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TRANSCRIPT
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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
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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.
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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
use is non-commercial and properly cited.
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
at http://ucblib.link/OHC-rights.
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
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Randy Rowland, 2018
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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.
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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
Interview 2: October 10, 2018
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,
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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
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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
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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.
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Interview 1: October 9, 2018
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.
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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
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Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 3
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
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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]
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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
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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?
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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
Berglund Sokolov: Yeah.
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?
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Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 8
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
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Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 9
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.
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Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 10
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
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Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 11
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
Berglund Sokolov: Right.
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.
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Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 12
01-00:28:34
Berglund Sokolov: Right.
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.
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Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 13
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
Berglund Sokolov: Yeah.
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?
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Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 14
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
Berglund Sokolov: Yeah.
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
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Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 15
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
Berglund Sokolov: Yeah.
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?
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Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 16
01-00:38:13
Rowland: Sure, I mean because there was the hip culture.
01-00:38:14
Berglund Sokolov: Right.
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
Berglund Sokolov: Right.
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.
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Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 17
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.
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Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 18
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
Berglund Sokolov: Right.
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
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Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 19
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
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Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 20
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
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Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 21
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?
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Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 22
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.
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Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 23
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.
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Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 24
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
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Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 25
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
Berglund Sokolov: Yeah.
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
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Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 26
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
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Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 27
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
Berglund Sokolov: Right.
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