Oral History Center University of California The Bancroft Library … · 2020. 9. 21. · Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley ii Since 1954

Oral History Center University of California

The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

Randy Rowland

Randy Rowland: A Life of Resistance and The Presidio 27

The Presidio Trust Oral History Project

The Presidio 27

Interviews conducted by

Barbara Berglund Sokolov

in 2018

Copyright © 2020 by The Regents of the University of California

Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley ii

Since 1954 the Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library, formerly the Regional Oral History

Office, has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in

the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of

collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand

knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of

preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The recording is transcribed, lightly edited

for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound

with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University

of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary

material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events.

It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is

reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

*********************************

All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents

of the University of California and Randy Rowland dated October 10, 2018. The

manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in

the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library

of the University of California, Berkeley. Excerpts up to 1,000 words from this

interview may be quoted for publication without seeking permission as long as the

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Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to The

Bancroft Library, Head of Public Services, Mail Code 6000, University of

California, Berkeley, 94720-6000, and should follow instructions available online

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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Randy Rowland, “Randy Rowland: A Life of Resistance and The Presidio

27” conducted by Barbara Berglund Sokolov in 2018, Oral History Center,

The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2020.

http://ucblib.link/OHC-rights

Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley iii

Randy Rowland, 2018

Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley iv

Abstract

Randy Rowland was part of the Presidio 27 Mutiny on October 14, 1968. He was born in 1947 in

St. Louis, Missouri. He moved to Alabama after his parents divorced, where he graduated from

high school before becoming an Army medic. In this interview, Rowland discusses his early life,

education, joining the military, becoming a conscientious objector, his time in the Stockade at

the Presidio, and his involvement in the Presidio 27 Mutiny, as well as how this action impacted

his life.

Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley v

Table of Contents

Presidio Trust Oral History Project History vii

Interview 1: October 9, 2018

Hour 1 1

Born on January 28, 1947 in St Louis, Missouri — Growing up in family housing

during the Korean War — Parents divorce at a young age — Father’s work as a

nuclear chemist — Adolescent experience with chemistry sets — Memory of

father’s assistant, Fred — Father’s pride in America — Childhood confusion over

who was the “good guy” in the war — Moving to Montgomery — Subpar

education and lifestyle in Montgomery — Prevalent segregation in Alabama —

Specific recollections of racist events in community — Community reaction to

JFK assassination — High school graduation — First experiences with narcolepsy

— First attempt at college — Enlistment in the military — Experience with a

banjo — First antiwar demonstration — Characteristic differences between youth

at the time — Thoughts and decisions around joining the military — Training to

be an occupational therapist — Family opinions on Rowland joining the army —

What Rowland liked about the military — Training to be a medic —

Conscientious objectors

Hour 2 25

Recount of horrific cases while working as a medic in the army — Recreational

smoking in college — Wanting to grow a mustache — Finding loopholes in

military regulations — Learning about Individuals Against Crimes of Silence —

Being accused of passing out anti-military literature — Having to figure out for

himself his opinion on the war — Conversation that occurred between other GIs

and medics — Role of marijuana on the base — How music influenced thought

and behavior at this time


Hour 1 37

Conscientious objector application — Denial of application — Orders to train and

prepare for Vietnam — Response to the officer that told him he would never be

called for combat — First day of training at the firing range — Refusing an order

to pick up a gun — Being confined to the barracks — Poor pay from the army,

leading to the brink of starvation — Move from Tacoma to the Bay Area —

Family’s reaction to going AWOL — Decision to go AWOL upon seeing the

violence of antiwar demonstrations in Berkeley — Recollections of the 1968

Democratic Convention — Influence of other protestors, such as the Fort Hood 3

— Participation in demonstrations in Berkeley — Running from the police and

leaving the Bay Area — Singing duo Sam and Dave — Losing and finding dog,

Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley vi

Time — Return to the Bay Area after 45-day AWOL period was up — Keith

Mather and the Nine for Peace — Finding out about more horrors of the role of

the United States in Vietnam — Moving in with the Farnhams — Mother turning

in the Auerbachs

Hour 2 58

Shooting of Richard Bunch — Beginning of planning the sit-down — Why the

stockade was called “trap door to Leavenworth” — Not expecting many people to

participate in the sit-in — Planning the logistics of the sit-in — How the sit-in

happened — Disappointment in the press not showing up — Being arrested after

the sit-in — Feelings of relief and accomplishment after the demonstration — All

protestors being moved into the maximum security cell block — Escape of

Mather, Pawlowski, and Blake — Realization of being charged with mutiny —

Hallinan’s court strategy — Pleading insanity in court — The Article 32 hearing

— Rowland’s sentence — Reflecting on the events after fifty years — How these

events changed America — The stockade, pacifism, communism, Leavenworth,

and Maoism — Hope for what the public will take away from the story of the

Presidio 27 — Obligation to tell the story — The museum of the resistance in

Berlin

Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley vii

Presidio Trust Oral History Project History

The Presidio of San Francisco is a new kind of national park. It is home to the spectacular vistas,

nature, and programs that visitors would expect, as well as a community of residents and

organizations who bring renewed vitality and purpose to this former military post. The Presidio

Trust is an innovative federal agency created to save the Presidio and share it with the public.

The Presidio Trust Oral History Project captures new layers of the history of the Presidio. The

project complements ongoing archaeological research and fulfills historic preservation

obligations through interviews with people associated with the Presidio of San Francisco, for

example: former soldiers, nurses, doctors, civilian workers, military families, descendants of

Californios and Native Californians; environmental groups; and Presidio Trust and National Park

Service employees. The interviews capture a range of experiences, including the legacies of

colonialism, stories of service and sacrifice, the role of the Presidio in a range of global conflicts,

everyday life on the post, and of how this post became a park. The Presidio Trust and the Oral

History Center have embarked on a multiyear collaboration to produce these oral histories.

The goals of the Presidio Trust Oral History Project/Presidio are twofold. First, to create new

knowledge about life on the post during peacetime, as well as during global conflicts, that

illuminates the diversity of experiences and the multiplicity of voices that is the essence of

Presidio history. And second, to share this knowledge with the public in ways that leverage the

power of first-person narratives to allow people to see themselves reflected in the Presidio’s past

so they feel connected to its present. The kinds of questions we seek to answer include: “How

can the Presidio’s military legacy inform our national intentions?” and “How can examining the

cultural mosaic of people living in and around the Presidio shape our understanding of the

nation?”

The Presidio 27

On October 14, 1968, 27 prisoners in the Presidio Stockade broke ranks during roll call

formation, sat down in a circle in the grassy yard, joined arms, sang We Shall Overcome, and

asked to present a list of demands to the stockade commander that addressed the treatment of

fellow prisoners and the conditions inside. Just days before a guard had shot and killed a

prisoner, and GIs had taken to the streets of San Francisco in massive demonstrations against the

war that came right up to the Presidio’s gates — the first anti-war marches organized by GIs and

veterans in the nation. For staging this peaceful protest, amidst the heightened tensions of a

country increasingly divided over the Vietnam War, the Army tried the 27 for mutiny, the most

serious military offense. The actions of the 27 and their subsequent trials made headlines,

shocked the Army and the nation, brought the GI movement onto the national stage, inspired the

anti-war movement, catalyzed improvements in US military prisons around the world, and

ultimately helped to end the Vietnam War.

In 1968, as more and more soldiers began questioning the Vietnam War, going AWOL (absent

without leave) and deserting the military, many flocked to San Francisco’s counterculture. Those

who turned themselves in or were picked up by authorities were brought to the Presidio, the

nearest Army post, and held in the stockade. As its population swelled to nearly twice what it

was designed to hold, stockade conditions became increasingly chaotic and overcrowded, a

Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley viii

ticking time bomb. The average age of the Presidio 27 was nineteen and all were AWOLs. Most

were from working-class backgrounds, some came from career military families, and only five

had finished high school. Their convictions for mutiny came with sentences ranging from six

months to sixteen years. Years later — and only after great personal hardship and sacrifice on the

part of the Presidio 27, including years spent in federal prison — the military overturned their

convictions on appeal and reduced their sentences. In the end, the appeals judge found that rather

than intending to usurp or override lawful military authority, requirements for the charge of

mutiny, the Presidio 27, in reading their demands to their commanding officers, were actually

invoking and imploring the very military authority they had been charged with seeking to

override.

Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 1


01-00:00:01

Berglund Sokolov: This is Barbara Berglund Sokolov, historian for the Presidio Trust,

interviewing Randy Rowland, one of the Presidio 27, close to the fiftieth

anniversary of that action. Today is Tuesday, October 9, 2018 and we’re at

the Presidio of San Francisco.

01-00:00:28

Farrell: This is our first session.

01-00:00:28

Berglund Sokolov: And this is our first session. [laughing]

01-00:00:37

Rowland: I should have done this, but I’m going to put my phone on don’t disturb.

01-00:00:39

Berglund Sokolov: Oh, good idea.

01-00:00:39

Farrell: Yeah.

01-00:00:40

Rowland: Sorry.

01-00:00:40

Berglund Sokolov: That’s okay.

01-00:00:44

Rowland: I’d kind of hate for it to go off—if I can make it work here.

01-00:00:45

Berglund Sokolov: Yeah, it’s hard to remember to take care of all this stuff.

01-00:00:54

Rowland: Okay, that did it.

01-00:00:55

Berglund Sokolov: Okay, so Randy, we’re going to start with a little background on your early

life, just to kind of set the context. Where were you born?

01-00:01:07

Rowland: I already did the joke about I was born when I was very young, so I guess I

can’t pull that one again. [laughter] I was born in St. Louis, Missouri.

01-00:01:16

Berglund Sokolov: What year?

01-00:01:17

Rowland: 1947. January of 1947.


01-00:01:20

Berglund Sokolov: What day?

01-00:01:21

Rowland: The twenty-eighth of January.

01-00:01:23

Berglund Sokolov: Okay, great. What was your home life like? Who were your parents?

01-00:01:30

Rowland: My parents were both from Missouri. My grandfather was a lawyer, who

then went back into the military. I don’t know if he was a World War I vet

or, at least certainly, he was a World War II vet. When I was a little kid, he

went back into the military. My father, at a certain point, joined the Air

Force. My grandfather and my father both were in the Air Force. We all

lived in Japan. I like to say I spent time in a foxhole in the Korean War,

which is true, because we lived in family housing on this base in Japan, in

the early ’50s. And kind of at the end of the runway, the damn bombers

would take off and everything in the house would rattle, and they’d go off to

go bomb Korea, you know, the B-52s, whatever. Every house—you know

military-style housing—you’re familiar with that, here in the Presidio, the

base housing. In front of every building there was a foxhole, because it was

the Korean War. Like the Koreans were going to fly over there and bomb

Japan? Fat chance.

But at any rate, there was a foxhole with a little berm around it, a dirt

foxhole. I was just learning to ride my bicycle, and I rode my damn bicycle

up over the berm and fell into the foxhole. I was stuck down there, because

it’s six feet deep. You know, a little kid can’t get out, so I was in the damn

foxhole till some adult could come along and pull me out. [laughter] So I

literally spent time in a foxhole during the Korean War, even though I was

only probably six years old, or five, or whatever. [laughter]

01-00:03:16

Berglund Sokolov: That’s funny. Tell us your parents’ names, just for the record, if you don’t

mind.

01-00:03:23

Rowland: My father’s name was Don. My father and my mother di—

01-00:03:35

Berglund Sokolov: Divorced.

01-00:03:35

Rowland: Divorced, thank you. I was just stuttering there. They divorced when I was

like a little kid, two or three years old. My father and I moved in with my

grandparents while he finished college. While he was in college, he met

some woman who he ended up marrying who was my stepmother, and so I

was raised by my father and my stepmother. Her name was Betty, and she

came from southeast Missouri, from a little town called Chaffee, which was


about three thousand people. Her father was a conductor on the Southern

Pacific Railroad, which ran through Chaffee. I would spend my summers a

lot of times—I think they were just—it was a way to get rid of the kid, you

know? They would send me down to my grandparents’ in Chaffee, Missouri,

and I would spend my summers there. Not when we were living in Japan,

obviously—so I have roots to rural southern Missouri. The rest of the time,

though, we were a military family, so we moved—Japan, Florida, Alabama.

01-00:04:51

Berglund Sokolov: And after college your dad enlisted in the air force?

01-00:04:54

Rowland: Yes. His first job, he was a chemist, and he worked for Emerson Electric.

We lived in O’Fallon, Illinois, in an apartment. I can remember my father

bouncing some of my mother’s biscuits down the steps. It was an upstairs

apartment, I guess, and I remember the mice running around in the

apartment. An exciting time when the old man is chasing the mice with a

broom. [laughter] Excuse me—[coughing] I’m so sorry about—[drinking

water]

01-00:05:29

Berglund Sokolov: That’s okay. Getting over a cold, as you said. So your dad also worked as a

teacher at the Air War College?

01-00:05:38

Rowland: Well, he did. His main thing—he was a nuclear chemist, and he worked for

the Air Force as a nuclear chemist. But the way that they regulated radiation

exposure in those days was that you would work a tour in his field, which

was nuclear chemistry, and then he would go and work a tour, usually a one-

year tour, somewhere else. And then your average exposure was low enough

that they could get away with it, I think is kind of the way it worked. I don’t

know how they do it these days, but that’s how they did it then. On his off

years, when he wasn’t working as a nuclear chemist, why then, he taught at

the Air War College on two different occasions. One time he taught ROTC

at the University of Missouri in Columbia, which is where I graduated from

high school. But really, his primary task was—it was nuclear chemistry. I

didn’t know this at the time, because of course that was all classified

information. I mean I knew he was a nuclear chemist—that was as much as I

knew. I had a hell of a good chemistry set, you can bet, because he would

bring home flasks and beakers, and whatever I wanted I could get him to

bring it home. I mainly blew up stuff. [laughter] Like every kid.

In those days, the way it was—remember the U-2 and Francis Gary Powers

and that whole thing? Well, it turns out that what that U-2 was doing was

when the various countries would do nuclear tests, atmospheric tests or

aboveground tests, then the U-2 would fly through the atmosphere and

gather samples, atmospheric samples, and then they would bring them back

to my father’s lab, the lab he worked at—it’s not like he owned the lab—in


Sacramento. They would analyze those samples, and then they could tell

what those other countries—so the French were doing nuclear testing in

Africa. The Russians and the Chinese did nuclear testing, at least—I don’t

know what the Chinese did, but the Russians, anyway, did nuclear testing.

When Francis Gary Powers was shot down, that’s what his mission was, as

my father later told me, later in life when it was no longer classified

information, what that U-2 was doing flying over was gathering nuclear

specimens for analysis in the lab.

But anyway, so that was, from my point of view, like I say, it was a good

chemistry set. My buddy’s father also worked at the same place, and both of

us had really great chemistry sets, and we used to make this stuff called

ammonium triiodide. You take reagent-grade ammonia, which is a lot

stronger than your stuff that you use around the house, and iodine crystals,

and you mix it together into a paste. As long as it was a paste, with a little

liquid, then it was quite stable. But it would dry out into this unstable crystal

and then explode with the slightest little motion or activity. We would make

it up and then put it on the sidewalk out there, and then once it dried, then

anybody who walked down, it would be like little firecrackers going off.

[Sokolov laughs] It was great fun, till my buddy made a great big beaker full

of the stuff—I don’t know why he made so much. Like me, he had a little

lab in his garage—so did I—a little chemistry lab in my garage, like a

workbench and an army footlocker that I had full of beakers and all my

equipment. He made up a big beaker full of ammonium triiodide, and then

his mom called him to dinner, and he just set it on his bench and went in for

dinner. Of course while he was at dinner it dried out, and then somebody

slammed the door in the house, whatever, and it blew up his garage, you

know? [laughter]

01-00:09:50

Berglund Sokolov: Did it blow up the whole thing, like did serious damage?

01-00:09:50

Rowland: Well, I mean, enough that we got in a lot of trouble. That was the end of

that.

01-00:09:54

Berglund Sokolov: The end of the good chemistry sets? [laughter] Or at least—?

01-00:09:57

Rowland: At least that part of it. But you know, we were unregulated children. Nobody

watched the children very much in those days, and of course we gravitated

towards the explosives. And rockets—we were into amateur rocketry back in

the days when you had to do it all. Now kids usually just buy a kit, and you

just assemble the prefab stuff, but there was none of that back in those days.

So, you know, we were sort of chemistry nerds. [laughing]


01-00:10:25

Berglund Sokolov: What was your impression of the military when you were a kid, as you were

moving from place to place and watching your dad’s work, and your

family’s long history of military service?

01-00:10:37

Rowland: Well, you know, it was twofold. On the one hand, like when we lived in

Japan, my father had an assistant named Fred, and whenever he would take

me into the office—and I don’t even remember what his duty was. He

wasn’t doing nuclear chemistry for that tour; he was doing something else.

But you know, he would take me over with him, and then Fred, who was

kind of like the secretary, was the guy who had to entertain me or deal with

me while my father took care of whatever he had to do. I really liked Fred

quite a bit. I remember Fred once gave me—what do you call them, a tie

tack? It’s a little thing that goes like this that you—a little metal thing that

would go, in those days you’d have a button-down shirt—not button down,

but a shirt with a collar and then you’d have your tie. This was a little thing

that the military guys used up underneath to kind of hold their tie in the right

spot. Fred gave me one, because I was having trouble with my tie, and Fred

gave me his tie tack, or whatever they call those things. You know, I always

liked Fred, but the thing with it is that my father always talked to Fred in this

kind of condescending way, because he was an officer and Fred was an

enlisted man, and so there was a class thing in it. There was plenty about the

military that I thought was cool, but I really didn’t like that class—because

Fred was so nice to me, and I always felt wrong about how my father

addressed Fred in this kind of condescending way, and it kind of irritated

me. I didn’t like the class structure, for that part, because I liked Fred so

much.

01-00:12:31

Berglund Sokolov: Yeah.

01-00:12:31

Rowland: I even named a hard drive “Fred” in my adult years, just because I

remembered Fred from back when I was a little kid.

01-00:12:39

Berglund Sokolov: His kindness and that he gave you kind of a special adult accessory?

01-00:12:43

Rowland: Yeah, the thing that I needed, you know—I had those at home, but I didn’t

have one at that moment, when I was kind of out and about. I needed one,

and he gave me one, which was a kindness. Well, at any rate, I didn’t like

the class structure so much. But my father, for instance, was very proud of

the military because it had led—it was early—and the military integrated

before American society did, and my old man was proud of that. He was one

of these old guys that, from his generation—he was a World War II vet, an

enlisted man in the Army, and then he went back in and he was a career

officer in the military, in the Air Force. My father was really proud of the


military. He was proud of America. For instance, he would talk about,

“America didn’t have the knock in the night.” That was one of his phrases,

you know? “We don’t have the knock in the night, unlike the Nazis and the

commies,” and whoever—the bad guys he was talking about, you know? Of

course what he meant by that is they don’t come and arrest you in the middle

of the night. Nowadays, in modern America, they brag about the fact that

they prefer to arrest people in the night, the same as the Nazis did, see? I

asked my old man about that a few years back, and he kind of just sucked it

up and pretended like he didn’t ever have the conversation with me when I

was a kid, but I heard about the knock in the night plenty of times as a child.

01-00:14:09

Berglund Sokolov: Interesting.

01-00:14:09

Rowland: And how proud he was of America for not having the knock in the night. He

was proud of the fact that the military had integrated and had moved

American society forward in that regard. We didn’t use the n-word or

anything of that sort in our family.

01-00:14:23

Berglund Sokolov: That says a lot about people’s conceptions of the United States right after

World War II.

01-00:14:30

Rowland: Yeah.

01-00:14:31

Berglund Sokolov: Versus what it started to look like by the late sixties/mid-seventies.

01-00:14:37

Rowland: Well, that’s exactly—my generation grew up with fathers like my father,

who believed in America and everything about it. It was America the

Beautiful, and “my-country-right-or-wrong” to some degree, but that came

later. The my-country-right-or-wrong business was a response to the fact

that people were recognizing that there was a lot of bad stuff going on and

started to criticize the bad stuff. My father’s generation couldn’t understand

that because they had gone to war against fascism.

01-00:15:06

Berglund Sokolov: Right.

01-00:15:07

Rowland: And to save the world for democracy and all that kind of stuff, and we were

the good guys. I grew up thinking that we were the good guys, and that was

unchallenged in my mind, about whether we were the good guys or not.

01-00:15:23

Berglund Sokolov: Let’s talk a little bit about your experience in Alabama in ’63-’64, before

you graduated from high school I think?


01-00:15:34

Rowland: Yeah, my junior year in high school.

01-00:15:35

Berglund Sokolov: Yeah, when JFK was shot. Can you tell us about your memories of that?

01-00:15:42

Rowland: Well, sure. My father had been stationed in Sacramento. That was his

nuclear job, and then it was time for him to do a tour somewhere else. He

went to teach at the Air War College in Montgomery. It was our second time

to Montgomery. We had been down there in the early ’50s. I think we were

there during the bus boycott, but this was now early ’60s.

01-00:16:14

Berglund Sokolov: Yeah, ’63-’64ish.

01-00:16:17

Rowland: It’d be the school year of ’63-’64, because I graduated in ’65, so that would

have been ’64-’65, so ’63-’64. Well, we were moving from Sacramento. I

had already learned to drive. I was sixteen. I had learned to drive, and I had

driven on freeways because California had freeways.

01-00:16:35


01-00:16:36

Rowland: And Alabama didn’t have any freeways, and so when I got to Montgomery, I

had driven on freeways. The school system in Montgomery was so crappy

that, for instance, my English teacher had never gone to college. We had

learned how to—what do you call that where you—diagram sentences,

where you have a little thing and you put the predicate and the verbs and the

nouns and—and I’d had that years before that. I was really good at

diagramming sentences, and my English teacher was really crappy at it, as it

turns out. I could give her sentences that she couldn’t diagram, and she’d

go—I’d stump her and she’d go, [imitating teacher’s high squeaky voice]

“Well, that’s just icky-ticky.” We’d just move on to the next thing, you

know? [laughter]

I was kind of a little bit of an arrogant asshole. I was a teenager, and you

know teenagers tend to be that way, and I was. As I had driven on the

freeways, and all they had to show in Montgomery was chain gangs and

convicts working on the crappy-ass roads, and the schools were terrible, the

roads were terrible, and I didn’t mind telling people, you know? At some

point I realized, though, that whenever I would talk to a person from

Alabama about how crappy their roads or their schools—or any other part of

Alabama that was bad—they would inevitably always answer in exactly the

same way, “Well, Mississippi’s worse.” As long as Mississippi was worse,

then it didn’t really matter how bad Alabama was, you know?


Now, George Wallace was the governor, and he was fighting to keep Jim

Crow alive, because this was kind of the final years of Jim Crow. I was

going to an all-white high school, because they were still segregated in those

days, and it was Jim Crow. It was men, women, and colored. We had a black

maid, and my mom would give her a ride down to the bus stop, which was

enlightened, and she would always ride in the back seat. She would never

ride in the front seat, you know. On Thursdays she would come in through

the front door, but every other day she would go in through the back door.

But on Thursdays the movement demanded that the maids come in through

the front door, and so on Thursdays she apologized a lot. “Sorry, but I’ve got

to do this.” Of course my mom thought it was just fine. “You can come in

through the front door every day.” But she wasn’t about to do that, because

there were community standards, right? Well, at any rate, so those were the

days.

I was in the marching band. I went to Robert E. Lee High School, and our

high school marching band uniforms were Confederate uniforms, paper-

damn thin. Every time George Wallace would come back from

campaigning—he was going around, because in those days JFK was going

around the country campaigning for the Civil Rights Bill, and George

Wallace was going around the country campaigning against the Civil Rights

Bill. Every time goddamn George Wallace would fly back into

Montgomery—it didn’t matter if it was one o’clock in the morning—the

Robert E. Lee High School band would be out there playing some version of

“Dixie” on the tarmac, and he’d come—in those days it was you’d walk

down some stairs onto the—

01-00:19:48

Berglund Sokolov: Runway.

01-00:19:48

Rowland: Yeah, runway. We’d be there to play “Dixie,” and we’d be freezing our

asses off. It gets cold in Alabama, and there you are in this paper thin phony

Confederate uniform, you know—whatever. But at any rate, so that was the

thing.

I was in the South, but I was not of the South. Like for instance one day I

was walking down the street, on the sidewalk, dum-dee-dum-dee, just

minding my own business, and this old black guy comes walking the other

way, and at the same moment we both stepped into the gutter. I stepped into

the gutter because he was an old man, and I was giving deference to my

elders. He stepped into the gutter because I was white. And then, there we

were, and what I really remember about this is the horror on his face,

because he assumed that I was messing with him, because why else would I

have stepped into the gutter, see? He just assumed—and I could just read it

in his face, that he didn’t know how to handle the situation now, and he just

assumed that I was messing with him, and I felt so bad, because I was trying


to give him honor, you know? Because he was the old guy, you know? There

we stood in the gutter, and neither one of us knew what to do then, and it

kind of went on for what seemed like a long moment, because he wasn’t

about to do anything else until I did something. I don’t even remember how

it resolved, but I assume I stepped back up on the sidewalk, because I’m

pretty sure he wouldn’t have. It was those times.

You walk into the department stores, and if there was a black person, they

could shop. They could go into a department store and up to the jewelry

counter and buy something if they felt like it. They couldn’t try clothes on,

but they could go up to the jewelry counter. But if there was a white person

who walked up, the black customer just had to stand there until no white

people needed help, and then they just would stand there forever, until there

wasn’t any white people around, and then they could get some help.

Everything about it was bad, you know what I mean? It just really rubbed

me the wrong way. But there I was, in my confederate uniform playing

“Dixie” whenever George Damn Wallace came back into town.

At any rate, so then the President got shot and killed, and it was a school

day. They announced over the intercom that President Kennedy had been

shot and killed. Everybody in my class, whatever class it was—I don’t

remember what class it was—but everybody in the class broke out into a

wild cheer, and it was like “The president of the United States of America

has just been killed,” “Yay.” Because, of course, he was the enemy, because

George Wallace, our governor, was going around trying to stop the Civil

Rights Bill, and JFK was going around trying to get civil rights passed.

The local TV would never show anything about civil rights protests or

anything to do with the civil rights movement. When the national TV—this

is how it was—when the national TV, and the national news would come on

and then would start to say something about the civil rights movement, the

TV would just go black. Later the local people would announce, “Well,

somebody threw a chain over the transmission cables, or they had some

other technical difficulty.” Well, no guy with a chain knew what was going

to be said next, but somehow they always managed to find just the right

moment to cut the program. And so, the white folks didn’t have any sense, in

Montgomery, of what was going on, because the censorship was so strong

that the local channels wouldn’t say anything, and the national channels

would get blacked out. That’s the way it was in the final throes of Jim Crow.

In that context, I guess it’s no surprise that the kids in the class all cheered

when the President got shot. But I remember walking home that night, or on

that afternoon, walking home from school and just thinking—I’m on a

different planet, because the President of the United States just got killed,

and they were all happy.


01-00:23:39

Berglund Sokolov: How do you think that influenced you, either then, later in life, those

experiences, having that experience, as you said, of being in the South but

not of the South?

01-00:23:52

Rowland: I learned two big lessons in that year. The first one had to do with

“Mississippi’s worse,” because later when I became a protester and people

tried to say, “Well, Russia’s worse. If you don’t like it here, just go to

somewhere else. It’s all worse,” I was immune to that argument, because I

had heard “Mississippi’s worse” for a whole year. When they started running

that thing about, “Well, it’s worse in Russia,” I didn’t give a shit. I had

already worked my way through that argument. The other thing I learned

was that just because it’s the law, that don’t necessarily make it right,

because Jim Crow was the law. Racism was the law in Montgomery,

Alabama in 1963. That was the law, and I knew that that was wrong. I think

that, in a way, later when it was time for me to actually face the thing of—

well, am I going to break the law? Pffft—I had already figured out that just

because it’s the law, that don’t make it right.

01-00:24:53

Berglund Sokolov: Yeah, yeah. Let’s talk about what happens after you graduate from high

school in 1965. So you finish up, and you finish up in Missouri?

01-00:25:06

Rowland: In Missouri. I graduated from high school in 1965, from Hickman High

School. We were the Hickman Kewpies, if you can imagine that. You had to

be tough to be a Kewpie.

01-00:25:17

Berglund Sokolov: Like the kewpie dolls?

01-00:25:18

Rowland: Like the kewpie doll. [laughter] They’re still the Hickman Kewpies, as a

matter of fact. There’s more schools in town now, I think, but there was only

one high school in Columbia, Missouri in those days. My father was

teaching ROTC at the University of Missouri, and that’s why we were in

town. I always went to public schools, and so I graduated in 1965. Then I

started going to the University of Missouri. What I didn’t realize—I had

already wrecked a car—I have narcolepsy, so I fall asleep inappropriately,

like when I’m driving. By the time I graduated from high school I had

already ran a car off a bridge and was trapped underwater in the car in a

river.

01-00:26:03

Berglund Sokolov: Wow.

01-00:26:06

Rowland: And survived it. Luckily, the car was upside down. I actually credit going to

summer camp for my survival, because in summer camp we’d take the canoe


and we’d paddle out there and flip the canoe over and then swim up

underneath it and breathe the air inside the canoe, in hopes that the

lifeguards at the summer camp would think that we were drowned, and then

that’d force them to come out there to rescue us, and we’d, “Hee, hee, hee,”

you know, little asshole children. You know how kids are. But I had done

that so many times. You know, the lifeguards never fell for it. Every kid that

ever went to summer camp tried the same trick.

01-00:26:37


01-00:26:37

Rowland: But I was used to the idea of going up and finding the air pocket, and so

when I found myself in the river, upside down in the car at the bottom of the

river, if the car had been right side [up], there wouldn’t have been a very big

air pocket, but being upside down, it gave me an air pocket about that big,

from the bottom of the door to the floor. Once I found that air pocket I could

breathe, and that gave me enough time to clear my head—because I’d gone

ass over teacup down this cliff, and the guardrail for the bridge went right

through the passenger side. Luckily, it didn’t go through me, and there was

no passenger. I was alone in the car. I fell asleep at the wheel, and it’s not

the only time I’ve fallen asleep and wrecked a car.

But the point of that diversion was just to say that by the time I got into the

University of Missouri, I realized that I wasn’t a very good student, because

I just couldn’t stay awake in class. I didn’t know I had a problem. I was in

my thirties by the time I actually got a diagnosis. But even though I’d been a

bookworm as a kid and sort of a science nerd, and this and that, I did very

poorly at the university. Firstly because I thought that I was supposed to go

out and get drunk, and I wasn’t a frat boy, but that kind of atmosphere was

out there, which I wasn’t very good at that. But secondly, I just couldn’t stay

awake in the classes, and so really, I was flunking out of college. That’s all I

was doing.

01-00:28:05

Berglund Sokolov: Yeah, it wasn’t the right fit for you.

01-00:28:07

Rowland: It wasn’t the right fit for me. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to stay in

school. You know, the draft was on, and there wasn’t any question about

whether I was going to end up having to get drafted if I left school. I was. So

I went down to the recruiter and talked to the recruiter.

01-00:28:27

Berglund Sokolov: Did that weigh heavily on your mind? I know a lot of guys—right?

01-00:28:32

Rowland: Oh, every guy in those days—the draft was huge.


01-00:28:34


01-00:28:35

Rowland: Because this is before there was a lottery. What came later was a lottery

where you knew that your number was low or high, and you could say “Oh,

I’m screwed,” or “I’m not screwed.” For those that had a number that was

such that they—it was unlikely that they’d get drafted, they could kind of

relax. But in 1965 or ’66, it was before the lottery. Every young man faced

the realization that they couldn’t just follow their own dreams. I kind of

wanted to be—I had been influenced by the beatniks.

01-00:29:12

Berglund Sokolov: How did you hear about the beatniks?

01-00:29:14

Rowland: I lived in Sacramento.

01-00:29:15

Berglund Sokolov: You were in Sacramento, and then you—?

01-00:29:17

Rowland: Yeah, the first person in my crowd, and so that’s my sophomore year in high

school. The first person that got a driver’s license, we would pile into their

car and drive into San Francisco and go to the beatnik cafes or coffee shops,

and everybody would sit there and snap their fingers [snapping fingers]

instead of clapping, and we thought we were so cool, high school kids going

to hear the beatniks read a poem. I was kind of hanging out in that kind of a

crowd and was greatly influenced by them. Maynard G. Krebs was my hero.

01-00:29:52

Berglund Sokolov: Who’s Maynard G. Krebs?

01-00:29:53

Rowland: Well, he was the same guy that played the part on some TV show that came

later, where—Gilligan’s Island or something. It was kind of the guy who

was the clown, that guy. [Bob Denver] I can’t remember the name of the

show now, [The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis] but it was Fonzie, or

something—some guy who would comb his hair back and stuff, and he had a

sidekick. His sidekick was a beatnik named Maynard G. Krebs, who

whenever they’d say, “Work,” he’d go, “Work????” [laughter] I loved

Maynard G. Krebs.

01-00:30:33

Berglund Sokolov: Yeah, that must have made you really different, or have this core different

experience than most of the kids your age in either Alabama or Missouri,

right? Aside from driving on the freeway, you’d spent time in coffee shops

in North Beach and had a California experience, and all of that.


01-00:30:50

Rowland: Right. Even when I was a kid, going for summers in Chaffee, Missouri, in

that little three-thousand people town, even then I remember being on the

playground—this is an early childhood memory—but being on the

playground with my playmates in that little town, and realizing that they had

no idea about what kind of a world was out there. I’d been to Japan. I’d seen

something about the world.

01-00:31:17

Berglund Sokolov: You’d been in a foxhole during the Korean War.

01-00:31:19

Rowland: I’d been in a foxhole in the Korean War. [laughter] In those days you didn’t

fly to Japan—we took a ship to Japan. I’d been on a ship across the ocean

twice, to go and to come back. I think I turned eight on the ship coming

back, and so there I was on the playground thinking they have no sense—

they don’t know what kind of a world is out there, and they’re just so

ignorant.

01-00:31:49


01-00:31:51

Rowland: I don’t think that I was condescending about it as much as just felt bad for

the fact that they hadn’t had an opportunity to see anything outside their

little town. It’s one thing if you—later in life I kind of grew impatient with

people who raise ignorance to principle. It’s one thing to be ignorant just

because you haven’t had an experience or had a chance. It’s another thing to

be proud of being ignorant, and I have very little tolerance for people who

raise ignorance to principle.

01-00:32:18

Berglund Sokolov: I can understand that.

01-00:32:19

Rowland: And I suppose that’s been a lifetime in developing.

01-00:32:23

Berglund Sokolov: When you left college, did you at all think about staying to get a deferment

at that point?

01-00:32:32

Rowland: Well, there was no deferment. College was the deferment.

01-00:32:35

Berglund Sokolov: That’s what I mean. By finding ways to potentially stay in school, so that

you weren’t drafted. Or at that point was military service just something that

you kind of saw as something that would be part of your life?


01-00:32:46

Rowland: Well, yeah, that seemed inevitable to me. On the one hand, I didn’t have a

problem with the concept of paying the dues to live in America.

01-00:32:54


01-00:32:56

Rowland: I grew up in a military family, so the idea of service to country was pretty

much ingrained in my DNA. I didn’t have a problem with that. I wasn’t

against the war. My friends, in that year that I spent at the University of

Missouri, I was going to the hootenannies. I actually bought a banjo. I never

actually learned to play the banjo, but what I noticed with these guys, the

cool guys all had guitars. They’d sit around the fountain and everybody’d be

singing, “Where Did All the Flowers Go?” [“Where Have All the Flowers

Gone”] Singing away and just playing their guitars, and I thought if I take up

the guitar now, by the time I get as good as them they’re going to be so good

that I’ll never catch up. [Sokolov laughs] In those days, it was Peter, Paul

and Mary, and the Kingston Trio. They had a banjo—one of them played the

banjo. And so I thought, I’ll play the banjo. Well, of course it’s hard to play

the banjo. You actually have to learn an instrument. All I really did is I’d

just sit around and tune the banjo—but that was enough. You can get the

girls by tuning a banjo just as good as playing the banjo, so it didn’t really

matter, you know? [laughter] And I’d sing. Every time we’d sing a song,

well, I’d sing “Where Did All the Flowers Go,” same as everybody else, and

then between songs I’d just sit there and kind of tune my banjo, and then I’d

just put it down and hold it on my lap while we sang, right? I never did learn

to play the damn banjo. [laughter]

But I was doing that, but at the same time I had this—I very proudly wore

this button that instead of—some of my friends had peace signs. Joan Baez

and people were out there starting to take stands against the war, but

somebody had given me—my girlfriend—actually not a girlfriend exactly, a

platonic friend in Sacramento sent me, because I was not coming around to

activism in a way that she thought I should. Finally, just in disgust, she sent

me this button that instead of a peace sign it had been turned into a swept-

wing bomber, and it said in little white letters on it, “Drop It.” All for

nuclear weapons, or you know, drop the bomb. Everybody else was running

around with these peace-sign buttons and whatever, and I was wearing this

damn Drop It button. I was conflicted, shall we say. I wasn’t against the war

at all. Like I said, I was wearing the wrong button.

In fact, in that year I saw my very first antiwar demonstration, and it was in

front of the post office, which was kind of the only symbol of federal

authority in the town. I was on the wrong side of the street; I was on the

other side of the street with the people that were throwing tomatoes and stuff

at the demonstrators, which was a really small gaggle of people who were—

had some signs. But they were being miserable, because there was a larger


crowd on the other side of the street giving them shit, and I was one—I

walked up and saw it and wasn’t quite sure which side I was going to go to. I

didn’t think once about going and joining the demonstrators. I didn’t even

consider it.

01-00:36:02

Berglund Sokolov: Do you remember how, in your mind at that time, you thought of the

demonstrators? Like what went through your mind about them?

01-00:36:10

Rowland: They weren’t me. Certainly, I didn’t identify with them at all.

01-00:36:16


01-00:36:17

Rowland: I kind of liked all the hootenanny songs, you know, but I had some notion. A

lot of that was also around, you know, if you think about “Where Did All

The Flowers Go,” or all those songs, a lot of them are around civil rights,

you see, and around racial issues. A lot of it’s you know, Tom Dooley, and

he killed his wife for whatever reason, you know. Not all that uplifting, but

it’s the old songs.

01-00:36:46

Berglund Sokolov: Folk songs.

01-00:36:46

Rowland: You just sang those old folk songs, right. But you know, I wasn’t an antiwar

guy. I found a photo in my photo book where my—I lived in the dorm, and

my buddies and I—and we all burned our draft cards. But we did it kind of

privately, and I don’t think any of us actually thought of it as—it was kind of

like it was sort of a thing to do. We burned our draft cards, took pictures of

ourselves doing it, but never did it publicly. Honestly, I don’t think that I

was—I don’t know why I did it, because my sentiments were really more for

the other side. I believed in America. I believed in JFK. My parents were

Eisenhower Republicans, I suppose you could say. My father is proud to be

a conservative. You know, that was my upbringing, but it had elements of

decency threaded through it, and I picked up those decent elements, I think,

to some degree. But there was an awful lot of the other part that came along

with growing up in the way that I did.

01-00:38:02

Berglund Sokolov: Yeah, it sounds like the draft-card burning wasn’t so much an act of

resistance, right?

01-00:38:07

Rowland: No, hardly.

01-00:38:07

Berglund Sokolov: As kind of following with things that were going on in the times?


01-00:38:13

Rowland: Sure, I mean because there was the hip culture.

01-00:38:14


01-00:38:16

Rowland: My girlfriend tried to get me to grow my hair out, and that was the last thing

in the world I was going to do. Because in Columbia, which is halfway

between St. Louis and Kansas City, you get kids from both cities that come

to the school there. In those days it seemed like the kids that came from

Kansas City were hipper and knew the songs quicker and the latest dances.

The kids from St. Louis tended not to—they were always one step behind it

seemed like, just being the guy that was in the middle seeing them coming

in. It was the Kansas City kids that were starting to grow their hair longer,

but I was a St. Louis guy.

01-00:39:03

Berglund Sokolov: And growing your hair long was a big deal then.

01-00:39:06

Rowland: Well, it was getting to be a big deal. I certainly grew my hair quick enough

later.

01-00:39:10


01-00:39:11

Rowland: But it was starting to be. The Beatles—what year was that, when they had

ever-so-shortly cropped but slightly long hair, and everybody thought oh my

God, they’ve got long hair. That was ’63-’64, because I remember driving

along in Montgomery. I was driving in the car, the family car, and all my

friends were in the car, and a Beatles song came on at the intersection. I just

put the brake on, and we all jumped out of the car and danced like crazy in

the street to this Beatles song and then hopped back in the car and drove on.

You know, teenage stuff. It was only a year after that—or two years

maybe—and the issue of growing your hair out was raised by my girlfriend,

and I wasn’t going to go for it.

01-00:39:57

Berglund Sokolov: That wasn’t your thing.

01-00:39:58

Rowland: Yeah.

01-00:39:59

Berglund Sokolov: So let’s talk about when you joined the army, 1967.

01-00:40:06

Rowland: 1967. So I was facing the draft. I knew I wasn’t going to be in school. That

just wasn’t going to happen. You know, I just felt like I needed to get it over.


Well, what I really wanted to do was take my motorcycle and just ride

around. I had spent one summer doing that, just riding my motorcycle from

little town to little town in Missouri, and spent the whole summer doing that.

That’s kind of what I really wanted to do was the call of the road and the

motorcycle, but that wasn’t going to happen because of the draft. I figured

okay, take the bull by the horns. I’ve got to pay my dues, and I might as well

just go do it. I went down to the recruiter.

01-00:40:50

Berglund Sokolov: Did you ever think about waiting it out and just waiting until you were

called? Or there was really the feeling of—because I think this is something

that young people today don’t really have any kind of understanding of, the

choices that get made when there’s a draft and around how to deal with that,

right? About whether to wait, whether to—like that you did, to just, as you

said, grab the bull by the horns. It’s very much defining moments of your

generation, but I think for people that came after you it’s a little—it’s not

something that they’ve experienced firsthand.

01-00:41:25

Rowland: Well, there is an inevitability to the draft. They were ramping up the war,

and this is 1966 I guess, because I went in, in January I think it was, of ’67.

It was an inevitability. I mean you could wait and let them call you. Of

course you could go try and get out of it, say you’re disabled or try to, you

know, whatever. I didn’t even consider that road. If I thought of that I’ve

long since forgotten it, because that wasn’t my main thing. Yeah, like I said,

I didn’t have a problem, really, with service or going in the military. I was

pretty sure I didn’t want to be an officer, because I didn’t like the way my

father had treated Fred when I was a little kid, you know? My father had

tried to convince me. He says, “Do you want to be the guy shitting in the

latrine, or do you want to be the guy cleaning the latrine?” I thought, well, I

guess I’ll go clean it. What the hell. I was kind of against the officer corps,

just because of that arrogance or that kind of thing. My father wasn’t a bad

guy. It wasn’t like he mistreated people, but he would have a little edge in

his voice when he talked to subordinates that was not collegial.

01-00:42:42

Berglund Sokolov: Well, and that kind of hierarchy is really built into the military, right?

01-00:42:45

Rowland: It is, it is. I took offense to it early on, you know, from when I was living in

Japan, which is before I was eight. I was pretty sure then that I wouldn’t be

an officer. I didn’t have a college degree, so it wasn’t like I had an option of

going into the military as an officer anyway, as far as that goes. Well, at any

rate, at a certain point I just decided to go for it. I went down to talk to the

recruiter.


01-00:43:13

Berglund Sokolov: Did you think at all like oh, I’ll get this over with, I’ll do my year or two of

service, and then I’ll move on with my life? Was that part of the thinking at

all?

01-00:43:26

Rowland: Well, sure. It wasn’t like I was joining up forever. I wasn’t going to be a

lifer.

01-00:43:30


01-00:43:31

Rowland: I had no desire or interest at all to be a lifer. I wanted to ride my motorcycle.

You know, I wanted to be a beatnik. The beatniks had kind of already come

and gone by then, but the hippies hadn’t shown up yet, and so beatnik was

the only model I had for counterculture, and that’s kind of where my head

was. I was pretty sure that they were having free sex or something, I don’t

know, something. [laughter]

01-00:43:59

Berglund Sokolov: Right, some kind of fun somewhere.

01-00:44:01

Rowland: They were having some kind of fun, yeah. Every stereotype, whatever, but

that wasn’t an option because of the draft. And like I said, I thought you’ve

got to pay your dues, so I figured I’ll pay my dues.

I went down to the recruiter. The recruiter—slimeball recruiters. They

always lie to you. Recruiters are a Judas goat. The Judas goat, in a factory, is

the goat that they spare, that leads the other goats through the pens and the

corrals and whatever, and over there to the slaughterhouse. They take the

Judas goat and bring him back over, but then they slaughter all the rest of

them, right? The way a recruiter is, is that as long as they can keep the

supply of fresh meat going to the front, well, then they don’t have to go to

the front themselves.

But I didn’t think of it in that way in those days, and I went to talk to the

recruiter, and I believed him, and he said, “Well, you can be anything you

want to be. You can join the Army. If you get drafted, they’re going to make

you an infantryman, and you’re going to be out there marching in the mud

and hoping you don’t get killed. Or you can be anything you want to be if

you enlist, and it’s only one more year.” You know, it’s two years to be

drafted, three years if you enlist. I said, “Well, okay, let me see.” He says,

“You can be anything you want to be.” I looked at this list of things and for

some reason occupational therapist jumped off the page at me, and so I said,

“I want to be an occupational therapist,” because I thought that occupational

therapists did little leather projects with the wounded, and arts and crafts. I

always kind of liked arts and crafts, and I thought well, that’ll be cool. I’ll be


making little leather wallets, because I’d done all that stuff in summer camp.

You know I was a Boy Scout, I was an Eagle-damn-Scout. I had gone to

Boy Scout camp every—[loud sound outside] that helicopter kind of ruins

your sound, doesn’t it?

01-00:46:02

Farrell: It creates texture.

01-00:46:04

Rowland: Yeah, really. At any rate, I had gone to summer camp every year, and that’s

how come I knew to swim under the canoe and find the air pocket, because

I’d always gone to summer camp. The idea of doing arts and crafts struck

me as—I knew how to make lanyards and do leather projects, and whatever,

I thought okay, I’ll be an occupational therapist. I was so dumb, I didn’t

realize that an occupational therapist actually had to have a college degree

and was actually a trained person. I was just thinking leather projects. I said,

“Yeah, okay, I’ll be an occupational therapist.” He goes, “No problem.”

01-00:46:40

Berglund Sokolov: But he didn’t correct you either.

01-00:46:42

Rowland: Of course not. In fact what he did, he says, “You know, it’s the Army, and

so everything is in some kind of military code. But I’m going to give you the

written guarantee. You’re going to walk out of here, you’re going to sign on

the paper. I’m going to give you your written guarantee, and I’m

guaranteeing that you’re going to get the training that you’ve asked for.” So

okay, cool. He gives me 91A, and gives me my piece of paper, my written

guarantee, that I was going to get to be a 91A. I said, “Cool.” Then I went

and joined the Army, and it didn’t take me too long to find out that a 91A

was a basic combat medic. Instead of doing leather projects with the

wounded, you know, arts and crafts, which I thought I was signing up for,

what I really signed up for was to go drag them off the battlefield and try and

keep them alive until the helicopter got there. [laughing]

01-00:47:32

Berglund Sokolov: Wow.

01-00:47:32

Rowland: You know, at any rate, recruiters lie. No news in that.

01-00:47:38

Berglund Sokolov: So then you go off to do your basic training, and you go to Fort Leonard

Wood. That must have not been too far from home at that point?

01-00:47:47

Rowland: Right. It wasn’t. That’s southwestern Missouri, and I was in central

Missouri. This is wintertime; it was cold as hell. I tested well. They give

you, the first thing they do is they give you all kinds of tests, and so they

offered me a job in language school and a couple other things. But I had that


attitude of I didn’t want to—I was kind of against that military hierarchy

business. Well, at first I thought I was going to be [an] occupational

therapist, but then when I realized I was going to be a medic, that didn’t

strike me as that bad either. I was interested in the medical field.

01-00:48:30

Berglund Sokolov: Did your family or your father, did they have strong opinions about you

joining the Army or about what you’d been doing before you joined the

Army?

01-00:48:43

Rowland: I didn’t consult them about it, I don’t think. I’m sure I must have told them I

was going in, and everybody knew that there was the draft and the

inevitability of going into the military if you were a young man in those

days, able-bodied young men anyway. I wasn’t living at home. I was living

in the dormitory, and so it wasn’t like I was really talking to them about all

this stuff when I was busy dropping out of school and just went right into the

military, and that was kind of the end of that. I don’t know what they

thought about it, but I’m sure they were not against—maybe the old man

would have liked for me to—he told me to go in as an officer so I didn’t

have to clean the latrines, I remember that conversation. But I don’t think it

really mattered. He had been in the army during World War II, so it wasn’t

like he was against the army just because he was in the air force.

01-00:49:38

Berglund Sokolov: Right. Let’s talk a little bit about your medic training, because you go

from—well, Fort Leonard Wood—is Fort Leonard Wood where you’re

carrying the drum?

01-00:49:51

Rowland: Yeah.

01-00:49:52

Berglund Sokolov: Let’s talk about that.

01-00:49:55

Rowland: The Army has basic training, and of course what they’re trying to do is make

you into little killers. It’s regimentation, you know, they teach you how to

march, teach you how to obey orders, whatever.

01-00:50:05

Berglund Sokolov: To lose your own individuality, right, in the will of the whole, right?

01-00:50:10

Rowland: Right, right, exactly. You know, I was an acting jack. I—at least for a little

bit, I was. They have trainees that act as the first level of leadership—but

one Saturday everybody was out on detail, and I got everybody out on detail

doing whatever they were supposed to be doing, cleaning up this, or that, or

the other thing. Everybody was doing what they were supposed to do, so I

just went and found a magazine, and I sat down and started reading the


magazine, you know, and the drill sergeant caught me reading the magazine.

It didn’t even occur to me that there was anything wrong with that, because

everybody was doing what they were supposed to do. My job was to make

them do what they had to do, and they were all doing what they had to do, so

I was just reading a magazine, you know? Well, they didn’t think that was

exactly the way it was supposed to go, and so that was the end of being an

acting jack.

But in the meantime, they needed somebody, because you march around

everywhere you’re going to go. They said, “Well, we need a drummer.” The

deal was if you volunteered to be the drummer, then you didn’t have to pull

KP. I had been in the marching band—I was in the University of Missouri

marching band—I played the trumpet. I figured, well, I can keep a beat, I

guess. So I became the bass drummer, which meant that on my back was my

pack, and on my front was this big goddamn bass drum. You’re marching

along beating the drum and keeping the beat, you know? When it was time

to double-time, I was running with the damn bass drum fastened to my front.

Everywhere I went I had that damn bass drum. I’ve made lots of dumb

choices in my life, but that was one of the dumber choices, because I would

have pulled KP twice maybe—might have even gotten some free food out of

the mess hall, who knows. But instead of pulling KP twice, I had to, on a

daily basis, carry that damn bass drum around. [laughter] But I did it, you

know.

01-00:52:10

Berglund Sokolov: What were some of your other kind of early impressions of being in the

Army?

01-00:52:16

Rowland: Well, I already knew how to march. I was in the marching band. I already

knew how to—I, well, you know, because I was a military brat, and my

father was really, really good at—he was a little condescending to the people

below him, but he was really, really good at sucking up to the people above

him, in a way that was sort of familiar but respectful. He was a master at that

balance of not being deferential but never crossing the line of being

disrespectful. For a career military officer, that’s kind of what you want to

be—and he hit that mark really well. I had learned that from him, so I was

never deferential. I wasn’t intimidated by the—every trainee is intimidated, I

guess, to some degree by the drill sergeants and all that kind of business. But

I was very comfortable with military ways, and I already knew how to

march, and I could do all that kind of business and understood the hierarchy,

and so I was fine. I like military food. I loved mess hall food.

01-00:53:34

Berglund Sokolov: What did you like about it?


01-00:53:35

Rowland: Well, it was—it was, in those days—nowadays I think they just do kind of

prefab foods, but in those days it was real food. It was real mashed potatoes,

and it was kind of what now people would call “comfort food.” It was old-

style home cooking, except in a mess hall. You know, your green beans and

your meat and your potatoes and your stuffing. I loved the military food.

[laughing] They didn’t give you much time to eat it, but it wasn’t like I had a

problem with the grub.

01-00:54:06

Berglund Sokolov: Yeah. Anything you remember as a special favorite?

01-00:54:11

Rowland: No, not really.

01-00:54:16

Berglund Sokolov: Just kind of the general feel of it.

01-00:54:18

Rowland: Yeah. The whole, mess hall food was fine with me.

01-00:54:21

Berglund Sokolov: Yeah, yeah.

01-00:54:23

Rowland: Just like home cooking.

01-00:54:26

Berglund Sokolov: So from Fort Leonard Wood you end up going to Fort Sam?

01-00:54:34

Rowland: Houston, yeah.

01-00:54:35

Berglund Sokolov: Houston, in San Antonio, for medic training?

01-00:54:40

Rowland: Right. The way it works is that everybody goes to basic training, and then

after that you’ve got to go to your advanced individual training; AIT they

call it, in which they teach you whatever you’re going to be doing for the

Army.

01-00:54:54

Berglund Sokolov: The skill that they assign you—

01-00:54:55

Rowland: Right, right.

01-00:54:56

Berglund Sokolov: —whether it’s the one you think you were getting when you came in or

something different.


01-00:54:58

Rowland: Right, like I clearly wasn’t going to go to—because the army didn’t train

occupational therapists. They were trained in the civilian life and came in as

an occupational therapist, right? So that wasn’t happening. I’d already

figured out, at some point, that I was going to be a medic, that I’d been

ripped off. But so if you were going to be an intelligence guy, they’d send

you to language school to learn Vietnamese, or whatever language you were

going to be assigned to. If you were going to be a mortarman, they’d send

you to mortarman school, whatever. In this case they sent me to medic

training.

I got there, for some reason, out of cycle. Every couple of weeks they would

start a cycle, and I just got there like two seconds after the previous cycle,

and so I spent two weeks in truck-driver school, which was great fun

because you got to drive around the bush in Texas there, just drive trucks.

They taught us how to double clutch all those old military vehicles and

military ambulances, and deuce-and-a-halfs, which were the bigger trucks

with the canvas backs—that was great fun. I really enjoyed that. The final

test was you had to go up this long hill, and you’d start in high gear, and by

the time you’d crest the hill you’d be in low gear. It was like four forward

gears plus a granny gear, so it’s eight gears you were shifting, and you had

to double-clutch through each one and catch it just right and grind up the hill

a little bit further to shift down, and what great fun that is, to learn how to—

01-00:56:43

Berglund Sokolov: Maneuver a big beast of a vehicle like that, right? Yeah.

01-00:56:44

Rowland: Yeah, I loved those transmissions. It was so fun. So I did that, and then my

cycle came up, and then I transferred out of the truck-driver school into—

which I think the logic was that way I’d be able to drive an ambulance, you

see? Then I went to medic school, which was where I was actually supposed

to train to learn my specialty, which was going to be a basic combat medic.

You learn how to carry stretchers and how to treat wounds and whatever. It’s

eight weeks of that training. And that was fine. That was certainly interesting

enough.

I had bought a motorcycle, and even though I was training, you weren’t

really supposed to—I had figured out that I could keep my motorcycle over

on—there’s the training area, and of course I couldn’t keep it there because

they would have noticed it. But I just parked my motorcycle in a part of the

base where the regular people that were just doing duty, and then all I had to

do was walk out of the training area, and I could go get my motorcycle. On

my weekends I would go down, and I’d sell plasma and get five bucks on

Saturday morning, That gave me my gas money, and then I’d ride my

motorcycle around in that part of Texas.


01-00:58:06

Berglund Sokolov: You’d have some of the kind of experiences you had wanted to be having,

right?

01-00:58:09

Rowland: Right, right. I had a chopped and raked Ducati, man. I was [clapping hands].

[laughter] What a godawful motorcycle that was, but whatever. The training

was fine. Frankly, I ended up as a nurse, and so I got a career out of the

military. I can’t carp in that regard, because I did end up retiring as a nurse

from the trauma center in Seattle, and the beginning of all that was that eight

weeks of training as a medic.

01-00:58:47

Berglund Sokolov: When you were there at Fort Sam, you ended up running across some guys

who were conscientious objectors?

01-00:58:54

Rowland: Well, we had plenty of conscientious objectors in our unit, in our training

unit. On their bunk they would have a little thing that said what they were—

like if they were a Jehovah’s Witness or something then it would be “JW,”

or whatever. If they were Quakers then it would say—it was some kind of—

01-00:59:17

Berglund Sokolov: Symbol or sign.

01-00:59:18

Rowland: —symbol or something. Because each type of conscientious objector kind of

has their different notions about what they will and won’t do. It’s kind of

like nowadays when you go to a potluck, and everybody puts the signs about

whether it’s vegan or not or what the ingredients are in the dishes. Well, in

that context it was kind of what their religious affinity was, because that

suggested what they would and wouldn’t do, and they weren’t trying to cross

those guys up or force them into something where they were going to refuse

stuff—they were trying to train them as medics so they could ship them off

to Vietnam and they’d be a functional medic.

01-00:59:50

Berglund Sokolov: Right, part of the Army.

01-00:59:51

Rowland: Part of the Army, right. You won’t carry a weapon, but you’ll do this or that

or the other thing. The thing with it is those guys were really upstanding

guys. They were really moral, and really thoughtful—and interesting,

intellectual, kind of a cut above your typical soldier—even the medics,

which was kind of—you might think was a cut above your infantrymen or

something, in terms of their well-roundedness, shall we say, or something.

But these guys were a cut above other people, and they were my buddies.

That’s who I was training with, right? The guy on the other end of that

stretcher was most likely a conscientious objector, and we’d be running

around with our stretcher and practicing putting the wounded on, and


wrapping the bandages and doing all the things you do. I really started

learning to respect those guys.

01-01:00:47

Berglund Sokolov: Had you met people like that before?

01-01:00:50

Rowland: No, I don’t think so. Not like that, no, I hadn’t.

01-01:00:54

Berglund Sokolov: Did you even really know they existed as a group?

01-01:00:57

Rowland: No, I didn’t know anything about that stuff.

01-01:00:59


01-01:01:01

Rowland: But I quickly learned that there was two kinds of conscientious objectors.

There was the kind that didn’t go into the military at all—and I didn’t learn

this part in those days, that during World War I the conscientious objectors,

they’d go and hang them by their wrists every day for cutting their buttons

off and all that. It was sometime in World War I that the United States

actually came up with the idea of a conscientious objector. By World War II,

they were a real thing.

01-01:01:29

Berglund Sokolov: A protected category.

01-01:01:31

Rowland: Yeah, and by Vietnam, I mean that was well established. That was like

another generation later, or two generations later. These guys would either—

they would either, wouldn’t be in the military at all, or they could be what

they called “noncombatants,” which just meant that you didn’t carry a gun,

that maybe you’d carry the aid bag, but you wouldn’t carry the gun. That’s

what all these guys that I was training with—they were in the military, they

just weren’t going to shoot anybody. I liked that. I really respected those

guys. It wasn’t like they won me over. It wasn’t like I thought even one

thought about applying to be a conscientious objector or anything of the sort,

but I think it did plant a seed in my head.

01-01:02:16

Berglund Sokolov: And you respected them. It sounds like you respected them.

01-01:02:19

Rowland: I did respect them. You think about your average GI Joe was kind of like a—

it’s kind of like let’s go get drunk, let’s go get laid, let’s have a fight, let’s

do, you know, whatever, which is an unfair stereotype, but for the purpose of


this conversation, you can say that. And then there’s the guys that they’re,

that kind of have some moral character to them, and I was attracted to that.

01-01:02:48

Berglund Sokolov: So after Fort Sam—tell me if I’m right in this chronology here—you go to

Madigan Hospital in Fort Lewis?

01-01:03:05

Rowland: Right.

01-01:03:06

Berglund Sokolov: And that’s where you started actively not just training, but really taking care

of wounded soldiers as a part of your training?

01-01:03:17

Rowland: Both. Right.

01-01:03:17

Berglund Sokolov: Can you talk about how—?

01-01:03:18

Rowland: It was more advanced training. By the time I got out of the army, I was an

LPN. I had passed the state boards in Washington State as an LPN.

01-01:03:29

Berglund Sokolov: What’s an LPN?

01-01:03:32

Rowland: Well, in nursing we always called it Low Paid Nurse. [laughter] But it’s

actually, I think in California they call them LVNs, but LPN, in most states,

it’s a Licensed Practical Nurse. It’s one grade below a registered nurse, but

they can still pass meds and give shots and do stuff. I was in training, but I

was also working in the hospital, living in the barracks and working in the

hospital and being influenced by the world around me. Because by now it

was 1967, and—well, I mean I joined in 1967, so the later part of or halfway

through, the last six months of 1967, I suppose, I was at Madigan—or

whatever.

The world was changing, but also what was going on was I was taking

care—I was taking care of these guys who were paralyzed. You know, it was

just like a regular hospital. You have different units for different kinds of

patients, your orthopedic patients, or whatever, and so this was a neuro unit.

These guys who had caught a fragment in the spine or were head-injured.

We had one guy that was on a—what do you call those beds, not a rotobed

but a—can’t think of it—circle, it’s called a circle bed. They’re great big

metal circles, and the bed’s like this, and you push a button, and then it’ll go

into—because you’ve got to prone them. If a person just lays in one position,

they’ll get bed sores and congested and die, so you’ve got to move them

around. This was a way to stabilize a person who had spinal problems, and

still be able to prone them. Well, this guy was head-injured, in a coma, but


he was alive. He was a training object for the doctors and nurses to practice

everything that we had to learn on. It was kind of a horrible circumstance.

And you know, other guys had caught a fragment in their spine, and they

were paralyzed from some point down, some from the waist down, some

from the neck down. I mean you take care of guys, feed them, and do

whatever they need. They literally couldn’t turn the page of a book by

themselves, couldn’t shit by themselves, couldn’t anything by themselves.

Their girlfriends would come in and visit them one time. They were like

eighteen, and the girlfriend’s sixteen or seventeen, and they’d show up one

time—here’s Johnny the Vegetable—and they’d never come back. These

guys were going through changes. Frankly, those guys would beg us to kill

them. You know that was kind of the moral crisis for the medics. Here’s the

people you’re taking care of, just really begging for death. And that was

horrible. What a horrible circumstance to be in, and those guys didn’t go

away, so you got to know them.

01-01:06:43


01-01:06:45

Rowland: Yeah, the other thing about it though is that not a single one of those guys

that I ever took care of that was back from Vietnam ever felt like they had

made their sacrifice for a good cause. They talked about guarding some rich

guy’s banana plantation or had all these various theories for why we were

over there, but none of them felt like we were there to defend freedom and

democracy and the American way or any of that kind of—more exalted

reasons. Every one of them had a bad attitude about the war and would tell

stories that were dreadful, in terms of the misbehavior of American forces.

Two things happened in my mind—one, on the one hand all of a sudden I

felt like a conscientious objector, because I felt like I don’t want to be

somebody that will put somebody, from any side, into a hospital into the

kind of conditions, because those conditions are hell.

01-01:07:46

Berglund Sokolov: Had you ever seen anybody with those

Documents

Oral History Center University of California The Bancroft Library … · 2020. 9. 21. · Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley ii Since 1954