When he finished at MIT, he knew he was going to Vietnam. It was the only assignment in his career he didn’t get to pick. But he didn’t mind going. He realized how terrorized the South Vietnamese people were. Much controversy surrounded America’s involvement there, but Brown saw it as a simple question of helping his neighbor. He knew the atrocities that the Viet Cong soldiers were inflicting on innocent villagers.
Brown was stationed at Cu Chi, thirty-five miles northwest of Saigon. But the Army didn’t know what to do with a Ph.D. in the middle of Vietnam. Brown had little actual experience in the Ordnance Corps because he had been going to school. They scratched their heads and ended up giving him a staff position—being a Division Material Officer.
When Brown reported to his unit, the Colonel commanding his brigade interviewed him. The Colonel looked up after reading Brown’s record. “I have never in my life seen anyone so ill-prepared to take the job you’ve got!” he said, unable to hide his disgust. “You have no experience at all. I can’t understand why you were sent here. Brown, you better hit the ground running hard!”
Brown did his job well, and this Colonel quickly became one of his biggest supporters. As the Division Material Officer, Brown had five captains and several other men working for him. Their job was to make sure that all the equipment of the division worked. They had to keep everything in repair—tanks, rifles, artillery, helicopters, radar, and radios. And they had to coordinate getting replacement parts shipped over so that few pieces of equipment would be sidelined for a lack of spare parts.
One morning, the division commander called him in and showed him a dozen muddy rifles on the floor. “We had a patrol out last night. They were ambushed, and eight men were killed because their rifles did not work. This is happening all over Vietnam. Fix this problem, Brown!”
And so Brown, the cadet who had trouble taking a rifle apart, would have to identify the problem. He did a lot of testing. He found that the rifle was actually a good weapon, but different cleaning techniques were needed. Brown conducted dozens of classes for key maintenance people who then taught their soldiers these cleaning techniques. Reports of jammed rifles ceased.
Each day there were new problems for Brown to solve. He found that Vietnam was a demanding assignment. The first several months he got four hours of sleep a night and ended up in the hospital with pneumonia. While recuperating, he noticed what an outstanding hospital they had—much like the M.A.S.H. unit that was popularized by the television series. These doctors and dentists are usually underutilized, Brown thought. Why not use them to help the local people?
He mentioned it to his boss who was enthusiastic about the idea. So, every Wednesday that year, Brown gathered a group of doctors and several soldiers for security, and they headed down the road to the village of Phouc Hiep.3
At night the Viet Cong terrorized this village. The village chief had to sleep in a different bed every night because he was never safe. His son had been killed one night—his throat slit while he was sleeping in bed.
Only one young man in the village spoke English, a grade school teacher named Lam Van Hai. (In Vietnam, the names run backwards, so his first name was “Hai.”) The villagers looked forward to the weekly visit from the Americans, and Hai, Brown’s translator, organized little programs for the kids to perform for the soldiers. Hai and Brown became friends, and Peggy wrote several letters to Hai so that he could practice his English.
One day the doctors were busy with other patients and asked Brown to help a little girl with a fever. “Here, take this little girl and give her a cold bath,” a doctor said. Brown picked her up and gently lowered her into the cool water. She screamed, and her cry sounded just like his daughter’s when he had given her a cool bath for a fever. As he held this little girl, he thought, We are just like these people. We laugh alike, and we cry alike.
As Brown got to know the Vietnamese people, he came to love them. He saw that racial distinctions were artificial. He realized that there is only one race—the human race.4 And he found that the stereotypes about Southeast Asians were false. It was completely false that they thought life was cheap, that they somehow didn’t hurt as much as we did when one of their own died.