems and cancer and on and on and on. But he was a great person, but a little bit, how do I want to say, bound by his limited expectations for himself, because he was an adopted kid. And I don’t want to get into all of that. But the whole point was is that he had low self-esteem and wasn’t prepared to—couldn’t handle type A personalities and expectations, so he didn’t get his college education, although he professed he was going to do that. Because she met him in Greece when we were there and he was enlisted in the Air Force. And my dad wasn’t really all approving of it. My mom was definitely disapproving of it. My mom had all these high expectations of my sister. And they ended up getting married, and then she got prematurely pregnant, dropped out of college, and the rest, you know. You’ve heard it… [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       So she had a tense relationship with her mom, yeah. [Both talk at the same time]

HALLAM:                   Yeah. Go ahead.

STERN:                       So your mom was, it sounds like, fairly lenient with you. Was your father, as well?

HALLAM:                   Oh, my dad was, you know, again, every—how many kids do you have in your family?

STERN:                       I have one brother.

HALLAM:                   Okay, because birth order matters.

STERN:                       I’m older, yeah.

HALLAM:                   Okay. I want to say birth order matters and how many kids you have matters. My experience, I can only speak for mine. I told you I had a nanny that raised me in Japan, and I raised myself. My parents never said, “Let me see your grades.” They’d look at my report card. “Let me see your homework.” I raised myself 100%.

STERN:                       And were you pretty self-motivated.

HALLAM:                   Yeah. I didn’t find that to be a burden. I thought it was great. I really didn’t want them in my business. So, you know, but I’m not going to say that that’s my siblings’ experience, because it’s a function of birth order. So I pretty much just did my own thing. [both talk at the same time] I’m the youngest of five. There was five of us in five years. Good Catholic family. And after that, my mom said, “That’s it. I’m done. The Pope be damned.”

STERN:                       Did your mom work at all?

HALLAM:                   Yes, she did. She did towards the end, when she was a secretary when we were in Greece. She went to Katharine Gibbs [College] in Boston and was trained as a professional stenographer, you know, secretary, blah, blah, blah. And she worked for a couple of years there before she met my dad, or a year or so. I’m not going to say it’s two years. And then in the end, she ended up meeting my dad, marrying him. She did work for many years while we were growing up. We went to Greece as college was approaching and all that stuff. She worked as a secretary at the American community schools, and then once she got to Alabama, she worked as a secretary for the Alabama Homebuilders Association and did that for a few years, and then, so, that’s how that went.

HALLAM:                   So, you grew up obviously in the context of the Cold War, Vietnam War, civil rights movement. But you were both abroad and back home in the US. What were some of the international or domestic events that you kind of most remember from your childhood, and how do you think these kind of impacted your world views upon coming to Dartmouth?

STERN:                       Okay. Probably the best one to use as an example was the Cuban Missile Crisis because my dad came home ashen and told all of us, “I think we’re gonna go to nuclear war with Russia.” And my dad was not one to get overly dramatic about anything. But he really thought there was a high probability that we were going to go to war with Russia over the blockade of Cuba. And so, that had a profound effect on me. But in terms of my world view? I lived early on, and this does shape my view when I was at Dartmouth, I’d already lived in multiple countries overseas and traveled all over the world before I even showed up at Dartmouth. So I already had a pretty clear picture, at least in my view of the world.

And one of my views of the world was that number one, the United States is not necessarily the best place in the world to live, although it’s pretty far up there, that there’s good things about America and there’s things that I don’t think very highly of. And, so that may surprise you a little bit. And number two is that those people who have not spent any time overseas don’t understand or appreciate how really ugly and dangerous the world really is, and it shaped what I would describe as my Roman view of the world. The Romans really kind of get a bad rap, and it’s for some of the stuff they certainly deserve. But they maintained civilization for a long, long, long period of time, and they did it by basically having a scorched earth policy, which was to say that, (a) as long as you get along with us and you want to be our trading partners and follow our rules and act like civilized neighbors, we’ll get along just fine, but if you cross us, we’ll destroy your villages, we’ll enslave your children, we’ll kill all your men, and we’ll send your women into slavery or elsewhere. And it’s a really brutal view of the world, but unfortunately there really are barbarians out there that would love to destroy your way of life.

And I think, to this day my view of Dartmouth community is a very coddled, very insular world of top one percenters who have no appreciation for really how ugly the world can be. And then it’s fine. I’m happy for them. But, thank goodness there are still people out there that understand what it takes to protect that way of life so that people like that can enjoy it, even if they don’t even understand. So, that set the stage for some of my personal conflicts while I was at Dartmouth the whole time, because I think the students there, when I was there especially, and I think it’s true to this day, because I have arguments with my daughter all the time on these things because she tends to have a more… And it’s good. You have to say it. You want to be born liberal because if you’re born conservative, you’re going to be, you know, fascist by the time you get old, because over the years as you become more cynical and distrustful of people, you’re not going to have a positive world view. So my daughter’s in that youthful optimism stage for having not, you know, suffered, if you will, and so that’s good. That’s good. I’m a lot more comfortable with that than you might think. But… [both talk at the same time] Go ahead. So, that’s how these experiences shaped my views of the world, but even before I got to Dartmouth.

STERN:                       Do you think that you had a kind of a heightened sense of the threat of Communism, or did you talk a lot about international politics, about the Vietnam War growing up?

HALLAM:                   Oh, yeah. Yes. Oh, absolutely. Oh, my dad really thought there was a real genuine chance… And, you know, again, I don’t know where you’re coming from on this personally, but let me just explain. Dead is dead, okay? You know, whether you use a nuclear weapon to kill people or whether you use conventional weapons or use firebombings like we did in Japan, dead is dead. Okay, now obviously, thousands versus millions are big number differences. But, ultimately dead is dead. So, from the Cold War standpoint, even my dad’s attitude, and it might be different than his contemporaries was, not so much about the idea of the quote-unquote, you know, “the nuclear threat” and all that stuff. His real concern was that instead of millions you could have maybe a billion people killed. And, you know, so…

STERN:                       Right, it was a matter of numbers.

HALLAM:                   Just a numbers game, so, okay, so from that standpoint, yeah. And did my dad think that Russia was a major ideological threat to the United States and to especially Europe? No question about it. And I think that that’s something that you can’t possibly appreciate. Well, let me fast forward and just tell you, my girlfriend in Romania was born in jail. Her parents worked for the Royal Government that was loosely allied with the Germans during World War II. So, she was born in jail because they rounded up everybody associated with the government and threw them in the Royal security’s jail. That’s where she was born.

STERN:                       [inaudible]?

HALLAM:                   And while I was there, the Secret Police in Romania were still carrying people away in the middle of the night, and people disappeared left and right. So, you know, that was commonplace. And, [both talk at the same time] So, I thought she was a terrific human being. Other than my current wife, she was the smartest woman I’ve ever known and probably one of the smartest human beings I’ve ever known, because 19 years old she spoke seven languages fluently. Okay, so now let me ask you this. What do you think the odds are that she wasn’t a plant? She’s really the first American to study in Romania since World War II. I mean, the country was defiantly Communist. [laughter]

STERN:                       So she was the Dartmouth student who went with…

HALLAM:                   No, no, no. She was a Romanian that I met and she became my girlfriend there. And I was immediately suspicious of the circumstances that we met and our relationship, and that’s a whole… because I said, “Oh, odds are since I’m in naval ROTC and I got approved by the Navy to go on that exchange and to live in a Communist country even though my security was at risk.”

STERN:                       Which is surprising in and of itself.

HALLAM:                   No, they wanted me to go for that reason.

STERN:                       They did? Okay.

HALLAM:                   Matter of fact, I was offered an opportunity to join the CIA while I was active duty because of my experience in Romania. So… [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       And what about the civil rights movement? Sorry, continue.

HALLAM:                   What’s that?

STERN:                       No, no, no, continue.

HALLAM:                   So, when you asked me, you know, was I aware of—was it discussed, the threat of Russia and the existential threat to Europe and the whole Western civilization, unquestionably. I mean, that was a real threat.

STERN:                       And in terms of US intervention in Vietnam, what was your dad’s views on the policies in Vietnam?

HALLAM:                   Well, his views were that, okay, quite a bit. And I’m a contrarian, and even more so the more I studied this, and whether you’re going to like to hear this or not. In most respects the Vietnam War was the most noble war the United States has ever fought, and I’m going to explain what I mean by that. There was very little self-interest in the United States to be involved in that war except to promote democracy and prevent Chinese expansion in Southeast Asia. Quite candidly I’m telling you that. Now, I’m not saying whether it was right or wrong. That’s not what my point is. My point is that it’s noble in the sense that it wasn’t pure unadulterated self-interest involved. You know, there were thousands if not hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese people who believed in capitalism, believed in democracy, and believed in the principles that Western Europeans and the United States espouse, and didn’t want to have a Communist society, okay? And guess what? They all suffered terribly as a result. Terribly. And because of how we handled it in the end especially.

Okay, so, you know, from that standpoint, I don’t think—I know my classmates, and I know most of my contemporaries really just don’t want to even think about it because it’s very unpleasant. Even to this day, the government of Vietnam is one of the worst abusers of human rights in the world, but nobody gives a shit because it doesn’t bother them. And that’s fine, if they don’t want it to bother them, but you’re asking me why do I say that? Okay, because there’s no human rights really to speak of in Vietnam today. It’s better than it was during the time, okay, but it’s still not as good as it was in South Vietnam before it fell. You understand that. I’m not talking about the corruption. I’m talking about the human rights abuses.

STERN:                       Right. Yeah, nobody talks about them.

HALLAM:                   Due process, habeas corpus, I mean, you’re a government major, you know all of those issues. And yet everybody can immediately, you know… So, I want to tell you a story that will be very eye opening to you when I was in Romania. My brother was bombing North Vietnam at the time. In our dormitory we had a number of North Vietnamese students because the dormitory I was in was nothing but Communists. Everybody assumed that we were American Communists. Okay? But of course we were. Why would we be in Romania?

STERN:                       Otherwise, yeah.

HALLAM:                   Okay? Okay, so, I got to be real good friends, but I was very careful with what I said to whom at all times. Well, a good friend of mine who was Romanian, told—well, let me back up a second. A B-52 was shot down in Vietnam. As part of the political campaign against the US Government, North Vietnam decided to send the parts of this shot down B-52 to Romania, and they were going to reassemble the parts in People’s Park, and they wanted a rally of 500,000 people in People’s Park to protest the Vietnam War, while I was there. And I turned to my friend and I said, “You know, I don’t know how to tell you this.” Because this was not optional.

STERN:                       You had to go.

HALLAM:                   If you were in school… Yeah, you’re in Romania at the time, you weren’t in school because you’re smart and everybody wants you. It’s because you’re politically correct. You know, you agree with the Communist principles. All right, so if you didn’t, you wouldn’t be going to college. So I told my friend, I said, “Well, I can tell you right now I cannot go to this rally, and I won’t go. And what do you think? Am I gonna get in trouble or is that gonna be a problem?” He says, “Ah,” he says, he laughed and he said, “My friend, don’t worry about it.” Because I told him my brother was bombing at this very moment, and he was. And he said, “Firstly, you can kill them all as far as we’re concerned. We can’t stand those little shits.” Because they were, they were assholes, even there. The Communists couldn’t stand them. They were uncivilized, they stunk, they made their fish breakfasts on the top floor, you know, and everybody’s pissed off at their behavior. They were just, they were like the scum of the earth. I’m just gonna tell you that’s how the other Communists looked at them.

STERN:                       That was the Romanian perception?

HALLAM:                   Yeah. They said these people are the most uncivilized group of Third World, what they considered them, okay, I’ll use the current term, they came from the biggest shit hole on earth. “So, we don’t care if you care if you kill them all, because we can’t stand them either.” And that’s when I said, “Wow, there goes my perception about this great Communist solidarity and how everybody feels the same about American imperialism and all that stuff. So, ah, that’s kind of an interesting perspective.” So, yeah, so those were the kinds of… But, I digress, because the purpose of my—I’m not trying to resell the Vietnam War. That’s not at all what I’m trying to do. I’m just trying to say, to give a perspective that was not shared by my classmates, because they were just really more concerned about—and I understand why and I support this, and I want to make sure that that’s clear—they’re more concerned with how the Vietnam War and US government policy was going to affect them personally in their career choice, and they merely didn’t want to be bothered.

STERN:                       So, it was a more self-interested view on their part?

HALLAM:                   Yeah, and again, I’m not saying that that’s… And I would say that to be fair, I thought they were pretty fairly receptive to my view on that, okay? But, I’ll give you another story. I know we’re going to digress a little bit, but I have to tell you…

STERN:                       That’s okay.

HALLAM:                   It’s my favorite Vietnam era story.

STERN:                       Go for it.

HALLAM:                   And I’m going to keep the names anonymous for obvious reasons, because these are people I really deeply respect and love, okay? So, after the bombing of Cambodia, I’m not sure if that was the trigger event, but I believe it was, there was going to be the big march to Washington. And you’ve probably heard all about that. And that’s when Dartmouth closed down for the spring of, was that 1970?

STERN:                       It was 1969.

HALLAM:                   ’69, okay. So, in any event, meanwhile there was a group of Dartmouth students said, “Well, we need to have a kind of a personalized protest against the war.” So, a bunch of the anti-Vietnam students decided that a good target would be, the only closest military facility was the Army’s Cold Regions Research [and Engineering] Lab [Laboratory] there in Lebanon [Hanover, NH].

STERN:                       Yeah, I’ve passed that before.

HALLAM:                   Okay. So, you have to picture the irony of this, because you’re protesting a jungle war by attacking or taking action against the Cold Regions Research Lab. I thought that was kind of funny to begin with. And, so, you have to understand the people who work at the—the [inaudible] who work there, you’ve heard the expression “pawn people” up there? Do they still use that term? Or townies?

STERN:                       No. Townies I’ve heard.

HALLAM:                   Well, you’ve heard of townies. Okay, so townies are people, you know, who would love to go to Dartmouth, but they’re making $5 an hour, okay, at the time, or $15 an hour today, working at Molly’s Restaurant or something, you know? Okay. So, here these Dartmouth students decide they’re going to stage a sit-in in the parking lot of the Cold Regions Research Lab as Dartmouth’s protest of the Vietnam War. So, you’ve got the scenario. So, they do that. And, of course, these poor lower blue collar people show up to park their cars and they can’t, so they call the police, and guess what happens? They arrest all the students.

STERN:                       Was this the same year as the Parkhurst takeover? [both talk at the same time]

HALLAM:                   I don’t even remember exactly what year it was. I think it was 1970, but it was right during that timeframe. And, I mean, it’s really not important, but it serves to illustrate my point. So I come back and my roommate is crying. And I go, “God, what the hell happened here?” I mean, he was bawling like a baby. I’d never seen him cry ever. I said, “What the hell’s happened? Did your mom die? Is your dad dead?” And he says, “Something terrible happened today.” And I said, “Well, what’s that?” And he said, “Well, I got arrested for this protest we did at the Cold Regions Research Lab.” And I said, “Well, Gandhi would say that’s a small price to pay for your political convictions, because, you know, I was realistic to know, what are they going to do about the students who… at the most they were going to get charged with trespassing or obstruction or, I don’t know what, whatever, you know, it can’t be very serious. But, okay. He goes, “Well, does that mean I won’t get into Harvard Law?”

STERN:                       Thinking about his future. [both talk at the same time]

HALLAM:                   And I said, “Well, maybe that’s something you should have thought about before you went there.”

STERN:                       Were you pretty open with your views on the Vietnam War while you were here?

HALLAM:                   Oh, well, I would actually say I had to be combative, because it was the only survival technique, because there was only a handful of us. I mean, the universal view at Dartmouth was: this is an illegal war; this is an affront to the American people; there’s no benefit to this; it has no value whatsoever. How can this school possibly be part of the military-industrial complex of the United States government that controls everybody? Oh, just on and on and on. You just have no idea. Actually you would because it’s kind of like it is today, you know, in terms of…

STERN:                       Yeah. Silencing certain views.

HALLAM:                   Yeah. Like, okay, let me give you a better example since you’ve been down to New York. It’d be kind of like saying, well, all cops are racists and forces of fascist Nazi rule in the United States. There are people who believe that, you know that?

STERN:                       Right. Yeah.

HALLAM:                   Okay? And that’s how they believe. [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       So you were always on the defensive?

HALLAM:                   Yeah. So, the point would be is like, how can you be that educated and be so stupid? That was my view on it. Okay, if you want to have a… Okay, so my mom used to say to me, so I interject this so you know where I’m coming from, because you don’t know me that well, but you’re getting to know me. She said, “Why do you like to argue? Because you can’t change people’s minds.” I said, “That’s an interesting comment.” I said, “I like to argue not to change other people’s minds, but to change my mind, because I really don’t give a shit what other people think. But I do care about what I think. And I’m willing to…” [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       So, do you think you developed your views further and that they changed as you talked them through?

HALLAM:                   No, all of my views change. All of my views change all the time, maybe not fundamentally, but they definitely… I’m willing to listen to the other perspective on things. I’ll have to admit, like my wife, and I’m the liberal in the family, by the way. I’m far left of my wife, so, which is very unusual in American society. I’m the one that said I’m wanting to even listen. But my point of it, you know, my point I’m trying to get at was that okay, you know, I may disagree with these views, but I can understand where they’re coming from and there may be some value to that perspective, so I would entertain them. And if it changed my views at all, then I’d say “okay,” you know.

Like for example, I don’t want to get into a lengthy discussion about it, because I already agree on it, is that I do understand how the Vietnam War could very negatively impact the lives of people who had far less control over the outcome, lower, blue collar families whose sons got drafted, who couldn’t get an officer position like I had, okay, and couldn’t find a way, like people would say about George Bush to get in the National Guard and avoid getting involved in a war, and so, they don’t come home in a body bag. I get that, okay, and I’m very sympathetic. Nor, you know, it’s kind of like the old story about wars, is like the story that when a neighbor loses his job it’s a recession, and when you lose your job it’s a depression. So, you know, the war is really bad anyway, but if your own child comes home in a body bag, it’s a pretty terrible thing. I think I get all that. So you do have to take this very seriously. So, and I get that, too. So, that… so I’m not so gung ho. In fact, I don’t believe… War should be an act of last resort, and you should be proud of General [James M.] Mattis, our Secretary of Defense, who’s probably the most thoughtful warrior that’s ever existed in American politics, okay.

STERN:                       Yeah, I’ve read that.

HALLAM:                   So, if you understand him, okay, here’s a guy who sleeps in a soldier’s cold barracks to let him go home on leave, as a general, okay?

STERN:                       Yeah, incredible.

HALLAM:                   Okay. A guy who would sacrifice his body for any of his Marines, without question, without hesitation. And you know the story when he said the message he gave to the Taliban—I don’t think it was the Taliban, but it was in Afghanistan where he said, “Please, I beg you. I beg you with all of my heart essentially, lay down your arms, because if you don’t, I will destroy you like you—it’ll be hell on earth.” And that’s the kind of guy you want to have. Yeah, so that echoes a lot of my views, as well.

So, the whole point was, I’m not here to debate the issues about whether Vietnam was a justifiable war, whether it was worth the cost or any of that stuff, and I think it surprises people when you say that. What I do debate strongly, and feel very strongly to this day, is that that what happened in Vietnam forced people to finally understand why you want civilian control of the military and why it’s important to have good policy, because the military’s going to do what you ask them to do, and that’s the way it should be. And you don’t want a military that decides, “We don’t like the politics right now, so guess what? We’re gonna close this government down and start our own.” So, now, that battle, I won’t say that I won that battle, but I think because it didn’t really affect a lot of my classmates, they didn’t really entertain that whole perspective at all. They went, “Oh, okay, I never even thought about that.” “Well, okay, I don’t expect you to think about it.” Now… [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       Did you engage with professors, as well?

HALLAM:                   Oh ho ho, God, you have no idea. Yes, multiple times.

STERN:                       Were there any incidents in particular that come to mind?

HALLAM:                   Yeah. I came back from Romania and there was a history professor who I knew quite well, and I’d have to look up who he was. He was well regarded. But he was an unabashed supporter of Ho Chi Minh, and he was basically a Chinese beyond sympathizer, I’d have to say he was Communist. So he said, “Hey, hey come by my office. I’d like to hear about your experiences in Romania.” I said, “Let me tell you something.” So I sat down for four hours and told him about life in the “Great People’s Republic” of Romania. And that’s when I became—I went from being more open minded than I am now to I despise socialism. I just have to tell you that right off. I think it’s a great lie. I mean, I had very strong—very few things I have strong feelings about, but that’s the biggest lie on earth, and I’ve just seen it destroy whole generations. I feel so sorry for the Romanian people, entire generational life destroyed because of the lies of socialism there.

STERN:                       Yeah, you were able to see it firsthand.

HALLAM:                   And I saw it firsthand, and it was horrible. It was just the most disgusting society possible. We’re not talking about 5 or 10 years. We’re talking about whole generations that lost everything because of it, because they’re liars and they’re thieves, they’re cheats, they’re terrible. Sorry. So, because there’s no checks and balances. They had all the power.

STERN:                       So, I’d like to talk… [both talk at the same time] I’m sorry.

HALLAM:                   Go ahead.

STERN:                       No, I was just going to say I’d love to talk for a minute just a little bit more broadly about your time in Navy ROTC in Dartmouth, and then your experience at Dartmouth in general, if we could just kind of pivot that way. I guess, maybe for starters… [both talk at the same time] if you could describe…

HALLAM:                   When I started out, we had about 30… My brother’s class at Dartmouth, half of his class was in Navy ROTC, so over 400 students. It was massive. My class… [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       Okay. And you said he graduated in ’51, right? No, I’m sorry…

HALLAM:                   No, I’m talking about my brother. He graduated in ’69. There were 400 students in ROTC out of his class. It was huge. Yeah. So, my class, entering class had about 30, at least 27, 30. And then, after your sophomore year, because you’re a minor when you sign your agreement to go into the military, and again because of due process, oh, I could go on and on on, but ideas of due process, minority, majority, blah, blah, blah, contract law, yeah, the military in its wisdom said, “After your sophomore year when ostensibly you’ll now be in the majority, not a minor,” because I signed my papers to join ROTC when I was 16 years old, okay. So, you had another chance to decide that you were not going to go into the military, and you would have gotten your first two years free. No obligation, nothing. No payback, nothing.

STERN:                       And so, did a lot of people end up doing that?

HALLAM:                   Yes, yes. A lot of my class did that. So I struggled with that decision because at the time I thought I might go to law school, my draft number was like 353, the war was winding down. I go, Huh, I go, well, why do I want to go in the military when this war’s going down?” I didn’t want to go in the military in the first place, but I was gonna get drafted. And now I have an opportunity. I’m not gonna get drafted. I can just go on with the rest of my life. And in the end, out of a sense of principle, part of it was financial, but part of it was on principle, I said I really felt really I was cheating the system at the time…

STERN:                       Yeah, to do otherwise.

HALLAM:                   I said that I was gonna do this, and so I’m gonna do it. And, of course, it turned out to be the best decision… [both talk at the same time] Go ahead.

STERN:                       Did you feel any pressure from your father, or not at all? He didn’t come into play?

HALLAM:                   No, none whatsoever. None whatsoever. He said, “You should do what you want to do.” And, so I called back after thinking about it over the weekend and I said, “I’ve decided I’m gonna continue to do this because I think it will be worthwhile. I mean, that is, it’ll be a good experience. Maybe I’ll grow up. Maybe I’ll learn something.”

So, and I’m gonna interject here real quick, because one of my professors at the ROTC was a Major O. [Orlo] K. Steele, and Major O.K. Steele was one of the most impressive human beings I’ve ever met. He’s the most squared away. He looked like, you know, he looked like an Olympic decathlete, you know, five percent body fat. He has a master’s from Princeton [University].

STERN:                       I think I might have come across his file actually in Rauner [Special Collections] Library.

HALLAM:                   Yes. He ended up making three stars in the Marine Corps. And if you know about the Marine Corps, to even make general at all is almost impossible. To make three stars, you’re really something else. And he made a big, big impression on all of us, because he was very kind, but firm. If you showed up out of uniform or in a shitty looking uniform, he wouldn’t berate you. He wouldn’t even raise his voice. He said, “Do you basically, do you have that little respect for yourself that you would allow yourself to look like that? What does that say about you as a person? Is that who you are? I’d do a lot of soul searching about that. You’re out of shape. Is that the way you want people to think of you, as sloppy, lazy, undisciplined? Or do you want to control your own urges and become a man?” So, my experience at ROTC at Dartmouth, I probably would have, I’m jealous of me is the way I always say it, because it was a great counterbalance to my experience at Dartmouth, and I’m not saying negative. It was a great combination. I owe who I am today principally because of the two very diverse influences on my young adulthood, and none being more important than the other.

STERN:                       Was there a sense of kind of alignment or affiliation between the college and your ROTC instructors, or were they also involved in college life and committees? Or were they very much two separate paths?

HALLAM:                   Oh, no. No, at that point they were a caretaker. It was out the door. They felt like persona non grata. They couldn’t wait until the tour was over. No, it was a very negative experience in that. They were basically turning out the lights.

STERN:                       And was there a sense of collective identity? [both talk at the same time]

HALLAM:                   They were reviled by the faculty. It was just, it was embarrassing, that part of it.

STERN:                       That’s a shame.

HALLAM:                   Yeah, it was really, really embarrassing.

STERN:                       This is horrible.

HALLAM:                   It was. It was awful. It was mob mentality. So, you’re going to try to say that about somebody like Major O.K. Steele when you look at his resume? As my wife’s favorite expression is, you couldn’t smell where I piss. That’s how he felt about it.

STERN:                       Was there a sense of collective identity among the ROTC cadets?

HALLAM:                   Yeah, quite a bit because it was a small group. Fun group, very diverse. I do stay a little bit, yeah, I want to say a little bit like reunions, little bit in touch with them. Just really great guys. But, not as homogeneous a group as you might think in a lot of ways. Very, very diverse group. And yeah, just good guys all.

STERN:                       So I know that there were two kind of principal types of students. There were the regulars, who like you came into ROTC based on your scores in some sort of nationwide exam, and then there were contract students who signed up for participation during freshman week.

HALLAM:                   We had zero.

STERN:                       There weren’t any? Okay.

HALLAM:                   No. That was already gone. It had already been dismissed. Yep, so that wasn’t an option. So, these were all scholarship students. That’s all they had left. But some of the upperclassmen my freshman year were still there. You know, it was kind of one of those things, and you know, like your freshman year is you just try to stay above water. You didn’t really… You know, we didn’t interact massively with them. But I’m saying I don’t have real strong memories of interactions with them. They kind of did their own thing.

STERN:                       Interactions with who? I’m sorry.

HALLAM:                   I’m saying we didn’t have as much interaction with the upperclassmen for the remaining years we were there. So, my freshman year those would have been seniors. So they dwindled down every year. But yeah, because it was kind of like there was a little bit, I don’t mean this negatively, it was kind of an “us and them” that they knew we were kind of the last class and they were on their way, and they’re focused on where they’re going in their careers and, you know, whether they’re going to get in flight school, you know, what path they’re going to take in the Navy. So, a little bit different in that regard. Does that make sense?

STERN:                       Yeah. And can you describe a little bit the naval ROTC curriculum? Were you taking additional courses?

HALLAM:                   Oh, we got credit for… Okay, so what happened was, and I can’t even tell you which ones they were, but essentially the Dartmouth faculty—and you’ll have to look into the research on this—decided that most of these courses were not worthy of credit from Dartmouth College. As we see it, there may even actually be some merit to that argument. So, we only got credit for, I want to say two courses, maybe three at the most. My freshman year we had one course, my sophomore year we had one course, and all the rest we did pro bono on top of our regular course load, even though we got graded by ROTC. [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       Were those exclusively ROTC students or were there non-ROTC students in those courses, as well?

HALLAM:                   Oh, no, no, [inaudible]. Yeah, there were no non-ROTC students, yeah. So for example we did get credit for celestial navigation, which [laughter] I remember at the time thinking, Oh, that can’t be that hard. So, boy, that was one of the hardest courses I took at Dartmouth. I thought, Oh, God, what did I get into? And here we are taking essentially pro bono, yeah, three days a week and tests and everything else like that, on top of our regular course load. So, that was a bit of a challenge.

STERN:                       Were your courses mainly classroom or field work or a mix of both?

HALLAM:                   Classroom. Since there would be very little, if any, field work. So, it was like celestial navigation.

STERN:                       And at what point did you declare your interest in serving as a Navy pilot? And was this your decision alone or were you kind of pushed down that path?

HALLAM:                   No. It’s a long story on this, but I’ll make it quick. I actually got drafted by [Admiral] Hyman [G.] Rickover to enter the submarine force, and even though I was a government major, and really didn’t have much of a choice because he had first pick on everybody. So I actually started out at nuclear power school for the first six months, in which the second week we were doing 3-dimensional calculus and I hadn’t had calculus since my freshman year. So, you can imagine. They made Dartmouth look like a gut school. No, I’m serious. No, it did. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.

STERN:                       But this was all after…

HALLAM:                   Yeah.

STERN:                       This was all after Dartmouth? [both talk at the same time]

HALLAM:                   Yeah. So, I went to nuclear power school immediately upon graduation, and flunked out within six months. [laughter] So that’s the way that went. But I’d wanted to be a pilot, because what happened was, no, I wasn’t that passionate about being a pilot, and since my other brothers were pilots, I kind of went, Oh, well, this nuclear power thing might be okay. Actually, you know, it’s pretty prestigious, blah, blah, blah. You can imagine. But then, the weekend before I was to make the decision or have to tell them flatly I would not do that, okay, if you understand what I’m saying… You could, but you really had to fight pretty hard, you know, and it was an embarrassment to the command if you did because, you know, all of the above. But, my brother was in an Air National Guard unit in Maine, and the commanding officer of his squad unit took me out in a 233, because I was an ROTC guy, so I could do a backseat ride. And we went out and flew over Bar Harbor, did acrobatics and a bunch of flying and stuff like that, and I said, Well, that’s it. That’s it. I’m gonna go into flight school.

And that Monday my commanding officer said to me, “Hi. Hey, we got your orders for nuclear power school.” And I was just too much of a coward at that age to say, “Absolutely not. I’m not doing that. I don’t care how pissed off they are. This is not for me.” I said, “Well, okay,” you know, “I’ll try to make the best of it,” which was a mistake and I regret that. I should have just said, you know, “I’m not gonna do that.” But, we digress. [both talk at the same time] So did that answer your question? Go ahead.

STERN:                       So, you didn’t participate in the flight indoctrination program while you were at Dartmouth?

HALLAM:                   Oh, I did. Oh, I did. No, I did do the flight indoctrination program at Dartmouth. Oh, I’m sorry. Your answer to that is yes, I did. Loved it. Problem was, it was… [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       And so, where was that training?

HALLAM:                   It was at Post Mills, Vermont, which was a dirt strip, for the first half of it, because you know, they go by whatever flight school could provide the training for you. And it was on a dirt strip. And I absolutely loved it. The problem was that it was during the winter of my senior year, and the weather was terrible. And I remember an aircraft landed before us, and the whole runway was solid ice, like sheer ice, and the airplane just slid all over the runway and hit a snowbank and crumpled its left wing. And I went, Oh, this is great. I’m really excited about doing this. Because you imagine when you’re young, the idea of crashing an airplane and maybe ending your career and maybe killing yourself is not a very… [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       Not top on your list, yeah.

HALLAM:                   Not top on your list, so… But, we did do some flying out of Lebanon. The issue was because of the weather, and in the program, see, I’ve actually owned a flight school since I’ve been in the airlines, general aviation like that, and you can’t really realistically train a person to get their private pilot’s license in 40 hours, and that’s all they paid for was 40 hours. It’s really more like 75 to 80 for the average student. Yeah, so, so I didn’t have the money and I wasn’t going to pay what’s [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       Out of pocket, right.

HALLAM:                   Yeah, so, that kind of shriveled up. I kind of regret that I didn’t finish. I did solo, but I did not get my pilot’s. But I did participate and used up all the available funds in the FIP [Flight Instruction] Program.

STERN:                       And I know Navy ROTC cadets traditionally participated in some sort of like six to eight-week training course over the summer. Did you participate in those?

HALLAM:                   Yeah. Every summer I did, all three summers, yep.

STERN:                       Can you provide more detail on those?

HALLAM:                   Yeah. My first one was on the USS Ingraham, it was a DD-694, and it was based in Newport, Rhode Island. It was the oldest World War II class, what they call a FRAM-II destroyer in the Atlantic fleet. So it was built in like 1942 or ’41. It had no air conditioning, and it was just, it was such a rust bucket dump. Not a good experience. I had some funny experiences on it. For example, we chased a Russian submarine off the coast for about 800 miles. They were going so fast trying to keep up with the submarine that they just tore the shit out of their… And they used to drop this basically like on an anchor to get below the boundary layer so they could detect the submarines. And when they brought it back up, it was just completely mangled and destroyed because it wasn’t designed to go at 26 knots. So, you know, it was pretty funny.

But, then, so that was my freshman year. But after my sophomore year, sophomore year you do Little Creek, Virginia, and then you do Corpus Christi for the aviation part of it. And obviously, the Marine Corps Little Creek portion of it I wasn’t too thrilled about, but I thought it was okay, because it was the Marine Corps orientation. And then, the last three weeks we were down in Corpus Christi doing the aviation thing, and they took us out in the trainer aircraft. We just did some flying, and a lot of PT [physical training], a lot of what you’d call boot camp type activities.

STERN:                       Was this with the other Dartmouth students?

HALLAM:                   Yeah. My roommate there was John [W.] Floberg [‘73]       (F-l-o-b-e-r-g). John and I were roommates. And if you talk to John on this project, ask him about the day we cleaned the fan, because we took an aluminum fan—we were going to have an inspection, and we must have spent three hours trying to get the corrosion off an aluminum fan that we were using metal cleaner on to try to get it shiny. I mean, it was like we were looking at each other, What the hell are we doing here? But, that damned fan looks beautiful when we’re…

STERN:                       Spotless, yep.

HALLAM:                   He’ll remember that story if you ever talk to him.

STERN:                       Okay.

HALLAM:                   He’ll definitely remember that one. So, yeah. So, that was after my sophomore year. And then after my junior year I was here. I can actually almost see the jetties where the ship would be. I was in Jacksonville at Mayport [Naval Station] on the USS Chuck Ware [USS Charles R. Ware (DD-865)], the Chuck man Chuck Ware. And it was an awesome, awesome six weeks, because the first three weeks we didn’t really do anything. The water was great and we’re at the beach, so I had a lot of—they were on tropical hours, so it was done at like 1:00 in the afternoon, so I’d hang out at the beach and doing all that stuff. And then we did a quick training run out of Mayport down to St. Croix and St. Thomas and the Virgin Islands. So, basically it was like a Love Boat trip. So, I enjoyed that one. But, you know, you had this book you had to fill out with all of these tasks and stuff, and we did them all. So it was one of those things, okay, it wasn’t all, you know, you can just sit around doing nothing. You had to show them that you could do this and that, and you’d have to get signed off by the officers, and they were very cooperative, a really good group of young officers on the ship. And we had a fun time, and the cruise was successful, and it was a blast. That was the only cruise that I could say I genuinely enjoyed. [both talk at the same time] Go ahead.

STERN:                       Do you have any sense of about how many ROTC trainees were on these trips?

HALLAM:                   Generally, on the ships you’d get about maybe half a dozen to a dozen, no more than that.

STERN:                       So, not many.

HALLAM:                   Yeah. And now, the ones who went to the carriers, okay, they would have a large contingency, like you’d have a lot of Academy guys and stuff, and there was no logic to…

STERN:                       …where you were put?

HALLAM:                   …where you ended up, yeah. It was really more the mission you were going to get involved in, not what group you were going to be with. So, we were with ROTC students from all over the country, and some Naval Academy actually, mostly ROTC cadets. All right?

STERN:                       Yeah. So, pivoting a bit from ROTC at Dartmouth to other engagements at Dartmouth, can you walk me a bit through your time here? What else were you involved in? Were you a member of a fraternity? Why did you decide to major in government?

HALLAM:                   Well, okay, I was going to rush a fraternity, but that was not a popular time to be involved with fraternities. It was all kind of the ennui, if you will, at Dartmouth during those years where, you know, everybody was questioning everything. And quite frankly, I really didn’t have the time for it. As I said, I started out as a pre-engineering student my freshman year, and I just got absolutely brutalized. That’s why I became a government major. I had taken a course in government from Mick McGuire [Robert G. McGuire, III], who had a profound effect on me academically. He was an African-American and brilliant and he was a graduate of Howard University, and he did a freshman seminar. And I remember because, you know, you’ve had your freshman seminar, and a lot of people are influenced by it.

STERN:                       Right. I was, too.

HALLAM:                   Yeah. So, I was always a pretty good writer anyway, and so we had this assignment to read a ridiculous amount of books in a short period of time and write a five-page paper. And, you know, I put my time in there and thought I did a pretty good job. And I could type, which was always a good deal, so I could write things faster than most people. And, so I wrote what was a pretty good paper and I got a pretty good grade on it, and I got back from it from Professor McGuire. My paper was five pages. I got a six-page single-spaced typed written response to it, my paper. So that was my… [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       That’s incredible, yeah.

HALLAM:                   That was my introduction to Dartmouth College academic rigor. And, so we all were very heavily influenced by that. So my freshman year was pretty much figuring out what major I was going to do, and I quickly found out that while I wasn’t failing or anything like that, I wasn’t thriving, just your… You know, I told you I went to Alabama and I had the opportunity at the time, and I should have taken advantage of it, to study at a local community college and start taking calculus, but I, you know, that’s not something kids ended up ordinarily doing, and, you know, my parents didn’t make it particularly easy. So, I was in a pre-engineering curriculum with Korean students and Chinese and Japanese students who’d already had two years of calculus, so I was hopelessly behind students from the outset. So, I quickly decided this is not gonna be my forte. So, what am I gonna do?

So, well, that’s when I decided that I’d be a government major, because I had a lot of interest in going into foreign service after the Navy. So that kind of made sense in that regard. And I like history. And basically, I mean, with all candor, at that point I kind of said, Well, I’m really majoring in Navy. I’ll get my Dartmouth diploma, and these are subjects that I’m interested in, and I’ll get a well-rounded education taking these various courses, do some language courses, a bunch of government history courses, blah, blah, blah. So that’s kind of how that kind of unfolded. Does that make sense? [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       Yeah. Are there any other courses or professors that were particularly notable?

HALLAM:                   Yeah. Well, let’s see. Well, what we ended up doing with Mick McGuire is he set up a special seminar for us for our sophomore year, which there were only five students in the class, and it was about developmental issues, whatever we wanted to do in particular, but it was about problems in developing the countries. And we took that course, the five of us in there, and I remember we ended up, I think my paper for that course was—now, this is before word processors, so you have to remember that, okay—it was 118 pages, plus about 40 pages of footnotes.

STERN:                       Super impressive.

HALLAM:                   So, for one course.

STERN:                       Yeah, especially given… Yeah, like a thesis.

HALLAM:                   It was a brutal process. I probably read for that one 10-week course, I probably read 40 books and wrote the 118-page paper. So, that was…

STERN:                       Do you remember what the paper was about?

HALLAM:                   Yeah, it was about Egypt and some of their developmental issues. Then, I can’t remember the professor’s name. Gotta think about that. But, later on there was an NYU professor who was highly regarded, by the way, very highly regarded, who was on, I don’t know, sabbatical, whatever it is, he was on loan to Dartmouth. And he was very, very rigorous. And I wrote a paper with him about the Reformation and the rise of capitalism in the role of Martin Luther, and that process. And I remember it to this day because it was the only paper that I got an A+ on, and this was not a guy who gave out A’s. And he said… [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       Congratulations.

HALLAM:                   And he said, “This is the finest paper I’ve read in all my years of teaching.”

STERN:                       That’s incredible. [both talk at the same time] It must have really had an impact on you.

HALLAM:                   So he said, all he said was, “Outstanding. Well done.” And that was it. There were no red marks, nothing. And I know he could have just taken the shortcut on it, but it was, I thought... It kind of was my, you know—I’m not trying to—it’s not about bragging about it. I would say that was kind of like my hitting my [inaudible] for my experience at Dartmouth where I finally did something I knew was good. And I really didn’t care.

STERN:                       You felt really proud of.

HALLAM:                   I really didn’t care. I wasn’t writing for them. I was writing for me and what my thoughts were on the subject. And, you know, it was well received, so… And then, I can’t remember, was it Professor [J.C.] Adams who taught the history of Europe since 1900 at the time? Of course, he’s world famous. He and Professor [inaudible] are two of the most highly regarded professors. Well, everybody was so terrified of his course. At that time you had the pass-fail option. [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       And everyone used that.

HALLAM:                   That was the spring of my senior year, I said, “Hey, I’m gonna take this pass-fail, because you know what? I’m too terrified to take his course for credit because I’ll probably get a “C” and I don’t want to hurt my average.” You know, the same argument everybody makes. And, so I took the course. I got an “A”. Solid “A”, not even an “A-.”

STERN:                       So, did you end up using the pass-fail or you didn’t use it?

HALLAM:                   No, no, in those days if you got higher than your grade point average, you kept the grade. So, my grade point average was 4.3, I think, at the time and I got a 5 on the course, so I got to keep the 5. So, but I just remember some of my classmates who were taking that course were just like… Because the final exam of the course was, I don’t know, it was a four-hour exam. I think I wrote like 40 pages on one of those little blue books. It was about basically the Treaty of Versailles and the effect. He had like four questions and I think I wrote 10 pages on each issue. You know, it was like Treaty of Versailles and, you know… Honestly, you could have predicted what the questions were going to be because it really wasn’t that difficult to figure out what it was. The question you had to figure out was, what did you want to say?

STERN:                       What to write. Right, yeah.

HALLAM:                   Yeah, what do you really want to say about it? [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       I think that’s similar to a lot of courses today.

HALLAM:                   Yeah. So, you know, so I spent time thinking about, Well, what would I ask if I were gonna ask a question? And he kind of knew what he—you know, it’s like any professor, he kind of gave you a hint of what he thought were some of the highlights. And I knew, of course, Treaty of Versailles as a precursor to World War II being an obvious choice there. Oh, and I think he asked questions about the Yalta Conference and all that stuff, you know, nothing that would surprise you. But, so I’d given some thought to what I might say and what I thought about it. But even before I could test, every question that was on the test was not a surprise to me. So I didn’t spend any time thinking. I just started writing what my thoughts were on it. So, those were the highlights. And then, probably the most important one was when we were asked… Okay, so, Professor [Charles B.] McLane [‘41] was the Dean of the Government Department. He was a classmate of my father’s, class of ’41, and he’s one of the reasons I became a… He never told me that he knew my dad. Firstly, they were both on the ski team together. He never once told me that. I didn’t find out until afterwards.

STERN:                       But he did know who you were?

HALLAM:                   Oh, he knew, but he never told me. I’m saying I had no idea, you know. But I said, I’d never told my dad who the dean was. So, it wasn’t until after I graduated, I said, “Oh, yeah, you know…” And he goes—well, no, when I went to Romania—and in any event, my dad, “Oh, yes, we were on the ski team together.” You know, because my… So, that was kind of a funny thing. But anyways, so, not talking about him so much. I did want to go on an exchange tour like everybody does, and I planned to do a foreign exchange, and I was thinking like, Okay, I’m gonna go to… I already had this figured out. I’m gonna go to Salamanca or I’m gonna go to De Cinza or something like that. Yeah and I can’t wait.

And so I go to this—they had the job fair for the exchange programs, and I went there and Professor McLane said to me, he said, “Hey, can I talk to you for a few minutes?” I said, “Sure.” He said, “I’ve got two fantastic programs I really strongly want you to consider today.” So, you know, I got along really well with him. He’s a great guy, and even though I didn’t know that my dad and he were personal friends and stuff, but I got along with him real well and I’m sure that was a factor in it. I said, “Okay, fire away, tell me.” “Well, the first program’s in Kenya.” And I said, “Kenya?” Oh, God. [both talk at the same time] Now, that wasn’t exactly my idea…

STERN:                       Dartmouth doesn’t even have a program there now, and I’m surprised they did at the time.

HALLAM:                   Yeah, it was in Kenya, it was developmental issues, and I said, Oh, God, I’d probably come back with a bush baby or something. I said, “No. Absolutely not.” Sorry. I’m being tongue in cheek. Don’t take me too seriously. I said, “So, what’s your other one?” And he said, “Oh, we’ve got this great program in Romania.” I go, “Romania? Where the hell is Romania?” I mean, I knew where Romania was. You understand what I’m saying, but honestly? How many Dartmouth students could actually pinpoint it on the map without any names? Probably not a lot.

STERN:                       Not many.

HALLAM:                   Even today. Okay. So, you understand what I’m saying. I mean, I knew it was in Eastern Europe, but I knew absolutely nothing about the country. And I said, “Why? I don’t speak Romanian. Why would you do that?” He said, “Ah, grasshopper. One of our professors of Spanish here, Ion Agheana (and that’s A-g-h-e-a-n-a), who is a professor of Spanish here, but he is a Romanian national, and he is going to teach you Romanian before you go. I said, “Ah, well, that’s kind of…” [both speak at the same time]

STERN:                       Did he go with you?

HALLAM:                   No, he did not go there. So, but what he did do was when they were recruiting us for this program, what it was, was one of the chargé d'affaires, one of the foreign service guys at the embassy in Romania was a Dartmouth grad. And he noted that there were five undergraduate positions as a result of the cultural exchange agreement that was signed between [President Richard M.] Nixon and [Nicolae] Ceaușescu in ’71, ’72, providing for undergraduate students to study reciprocally. Well, of course, Romania took advantage of every one that they had available, but nobody had done the undergraduates. There had been plenty of graduate students. So he said, “Hey, why don’t you send five students over here for a semester in Romania?” And so they obviously talked about it, and they had this professor able to spool us up.

So, Professor Agheana had us over to his house, and this guy was the most urbane, educated, sophisticated, cultured, interesting person probably I’d met at Dartmouth. Fantastic human being. Just, I love Romanian people anyway, but I mean, this was the first experience I’d had with it… He went to Harvard. He was one of the first Romanian students to graduate from Harvard, you know, as a Romanian student, okay. That’s how obviously connected and intelligent this guy was. And then, he met his wife when he was working for the Romania government on some corporate deal. They fell in love. Well, he actually got permission. He was proud to say his story—I remember what it was—he said, “My passport from Romania was number 68,” you know, non-diplomatic passports. He’s like the 68^th person since World War II to be able to leave the country legally. And so, and then he became a professor. [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       One of the first.

HALLAM:                   And then, see, one of the very first. So he said he volunteered to teach us Romanian pro bono, and he’d already worked with John Rassias at the time where they were going to have us do it our junior year in our spring term. And this is on top of already the first one. Important to know. No credit… [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       Oh, so this was not a Dartmouth offered course. It was outside on his own time.

HALLAM:                   Yeah, not at all. “You’re not going to get any credit for it.” And it was, I don’t know, I remember at the time it was three days a week for two to three hours, maybe more. And then, before he left, we got the classic Rassias method, intensive immersion course that they used to offer to adults, you know, new graduates and stuff. And so, we spent two weeks at Dartmouth before my senior year, because this was for the fall of senior year. And we went from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. five days a week.

STERN:                       So you were pretty fluent by the time you went to leave?

HALLAM:                   No. Nah.

STERN:                       Or conversa… [both talk at the same time]

HALLAM:                   Yeah, I was fairly conversational.

STERN:                       Were you conversational?

HALLAM:                   Yes. Yes. I was quite conversational at that point, and you know, Romania’s really a pretty easy language if you know Spanish or Italian, because the same rules, just different nouns and… [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       Were the courses in Romania all… [both talk at the same time]

HALLAM:                   Yep, all our courses, yep, they were all in Romanian.

STERN:                       They were in Romanian?

HALLAM:                   Yeah.

STERN:                       Okay. And was it a government —so it was a government program. Were you taking government courses there?

HALLAM:                   Yes. Oh, yeah, I mean, imagine, it was all Communist indoctrination. I loved it. It was so funny.

STERN:                       It’s fascinating.

HALLAM:                   And all bullshit. It was such bullshit. I laugh because, I remember one of the courses I took was a sociology class, and at the break I said—it was all Hegelian dialectics and the flowery language if you read into that old bullshit. It’s like have you ever read what’s his face? Who’s the original North Vietnamese guy? Old Grandpa. But you have to read it to really laugh about it, because basically the whole idea is “if we throw enough words at you that you don’t understand, then you’ll say, ‘Wow, this is really…’” [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       You’ll just accept it.

HALLAM:                   ‘Really deep. This is really deep.’” You know, it’s really just fuckin’ nonsense. It’s just garbage. So, at this sociology class, I told my classmates, you know, “Hey, I don’t even understand what the hell he’s talking about.” And he said to me, in Romanian, “My friend, it’s like this. In Romania we have sociology courses and classes and professors, but there is no sociology in Romania. It’s all Communist bullshit.” [laughter] I said, “Oh, okay. Well, that’s the stuff [inaudible].

STERN:                       And your Romanian friend said that?

HALLAM:                   Oh, yeah, he just said, “Yeah, we’re just, you know, we’re going through the motions. We know it’s all bullshit, too. But, you know, you gotta do it because it’s required. That’s what it is.” And I just laughed and said, “Oh, okay, that’s the way it is.” So, now I’m going to confess to you. I know I’m being taped, but I don’t really care because I’m old. But at that point I decided, You know what? This is all just a complete waste of my time in the class side of it. Okay. And I’m gonna immerse myself in the culture. So, I pretty much quit going to classes, because I knew what I wanted to do for the term was to write a long paper afterwards about my experiences [inaudible] like that, and I knew I could do that pretty easily. So, I hung out with my Romanian friends. So, I was the most fluent in any language than I’ve ever been. I had no problems communicating at all. I mean, I’m talking about, so I spent hours and hours and hours. My girlfriend would only speak to me in English. If I really got stuck on a word, that was it. She refused to speak any English, even though she was fluent in English. And so I was very—so I’d speak 10, 12 hours a day in Romanian. So my language was really strong at that point.

STERN:                       Yeah, it’s an incredible experience. How else did you immerse yourself in the culture?

HALLAM:                   Well, we traveled all over the place. Went up to Transylvania, went to Dracula’s castle, went to Timisoara, Brasov. Oh, we stayed at a—five of us went on this trip. I kind of hung out with her, so I kind of had a little bit of a different experience than they did for a while, because they really got serious about it. And again, this is all off the—I know it’s on the record, but it’s, you know… I had already kind of decided I really don’t care. I mean, I’m gonna do okay just because I went, so I’m not gonna worry about… if they want to give me a “B” or even a “C” because, you know, I didn’t go to classes or anything like that, because I remember I went to—we had this mandatory language class. The other ones we attended, but they were like basically auditing, you know what I’m saying?

STERN:                       Yeah.

HALLAM:                   You know, they had a schedule. The whole thing was so ad hoc, as you might imagine. Does that make sense?

STERN:                       Yes.

HALLAM:                   They didn’t put much effort into the program. Okay, and I understand that now as an adult. But they did have the language ones where they felt, Oh, the American government’s really gonna be pissed if we don’t really put an effort to help strengthen their language skills. And I remember the teacher got so mad at me one day because I’d missed one of the classes because I was hanging out with my girlfriend and her friends and stuff, and we were going over stuff and it was so basic at that point, you know. And so I started talking and she says, “How come you go to my classes? You’re learning all of this slang and all of this incorrect, you know, basic street language.” And so I told her, I said… You know, for example there’s a term where something’s really cool and you say it’s [speaks in Romanian], which means, well, it means literally “with a cane,” because it’s from the German or the actually the—what do I want to say? There are a bunch of guild, not German—I’m having a brain freeze for a second, I’ll come up with the term—they didn’t speak German, they spoke—ah, it’ll come to me. Just bear with me. But anyway, [Romanian word] means “you rich stalk.” A stalk is the cane. It’s from the German. And, but everybody used that term in the main, and she goes like, “Yeah, you’re using a word like [Romanian word] and things like that. That’s all slang.” And I said, “Yeah, well, that’s what everybody’s using around her.” She said, “Well, is it correct?”

And so, let me give you a Romanian example real quick, not that it’ll make any difference. But, how you say the word “because” in Romania to this day signifies your class. So, if you’re a classical man you’ll say [Romanian word], which is a unique Romanian word for “because.” If you use [Romanian word], it’s more modern, like modern Italian, so that would say that you’re a modernist. And if you’re really old school, you use [Romanian word], which comes from “being the end,” because “in the end” is what it means. And, so I was having that conversation with her, so she goes, “Oh,” she says, “you understand [Romanian word]?” “Yeah, it’s pretty straight forward stuff.” Because they were very class conscious in Romania. It’s just like a lot of Latin cultures are. And how you spell, what kind of words you use, signifies who you were. So anyways, that part was kind of…

STERN:                       Okay. And so, what were your biggest takeaways from the program?

HALLAM:                   From the exchange program?

STERN:                       Yeah.

HALLAM:                   Oh, that communism’s a fraud, socialism’s a fraud, and it’s all going to come collapsing down and the Russians aren’t going to be maintain and control on this. So, the fall of the Berlin Wall and all that stuff was not a surprise to me at all.

STERN:                       And did you have any frank conversations with your girlfriend or Romanian friends about capitalism?

HALLAM:                   Oh, yeah. She said, “It’s all bullshit.” She said, “Someday this will all end, the nightmare will end.”

STERN:                       And was that generally the sentiment among students?

HALLAM:                   Oh, yeah, they said, “This will all end and we’ll go back to being a real country.” The only thing that was kind of interesting is that, aside from that, was the fact that they really didn’t believe American society was as wealthy as it was. They’d see a lot of these American shows and they’d say, “Oh, that’s all Hollywood. That’s all make believe. Nobody lives like that, do they? Nobody has… Everybody doesn’t have a car and nobody has two cars.” And I said, “Tons of people have two cars.” And they found that very difficult to believe, because it was the most impoverished… Well, let me give you an example. At the time that I was there, I think the average Romanian was making about $700 a month in today’s dollars. It was abject poverty.

STERN:                       And you could see it on the streets?

HALLAM:                   Well, no, everybody’s clean. I just got to tell you it’s the most depressing… The only time I had an experience like that, I was down in Havana in the ‘80s when I was flying on a charter down there, and they had all these Polish mine workers at the Copacabana. And you can just—can you imagine that scene? With their yellow fingers and their big bags under their eyes and their three days’ growth of beard, and with filthy berets that looked like it came right out of the mine. And you had all of these Copacabana dancers who wore the same outfits that had been sitting around for 40 years and they were all wilted, dirty and, you know, thread bare. And I just laughed, I said, “Yep. Right back in Romania again.”

STERN:                       Did you stay in touch with anyone from Romania once you returned?

HALLAM:                   No, absolutely not.

STERN:                       Would you have been able to?

HALLAM:                   I wasn’t going to take a chance on it. Worried about my security clearance. And probably looking back, I kind of regret that. But, I was actually offered in 1999 to head up the military liaison for Romania’s application to NATO, and to work for the ambassador when I was in the Navy Reserve. And that’s another one of my big regrets, because the guy who took it gave me a bear hug at a conference later on because he said my God, it was the greatest experience of his life. He’d never been there before. He was a surface Navy guy. But, they said, “Oh, we’d love to give it to you, but we have the perfect guy for that job and, unless he says ‘no’ you’re gonna get it.” And my first marriage was kind of shaky at that point and my son was having issues and I said, “I really can’t go for six consecutive months with all the stuff going on,” so I declined to go. And I very much regret not doing that. But, so, but it is what it is.

STERN:                       So, just my last question about your Dartmouth years. Dartmouth admitted its first of thousand women in 1972, which would have been your junior year. And I imagine that co-education was kind of a significant turning point in your time at Dartmouth as it was for the school. Can you speak about… [both talk at the same time]

HALLAM:                   Oh, yeah, I could easily answer that question. It was in a lot of respects the most horrible time ever to go to Dartmouth. You know, my brother was class of ’69, I’m the class of ’73, and our experiences could not have been more different. He was what you would call the old Dartmouth, where everything was—and I’m not being critical of that. I’m saying the school was well positioned to take care of the fact that it was a single sex college, okay, and the society was well positioned to take care of that. So, you had mixers and you had avenues. And when that period dried up, there was a transition going to what you would consider the modern Dartmouth. What you have to understand is that that transition was extremely bumpy, not good at all, because it wasn’t not good for the reasons you might think. It had nothing to do with whether a woman… I went through the same thing with women in naval aviation, and commercial aviation. You know, as you transition, you have all sorts of people there with agendas on both sides and all sides, and it’s just very unpleasant. You know, it’s not a fun time to be there. And it may be important, it may accomplish really vital things, but it’s a really shitty time to be there. That’s why they still talk about this mid-‘70s at Dartmouth as the “lost years.” You may have heard that term?

STERN:                       Yeah.

HALLAM:                   But they do. They consider the class of ’73, ’4 and ‘5 as the lost years. They really haven’t done much to the school. The school’s really kind of found its footing since. And then they have a lot of explanations for that. But I will just tell you this, is that, you know… Okay, so for example, how would you think if you were the one of those thousand women there? Well, you might think a lot of different things. Right?

STERN:                       Yeah.

HALLAM:                   You might be excited at the opportunity. You might be humbled at the chance. You might be, have an agenda, and basically you hate men and hate the school, but you’re going to prove a point about equality, and, you know, you’ve got a big statement to make. And it’s, so there was a little bit of everything. So it was not good at all.

STERN:                       For anyone you’re saying? Men… [both talk at the same time]

HALLAM:                   Yeah. It doesn’t create a lot of humility, okay? Okay, let me give you the converse of that. My classmate, Joe Ludwig [’73], went to Vassar on his exchange, sort of like my Romanian experience. Well, and it was still all female. He said, “Oh, my God,” he said, “it was like…” He can’t—he used to laugh at them, a good Catholic boy. Those women down there wanted to tear him apart for the whole time he was down there. He said, “Hell, I couldn’t get any studying done. I couldn’t do anything. I mean, I was like attacked,” and he means in a pleasant way. There’s not any guys going to complain about this situation. But he said, “Oh, girls, I could never think about dating. They were all calling me up and saying ‘Joey, what you doin’? Let’s go out. Let’s have some fun.’” Okay, so, it was just the inverse of that, okay. So, if you’re one of the 80% male and 90% male, you know, you can imagine.

And now all the institutions that made it work—I’m not saying “institutions,” but all the, you know, the road trips and the mixers at the various, all the girls’ schools, and all that just died. It was non-existent once they agreed to go co-educational. So, the social life at the school suffered terribly during my period of time.

STERN:                       So, did students generally, did most oppose co-education or were they supportive of it?

HALLAM:                   I know that I was supportive of it in principle, and I’d say most people were supportive of it. But I think that they were—now, you’ve seen the movie, Animal House. I mean, there’s a reason… You know the history on Animal House, right? You know it’s about Dartmouth?

STERN:                       Yup. Right.

HALLAM:                   And it was actually my brother’s fraternity it was patterned after, okay. So, you know how much distrust there was with the administration in that movie. That’s exactly the attitude it was during that period of time, is that, you know, We’re not fooled by the administration and the faculty. They have an agenda and they’re gonna push their agenda, so it doesn’t matter whether you like it or don’t like it, it’s gonna be what they want. So, that’s kind of… And I think it was inevitable.

Again, I want to make sure it’s clear, my daughter is a graduate of ’09. I am fully in favor of it. But I’m also fully in favor of things like that being done well, and I would say the school… Listen, you’ve already figured this out if you’ve been there a while. Dartmouth has massive hubris. Didn’t say it’s all unjustified, but, you know, at times they think a lot more of themselves than they really need to. And they need to be a lot more introspective about how well they do things. They do a lot of things magnificently, or I wouldn’t still be supporting the school. But they’re not the only fish in the sea.

STERN:                       Flawless, right.

HALLAM:                   And they sure sometimes, you know, I mean, you could make the argument that it’s just a little backwater college in the cold mountains of New Hampshire, so I’m not that impressed. Okay. And see, bear with me when I say that, because I love the school. [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       Of course.

HALLAM:                   Okay? Right. So, get off your high horse. Matter of fact, I think it’s one of the chief positives about Dartmouth is that at times they’re well aware of the fact that they have been uniquely successful with all the things going against them, okay? That is, small school, terrible location, horrible weather, go down the list.

STERN:                       I agree with that.

HALLAM:                   Why would anybody want to go to school there? Honestly.

STERN:                       Fantastic place. Fantastic professors and community. And academics. But I understand your point.

HALLAM:                   I agree. Like my daughter said this, because she did her exchange tour to UCSD [University of California San Diego] in San Diego, and she goes, “God.” She goes, “I wish I’d gone here or Stanford [University], get away from those God awful winters.” Now, just bear with me. She’s militantly proud of being Dartmouth now. But I’m saying at the time, you know, when you get so tired of the winters and all that stuff like that, you get a unique bonding at Dartmouth that you don’t get at a lot of other schools, and I get that. And, you know, I was a district enrollment director and did a lot of interviewing and stuff like that, so I mean, I am really plugged into the students that have gone there from this area and what they got they’re excited about and how their experience has been. Not as involved now, but I’m just telling you, so I get what’s special about the school, but I also get some of the things where they’re just kind of full of themselves. I’ll have to give you one—this is really not part of the interview, but I’ll…

STERN:                       That’s okay.

HALLAM:                   My wife and I are really big supporters of Florida State University [Tallahassee, FL], okay, and they’re the Seminole Indians. Of course, Dartmouth was the Indians. And I remember how I transformed my attitude after talking to my wife on this, because anybody like at Dartmouth said, “Oh, that’s disgraceful. They’re making a caricature of Indians.” Well, what people outside the community don’t know is that the Seminole Indian Tribe has adopted Florida State University, and that they filed a countersuit against the NCAA [National Collegiate Athletic Association] when the NCAA in their infinite lack of wisdom decided to take on the university because they thought, Well, all Indians are offended by this, so you shouldn’t do this. So, but then the Seminole Indian Tribe countersued the NCAA and said, basically said, “We’ll take you to the Supreme Court if necessary, because this is our university and this is our team.”

STERN:                       Never heard that.

HALLAM:                   Yeah. So I said to myself, Wow, you know, it’s pretty hard to get excited about a tree as a symbol of the [inaudible], okay? Or changing to the keg [“Keggy”, Dartmouth mascot].  But my point of it is is that, you know, it does make you say, Well, why is Dartmouth embarrassed about the fact that the team’s called the Indians? I mean, we know the argument. I just want you to think about this concept. When you would think, and you find some Indian tribe that would say, “You know, well, I’ll be damned proud to have a school as tremendous as Dartmouth College to be our school,” which it is their school. And we want it to be at Dartmouth, and because that’s why the school was founded. You see where I’m coming from on this? It’s like…

STERN:                       Yeah.

HALLAM:                   But, the political correctness would never permit that, and I get that, too.

STERN:                       No, it wouldn’t.

HALLAM:                   But it’s just it’s an interesting counterpoint to me. And like I said, I find it embarrassing because, you know, and you wonder why… You know, when I was there, the team only lost like two games in the four years. That’s why I’m a huge football fan, okay, because I watched my high school team won the state championship, and there’s a big fever for Alabama. Dartmouth was Ivy League champ almost every year that I was there. I’ve got season tickets for Florida State. I’ve got season tickets for the Jacksonville Jaguars. So, we’re into football.

STERN:                       Quite the fan, yeah.

HALLAM:                   And my wife’s into it, too, probably more than any three men, and but not for the reasons you might think, is that she’ll watch a game three or four times because she’ll dissect all the plays over and over and over, figure out what could have been done differently. And of course, you know, Tom Coughlin is our president of operations, he was a Boston College head coach before and, you know, just a total class act. And I met him multiple times. And I’ll just say the whole point, like he said years ago, is that football is a mental game disguised as a physical one. It’s the most difficult… It’s the closest thing to combat without killing people.

STERN:                       Did you ever play?

HALLAM:                   No. Of course, like I said, in high school in Greece we didn’t even have a football team. And then, when I went to Alabama, these kids are guys that went to the NFL. Yeah, okay… [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       So, you weren’t playing there?

HALLAM:                   No. We have 40,000 people go to a [inaudible] game in Alabama.

STERN:                       Can’t imagine.

HALLAM:                   Yeah. You have no idea. And like a college football game down here, you’re talking 110,000 will go to a game. So, they take it very, very seriously around here. So, but the point I was talking about is how, you know, when you get in this little insular environment and you think, Well, we’ve got all the answers and people need to listen to us. We’re all wise on all of these subjects. And I’ll say to you that I love the school more than anything on earth, and it’s very much shaped who I am today, and I am very proud to be a graduate. And I do believe in the "Vox Clamantis in Deserto." That’s the best thing about Dartmouth.

But, like any other man-made institution, it’s got plenty of flaws. And one of my biggest concerns about it going forward is that the one thing that distinguished Dartmouth from the other Ivy League schools was that even in my time, you should know this, there was no political debate in [inaudible]. Now, I don’t know if you understand that. Even when I was at Dartmouth—how many years was that, almost 45 years ago?—there was zero dialogue. Everybody was liberal. So there’s no debate. Everybody agrees on everything.

STERN:                       No, it’s very much above all an echo chamber.

HALLAM:                   And Dartmouth has a little bit of dialogue. I think it’s less than it used to be, but, and ROTC and those kinds of people who went into ROTC had a big impact on shaping a… [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       Dialogue on campus, yeah. There isn’t much of one now.

HALLAM:                   What’s his name when I was still there? Jeffrey Page? The editorialist. Jeffrey Hart. Okay, Jeffrey Hart was a professor when I was there. You talk about a voice crying in the wilderness. A brilliant conservative ideologue. Didn’t say I agree with anything he said, but you talk about a fish out of water. Faculty I’m afraid at Dartmouth now they just would have never have tolerated—would barely tolerate a Jeffrey Hart today. And I think that’s a fair statement.

STERN:                       It is.

HALLAM:                   It’s a fair statement. And so, I mean, so in many respects over time, I got very dismayed by principally the faculty, in terms of their living in a bubble and not really seeing the real world. And so, that’s a principal reason why I decided to engage you in this Vietnam discussion, because it really highlights the warts about Dartmouth. And, you know, my dad used to get adamant in his older years. He said, “Ah, I’m not gonna give a penny to that school again. I can’t stand what they’re doing now. They’re so full of shit,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, I’m standing… It’s hard for me to be as enthusiastic as I might otherwise be, only because I don’t think a conservative viewpoint is welcome or respected, and so why should I give my money to an institution that disrespects my views? Now, I’m being blunt.

STERN:                       Yeah. Oh, thank you for saying that.

HALLAM:                   And I didn’t say that that’s where I’m at. But I’m saying that’s the rhetorical question you have to ask yourself. My wife asks me that all the time. I said, “You know, Dartmouth today doesn’t stand for anything.” And they do stand for a lot of things, okay, you know, the quality of life, the rule of law, you know, all the basic stuff, I said. But, outside that, when we start getting into other more sensitive areas, okay, I have very grave concerns about the deterioration of the dialogue which we see throughout the country, where we’re reaching the point where there’s what I would describe as a tyranny of the minority, which is just as bad as a tyranny of the majority, no different. So, all these special interest groups that are intimidating even the administrations into accepting a viewpoint.

And I’ll give you one. You know, I happen to be pretty religious, but I don’t think you’d ever describe me as a, you know, like a zealot. Nothing close to that. I worked with a lot of great Muslim guys in Afghanistan, so that’s important for me to say that, okay. So it’s not a matter of zealotry. But, the attack on people who call themselves Christians and what they believe in, like things like you ask yourself, does it make sense that things like, how many black abortions are there in this country per year? I think it’s like 1.75 million a year, and nobody’s saying what a disgrace that is, okay. And so you get the Catholics and other Christians saying that, you know, not to turn back the clock. I’m not making the argument for a complete… But here to the point that, you know, at what point do we decide that this kind of behavior is just as barbaric as allowing a woman to die? And nobody wants to talk about it, because that debate’s done.

STERN:                       Yeah. Now a lot of states aren’t open on campus unfortunately.

HALLAM:                   Yeah, no, no. And I’m not trying to answer it. I’m not even trying. I’m really asking you more questions, do you understand what I’m saying?

STERN:                       Yeah.

HALLAM:                   Is that I think the danger is that I think a lot of these extremely intelligent people, and they are, and very thoughtful in many cases, are afraid to look under the rock at times, and live in a little bit of a bubble, an idealistic bubble, in which they don’t question the motives of people. You know, I do. And you know what? And I’m happy to let people investigate my motives, as well. [laughter] Because that’s the nature of humans. You know, we all have our agendas. And they have agendas, too, so… But anyway… Yeah, go ahead.

STERN:                       Yeah. I think we got a little bit off track when we were talking about kind of the policy and implementation of co-education. But I was wondering if we can—and please let me know if you have to go, and we can always reschedule to continue talking.

HALLAM:                   No, we can talk a little bit more. Yeah.

STERN:                       Sure. So, just moving on from your Dartmouth years to military service, can you describe the period from commissioning to deployment and what happened in between?

HALLAM:                   Yeah, well, like I said, I went to nuclear power school for six months. I washed out of that program, which was fine by me, and got accepted immediately into the aviation program which was still highly competitive, so it was basically a “no harm, no foul” situation, and I didn’t even really take it that personally. Went to the flight training program and graduated in May of 1975, and was assigned to the USS Forrestal [CV-59] here in Jacksonville, Florida, flew A-7’s, which is a combat light attack aircraft, carrier based, and I did three years of fleet tour, and had various assignments, you know, typical assignments as you’d have in a squadron during that period of time. Then I was an instructor pilot after that from… [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       Sorry, I just want to…

HALLAM:                   Yeah, go ahead.

STERN:                       I just want to stop you for a second. What were typical assignments?

HALLAM:                   Oh, well, okay. So, well, they only had 20 officers in the squad, and so you pretty much you had… the Navy’s a little different than the Air Force. We had… I was a line division officer, which means the guys who work on the airplanes, they worked for me. Then I was a training officer. I was a landing signal officer. I was a nuclear weapons training officer. I was the NATOPS [Naval Air Training and Operating Procedures Standardization] or standardization training officer. Yeah, I probably had about 12 different hats over that three-year period, so we were pretty busy during that period of time. And we deployed at that time with the 6^th Fleet. And I made one major deployment to the Mediterranean in 1978, and that was from, we left in April of ’78 and returned at the end of October, a very interesting operation. It was kind of, by today’s standard like a Love Boat cruise in that we had great ports of call: Valencia, Palma de Mallorca, Marseille, Naples, Athens. And we spent two weeks north of Shetland Islands operating there in 40-foot waves, which we just… [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       I read about that, yeah.

HALLAM:                   So, yeah, so then… Go ahead.

STERN:                       And in 1978 the Forrestal participated in several NATO exercises, correct?

HALLAM:                   Yes.

STERN:                       Okay, so what do you recall about these?

HALLAM:                   Well, specifically, in 1978 we did that exercise where we tried to do the gap there between Iceland and Norway, and operate a carrier battle group there, and we basically found out we couldn’t, because like I say, we had 40-foot seas, and it destroyed about five or six airplanes and, you know, it was pretty bad. But, meanwhile, I mean, we could operate, but it was very challenging. A lot of people got really, really scared, because the water was 40˚. If you were in the water, your life expectancy was about like two minutes, even with exposure gear. [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       Yeah, did you ever fear for your life?

HALLAM:                   Yeah. I had a cold catapult launch into the water on that cruise. So, basically they didn’t give me enough launch speed and the airplane wasn’t flying at the end of the carrier and I had to eject and was underwater for a couple of minutes and got fished out. So that was pretty dramatic. So, yeah, our squadron lost six airplanes in the six months we were deployed. [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       I would assume… And that’s a pretty high rate of accidents?

HALLAM:                   Yeah. By today’s standards. But, back in 1978, I don’t think any carrier had deployed and come back with all the airplanes and all the pilots ever. That didn’t happen. You always lost several of our planes and a few pilots every time you deployed. It was just the nature of the operations, you know, challenges. And we weren’t any different. In my squadron we lost four pilots in three years.

STERN:                       So I know there were a number of high profile… [both talk at the same time]

HALLAM:                   Go ahead.

STERN:                       So, in addition to the accidents, I know there was a few high profile fires, including the 1967 one during which 134 people were killed. Did this kind of shape… [both talk at the same time]

HALLAM:                   Yeah, we didn’t have anything like that. We didn’t have any major events like that, because it was pretty much a standard 6^th Fleet NATO supporting deployment. So, yeah, that’s pretty much all there is. I mean, if you want to ask more questions about it. I mean, it was a great tour and it was fun, and that’s where I was probably the best pilot that I ever was in my career at that point because you’re flying three times every two days, each flight’s five hours, so all you’re doing is flying, eating, sleeping and flying, that’s it. And my big thing was I was one of the landing signal officers, the guy that sits back and controls the aircraft as they’re landing and helps guide, get aboard safely. So I did that in addition to my other duties. So, it was a pretty busy schedule. And that served me well because I was… [both talk at the same time] Go ahead.

STERN:                       You were flying A-7’s you said?

HALLAM:                   Yeah, A-7, Corsair II, yes.

STERN:                       And what type of aircraft exactly are those? Like are they multi-mission or…

HALLAM:                   Yeah, it’s mostly a bomber. It’s a lightweight bomber. It did have a nuclear munition. I did get a chance when I was an instructor a couple of years later to drop an actual nuclear weapon, a B-43 one megaton nuclear weapon at the weapons range at Eglin Air Force Base [FL]. So, that was pretty interesting. Well, they take out the, obviously, the nuclear warhead material, but they had telemetrics to see how the bomb would have gone off, did it work? And for example, what you do is, when you come into the target area, you come in at about a hundred feet above the ground at 550 knots, and about 10 miles to the target you do a Half Cuban Eight, which is basically, well, it’s kind of three-quarters of a loop. So, do you know what a loop looks like?

STERN:                       Yeah.

HALLAM:                   So, basically, so you reverse course and go back out the way you came in, as fast as you can go because I was at 10,000 feet and 10 miles from the blast when the blast would have gone off. And that one megaton blast is a pretty big blast. So, you know, you want to get as far away as you can, so it doesn’t kill you.

STERN:                       Yeah. So, there was a fireball, I assume, even though there’s no radioactive material?

HALLAM:                   No. The concussion from the wave… Yeah, the wave force can just completely destroy your aircraft, so you have to get as fast away from it as you can. So, that’s why, this is what they call an air burst where the bomb was designed to explode at—it had a parachute attached to it and it explodes 3,000 feet above the target.

STERN:                       Right, before hitting the ground.

HALLAM:                   Yeah, and so, one megaton, you know, that would take out all of New York City and, you know, and it’s a pretty big blast. Pretty big blast.

STERN:                       What skills are… [both talk at the same time]

HALLAM:                   [inaudible] For example, interestingly, when I was deployed with the 6^th Fleet, I told them I would not plan a mission into Romania. See, we got to select whatever mission you wanted to do. So we had nuclear missions for Bulgaria, Russia, Crimea area and stuff like that. So we actually took paper and plotted it out and planned it and stuff, and so you were responsible for your target.

STERN:                       For Plan A? [both talk at the same time]

HALLAM:                   Yeah. So, if you… I mean, none of us really thought the odds of us planning a nuclear attack with a carrier based single seat airplane was very likely. I mean, it was really low on the—but you still had to plan for it and it was part of your responsibilities as a junior pilot to be able to do that, and brief it, and do all the stuff associated with it, and know everything about the weapon and everything about the aircraft and how you were going to deliver it, etc., etc. And you’re training for it. But, nobody really thought it was very realistic.

STERN:                       Okay. And so you were planning for where? [both talk at the same time]

HALLAM:                   Oh, I was just saying, I think my target—I had a target in southern Russia, I believe it was like the shipyards there in like Odessa. I just can’t remember precisely. So, that kind of thing. But it was pretty interesting.

STERN:                       And what skills or values do you think this military service cultivated in you?

HALLAM:                   Oh, well, quite a few, but principally is, it’s kind of more about aviation. Well, it’s both. But it’s aviation. Yeah, it’s military aviation, it’s such a dangerous environment. Oh, okay, here’s the difference. I think I can answer it best by saying this. Okay, like my brother. My brother, of course, at 25 was in Vietnam. But okay, so at 25 years old I’m flying off an aircraft carrier at night in a single seat aircraft where my life and death was dependent upon me doing what I was supposed to do and doing it correctly, and having friends who didn’t do it correctly and end up dead. That’s kind of, it’s about as simple as that. So, there’s no room for error, there’s no margin. So, imagine if you will compared to somebody who’s still on their parents’ medical plan at 26 years old who’s still in school. I’m sorry, but I’m just going to give you that example. There’s just worlds of difference in maturity, okay? So, my best friend on that cruise died, fell in the water. He had a wife and two small kids.

STERN:                       Sorry.

HALLAM:                   Yeah. You know, it is what it is. So, you know, so there’s no room for error. And so, let me give you an example. Fast forwarding, because I became an instructor of the airplane here from ’78 to ’81. You can get to that later. But the point was, I was responsible for making sure young pilots knew how to safely land aboard a carrier at night, which I can tell you, there’s probably nothing more difficult in aviation to do, period, hands down. And I remember one guy used to do kind of a graduation exercise in the simulated carrier conditions at night, and he didn’t do well. He crashed in the water short of the boat. He would have been dead. Did nothing that I did. And, so we let him stay in the simulator for about a minute or two to gather himself, because he was crying when he got out of the simulator. And I said, “You know what? You’re not really meant to do this. I know it hurts your feelings. You’ve invested a lot of time and energy and stuff like that, but I can tell you right now is that someday you’ll thank me for telling you, because you’re not gonna be—your wife’s not gonna be a widow. So you’re not cut out for this.” 25% of the guys who complete the entire naval aviation—25% of the naval aviators at that time who had completed the entire course of instruction in an airplane, so you’re talking about at that point at least two years of flight training, both in training aircraft and this particular aircraft, when they get to this stage, 25% still wash out and never go to a carrier.

STERN:                       After having completed training.

HALLAM:                   Yep. Invested everything they could into doing this, and you tell them that—and I was the guy that often had to say, “Hey, you’re not going forward. I’m not gonna recommend that you join a fleet squadron.” And that’s a tough thing. It’s a hard thing to do, but there’s no margin for error on that. It’s like, it’s not, “Oh, I’m gonna hurt your feelings.” It’s “I’m trying to keep your ass alive. And you’re not gonna make it.”

STERN:                       So, it kind of it’s… [both talk at the same time]

HALLAM:                   Honestly, I learned after a while… No, but I’m going to tell you, it’s funny, because I don’t know, you may find this, as an aside, you may find this interesting or not. But, I can usually tell after talking to somebody for about—a young man for about 25, oh, I’ll say, okay, I give it five minutes and I can tell you whether they would be a good naval aviator or not.

STERN:                       What do you draw out of that conversation?

HALLAM:                   Well, the big thing is self-confidence but not over confidence, focus, self-discipline, attention to detail, not too much bravado, humility but still self-confident because you’re going to have to have all of those cases. You have to learn from your mistakes. You’re going to have to really dig deep when things get rough, because there’s nobody—most cases like we’re doing, single seat airplanes, we fly by ourselves. There’s nobody there to hold your hand. You’re either going to survive or you’re not going to survive, and nobody there is going to help you out.

Okay, so for example, one of my good friends on his—he completed his training in the training squadron in the A-7, went out to the fleet’s squadron, had a hydraulic failure, and so, right off the coast here at Jacksonville, and he hung around the ship and then he tried to land aboard the ship, but it’s very difficult because the airplane doesn’t fly the same when you lose your hydraulic systems, and the controls are not really very good, and he was unable to successfully land aboard the carrier after three attempts. They sent him back to the ship, but because he had what they called blown the gear down with a nitrogen charge, he couldn’t—you can’t retract it. He ran out of gas two miles from Mayport Air Field and ejected. Sat in the water for a couple of hours until he got picked up. That was like his first week in his fleet squad. Welcome aboard. How do you like it so far? Yeah. He said, “I wanted to jump…” [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       Did he last?

HALLAM:                   Well, oh yeah, he became my operations officer when I was the commanding officer of my Reserve squad. Great guy. Great guy, great student. And one of my other guys from my squadron, they reset the wire on the USS Lexington [CV-16] improperly, and when he pulled the cable all the way out, it broke the wire and his airplane dribbled off the end, and he ejected and he landed in the mid-section in the front end of the boat and was dragged down by his chute, went down into the gun tub by the [inaudible] platform. Compound fracture of his arm, smashed his visor on the corner of the ship, blood everywhere, and the guy that I told you that he’d already ejected, jumped down and he said the gun tub was about 15 feet where the old World War II guns were on the Lexington, pulled them off the edge of the boat, and, of course, he had blood pouring out of his mouth. And so Lang thought he was dead, he said, “God, my God, he’s dead, he’s dead.” And Greg woke up and he goes—because he was knocked unconscious by the blow—he goes, “Does this mean I didn’t pass?”

STERN:                       [laughter] That’s a sense of perseverance.

HALLAM:                   And I said, “Shit.” And “did I do something wrong?” And he hadn’t done anything wrong at all. It wasn’t his fault. He’s a good friend of mine. He ended up being a Delta pilot, a real successful, funny guy, good pilot. Really a super, super guy.

STERN:                       What’s his last name?

HALLAM:                   Greg Hale. He’s not a Dartmouth guy. Yeah, Greg Hale. His call sign was “Ex”. Everybody’s got a call sign, so his was “Ex” for “exhale. But a good guy, great pilot. You know, and that’s the kind of stuff that happens to you, and just because you finished your training, you know, you’re going to be thrown right out there in the wolves. You might be in combat in another week.

STERN:                       So, what were the best and worst parts of the job?

HALLAM:                   Well, I liked it. I think the worst part about it was honestly in the end when I got out. I was staying in, and sometimes I regret that I didn’t stay in. But I don’t. But the one regret, because I would have loved to have been a commanding officer of an aircraft carrier, and I would have loved to have been a task force commander of a fleet task force. So, you know, I mean, talk about the ultimate challenge because, you know, the captain of the ship runs the ship, okay, that’s always a pilot. So, after you finish your flying tour and you’re advancing in the Navy, it’s unlike the Air Force, you quit flying airplanes and you start driving ships. They send you to ship school.

STERN:                       Really?

HALLAM:                   They send you to ship school and you learn how to drive a ship for two years, and then they give you a carrier and you get to drive it around. And you can fly the airplanes, too, if you want to every once in a while. And then when you’re the task force commander, that’s a two-star admiral, you not only have the aircraft carrier, but you got every ship and every Marine Corps amphibious group that goes with it, so that’s about 35,000 people. So that would be one carrier, one or two submarines, three or four cruisers, eight destroyers, and about 12 frigates and 4,000 Marines on their ships.

STERN:                       That’s a task force commander?

HALLAM:                   Yeah, that’s a two-star. And I’ve got several friends of mine who did do that, and it’s a very rewarding job. But, as you can imagine, it’s a 24/7. You know, it would be kind of like a Goldman Sachs experience, how’s that? You’re not going to get away from it, okay? You’re not going to get away from the job much. So, that’s, you know, that’s part of… And I think most people do get out of the military after their initial commitment because you’re young, you’re looking at starting a family, you look at the impediments to raising a family, and you’re able to get the support you need, and you’ll get married, and so you just go like, “Eh.” That’s the way it goes.

STERN:                       And were those the reasons that you left?

HALLAM:                   Yeah. Well, yes, and then, but I’m one of the more candid people. I got out because of the money. This is the end of the Jimmy Carter era, and they didn’t get paid—military people got paid shit, okay. When I left in 1980, which was a long time [inaudible], but it’s not that long ago, I’m working six days a week, training these guys to [inaudible]. I was making $28,000 was what I made that year. That’s it. Now, to give you the real numbers on that, my brother was a co-pilot for Southern Airlines, and was in the Air National Guard at the same time, so these are apples to apples, if you will. Okay, so I made $28,000 and I was working six days a week. He made $65,000 as a co-pilot and made another $15,000 as a Reservist. So he was making $80,000 and I was making 28. And I said, “That’s it.” [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       Unbelievable, yeah.

HALLAM:                   Enough of that bullshit. He’s just four years older than I am and he’s making three times as much, more than three times as much as I’m making? Forget this. [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       At least you’re honest about it.

HALLAM:                   Well. Well, you know what? Like I told my daughter, and I’m going to tell you this, too, because I enjoy this kind of parts of the conversation. My daughter’s not making shit as an assistant producer. And she says, “Well, I’m thinking maybe if this doesn’t work out, I’ll go into the Peace Corps.” I said, “Well, let me tell you one thing,” and my wife tells her daughter this, too, “It’s very important to do something rewarding that you believe in doing. Don’t…” [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       Sacrifice, yeah.

HALLAM:                   Okay? However, my daughter does like some of the finer things in life, whether she’s willing to admit it or not, and one day you’re going to wake up and go, I have busted my ass six days a week, 12 hours a day, and I can barely, I can only rent a place. And why am I doing that when friends of mine who are not working any harder than I am, have beautiful homes, they have great retirements, they don’t have the stress of trying to pay their bills? This is bullshit. Now, I’m being real candid. And that’s kind of how I feel about it. So, you know what? If you’re going to put the time in for work, you ought to do something that you enjoy doing, but you also ought to make sure it’s something you’re well compensated, because there’s more to life than what you do in your job.

STERN:                       So you left…

HALLAM:                   I left in 1980.

STERN:                       Okay, and then you were in the Reserves from then until 1999?

HALLAM:                   That’s correct.

STERN:                       And, so what were your responsibilities to the Navy during this period?

HALLAM:                   Okay. So, I was in the Reserve squadron here based at Jacksonville, Naval Air Station Cecil Field through the A-7. I had typical, you know, like I became a department head, which would be like a division of the squadron, that is like maintenance, operation, safety, administration, okay. And then I became the executive officer who was the second in command and I was the commanding officer of the squadron when we transitioned to the F-18 Hornet. And then from there, I got a job… So, that was, I was squadron commander in 1993, and then I went to the USS John F. Kennedy [CV-67] which became a Reserve carrier, so we had a lot of enlisted sailors on it that were Reservists. And, so I had 350 guys working for me in that, so that was in my second command.

And then my last tour was working for Admiral Greg Johnson on the USS Theodore Roosevelt [CVN-71] battle group. I was on the battle group staff at the end, and he was my instructor. He was my boss when I was a landing signal officer as an instructor during that ’78 to ’80 timeframe. Great guy. He ended up making four-star. He ended up being the head of the 6^th flight fleet. Personal friend. Great guy. Very model officer and human being. [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       And so, how long were these tours, or what did you call them?

HALLAM:                   Well, okay. So, here’s how it works in the Reserves. You probably don’t know this. Basically, it’s designed to be one weekend a month, and then a two week deployment in summer. So, you got that picture? But [inaudible] you can’t possibly do that. So, basically it appeals to like airline pilots, who typically have more flexible schedules and more total time off. So, from 1980 to 1999, I averaged three days off a month, or about 11, well, whatever period of time by the year’s, whatever. So, every free day that I had when I was back in Jacksonville I’d be at the squadron. I’d be flying a mission and doing whatever work, and then I’d go fly my airline job and, you know, and that just went on for a long period of time. So, that part was hard.

But that was like, you know, the ‘80s when the airline industry was very unstable, and no job security. That was a period of time we went through, you know, furlough from Air Florida; two, almost three bankruptcies at People Express; and another bankruptcy, one or two bankruptcies with Continental Airlines. You know, on and on and on. So you had no job security. And in the airlines there’s no lateral move. When you lose your job with a company and you start again somewhere else, you go to the very bottom like you just got out of college. So, people don’t move laterally. You just hope you made the right decision. And I… [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       So, the company…

HALLAM:                   Right. Now, I happened to get lucky because even though most of my career is pretty well stock in terms of pay and benefits and all that stuff, is that my last 10 years were really pretty good, because, you know, Continental did its turnaround, and then United bought Continental. So, I basically was a captain on the 737. I made captain in 11 months with People Express, and that was in 1984, and then they got bought by Continental, so basically out of my 33 years in the airlines I was a co-pilot for four of the years. So, that part I liked.

STERN:                       So, it was just one company was subsumed by another by another, pretty much?

HALLAM:                   Right, right. Yes, so People Express was bought by Continental and merged with them, and then Continental merged with United, and I retired off of United. So, it’s kind of how it went.

STERN:                       And did you ever consider leaving the aviation industry?

HALLAM:                   Oh, anybody who didn’t in those days would be a fool. My brother, Bill, who was an Eastern pilot, but he went through that and he went to Northwest, and then they had problems, too, he was going to start a lawn business instead of being an airline pilot. And I said it would be the stupidest decision he ever made. So…

STERN:                       So you thought about it, but…

HALLAM:                   No, he was pretty serious about it. He said, basically, “Fuck this. I’m not doing this anymore.” Excuse my language, but… Yeah, and then I said, “Well, you know what? Don’t be an idiot. Do something productively in life.” I said, “Stay with it. Take a leave of absence, whatever, but keep your seniority.” So he retired from Delta, so it worked out in the end. But, the airline business in 2018 has no resemblance to the ‘80s and ‘90s. Bankruptcy after bankruptcy. My brother, Tom, who was at Delta Airlines, basically lost everything, and that’s why he went to Afghanistan, I mean to Ethiopia, because he retired early to protect his retirement, but it was cut in half and, you know, so he was like 57 years old, no job, no money. He made some poor decisions himself because he had been making huge money at Delta, so he bought a massive home in Massachusetts where he had a $9,000 a month mortgage, and then Delta basically forced him to retire because he was going to lose like a $3 million retirement. So, he had to figure out what he was going to do to support his mortgage. And I thought his choices there were stupid. But, that’s how… It was very tumultuous, and it explains part of the reason why I stayed in the Reserves as long as I did, kind of to hedge my bets, because I knew I could pretty much go full-time. But, if I had made admiral, [inaudible] pretty much full-time, you know, like an… [both talk at the same time] So, it was partly a defensive measure. I said hey, I have some friends who really made a stupid decision and left the Reserves after 16 years, and in the process they gave up a retirement and full medical benefits, which start at age 60 in the Reserves. So I have a retirement for me, I have medical benefits culminating as a result, because I put in 28 years. So…

STERN:                       Okay. And where did you fly… [both talk at the same time]

HALLAM:                   …been very good to me.

STERN:                       I’m glad. You deserve it.

HALLAM:                   Oh, just say, I earned it is probably better. So, where did I fly commercially?

STERN:                       Yeah, where did you fly commercially and what were the advantages and disadvantages of being a commercial airline pilot?

HALLAM:                   I loved flying commercial. I love everything about aviation. I like commercial just as much as I like military aviation. I’m not like some of my brothers and contemporaries who get stuck in one thing their whole life. I thought it very challenging. I was an instructor. Basically I stayed on the 737 for all these years. From basically 1981 to about 2017, I flew the 737. But you know Southwest, that’s all they fly. So, as an example, it’s not that unusual. It’s the most popular… And I was an instructor on the airplane, but that was another reason why. And then, I had the opportunity because of the merger before I retired to fly the Boeing 787, which was what I retired off of, which is the most modern and advanced aircraft in the world… [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       Yeah, I saw in your resume.

HALLAM:                   It’s the most magnificent piece of machinery you could ever imagine. I was very honored. It’s a $280 million aircraft. God, it’s fun flying it, yeah. And it has the same composite materials as the road bikes in the whole thing, which is quite an engineering feat. You know, nobody’s quite done that yet, but Boeing is the only one to have done that.

STERN:                       Which are lightweight or what’s very unique about the material?

HALLAM:                   Yeah. It’s just like a carbon bike. It’s a carbon airplane. Imagine building a carbon airplane that holds 300 people. It burns about 40%... [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       Mindboggling.

HALLAM:                   Yes. It’s 40% less fuels than its counterpart. I was lucky enough and had the opportunity to fly non-stop maintenance ferries because Boeing has a periodic maintenance facility in Shanghai, so I flew a 787 non-stop from Houston, Texas, to Shanghai, China. And it was 16 hours and 28 minutes non-stop.

STERN:                       Is that the longest flight you’ve flown?

HALLAM:                   Oh, yeah, that’s the limits of that aircraft. I mean, that’s about as far as you can fly. So, that’s about, I think it’s 7,800 miles or more, which is pretty impressive. So it was a fun flight.

STERN:                       And since I… [both talk at the same time]

HALLAM:                   Yeah, I enjoyed, I really thoroughly enjoyed flying commercially. I loved working with the crews. I liked teaching people how to fly airplanes. I think my experience as a naval aviator—and I credit the people who taught me and the things I learned. And I learned as much from the guys who flew strictly civilian who, you know, really had a harder row to make because a lot of the military guys coming in could be lazy and sloppy, believe it or not, because guess what? They didn’t have to pay for the training. You know, you can’t even imagine how much stress a simulated check ride is with the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] because you don’t get very many opportunities to train or practice on those. And it’s not a no jeopardy environment. It’s a jeopardy environment. You know, you fail your check ride because you do something stupid like shut down a wrong engine or, you know, crash the airplane in the simulator, which happened all the time, and guess what? You could be put under an FAA training program where they examine whether you’re safe to fly as a commercial airline pilot. And people do lose their jobs. So, it’s very stressful, that part of it. So…

STERN:                       And since August 2016 you’ve worked as a consultant for the Afghan Air Force. Could you talk about the shift… [both talk at the same time]

HALLAM:                   Yes. Well, what happened was my wife said, “You cannot be retired while I’m still working.” So I said, “Okay, I can do that.” And she said, “Well, what are you gonna do?” I said, “Ah, I don’t know.” And I had an opportunity to be like a simulator instructor on the 737 or do something like that, but honestly, the pay is not very good, okay, because there’s lots of retired airline pilots who would like to do just that, and so, all of the airlines have pretty much subcontracted that out to small companies to do that, and hire these retired pilots. You know, they work their ass off and it’s rewarding, but it’s kind of like, it’s almost like volunteer work, if you will. So I wasn’t real excited about that, so my wife saw the article from Merlin Global Services and they said they were looking for somebody to train the Afghan pilots. Now, I can’t fly the airplane, okay. I mean, I could, but I’m not permitted to fly the aircraft, because I… [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       And what type of aircraft?

HALLAM:                   It’s called the A-29 Super Tucano aircraft. It’s a Brazilian aircraft made by Amber Air that’s been modified by an American joint venture, and supported by the US Air Force for the Afghan Air Force to operate against the Taliban. So, what does the aircraft look like? You can look it up, but it looks like a—are you familiar with a World War II aircraft like a P-51 Mustang?

STERN:                       Yes.

HALLAM:                   So, it looks almost exactly—it’s almost the same size and performances, the P-51 Mustang. But instead of a conventional engine, it has a turbo prop engine, so it’s a jet engine attached to a prop. And it has extremely modern electronics in it, so the technology is very sophisticated. So it’s a very extremely accurate bomber. You couldn’t do it in an environment where people could shoot you down. But they don’t operate in that kind of environment. You understand what I’m saying?

STERN:                       Yeah.

HALLAM:                   It’s like there’s no anti-aircraft fire by the Taliban or anything like that. So, it’s a very permissive air space. And it’s kind of an experimental program which I think it has turned out to be successful beyond anybody’s expectations. And I would like to comment further than that, but I probably can’t. So, all I’ll say is it’s been a very successful weapon against the Taliban.

STERN:                       And is that aircraft used by other countries, as well?

HALLAM:                   Yes, yes. About 8 or 10 countries that do. And the Air Force is actively looking at it to purchase 300 of them, and I think they probably will, not for the kind of environment that we operate in, but what they anticipate is more examples of where you have permissive air spaces. You might need—for example, what might be a good example is the Philippines against the rebel insurgents. It would be a good weapon against them, and they have used it. The Philippines has the aircraft. So, does that make sense?

STERN:                       So, it’s a good weapon for insurgency?

HALLAM:                   Yes. For example, the Colombians use it. They use it against the FARC [Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia].

STERN:                       Okay. And how has Afghanistan… [both talk at the same time] I’m sorry. How has Afghanistan changed in the two years since you’ve been working there?

HALLAM:                   Mixed bag, as you would expect. I’d say some positives, some negatives. I’d say, ah, I have to be careful about that. I’d say I’m very impressed by the people who share our Western values and are working really hard to create the kind of society that we take for granted. And, so I, without hesitation, I’d say that’s the big plus. The big negative is that they have a very limited infrastructure. They have very limited resources. And again, I have to be cautious how I talk about this in detail because some of this stuff is kind of, you know, sensitive information. But, what I’ve said so far is not that sensitive, I don’t think. You know, is that they’re trying to do the best they can with the limited resources they have, but when there is limited resources, there’s a lot of institutional infighting on where the priorities are. And I think there is a certain amount, and even they would admit this, so I can say this, a certain amount of dependency that, you know… But, the leadership of the Air Force guys, they are without question some of the finest officers I’ve ever worked with, really tremendous, tremendous human beings and officers. And they care about the people in Afghanistan. They struck a very delicate balance between helping but not allowing the Afghans to be overly dependent, and navigate a very, very delicate diplomatic and political and military profile to help them succeed. [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       And are you exclusively training Afghan officers, or also pilots working for Resolute Support in the NATO mission? [both talk at the same time]

HALLAM:                   Okay, I do assist the Air Force guys in maintaining their currency on their training. Okay, that is, you know, periodic training for emergency procedures and instrument training and things like that. So, I’m not an evaluator for the Air Force. I’m not really an evaluator for the Afghans either, okay, so I don’t even evaluate them and make decisions about yes, no. But I do give input to people who can make that decision when I see that there are issues that come up. I haven’t seen it. So it’s really been a pretty strong group all across the board.

STERN:                       And are you generally supportive of the NATO mission collaborating with the Afghans to provide training, advice and support?

HALLAM:                   Without a question, without hesitation. Without a doubt.

STERN:                       So, what are we doing well and what could we be doing better?

HALLAM:                   Well, I have to be careful about what I say about what I think we could do better, but I can make some comments on it. Okay, what we do well is that we’ve established a good relationship with the Afghans, we’re really helping them become more independent, become more self-sufficient, to understand the expectations, and to consistently deliver those expectations, and that’s being done, extremely well done. And so, the areas where obviously I would have to say in the context is that there is always a suspicion among our allies that the US will cut and run whenever there’s a change in the political climate. And so, they’re a little more wary about the Resolute [inaudible] mission. Now it’s called Resolute Support. I think they have some questions about how resolute Americans or, and particularly NATO is. And, you know, I don’t think that’s an issue. I really don’t.

I’m very impressed how some of the newer members of NATO or associate members of NATO, how very deeply entrenched they are in being successful there and working hard. I’m talking about like the Romanians, the Macedonians, the… Most of the Eastern European people are very, are super excited about it and contributing. Not to say that the other allies are less so, but especially for the Poles and the people from Bosnia and Herzegovina and stuff like that, they’re deeply committed to making a difference and helping out. Because they do believe—and they have their self-interests and I understand that. Because I think they think Americans really underestimate the Russian threat in Eastern Europe, and they know they’re right there on the front line, and that we could go back to the Cold War if things should devolve. So, yeah, they’re pretty much, they’re really focused on this mission and doing well. And they’re doing a good job.

STERN:                       Thank you. So, the last thing I just wanted to touch on was, if you don’t mind, talking a little bit about your personal life and your family, your children?

HALLAM:                   Yep. Well, like I said, in 2006 I got divorced. 2006 was a bad year. And there was a lot of reasons behind that. But I’m leading up to the good part of the story, but… And my dad died that year, so that was not a good year.

STERN:                       Sorry.

HALLAM:                   And, no, no, you have to let go sometimes. So, in any event, I actually met my current wife through a dating service, “It’s Just Lunch.” And so, we were both each other’s sixth date—and you’ll have to look online about how it goes, but basically they give you 16 dates, and you meet at an agreed location. You don’t even see a picture of the person. You have no idea. You’ve got a maître d’ that sits you at a table as a total stranger. But, so what they did that was pretty smart about it was, the reason they didn’t do that is because especially men are very visual and they have very fixed ideas of what they’re looking for in a woman, so they don’t want you to know what the person looks like. They want you to meet them first and see how it goes. And, of course… [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       So, did you know anything about her?

HALLAM:                   You know about their backgrounds. It said Debbie’s a nurse and she’s graduated from the University of Louisville, she works in Tricare, which is the military health care system, she is very athletic, and blah, blah, blah, you know, that kind of stuff. But, and then she got the word, oh, he’s a pilot, you know, he’s 5’11”, he’s athletic, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

STERN:                       Right. Basic interests and background.

HALLAM:                   Yeah. And then, so, of course, she had certain stereotypes and said, Okay, he’s a pilot. Doesn’t mean he’s gonna be an asshole. [laughter] So I laughed at that. And then, of course, I stepped on her toes, because she said, “Well, am I your type?” It was on the first date. “Oh,” I said, “well, I mean, I wouldn’t say you’re exactly my type but I find you intriguing.” Ah, I never heard the end of that one ever since, and that’s okay. It is what it is. But anyway, so we just finished our 10^th anniversary very happily married. Never had the fights in my first marriage that I’ve had with her, but things that are worth fighting for are worth fighting for. So, we’ve had some knock down drag outs, and she’s very strong willed. Her dad’s a—or was a retired—I’m sorry, a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve. Her brother’s a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve. So, she’s more masculine than most women. And I’m the left wing liberal in the family. And she’s the most disciplined and intelligent person I’ve ever known, ever met. So…

STERN:                       That’s wonderful.

HALLAM:                   Yeah, she’s done a lot of really interesting stuff. She’s in the mental health component of health care. She works for basically a Blue Cross, Blue Shield type company that subcontracted mental health issues here, and it’s a challenging job for her. She ran the largest forensic psychiatric facility for juveniles in Kentucky when she was living there, who were murderers and all the rest. So, she’s…

STERN:                       Where is she from?

HALLAM:                   Louisville, Kentucky. And so, she… Well, her first child had major—I don’t even know all the details—major defects, and spent 39 months in intensive care, then died. And then, she, of course, had a normal—her oldest daughter is—her daughter is the youngest principal in the state of Florida. She runs Jacksonville Beach Elementary School. She’s got two master’s degrees, and is just a really sharp, sharp girl. And then her son from the first marriage is the most brilliant and special human being I’ve known, and I’m only going to say this because, oh, she gets mad when I talk about this stuff because of what he’s accomplished. He’s about to complete his Ph.D. in biochemistry working on quantum mechanics of circuitries.

STERN:                       You have the right to brag.

HALLAM:                   He’s 100% blind.

STERN:                       Oh, my God. That’s incredible.

HALLAM:                   He lost his first eye at two years old, and then went completely blind his sophomore year in high school. And has never complained about anything. And he’s totally independent, and he’s my role model. He’s the most impressive, to say the least… You know, my wife’s IQ is north of 180. His is well north of 200. He’s just, he is off the charts. So, he’s getting his Ph.D. at BU now, Boston University, and completes that this August. But, and he’s a proud Florida State Seminole. [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       And then you have three children of your own?

HALLAM:                   Yep. My oldest son works for AT&T, is a video engineer, and he lives in Knoxville [TN].

STERN:                       What’s his name?

HALLAM:                   It’s Philip Glendon Hallam III, named after my dad. And his son, his oldest son, is Philip Glendon Hallam IV. But anyways… [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       Keeping it in the family.

HALLAM:                   Well, what was really funny about my son is that, you know, as a subtext, is that he clearly had Asperger’s, or he’s on the autistic spectrum, and it was really very challenging raising him, because he had really what you would almost describe as learning disabilities, but he doesn’t really have a learning disability. It really is more his autism spectrum, and which was not defined at that time. So, my ex-wife and I made a decision—I pushed it to a certain degree, because he was diagnosed as having ADHD, so I sent him to military school, boarding school, in 8^th grade and he stayed there until he graduated from high school. And it made a world of difference for him. And he hated every minute of it. Yeah, he hated every minute of it. To me he said, “Dad, I hated every minute of it, but I’m really happy that you made that decision, because I wouldn’t be where I am today if you hadn’t done that for me.” Because he couldn’t handle public school, couldn’t handle private school. He would have just been floundering.

But, he had never—to show you kind of how his little awkwardness is that, he said he had never been on a date all the way until he was like 24 years old, okay. I mean, that shy and awkward. And he calls me up and says, “Hey, Dad, I’ve got a real steady girlfriend. I want you to meet her.” And I went, “Oh, my God, what is this gonna be?” I’ll be real honest. And he met the sweetest girl. She’s from Tennessee. She’s a [University of] Tennessee graduate, and just a really wonderful young lady, and they got married and they got two kids. And so, he’s up in Knoxville and is doing well.

STERN:                       Great. Success story.

HALLAM:                   And then, my oldest daughter is, you know, graduated from Dartmouth in ’09, and works… [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       And her name is Molly?

HALLAM:                   Molly, yeah. Mary Louise, but she goes by Molly. And she’s class of ’09. And she works for Alain Goldman, (A-l-a-i-n) Goldman, who’s a French producer, produced did La Vie en Rose, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in the ‘90s. And she [inaudible]. She just produced her first film which should be released shortly. The name of the film is Mustang. It’s got Bruce Dern in it and a famous Belgian actor who I don’t know his name because he was not famous to me, but…

STERN:                       And what did she major in at Dartmouth?

HALLAM:                   French.

STERN:                       Right. You had said that, I’m sorry. [both talk at the same time]

HALLAM:                   Yeah, yeah, it was really funny, because I took her up there when she was trying to decide and I don’t think she was committed to going there. And I knew she had studied in Lyon [France]. An A-7 exchange pilot from the French Naval Aviation force, his daughter, he sent her over to the United States so she’d learn English and all that stuff, and she became good friends with my daughter. So, her sophomore year in high school, their family invited Molly to study in France for the year. Well, she stayed for a semester and it was a little too much for her to do the whole year, but she went to a completely French school. Nobody spoke English at all. And she got—I remember her saying, and she was like in tears, she said, “I can’t even understand this Voltaire guy.” She was reading Voltaire in her sophomore year in high school, and in archaic French. She said, “I thought I knew French…” [both talk at the same]

STERN:                       Yeah, no wonder.

HALLAM:                   “I don’t know anything.” Yeah, so, but anyway, so, yeah, so I took her up there when she was looking at Dartmouth. And, of course, I knew John Rassias pretty well, because I’d done his Spanish program. And, of course, with the Romania program we got to know each other even better. So, you know, I hadn’t seen John in 25 years, and I said, “Hey, John, my daughter’s interested in going to Dartmouth.” I said, “Could I come by your office and chat with you and introduce you?” Okay, that’s all I expected. And he said, “Oh, I got stuff going on,” blah, blah, blah, blah. “What are you doing Sunday?” I said, “We’re not leaving until Monday.” “Okay, well, how about 2:00 on Sunday?” So we went by 2:00 on Sunday, and he sat with my daughter for four hours, personally. And [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       Wow. Yeah, I never had the opportunity to meet him, obviously, but…

HALLAM:                   Oh, yeah, he was just a brilliant and just the most magnificent, one of the most magnificent human beings I know. I never took a course from him because I didn’t French or Greek, so, but I, of course, ran into him because I did a lot of language stuff. And then my youngest daughter is right here in Jacksonville. She’s a graduate of the Wilkes Honor School [Wilkes Honors College] of Florida Atlantic University. And we have a more problematic relationship because of my divorce. She’s a little more attached to her mom, so we’re not really very close. Sadly, we’re not as close as I’d like to be, but the door’s been left open. How’s that?

STERN:                       Always something to look forward to, to work towards.

HALLAM:                   Eh, it’s good. You know, it’s one of those [inaudible]. It needs to be on her schedule and not something that I try to force, because, you know, it’s probably better that way. So, that’s pretty well everybody.

STERN:                       And that’s Georgeann?

HALLAM:                   Her name is Georgeann. Yeah. And she’s a good girl. So, what are my plans? Well, I’m planning to work for about two more years, unless—you know, they keep wanting me to do stuff, and I don’t know how much more I want to work, but obviously I think they’re pretty happy with the job I’m doing over in Afghanistan, and they keep thinking they might try to get me to do other things, and I would entertain that in the right place. But, I think what we’re looking at…

STERN:                       Who’s “they”?

HALLAM:                   Oh, my company, Merlin Global Services. It’s a defense contractor. They subcontract to Sierra Nevada Corporation, which is the contractor that works with them on the A-29. So, Merlin works pretty closely with them. But, Merlin’s more involved in really, really, really, really, really deep stuff I can’t even talk about, okay, real black ops stuff. Yeah, so, I can tell you they do a lot of UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] stuff, you know, so they’re real big in that. But, they’re really a great company to work for. I love the people [inaudible], brilliant, brilliant people, really knowledgeable, you know, just great people. And I’m really pleased by that.

So, but my long-term plan? I think my wife and I are going to sell our place in Florida and buy a downtown apartment in Barcelona, and move there for my retirement.

STERN:                       Wow. Use your Spanish again. Or I guess Catalan, but pick that up. [laughter]

HALLAM:                   Yeah, you know, well, I’ve been studying a little Catalan, but it’s not—I don’t know if it’s going to be that difficult to master, but everybody speaks Spanish there. It’s really easy to get around just on Spanish. And I started really thinking about it, gotta jump into the Catalan, but I go, ah, I’m not sure if it’s really worth the effort. But, we just came back from there. It’s a great city, just… [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       Lots of energy.

HALLAM:                   Ah, it’s so, it’s such a positive place, and the food’s terrific. And it’s basically, it’s like a—right now, and of course, these things change—it’s like a mini Paris. It’s like Paris at half the cost. If money were no object, I’d go to Paris.

STERN:                       Does your wife speak any Spanish?

HALLAM:                   No, but she’s real excited. She wants to go more than I do.

STERN:                       Oh, her idea or yours?

HALLAM:                   No. She wants to go to Barcelona more than I do even. She’s very excited about it, yeah. So, we’re just trying to figure out how to do it, because it’s still quite expensive. It’s not as cheap as US to get in, but we’re trying to make it happen. We’ll probably live in one of those little tiny homes, like, you know, 700 square feet, which is fine by me. I don’t really care. [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       Just the two of you, yeah.

HALLAM:                   Well, the whole idea is not—you know, kind of like when I searched for my condo here, we took a global perspective and we shrank it down, okay. So, where do you want to live in the world? Okay, and that included France, Italy, Greece, Spain, Argentina, you know, and a few other places, Chile even. All right, then, what city? Well, okay, Paris, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Thessaloniki maybe, and then Lisbon. Okay, that’s probably a pretty good cross-section. And then it was like, ah…

Oh, and Mallorca, because when I was in the Navy, I had decided back in 1978 that I wanted to retire in Palma de Mallorca, and I still would. The old town there is absolutely unbelievable. It’s breathtaking. The most beautiful place on earth. And she had never been there. I took her this time on this cruise we went on. And she said, “You’ve been really talking this up.” She said, “My God,” she said, “this place is even more beautiful than you described.” And it is. I would say it’s the most beautiful place on earth. If I were to pick one spot on earth and say that, you know, it has it all, and it has absolutely it all. The fantastic weather, great culture, beautiful beaches, diversity, things to do, food, everything. It’s really special.

But, Barcelona’s even a step beyond that because you’ve got the port, you’ve got the airport, getting around all of Europe is a lot easier, and it’s just, it’s really… it’s just, no, it’s really a—and it’s really, really hot right now. That is, I mean it’s really very dynamic. There’s a lot, lot going on. You know, their big thing now is they’re pushing the Sagrada Familia, which they’re going to finish here in 2026. And you go in that place, I’ve never seen anything like it.

STERN:                       Breathtaking.

HALLAM:                   No, it’s beyond breathtaking. The pictures, you can’t imagine. The columns in the interior are 500 feet tall, a single column. It’s just…

STERN:                       It’s been under construction for how many years now? A long time.

HALLAM:                   It’ll be the 100^th anniversary. Yeah, so anyway, so that’s kind of symbolic representative cities, that they have big aspirations and big vision, and they’re extremely artistic, and they’re very proud of their heritage, and it’s very, very cultured, but it’s got good weather. [laughter] [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       Yeah, it sounds like you’re a warm weather fan.

HALLAM:                   I couldn’t live in London, sorry. The food’s terrible and the weather’s worse.

STERN:                       I was there this fall. I was there in the government foreign study program.

HALLAM:                   The food’s terrible and the weather’s…

STERN:                       It’s gotten better. [laughter] So, you’ve been…

HALLAM:                   No. You know, and I love what I did and the English [inaudible] in about four years, and I spent a lot of time there. And it’s really quaint and it’s cute. Oh, their style’s horrible, their apartments are dreadful, the prices are ridiculous. Really, you go like, Ah, Honestly, the older I get, the mystery to me is how the English won the war. And you have to blame God for that, because if the Armada hadn’t been sunk, and they had successfully invaded England, it would be a totally different world that we live in. And I joke about that because honestly, I know Spain’s got its issues there, but in terms of culture, food, and everything else, they’ve got it hands down over the English. Honestly. I spent a lot of time in London. But, you know, events transpire the way they do. And that’s the way it is. Just like, my daughter and I are talking about, think about this, consider this: “Why do you never see French people traveling anywhere?” Have you noticed that? The French don’t travel. You don’t see them anywhere in Europe. [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       What’s the answer?

HALLAM:                   Well, why would you go anywhere else? Where else would you want to be? Okay, you might go down to Italy and go to Tuscany, maybe. But Tuscany doesn’t have anything that the French didn’t have. Between the Loire Valley and Bordeaux and the Alps and the beaches and Cote d'Azur and all, would [inaudible]? It’s convenient, it’s cheap, you speak the language, and there’s nothing better. They have the best wine, the best food, the best culture, the best everything in the world. Why would you go anywhere else? [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       Well, I guess it’s a matter of perspective. [laughter]

HALLAM:                   No, I know, I know, I know I’m [inaudible].  So, nah, if I can pick one country that’s to live in the world? And honestly, I would either pick to be in Italy or France. And Spain’s not far behind. I like Spain. [both talk at the same time]

STERN:                       No, you’ll be close by.

HALLAM:                   And I like the warm weather. So anyways…

STERN:                       So, you have been more than generous with your time. But before we conclude, I just want you to know… Is there anything else you want to add, recollections on? Navy ROTC, your military service, or time thereafter?

HALLAM:                   No. I think we’ve covered it. I said, you know, I love Dartmouth. I will end on this note, that I think after the discussion you understand maybe why I believe that Dartmouth and the Navy were the two most powerful influences on shaping the person I am today, none more than the other. And so I give a lot of credit to Dartmouth for being who I am, but I likewise say the same about the Navy. So, I wouldn’t change a thing. I’ve been very, very blessed.

STERN:                       Thank you. It’s been a pleasure, and we’ll be in touch.

HALLAM:                   Stay in touch.

STERN:                       Thank you.

HALLAM:                   Bye.

[End of Interview.]