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.

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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.

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Randy Rowland, 2018

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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

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, 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

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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 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.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 kinds of injuries before?

01-01:07:49 Rowland: No, of course not. Whoever has until you work in that kind of conditions? The psych ward was—you know that movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? Where they’re standing there with a basketball, and they can’t figure out how to throw the basketball? That’s the way it was. Thorazine was the drug of choice in those days, and so you’d have what was called the “maintenance dose.” The way you’d get to the maintenance dose is that the doctors would prescribe higher and higher amounts of Thorazine until the guy couldn’t walk, and then you’d back off just a little bit until he could barely stand up, and that was a maintenance dose, see? It was more how do

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you manage a person who is going through the emotional trauma of having survived in a wartime zone, with all the additional overlay of feeling guilty about having raped and pillaged and carried on? More houses in Vietnam were burned down by a Zippo lighter than were burned down by napalm or something. That was the routine, I think, for those guys is to go in there, shoot anybody that they could, burn the village down, scatter the food supplies and make things as miserable as they could for the locals. So then these guys get hurt and they end up in the hospital, and so not only do they hate the fact that they were hurt or whatever, or head-injured or emotionally broke down, but they didn’t feel good about what they had been doing, see? I picked up on that, you know, quite a bit.

01-01:09:17 Berglund Sokolov: Was that a shock to you, given your upbringing, and given what you were walking into?

01-01:09:23 Rowland: Well, it’s true. We were the good guys.

01-01:09:24 Berglund Sokolov: Right.

01-01:09:24 Rowland: We were supposed to be the good guys. And people are supposed to be, you know, like throwing flowers when we marched into the village. Instead, we were going in there and shooting everybody up—and whatever—and all the stories and all the horror of the guys themselves.

Bit by bit by bit, the first thing that I did—actually, I was a little bit of an asshole. I wanted to grow a mustache. They wouldn’t let us young guys grow mustaches. You know, it was just part of the regimentation. The old sergeants, they could grow mustaches, but the young guys—they wouldn’t let us grow our hair, of course, and they wouldn’t let us grow mustaches. We all wanted a mustache in the worst way, because by now there was hippies. I first read a Life magazine about hippies when I was at Fort Sam, and there was an article about the Summer of Love in Life magazine. I looked at that and was like, “Oh, these are my people.” [Sokolov laughs] I looked at that article, and then I knew I was going to be a hippie. There wasn’t any question in my mind. Those are my people. I think probably the free love was as much a motivator as anything. But you know, because I’d always been attracted to the beats, and the beats were come and gone, and I kind of missed out on the beats, except the tail end of it. I saw that Life magazine article, and I tried marijuana, and that seemed kind of cool, and then, you know.

01-01:10:48 Berglund Sokolov: Where did you find marijuana?

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01-01:10:50 Rowland: Oh, in the barracks. Some guy sold me a match box. A match box was one of those little match boxes full of marijuana. It was the worst quality marijuana possible. I didn’t even know what to do with it. My buddy said, “Well, maybe we mix it in with our tobacco.” We mixed it in to try and make it last longer, because everybody smoked, right? You join the Army and then when you’re in basic training you’re running along and then they say, “Okay, take five minutes. Smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em.” Or, “The smoking lamp is lit,” and everybody smokes. So you know, I just started smoking too. I hadn’t smoked in college. My girlfriend smoked, and I didn’t smoke, even though she smoked. But once I joined the Army, of course, well, that’s what you did.

01-01:11:28 Berglund Sokolov: They’re handing out the cigarettes.

01-01:11:29 Rowland: They do. They put four little cigarettes in the C-rations—or used to, anyway. Every time you got a meal out in the field, you got four cigarettes. Well, at any rate, we mixed the marijuana with some tobacco and smoked it and barely got stoned at all. It was like a miserable introduction. But still, it was kind of the times, and that was what everybody’s supposed to be doing, and I was going to be right along with it. Anyway, I forgot how I got off onto that, I was actually talking about something else.

01-01:12:00 Berglund Sokolov: Oh, about the mustache.

01-01:12:01 Rowland: Oh. I wanted to grow a mustache, you know, just to be hip. There wasn’t any way in the world—the way they said it was—the military structure, even though you’re working in a hospital, you’ve got a command structure and you’re living in the barracks, and you’ve got sergeants and captains and lieutenants above you, and whatever. The way they regulated all that was that they said, “Well, you can’t grow a mustache, because if you grow a mustache you won’t be able to get paid.”

Now, in those days, the way it worked is that you got paid in cash. I got $128 a month as a private in the army. You would go once a month and you’d report for pay. The paymaster would come, some officer, and they’d sit up in a little office somewhere, they improvised some place, and you’d stand in the line. One at a time you’d open the door and you’d walk in there, and you go up and you salute, “Private Rowland reports for pay.” He’d count out your $128, and you’d accept it and then you’d salute and say, “Thank you, Sir.” You’d about face and you’d walk out, and then the next guy would come in and do the whole thing. Then you had your $128, and that’s what you were going to have until next month. They were saying that

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if you grow a mustache, you’re not going to look like your ID card. And if you don’t look like your ID card, then you’re not going to get paid.

Well, one of my buddies was an old sergeant. I kind of hung out with the old sergeants a little bit, even though they were older, but they were cool and they were my friends. One of the old guys says, “You know, they’re just bullshitting you guys. He suggested to do what I did, so I started growing it—right after pay day I started growing a mustache, and of course it didn’t take them any time at all before they said, “Rowland, you’re growing a mustache. You know you’re not going to be able to get away with that because you’ll never get paid.” I said, “I know, I know.” They all assumed that I would shave right before—that it was going to be a month’s worth of growth before I shaved it. But on pay day, I still had my mustache, and I walked in there. “Private Rowland reports for pay, but I can’t accept the pay, because I don’t look like my ID card. Sorry Sir.” And I saluted. Because what I’d learned from the old sergeants is that the paymasters—the worse thing in the world is if they can’t give the money out, because then they’ve got to go through all kinds of paperwork in order to get the money back into wherever it comes from.

01-01:14:28 Berglund Sokolov: The bureaucracy.

01-01:14:29 Rowland: The bureaucracy. And a paymaster—there’s no way in the world he didn’t want you to accept his pay. [Sokolov laughs] He came out with a certain number of dollars, and he’d better have no dollars by the time he went back. That guy looks at me like I’m from Mars or something. He says, “Go report and get a new ID.” I said, “Yes, sir.” [laughing] So I went back to my duty station and said, “They told me to go get a new ID.” I was under orders, and I went over there and they gave me a new ID, new picture, with my mustache on it. I went back, I reported for pay again, showed him my ID, and he paid me out my $128. Well, that very day every young guy in the barracks started growing a mustache, because we’d figured out how to break the system, see?

01-01:15:17 Berglund Sokolov: Right. Figured out the lie, right?

01-01:15:19 Rowland: Yeah, I mean, I wasn’t political at that point. I was changing, but I hadn’t really come up with a—and it wasn’t like that that was a political stand or an antiwar stand or anything of the sort—I just wanted to grow the moustache so I’d be hip. Because by then I’d also figured out that people had long hair, and if they’d let me grow hair I would have done that.

01-01:15:40 Berglund Sokolov: Well, and this was around the time that you were reading the Village Voice.

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01-01:15:44 Rowland: Well, it was. My best buddy in the barracks was from New York, and he had a subscription to the Village Voice, which was an underground paper in those days. It was what they called underground papers, countercultural papers, but it was much more political in those days than most of your—like we, in Seattle, we have The Stranger now and the [Seattle] Weekly, and those are kind of hip papers that have—that’s where you look to figure out what music’s playing or whatever. The Village Voice did that, but it had much more of a genuine political edge to it. He would get it every week in the mail, and he was kind of a hip guy really. When he was done reading it, he would give it to me. Of course when I was done reading it, I’d give it to some other guy. That’s the way it was in the barracks, of course, everything went from hand to hand.

I came across this little ad in the Village Voice. It was: “Individuals Against the Crimes of Silence.” I was going down the road of thinking against the war—and the guys that I was taking care of, and all the things I just got through telling you. And here was this thing, and it was really all about the crime of silence. The concept was if you see a crime being committed and you do nothing, then you’re complicit in that crime, and that’s the crime of silence. If they’re raping Sally Sweetheart, and you don’t do anything, then you’re kind of guilty of rape too, right? In the sense of complicity, and that was kind of the angle. I saw that, and I thought, well, that was a moral stand that I could appreciate. Christian upbringing or whatever.

01-01:17:40 Berglund Sokolov: And you’re an Eagle Scout.

01-01:17:41 Rowland: I was an Eagle Scout, yeah, everything. I filled out the little coupon and mailed it in.

Now, the way it worked in the hospital is that unlike a normal military unit, our mess hall was the hospital cafeteria. At lunch you’d just go into the hospital cafeteria and go through, so it was really a cut above a regular mess hall, and it was great. The hospital cafeteria was here, and the Madigan, in those days, was all one story. It just went for miles in every direction it seemed like. You’d be pushing gurneys down halls forever. But across, kind of across the hall was an area that looked kind of like a post office, and each soldier had a little post office box, with a little—I don’t remember if it was a key or a combination or whatever it was, but you’d open your box. Most guys like me, you’d go to lunch—well, since the mess hall was right there, you’d go and open up your box to see if you got any mail that day.

One day, there in my little box was this manila envelope. I picked it up, stuck it under my arm, went in there and got my tray, went through the line, got my food, and then I’m sitting down there at the table and eating my lunch—and then I opened up my mail, of course. That’s what everybody did.

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It was from the group, this Individuals Against the Crimes of Silence, and there was a whole stack of flyers in there where other people can sign the thing, and then a little letter saying, “Thank you for taking your stand,” or whatever. I don’t remember exactly what was in there. But there was a stack of the little flyers. I said, “Hey, look at this.” Of course I pass it down, and everybody down the table—they passed it around. I don’t know if anybody took them, or if they just passed it around so everybody could look at it, but we’re at these long tables and just eating our lunch. It’s not like a—like in basic training, you didn’t talk while you’re eating. You’re just shoveling the food in and sitting at attention and eating a “square” meal, that kind of business. But this was a way more relaxed atmosphere, because now I was in the hospital and the hospital cafeteria, and there wasn’t anybody looking at you or telling you what to do. As long as you’re back to your duty station by the time your lunch was over it didn’t really matter. I didn’t even think that I was doing anything wrong.

But it wasn’t any time at all before I was standing there in front of my commanding officer’s desk, and he was yelling at me because I had been passing out literature on base in uniform.

01-01:20:24 Berglund Sokolov: Because it’s not like to you that was anything that was antimilitary or antiwar.

01-01:20:27 Rowland: No, and I said, “Well, I’m an American. I can pass out literature. I got it in the mail, and I showed the next guy. That’s America.” He asserted, in no uncertain terms, that whatever freedoms Americans enjoy, they didn’t extend into the military, and that I had just committed a crime, see, by passing out antiwar literature in uniform, on duty, on base.

01-01:21:00 Berglund Sokolov: He saw it as antiwar literature?

01-01:21:02 Rowland: Absolutely, and then he went on to say, “And besides, those people are Communists.” I didn’t know if they were or weren’t, but I said, “You know, I’ll bet you they’re not Communists. I don’t believe they are Communists, Sir. If they are, I’d like to know about it, because I probably wouldn’t be for it. But I don’t think they are. Look, it’s a moral stand about something that I’m kind of feeling strong about.” Well, he didn’t want to hear anything about that. Did I want to go to the stockade right this second? Or how is that going to go? I got the concept. But I felt like, you know, I just passed something. I got it in the mail, and I showed it to the guy sitting next to me, and this is goddamn America. So that moved me a little further down the road.

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And each one of these little things. Then I was supposed to, we were at some kind of event, and I didn’t salute the general. I don’t think that I actually intended to not salute the general. To some degree I think it was that—my father coming out in me, about that whole thing about knowing how to handle superior officers without being subordinate, and riding that kind of edge. I went up and stuck out my hand. Of course when some man sticks out his hand, the general stuck out his hand and we shook hands, man to man. Well, of course I was supposed to salute and kowtow, and boy did I catch shit for that, you know? I genuinely don’t think I was trying to be bad, but you know, they expected me to be subservient, and I just went up and was like any man would to another man, or “Hi Sir.” Whatever.

01-01:22:57 Berglund Sokolov: Like he was an equal.

01-01:22:58 Rowland: Yeah, but with full respect. It wasn’t like I was dissing him at all. But oh boy, I caught hell for that.

01-01:23:05 Berglund Sokolov: What did they do?

01-01:23:07 Rowland: Well, they didn’t punish me, but they were trying to figure out—because by then I had a reputation, see? We were smoking dope in the barracks, and I was in the thick of that. I was starting to be more and more vocal about—and I was kind of a loudmouth. They were trying to figure out—was I trouble? Was I a bad apple, I think is what they were trying to figure out. I was a dumb apple is the truth of the matter. [Sokolov laughs] I really don’t think that I was trying to be bad or disrespect the general, but I had failed to salute the general, and boy, so there I was again, standing there at attention in front of some guy’s desk, catching shit.

Well, at a certain point, bit by bit, I kept moving, and each thing kind of moved me a little further, in this almost—to me it was almost, it was imperceptible to me. I didn’t realize I was changing, but I was changing. Hearing the guys that I was taking care of talking about the war, thinking— “There’d better be a damn good reason for this kind of suffering.” I wasn’t even thinking about the Vietnamese at that point. I was just thinking about the guys I was taking care of. Of course that raised the question in my mind, well, I’d better figure it out, because these guys are telling me that the war sucks, and that it’s all wrong and we shouldn’t be doing it, and whatever. Everything I had believed up until that point was patriotic duty and believe your leaders and yay team. At a certain point it dawned on me that I really had to figure this out. I had to figure out for myself whether or not war really sucked.

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01-01:24:45 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah

01-01:24:47 Rowland: All that kind of stuff. I didn’t have to look very far at all before it dawned on me that half the country was against the war. I hadn’t realized how the country had been changing, I don’t think. All of a sudden, I was against the war. Once I figured that out, then things really started moving along.

01-01:25:04 Berglund Sokolov: Were there—

01-01:25:04 Rowland: Oh, go ahead.

01-01:25:04 Berglund Sokolov: Were there any particular steps, like you know, in addition to just having these experiences that were gradually shifting your consciousness in this kind of imperceptible way, were there any real actions you took to dig into what was going on in Vietnam, what was happening with public opinion?

01-01:25:27 Rowland: No. I mean, probably, but I don’t remember. I don’t remember exactly the thought process or—the guys would sit around in the barracks at night and talk. I mean, you know, our patients are asking us to kill them.

01-01:25:39 Berglund Sokolov: Right.

01-01:25:41 Rowland: That’s a big moral challenge, and the question was well, should we be doing that? Maybe we ought to, you know—we had to take seriously our responsibility to our patients, and part of that responsibility was figuring out how do you respond to somebody who, while you’re feeding them the meal or turning the page of the book, and he looks up to you and he says, “You know, can you just put the pillow on my face?” We had to address it. There was moral questions and agony in the barracks among the medics. There was no wavering from the wounded about whether the war was good or bad. Every one of those guys thought it was bad. At some point—I can’t delineate exactly step by step by step. But at a certain point, I decided that I had to apply to be a conscientious objector.

01-01:26:30 Berglund Sokolov: There was all this conversation going on. In doing other interviews with guys who were affiliated with the Presidio 27, I think everybody I’ve talked to has talked about being in the barracks, talking about what was happening, reckoning with what was happening in the war. You had experiences like that too, with regular conversation with other medics and other GIs.

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01-01:27:00 Rowland: Plus, we were all getting stoned. I’ve got to say that much as you know these days you really don’t want to push drugs on people or whatever, I think that marijuana really was kind of tearing people away from mainstream society. We’d go and have a party, and everybody’d be smoking dope, and it just seemed like more and more and more we were—we’re not at all identifying with the military and the command structure. It was kind of us against them, more and more and more of that.

01-01:27:36 Berglund Sokolov: So more and more people were sharing—you weren’t an outlier at this point.

01-01:27:41 Rowland: No, no, I was one of the guys. I was right in the thick of it, yeah.

01-01:27:44 Berglund Sokolov: More and more people were sharing your feelings, the same feelings, the same attitude.

01-01:27:49 Rowland: I was the guy that figured out how to grow a mustache, you know? I mean I had a reputation in the barracks. [laughing]

01-01:27:55 Berglund Sokolov: Right, right.

01-01:27:56 Rowland: You know what I mean? As far as that goes—because I had, all I had to do, really all we had to do is talk to the old sergeants. They told you everything you needed to know.

01-01:28:05 Berglund Sokolov: But the attitudes about the war were changing.

01-01:28:08 Rowland: They were changing, and we would play, for instance, in the barracks, if we didn’t play Beatles music—the Sergeant Pepper album came out, I’m pretty sure that was when it was. I just went recently and went and saw Yellow Submarine, and I realized how there’s a lot of politics hidden in the Beatles’ music that I hadn’t recognized really until I started looking back at it.

But the other thing is somebody had a Country Joe McDonald album, and you know Country Joe had been in the military before he became part of the San Francisco sound and all that stuff. There was one song in particular, the second song, I think, second track, was one called—oh, I don’t remember the name of it [“Who am I?”], but it was like, “Who am I”—[singing] “Who am I to sit and wonder as the wheels of fate slowly grind my life away.” In other words, that’s the way we all felt, that the wheels of fate were grinding—these forces larger than us were wasting our lives. The guys that we were taking care of, us personally—not that we weren’t having a good

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time on the weekends or doing whatever we were doing, but we all had that sense that there was these forces that were not particularly good that were slowly grinding our lives away just like the Country Joe McDonald song. It was almost every morning, before we’d all go to work, we would listen to Country Joe McDonald, and I’m sure that had a corrosive effect on our otherwise good attitudes towards the military.

01-01:29:54 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah. I think this is probably a good time to wrap up for now, and then when we resume tomorrow we’ll start with your conscientious objector application and taking steps towards that.

01-01:30:09 Rowland: Okay.

01-01:30:10 Berglund Sokolov: Does that sound good?

01-01:30:11 Rowland: Sure.

01-01:30:11 Berglund Sokolov: Awesome.

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Interview 2: October 10, 2018

02-00:00:00 Berglund Sokolov: Okay, this is Barbara Berglund Sokolov interviewing Randy Rowland, part two of our interview. I’m the Presidio Trust historian. Randy is one of the Presidio 27, and today is October 10, 2018.

02-00:00:18 Farrell: And this is our second session.

02-00:00:19 Berglund Sokolov: Did I—?

02-00:00:20 Farrell: You may have; you may have.

02-00:00:21 Berglund Sokolov: It’s our second session. [laughter] So today we’re going to be picking back up with where Randy started to think about filing a conscientious objector application, and I think that’s where we left off yesterday; that you had been up at Madigan, had some experiences of either bucking authority or navigating military authority. Given the types of wounded soldiers that you were taking care of, what you were seeing, who you were talking to, that you started thinking about filing a conscientious objector application.

02-00:01:26 Rowland: Yeah, at a certain point, I just decided that I needed to be a conscientious objector. That is to say, a noncombatant, one of the ones that would carry the aid bag, but not the gun. In the course of that I went to my commanding officer, a lieutenant—I don’t remember his name. I just kind of poured out my heart to him and said, “I’m thinking about doing this.” He said, “You’re already a medic. Nobody’s going to ask you to carry a gun. Don’t bring this on yourself. Keep your head low. Just run with it. You don’t have to take this stand.” I explained I felt some—I was influenced, actually, I think, thinking back on it, by the Individuals Against the Crimes of Silence notion of complicity. I explained all that to him, and he said, “I will never ask you to pick up a gun. So don’t do this.” I said, “Well, I’m going to have to. I feel like I need to do it. Can I have an application, or whatever paperwork is required, to get this going?” Having no idea, really—I mean I had kind of— part of my mission in talking to him was to find out what I had to do to actually initiate this. I didn’t know—what do I know, I was just a soldier. But he told me, he assured me that he would never ask me to pick up a gun, but I decided I had to do it anyway. He gave me whatever I needed to start the paperwork, which was—I don’t even remember exactly now, a form to fill out or something.

I had no legal help or guidance. I actually called a few places in Seattle, which—Fort Lewis is just south of Tacoma, which is thirty miles south of Seattle, and I called a couple places in Seattle that were, that seemed—I

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knew that there was a movement going on. In fact, a couple of my buddies and I had gone up to a demonstration in Seattle, an antiwar demonstration. But the movement people kind of—they didn’t know what to do with a soldier who was asking for help. Maybe I didn’t get the right people, but I kind of think the movement was not there yet, where they realized that the soldiers were really part of the team, the antiwar team.

I was on my own, and I filled out the paperwork as best I could. When I thought that I had done the best I could, and without any sense at all of—like everything, there’s magic words you’ve got to say the certain—got to say the thing exactly the way the law says it’s supposed to be said in order to meet that standard. I had no sense of that whatsoever, so I just poured out my heart. Whatever, I did my best, and didn’t even realize—in my innocence I didn’t actually realize that there were, how you had to comply with standards or that kind of thing. I turned it in, and eventually it came back— denied. In retrospect, no surprise, because I really hadn’t met the standards, because I hadn’t realized what the standards were. I could have met the standards, easy enough if I’d known what I needed to say, because it wasn’t like I didn’t actually satisfy the requirements, but I just didn’t know. It came back denied.

02-00:05:07 Berglund Sokolov: I have a question. You said that you went to a demonstration up in Seattle, an antiwar demonstration. When we talked yesterday you mentioned you’d gone to an antiwar demonstration when you were—kind of college-y, maybe early army, and I’m just curious—?

02-00:05:25 Rowland: Yeah, but I was on the wrong side of that one. [laughing]

02-00:05:26 Berglund Sokolov: On the wrong side, so I’m curious, like how, if you look back at where— who Randy was, where Randy was, at those two demos, how had things changed?

02-00:05:37 Rowland: Well, I was in the army, and my eyes had been opened.

02-00:05:41 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah.

02-00:05:42 Rowland: That’s the thing that had changed for me, was that before I was just a stupid guy that didn’t know any better, but now I had had some experience. I had taken care of the wounded, for one thing. And sitting around in the barracks with all the other soldiers, trying to figure out what—which end was up, my thinking had clearly changed. By the time I went to that demonstration, I was—I really felt like that was—the idea was to go to the demonstrations, or whatever, and I—I suppose that was probably, the one in Seattle—which I

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don’t have much memory of, but I know I went. That was probably the first demonstration that I had ever been in, I guess, in retrospect.

I had seen civil rights demonstrations in the South, from afar. One of my regrets, thinking back on my childhood, is that when I lived in Montgomery I didn’t realize that white kids could go to civil rights demonstrations. If I had my life to live over, with a little—a bit more wisdom than what I had back in those days, I would have participated. It’s only really years later, when I looked at archival footage and realized there were white people at those demonstrations, that I didn’t know—I would have been there, I think. I mean I don’t know for sure, of course, but my sentiments were there. But I didn’t think that that was something that was allowed, or I don’t know what, appropriate or whatever. I certainly never went to a demonstration other than the wrong side in Columbia there, but so the Seattle demonstration was probably the first one I’d ever been to.

But we would go up to Seattle to score dope or go to the movies. There was kind of an art house movie theater there that my buddy who was from New York, who was much hipper than me—we went up to that, you know. We’d go up to Seattle from time to time.

02-00:07:51 Berglund Sokolov: He was the guy with the Village Voice subscription?

02-00:07:53 Rowland: Exactly, the guy with the Village Voice subscription. I’m sure he influenced me way more than he ever realized. I’ve lost contact with him and don’t know where he is or anything. So anyway, we went up to the demonstration in Seattle at some point. I had applied to be a CO, that was rejected, and then the next thing I knew I had orders for Vietnam.

02-00:08:24 Berglund Sokolov: Were you surprised when your application was rejected? Do you remember what that was like, to get it back?

02-00:08:30 Rowland: I don’t remember if I was surprised or not.

02-00:08:34 Berglund Sokolov: Angry or disappointed, or all of the above?

02-00:08:36 Rowland: I’m sure I was disappointed, but I don’t really remember. At that point the Army—I had realized kind of what a clown act the Army was. [laughing] Over the whole thing of—any clerk can send your file to anywhere, and chaos is more or less characteristic of what was going on in the military. I don’t remember what my response was other than—by the time I got denied, I was a lot more set in my ways in terms of my attitudes. My application came back along with orders to Vietnam, of course. Then what happened is

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that the next thing I knew I had orders to report to the firing range one day, sort of like—well, next Tuesday you’ve got to report to the firing range to familiarize yourself with the M16. In basic training we had used M14s, which is a completely different kind of rifle than the M16. It was certainly appropriate to go and learn all about the M16, because that’s what they were actually using in Vietnam. The M14 was the old news. But since I had just applied to be a conscientious objector and had asserted my unwillingness to carry a gun, when they told me to go report to the firing range to familiarize myself I said, “Well, I’m not going to do that.”

02-00:10:04 Berglund Sokolov: This was after your commanding officer, who you’d gone to about the CO application had assured you don’t—

02-00:10:11 Rowland: Exactly.

02-00:10:12 Berglund Sokolov: —do the application. I’ll never order you to pick up a gun.

02-00:10:17 Rowland: He had, man to man, told me. I went into his office and I said, “You told me, man to man, that you would never order me to pick up a gun, and here I have this piece of paper that says report to familiarize myself with the M16.” He says, “Well, I’m not going to tell you. The colonel will tell you,” which, of course, is a much bigger deal. And boy, did I feel betrayed.

02-00:10:41 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah.

02-00:10:41 Rowland: That asshole. I don’t know if he remembered that conversation that he’d had with me. I certainly remembered it.

02-00:10:50 Berglund Sokolov: Or if it was just a way to somehow manage you and kind of move you along?

02-00:10:55 Rowland: Right. He was trying to convince me not to file it, but I remembered very well that he had—what his words were. And I confronted him.

02-00:11:04 Berglund Sokolov: And you took him at his word.

02-00:11:05 Rowland: I took him at his word, because it was a conversation—I went to him to say here’s what I’m thinking about and to ask his advice—what a soldier is supposed to do with their commanding officer. I did exactly what I was

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supposed to do, I thought, to ask him how to handle the situation and take his advice, or hear it at least. I didn’t take his advice, because I did file.

Well, at any rate, so there it was, and so I, on the day that I was supposed to report to the firing range, I reported to the firing range. A friend of mine also had to go to the firing range that day, because there was a war going on and it wasn’t—I mean people were getting orders for Vietnam. We sat next to each other, and I sat there, and you’re at long tables, so to speak, sitting there. The first part of the process is that you learn how to break it down and put it back together, and how to clean it and all the different parts. The second half of it is you go out and shoot the damn thing. We sat there, and I left mine sitting there in front of me and wouldn’t touch it. I’m pretty mechanically inclined, and so I had done well in basic training with breaking down weapons and doing all that kind of business, but he was having trouble getting his M16—he got it apart okay, but then he couldn’t get it back together. When nobody was looking, I would reach over, and I would do his for him. [laughter] I would pull back and pretend like I wasn’t. I learned all about the M16 by helping my buddy, but as far as mine, I of course refused to touch it. I don’t even know if they were paying that much attention.

But then when it was time to go out there and actually do the firing, sure enough, there was some colonel who stood there and said, “Rowland, I’m giving you a direct order to pick up this weapon and report to the firing line and do your thing.” I refused it, and that was a five year, potentially a five- year sentence that I could get for—

02-00:13:22 Berglund Sokolov: For refusing a direct order?

02-00:13:22 Rowland: —refusing a direct order from some big officer. I’m pretty sure I realized that it was at least potentially a major offense, although I was still more innocent than I am now. But nonetheless, it was the only thing I could do really. They had boxed me into a corner, because I had applied to be a CO. I had poured my heart out and told them all about my thoughts and my—all that stuff. If I had done it, I would have more or less just been caving under the pressure, and I wasn’t going to do that.

02-00:14:00 Berglund Sokolov: Right, and not keeping to your word that you had expressed in your application.

02-00:14:04 Rowland: To my own—yeah. Yeah, exactly, you know. To thine own self be true, and so I refused. They had the option of a general court-martial or any of the lesser court-martials. There’s a whole system of lesser court-martials that you can—

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02-00:14:26 Berglund Sokolov: Just for that? Just for refusing a direct order is such a—

02-00:14:30 Rowland: Oh yeah, that’s five years. That’s potentially five years in prison.

02-00:14:35 Berglund Sokolov: I think for people who don’t have military experience, that might be a little shocking to them, who are used to being able to—I don’t know, negotiate their way out of something they don’t want to do. The chain of command isn’t so real in civilian life.

02-00:14:50 Rowland: Yeah, if your boss—in civilian life the boss says, “Jump off the bridge,” you can say, “Take this job and shove it.”

02-00:14:56 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah.

02-00:14:57 Rowland: That’s your option. But in the military, that’s not the case. For people who, for instance, refused to get on the airplane to go to Vietnam—what they were actually refusing was somebody’s order to get on the plane, you see. Because there’s nothing in the UCMJ [Uniform Code of Military Justice] that says thou hast to get on a plane to go to Vietnam. You’re not breaking a rule about getting on a plane; the rule that you’re breaking is you’re refusing a direct order from a superior officer, which is potentially a five-year sentence.

02-00:15:28 Berglund Sokolov: I guess it’s the glue that holds the army together. If that—right?

02-00:15:31 Rowland: Yeah, sure.

02-00:15:32 Berglund Sokolov: If that doesn’t happen, right?

02-00:15:35 Rowland: Yeah, you know you’re in big—deep doo-doo if you refuse orders. So I did it. I refused to pick up the gun. At that point I was an E-4.

02-00:15:50 Berglund Sokolov: And what’s an E-4 for a civilian—?

02-00:15:52 Rowland: Well, you’ve got pay grades. You start, and when you first come into the army you’re an E-1. That’s your most basic private. E-4 is either a corporal, if you’re in the command structure, or if you’re like a technical field, then you’re a specialist, so it’s Spec 4 or specialist grade four. Officers have their own, from the lieutenants and captains and all the way up. In the class

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structure of the military, the enlisted personnel have—their grades are E this and that, one through—whatever. I don’t even know what—E-8 or 9 is the top, the oldest sergeants and that sort of thing. I was an E-4. They gave me an Article 15, which is a non-judicial punishment. There’s various kinds of court-martials. There’s three different kinds of court-martials, if I remember correctly. But then there’s also a non-judicial punishment, where you’re not really challenging it. You accept your Article 15—in other words, you go before your commanding officer, and they say, “Here’s what you did wrong, and here’s the punishment you’re going to get,” and you accept it. I had the option, of course, to refuse to accept it, at which time then the case would have gone to court-martial. But it’s not like I—it’s not like I didn’t—I wasn’t pleading not guilty, or something of that sort. I had refused to pick up the gun and I was going to take the punishment, and that’s all there was to that.

02-00:17:26 Berglund Sokolov: And that wasn’t going to change any time soon.

02-00:17:28 Rowland: It wasn’t going to change, so there wasn’t any reason to go to court-martial. During the process of the thing, one of the questions that whoever was administering this punishment—I don’t even remember who, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t my immediate superior, who had promised me not to order me to pick up the gun—it was somebody above him. When they asked me, “Well, you’ve got orders for Vietnam. Are you still willing to go to Vietnam?” I said “Yeah,” because I was. I hadn’t gotten that far in my process yet. I was unwilling to carry a gun, but I wasn’t trying to get out of the army. I was just trying to not carry a gun, and that was my stand.

02-00:18:11 Berglund Sokolov: There’s different levels of CO belief, right? Some are won’t carry a gun, some are opposed to all wars, and you were at that—

02-00:18:23 Rowland: Well, there’s only two categories. There’s the kind that won’t go into the military at all, and there’s the kind that won’t carry a gun. All of the various technical parts about what you believe, or don’t believe, all boils down to two choices.

02-00:18:36 Berglund Sokolov: Got it.

02-00:18:37 Rowland: Which is the kind that won’t go in the military, or if you’re in the military and you have had a conversion, then you can say, “I’m applying for discharge, or you can say, “I’m applying for noncombatant status,” which just means—it doesn’t mean you don’t go to combat, it just means you don’t carry a gun.

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02-00:18:57 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah.

02-00:18:58 Rowland: And that was what I was applying for—I wasn’t asking to get out. I still believed in service, and I believed in my doing my duty and all that kind of business. I didn’t have a problem—I didn’t even—it wasn’t like I disliked the military life. I loved the food. [laughing]

02-00:19:16 Berglund Sokolov: I was just going to say, the food—you didn’t have a problem.

02-00:19:18 Rowland: I was comfortable in the barracks. By that point I was married, and I actually—I wasn’t even living in the barracks. I had gotten married to my college girlfriend, whose name was Sue. I was already married, and so the question though, that was put to me, is, “Well, are you still willing to go to Vietnam?” I said, “Sure. I don’t have a problem with that,” and then explained. They said, “Okay.” What they did is they busted me down to E-1 again, so I lost some stripes, and they confined me to the barracks for a week or two, which of course pissed me off because my wife was—you know, military pay is so crappy that what I would do, once I had gotten married, I had a mess hall card that I had to show when I’d go in for lunch, for instance, or for all of my meals. When you’re living in the barracks, of course you take all your meals in the mess hall, and you show—when you go in, because it was also the hospital cafeteria, and people, like a visitor or a patient might go into the cafeteria and get some food or whatever, and they’re paying cash. But all we would do is show our card and go through the line.

By then I was kind of known as the radical, and so when I got married they said, “Well, give us back the mess hall card, because now you’re living off- base, you don’t get to eat in the mess hall without paying,” I mean without having to pay the money. I said, “Well, I burned it. I didn’t have a draft card to burn, so I burned my mess hall card.” They believed me. [laughter] Because I kind of had that reputation now, see, I was the troublemaker, and they’re, “Oh, Rowland—he burned his mess hall card,” which—of course I didn’t burn my mess hall card. But that meant that I could go in for lunch and get free lunch. What I would do is I’d go in, and I’d get the lunch, and then I would take as much of it as I could and put it—and take it home to my wife so she’d get some food.

02-00:21:17 Berglund Sokolov: Because the pay was so bad.

02-00:21:18 Rowland: A hundred and twenty-eight bucks a month. We were paying $75 a month for our rent, and we had to pay $50 for car insurance because I was so young, and so there was the whole paycheck. One of the old sergeants, at

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Christmas that year, one of the old sergeants and his wife came over to our apartment with sacks of groceries and stuff for us, you know, because they knew we were starving. The guys all knew what I was doing with my food. I’d just take the leftovers or whatever, “Oh, you’re not going to eat that?” I had little containers, and I would take the food over to my wife. But that meant that when I was confined to the barracks, I couldn’t take any food home to her, I couldn’t exactly explain that to them, about why they shouldn’t confine me to barracks. But that was the truth of the matter, is that Sue was at home without any food. I couldn’t see her, and I mean—I was a young guy and I was married, and I wanted to be home with my wife, of course. Well, at any rate, so I did my confinement to barracks, which really all that meant was I just had to—after work I would go over to the barracks instead of going home. It wasn’t that big of a deal. I don’t remember if they gave me a mess hall card for the—but at any rate, that was that.

02-00:22:43 Berglund Sokolov: So at that point had you already received your orders for Vietnam?

02-00:22:47 Rowland: Yeah, that was why I had to go familiarize myself with the M16.

02-00:22:50 Berglund Sokolov: With the M[16]—now do you think that those orders were punitive or were expedited because of your CO?

02-00:22:56 Rowland: Well, that was my attitude, was that my punishment for failure on my CO application was orders for Vietnam. I had a certain date. Oakland Army Terminal was where everybody shipped to Vietnam from, and so I finished my confinement, confinement to barracks. It wasn’t confinement in the stockades; it was confinement to barracks. I finished my confinement to barracks, and then almost immediately after that I went on leave. They gave me forty-five days leave before I was supposed to report to Oakland to ship off to Vietnam. We packed everything we owned out of our apartment, and I had this old 1940 Plymouth. It was a great old car. I’d bought it for $125 I think. It had running boards and the hood opened on the sides like that, and those little separate headlights that sit on the fenders. [microphone rubbing and voice fades] Oops, there goes the whole damn apparatus. I got too excited about the car. [laughter] [interruption in recording]

There, are we back in business? I think it’s because I was waving my arms around. Let’s see if we—okay, we’ll try that. Well, at any rate, so we packed everything into the car—it was a real clown act, really, because we had stuff—we were, by that point, we were pretty bohemian, and so I had this— somewhere in a thrift store I had bought this artificial leg, for instance, and we had that tied to the roof of the car. [Sokolov laughs] And just, you know, what a clown act.

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At any rate, so we left Tacoma, because now I was on leave, and drove down the coast to the Bay Area. We pulled into Berkeley and didn’t have any plan. I think for a couple of nights we actually just crashed in an abandoned building which nowadays—we never thought of ourselves as homeless, or something, but it was kind of like that. But then quickly enough we rented an apartment in Berkeley, almost kind of by the Oakland-Berkeley line, but it was on Heinz Street, which was—there was a Heinz ketchup factory or something, and it was very close to Heinz ketchup factory or whatever—I don’t know if that’s still there or not. But so we rented—I don’t even know how, I can’t remember how we even found this, because there was already people living in it. The one guy was this—a Chicano guy who was part of the Brown Berets, and the other guy was this British artist, and then the third little bedroom was—Sue and I had that bedroom. We started living there, and we started hanging out in Berkeley.

And quickly enough, we fell in with this crowd—there was this guy named Jock [John Pairman] Brown. He was a minister who had sort of a street ministry for hippies and antiwar people. Jock Brown’s whole thing was religious antiwar, and we fell in with that crowd. That way we also kind of knew when the demonstrations were going to happen. His whole thing was—it was a Christian ministry, but it was really antiwar, and it was kind of capitalizing on people’s sentiments, I think. They had their little chant—I can almost remember it, something about, “The bread is not dead. The bread is rising.” I can’t remember now, but it was—something. But Jock was my entry into, also, the whole Clergy and Laymen Against the War. They later changed their name to “Clergy and Laity,” I think, because they were trying to—because the women’s movement came along, but in those days it was called Clergy and Laymen Against the War [Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam] which was—that’s where all the clergymen came from that were chained to the Nine for Peace.

02-00:27:17 Berglund Sokolov: Right. Where are we in time at this point?

02-00:27:22 Rowland: ’68.

02-00:27:22 Berglund Sokolov: Early 1968? Spring?

02-00:27:26 Rowland: Well, it’s sort of spring. Basically, I had forty-five days of leave, and then somewhere in the course of—[coughing] Sorry, poor sound system.

02-00:27:39 Berglund Sokolov: It’s okay. Get some water if you need it.

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02-00:27:48 Rowland: [taking a drink of water] I don’t remember what month it was exactly, but essentially, I had three months, and it ended in October. I guess we can probably calculate it back, because I had forty-five days leave, and then I had forty-five days of AWOL that I needed to do in order to be dropped from the rolls, which—we haven’t quite gotten to that part of the story yet.

02-00:28:05 Berglund Sokolov: No. And before we—

02-00:28:05 Rowland: But that gave me three months, ninety days, which is three months—give or take—at least that, maybe a few days over or something—is when we showed up in San Francisco.

02-00:28:24 Berglund Sokolov: Right. I have a side question, and then we can pick back up with what is happening with—in the Bay Area and with the Clergy and Laity Against the War, because that’s an important piece of the story. I’m curious—during this period where you decided to file your CO application, you come down here—

02-00:28:48 Rowland: No, I came down here to go to Vietnam.

02-00:28:50 Berglund Sokolov: To go to Vietnam. At this point had you—?

02-00:28:53 Rowland: But I had forty-five days to kill.

02-00:28:55 Berglund Sokolov: —have you talked to your dad at all about any of this?

02-00:28:59 Rowland: Well, I don’t think I had talked to him on the phone, but I had been writing at least—I can’t remember exactly. I did write him letters from time to time, and that’s what you’re supposed to do.

02-00:29:12 Berglund Sokolov: People did then, right?

02-00:29:13 Rowland: Back in those days people wrote letters. At a certain point I wrote him a letter saying that I was—what was going on and what was in my mind. I got back a letter from him that said, “We don’t want to hear about that shit,” essentially. I’m sure they didn’t say the word “shit,” but they were not at all pleased.

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02-00:29:39 Berglund Sokolov: Was it that they didn’t want to hear about it, or that they didn’t want you to do it—or both?

02-00:29:43 Rowland: Both. But the message I got was—because I think that what I was doing was pouring out my heart to them, and about what I was thinking about, and where I was going with this. I think from their point of view, they thought that I was trying to win them over, you see? In fairness to them, I think that they—they just didn’t want me to try and convince them of what they didn’t believe in, right?

02-00:30:10 Berglund Sokolov: Right.

02-00:30:11 Rowland: That was kind of really what it was, I think, going on there. But I don’t think I was trying to win them over as much as trying to explain. From my point of view, I was trying to explain so that they would understand what was going on with their son, right? When I left civilian life I was kind of one mindset, one guy, and now I’m kind of turning into a different kind of guy.

02-00:30:35 Berglund Sokolov: Right.

02-00:30:37 Rowland: It just seemed right to keep them abreast of what was going on. When my leave expired, I almost got—on the license plate of this old 1940 Plymouth, I had taken and drawn a peace sign on it. At one point, still thinking that I was going to go to Vietnam, or maybe I was even AWOL by then, I don’t know. But I drove over to the Oakland Army Base, and drove onto the base and got pulled over by the MPs. They said, “You’ve got a peace sign—you’ve defaced your license plate.” They were just like giving me shit, you know— and it was like, which it was there, and I just like ran my mouth about, “Oh, well in Washington State they allow you to do that sort of thing.” [laughing] Because it was Washington State plates, right? Somehow I got out of the deal, and they never—and I made my getaway, kind of.

I must have written to my parents though, at the point where I was going AWOL or just had, was officially now had failed to report. Going AWOL, it really meant was that I failed to report on the designated day.

02-00:31:54 Berglund Sokolov: On your forty-fifth day, or?

02-00:31:55 Rowland: On such and such a day I was supposed to be reporting to Oakland Army Terminal, and so when I failed to report, then I was officially AWOL, you see.

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02-00:32:05 Berglund Sokolov: By that time you’d decided that instead of thinking I’m packing up the jalopy and driving down with Sue, and I’m going to go to Vietnam, at that point you’re—it sounds like your experiences in the Bay Area had led you to move to the decision that you weren’t going to Vietnam.

02-00:32:24 Rowland: Well, exactly.

02-00:32:24 Berglund Sokolov: You were going to resist being deployed.

02-00:32:27 Rowland: I had decided, because once I saw the demonstrations and saw the cops beating people up and stuff, I literally saw them club a pregnant girl, and it was just like—I just, it was just beyond me. It was like this is what this was—because the propaganda in those days is what we were fighting for is “Democracy, and the American way,” and “if we don’t stop them over there we’re going to have to stop them over here.” Of course what had not occurred to anybody was that—and what the GIs found out when they went over to Vietnam—was that the Vietnamese didn’t have an off-shore navy, and so it wasn’t any question about stopping them over there or else we’ll have to stop them over here, because they didn’t have any capability to come over here, you know? [laughing] They didn’t have that kind of boats, so it wasn’t coming over here and stopping them over here. That was just like a bullshit. But that whole notion of all that stuff was—it was strong, and people’s notions—and so the defense of democracy—all that lie just went right out the window as soon as I saw the cops acting like they did.

02-00:33:30 Berglund Sokolov: The police brutality that you saw was another piece of your—changing.

02-00:33:32 Rowland: Yeah, police brutality, because Berkeley was kind of in chaos. This is nineteen sixty-damn-eight. What I remember, for instance, at some point, was the Democratic Convention, which was—you know, that was the Chicago—“Are you going to go to Chicago?” Wherever I was—I think I was in Berkeley—I was sitting around this kitchen table with a transistor radio, and it was like all of us sitting around the kitchen table one evening listening to the reportage of the Democratic Convention. The reporters were all choking into their microphones because of the tear gas, and they’re describing the melee and all that, and it’s like this is America in meltdown. It’s in full meltdown, and I was—that and seeing, just witnessing at the demonstrations. At a certain point I realized it was exactly what all those patients told me who I was taking care of, who said we’re not over there for a good cause. There was the proof of it, and at a certain point, then, I just I couldn’t do it. I had been willing to go and get shot at, but not willing to shoot somebody else. But I—at a certain point I realized that the mission is

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wrong. We’re not over there for a good cause, and this isn’t fighting for democracy—and I’m not going.

02-00:34:52 Berglund Sokolov: At that point, had you heard about the Fort Hood 43? They were the guys, right, the black GIs who, since you mentioned the Democratic Convention, who had refused orders out of Fort Hood to go and be security at the Democratic National Convention.

02-00:35:13 Rowland: Right.

02-00:35:14 Berglund Sokolov: So you know, it’s kind of like the confluence of things starting to come together.

02-00:35:17 Rowland: I hadn’t heard of them, but by then I knew there was a GI movement. And, in fact, one of the things I was doing during that period was writing letters back to the guys in the barracks up at Fort Lewis, that, “Hey—there’s a GI movement, and here’s what’s going on,” and kind of describing my adventures in the Bay Area, trying to get them on board with the GI movement. I saw two things—there was the Fort Hood 3, and I don’t remember exactly what they did that caused them to be the Fort Hood 3, and then there was a guy in the Bay Area here who was a reservist who refused activation. I saw this poster, which had that guy—and I don’t remember his name or anything about it. But the poster had him kind of looking over his shoulder, or somehow looking out at the viewer of the poster, and it says, “I followed the Fort Hood 3. Who will follow me?” I looked at that, and I guess I thought I was going to be the one.

Now, I’ve got to tell you that I had already—by the time I left Fort Lewis, in my wall locker at Fort Lewis, I had a newspaper clipping of Captain [Howard] Levy, who was this Army doctor who had refused to train Green Berets and had had a very public trial and had gone to Leavenworth and whatever. Whereas other guys had Playboy bunnies, or their wives, or whatever, in the inside door of their wall locker—I had Capt. Levy’s picture. By the time I left Fort Lewis, I already had refused orders to pick up a gun.

02-00:36:57 Berglund Sokolov: Right.

02-00:36:59 Rowland: I knew that there was other GIs doing stuff. They were individual acts, like Capt. Levy’s or this guy who had refused to—to be activated I think, this national guardsman, and the one—“And I follow the Fort Hood 3. Who’s going to follow me?” Whatever his name was, I don’t know—I’m sorry that I can’t remember that guy’s name.

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02-00:37:19 Berglund Sokolov: I think the Fort Hood 3—because I think there’s a 43 and a 3, but I think the 3 were—just by chance it was a white guy, a black guy, and a Chicano guy.

02-00:37:31 Rowland: Oh, really?

02-00:37:32 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah.

02-00:37:32 Rowland: It could be. I don’t remember that. I just remember what I remember of the poster. That’s all I really know about the Fort Hood 3, is that I remember the poster that I saw somewhere. By the time I came down here, and then when I decided that I wasn’t going to go to Vietnam, by then I was hanging out with Jock Brown and the movement. Somebody in the movement put me in contact with Hallinan, Terry [Terence] Hallinan, who was a radical lawyer. They said “If you’re going to refuse to get on the plane, you’re going to need a lawyer.”

I met with Hallinan, and Hallinan said, “Well, the last guy that refused to get on a plane, they just put him in handcuffs and threw him on the plane, and the next thing he knew he was in Vietnam, and then we lose contact with him, you know? You’re out there, and what they’ll do is they’ll put you in some kind of a unit and they’re going to say, ‘Here’s the guy that is undermining the war effort.’ You’re going to be among a bunch of guys who might not like you. [laughing] There’s no way that the legal—your civilian attorneys aren’t going to be over there to help you out. And so, that’s really a bad idea.”

He says. “Why don’t you do this instead? Just go AWOL, and then you have to go AWOL for forty-five days at least, because then you’ll be dropped from the rolls. If you’re AWOL less than that, then you just—they just put you back on the plane to Vietnam, right? You’re AWOL, they’re going to punish you, but you’re still under orders,” he said. “But if you go AWOL for forty-five days or more, then you’re dropped from the rolls, at which time you don’t actually have orders for Vietnam anymore and they’ll—and then while they’re figuring out how to punish you for your AWOL, that gives me a chance, as your lawyer, to apply for another—for discharge as a conscientious objector with a more proper application.”

I said, “Okay. That sounds like a plan.” That was going to be my individual solution. Instead of refusing another order for five years’ potential sentence, I’d go AWOL, which is a maximum six months’ sentence, and have this guy do a more proper application. So that was the plan. I started preparing, and he said, “Here’s what you’ve got to do, you’ve got to write up your statement,” and he was—he was a lawyer. He knew what to do. My assignment was to write up my statement and do all that kind of business and

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wait out forty-five days. We were still living in Berkeley and going to the demonstrations and participating in the movement, and I was writing up my statement and trying to—I was reading philosophy and trying to kind of pull my act together and trying really to figure out what my—think it through to greater depth than I had in my first application.

In the course of all that, I must have written a letter to my parents. I know I wrote a letter to them, because what happened is that the next thing—Sue and I had just toked up one evening in our apartment, and there was this very authoritative knock on the door. It was like “Oh shit, that’s the authorities!” I was AWOL, and in those days they were pursuing AWOLs with some vigor, and particularly if like this, where they had the address, all they have to do is come and pick me up kind of. Sue went to the front door, and I went out the back door. We were on the second floor, but there were steps that went down. As I went down the steps and went to jump over the fence to get out of the back yard—and behind it was the railroad tracks that went along on that—I guess it’s the west side of Berkeley and Oakland there’s all these railroad tracks there. As I went to jump out of the back yard, the cop that was supposed to be covering the back door came into the back yard. He saw me jump over the fence, and so, of course, he pursued me. In the dark of night, running down the railroad tracks just as fast as I could, I outran him. I outran him and lost him.

But now I knew I couldn’t go back to the apartment, so I just walked around for the longest time. Finally I walked up into the Berkeley Hills and just walked into somebody’s back yard and went to sleep on one of their lawn furniture—in some random house and I just—you know, I mean I was tired and sleepy, and it just seemed like— [laughing]

02-00:42:31 Berglund Sokolov: You’d had a stressful experience.

02-00:42:33 Rowland: Yeah, right, yeah, you know, outran some cop who could have shot me right there as far as that goes, and luckily—if I’d been a black guy, he probably would have shot me. But so at any rate, I just spent the, whatever was left of the night, sleeping on the lawn furniture, and then in the morning it was—in the wee hours, as soon as it gets light, then it was—it was summertime, so it gets light early. Then I got up and walked out of the yard, and they never even knew I spent the night there, I’m sure. I walked around and found a phone and called Sue, who was still at the apartment, and agreed where we were going to meet. Of course we were all worried about wire taps and all that stuff, and everybody in the movement was careful about all that. We agreed to meet somewhere, and I never went back to the apartment again.

What happened though is that the police, on several more occasions, came to the door. We were actually protected—they would have maybe gotten us

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even quicker, but the landlord lived downstairs in the ground floor apartment. He, it turns out, when the police came he didn’t cooperate with them, because we’d made friends with him and so it was a good lesson to me about always get to know your neighbors. Twice in my life I’ve had neighbors that have protected me, and that was the first time. It wasn’t a conscious plan on my part, but you can bet that nowadays, in my neighborhood, every Christmas I go around with cranberry breads that I bake myself and give to all my neighbors, and I am like the neighborhood central. [laughing] Everybody in the neighborhood knows each other, because I make a point of making sure that everybody knows each other, because I’ve learned that lesson twice, where the neighbors protected me.

So the cops kept coming back to our apartment, much to the dismay of the Brown Beret guy, who was like a political radical, and sometimes his buddies would be crashing over there, and all of a sudden the cops have got everybody up against the wall.

In the meantime, my mom decided to come and visit, now that I had gotten away from the cops. So my mom decided that she was going to come and try and talk some sense into me or something. But of course I wasn’t at home anymore, and she went with the authorities—but somehow through Jock Brown and that whole scene, there was a linkup, and we were supposed to go meet. Sue and I, and our dog, we had this dog named Thyme—and we were going to go meet my mom, who I think was probably there in spite of my father, rather than because of him. I don’t know about that part exactly, but so we were supposed to meet up with her. But as we got close, it was like so obvious—there was cops all around. We were like driving in to go to the meeting place and there was like—yeah, I couldn’t believe they were putting that much effort into catching one AWOL. But it was a trap, and my mom was the bait, and I was going to go in there and get arrested. So we pulled out of that at the last second, literally just a block away from the meeting.

By then, our apartment had been raided several times. I can’t even remember where I was staying. I wasn’t sleeping in somebody’s back yard at that point, but I don’t remember exactly where I was. It was just too hot to live in the apartment. Then this thing where I almost got busted meeting my mom, and it just seemed like the whole town was really too hot.

02-00:46:29 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah.

02-00:46:30 Rowland: In the meantime, our dog got hit by Sam and Dave. I don’t know if you remember singing duo Sam and Dave.

02-00:46:35 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah.

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02-00:46:36 Rowland: We were crossing the street in Berkeley, and of course nobody had leashes in those days, and our dog ran off into the street and got whacked in the head—poor Thyme. Sam and Dave took us over to a vet, and the vet said whatever, but I did get to meet Sam and Dave and ride in their car, with our poor damaged dog. Thyme had a head injury and would kind of just walk in a circle and couldn’t see out of one eye and was pretty messed up. Then, the next thing you know, she wandered off—so we lost our dog. We’d had all these narrow escapes, and the whole thing was just getting too weird.

And so because we were hooked in with Jock Brown and that whole scene, they arranged for some rich liberal to lend us a cabin up in the woods in Mendocino County. Somebody gave us a ride. We just gave our car to the movement and told them, “Well, you know, with every tank of gas you’ve got to put a quart of oil in. Make sure to check the oil.” But we gave the car to them and left everything behind, except for just whatever little bit of stuff that Sue grabbed, so we lost what few little wedding presents we had, and my father’s camera that he’d given me as a kid—and everything. As we were driving out of town, I’ll be go to hell—there was Thyme, standing on the corner, our dog. We said, “Stop, stop, stop,” and opened the door. Thyme jumped in the car and off we went to Mendocino County to stay in this little cabin. That gave us our place to stay while we were waiting for the forty- five days to be up.

That cabin was interesting, because there was nothing to do. There was no— nothing up there, except you know, we made bread and picked berries, and kind of acted like hippies, and that was all great fun. At night, there was this 1925 set of encyclopedias. Now, this is 1968, and so those were really old encyclopedias, from our point of view, anyway. At night what we would do is we would take turns reading the encyclopedia to each other. We got all the way up to the B’s, and there was the entry for butter. It was so obviously written by the butter lobby, because the whole article in 1925 under “butter” was all about how the nefarious margarine people were trying to sneak margarine in on good souls who didn’t understand the difference between the two. It was this anti-margarine rant—in the encylo-damn-pedia.

I was so shocked, because I had now—I had lost my faith in the command structure of the military. I had lost my faith in the politicians and the whole system. I had lost my faith in just about everything—in my parents, any authority figures—I had lost my faith in all of that stuff, but it never even occurred to me—the one—the encyclopedia is like the truth. That’s like more important than the Bible—that’s like facts. You could always go into any class and say, “I got this out of the encyclopedia,” and that was a legitimate source. Here it was, this entry for butter, and it was like God- fucking-damn—I just, I didn’t want it to be this way. It was the last thing I had, it was the “truth.” There it was, in the encyclopedia, and it was wrong. What occurred to me was if the 1925 encyclopedia was that biased and that

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wrong, then probably modern encyclopedias were just as wrong—but I was too close to them to notice. I had perspective on the butter article because it was so long ago. After that, we started reading the encyclopedia not to find out whatever the information was, or for idle pastimes, but to find other examples of distortion. And we found them. I don’t remember the others. Butter was the one that stopped our show.

Well, at any rate, our forty-five days came up, and we hitchhiked back into town. Thyme, bit-by-bit had started improving, and stopped walking in a circle and started acting more—got over the head injury but was always a pretty lazy dog after that. Sue and Thyme and I hitchhiked back down to the Bay Area and linked up with the movement again. Here we are, reporting to the movement for duty.

The first time we arrived in Berkeley, we had showed up in town right before the Nine for Peace did their thing, like the day before or something. I went over there, because all the Nine for Peace were gathered to do their thing. I met Keith [Mather] and some of those other guys, but Keith was the one that I remember specifically talking to.

02-00:51:48 Berglund Sokolov: What stood out for you about Keith?

02-00:51:52 Rowland: Well, nothing other than the fact that they were going to do this thing, and it was an organized protest. Here was nine guys—it was not just an individual act of conscience or an individual act of resistance or whatever. Wow. Guys acting in concert. That planted a big seed in my head. But I was too late. They had already figured it out. They all had their clergyman to get chained to. They were all on their way to do it, and I was kind of like the guy that showed up at the last second. They said, “Hey, sorry man. It’s just too late.” It was too late really, because we had—like for instance, we really hadn’t figured out where Sue was going to go. I figured I was going to Viet Nam, or later the stockade or back into military custody of some form or another. I already knew that, after being confined to the barracks—and the stockade would be even worse. We had to figure out what Sue was going to do. It was too late, and we hadn’t prepared. Those guys went off and did the Nine for Peace thing.

This time we showed up in Berkeley and the movement sent us to live with this family called the Auerbachs, over in San Francisco. I think they were old reds. I didn’t have a problem with that, because Terry Hallinan, when I first met him, had said, “Look, I’m a communist, and I want you to know that, right up front, because if you have a problem with that, I shouldn’t be your lawyer.” I didn’t have a problem with that, because I had already changed. When the guy had given me so much static at Fort Lewis for passing out literature, and he had red-baited the Individuals Against the

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Crimes of Silence, it was like—at that point I was like, well, if they’re really communists, then maybe I would take it back, or maybe I wouldn’t sign the thing. “But I don’t think they are communists.” But by the time Terry told me that he was a red, I’d been hanging out with—even my housemate, who was one of the Brown Berets—and so the idea of radical politics—look, the [Black] Panthers were selling Red Books [Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung] on the streets, right? I had kind of gotten immune to that thing. And so when Terry said that he was a communist, that didn’t bother me a bit. If anything, it made him better.

How did I get off onto that? I’ve kind of forgotten.

02-00:54:14 Berglund Sokolov: Oh, the Auerbachs.

02-00:54:15 Rowland: Oh, the Auerbachs. They were old reds, I think. I don’t want to publicly out them, I guess. I’m sure they’re dead by now, because they were an older couple. They lived very close to the Lombard gate of the Presidio, where Lombard St. kind of curves and then it goes straight into the gate. In that block, or those couple of blocks, was where their apartment building was. I think those apartments were—

02-00:54:40 Berglund Sokolov: Huh, probably right up Lyon St. somewhere, right in there?

02-00:54:42 Rowland: Yeah, or something. We were kind of just steps away from the Presidio at that point, but we were staying in their apartment. They gave me this book that was called [The] Free World Colossus: [A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War], because we had nothing to do to kill time. I had been working on my CO application, and more or less had that squared away, as good as it was going to get anyway. They said, “Well, here’s a book you can read.” Free World Colossus, I can’t remember the author’s name, but I’ve subsequently realized or heard that he was a leftist who flipped over into an ultra-rightist, so I don’t want to promote him in any way. But that book was very influential, because each chapter was about American foreign policy in Latin America, or American foreign policy during the Korean War, American foreign—it was like American foreign policy after World War II, and it was—each one was an atrocity story. I would read a chapter in that book, and I’d just really get angry. Because I didn’t want to know—I thought that I had more or less lost everything when I found out about butter in the entry in the encyclopedia, but I still thought of Viet Nam as like the exception, that America had a glorious proud history— with one exception. Every country makes mistakes—everybody makes mistakes. I had kind of that notion that Viet Nam was a mistake, the exception to the rule.

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But that book, chapter after chapter, it just broke that down, and by the time—and I would just—I’d read a chapter and I’d just throw the book down on the couch, and [groaning aloud] I’d just yell, “Do you know what this book says?” Sue wasn’t reading it, and I would read a chapter and then I would just yell at her, “Well, do you know what—it said? Do you know what they did?” I didn’t want to read it anymore. But then I had to, of course, and then I’d go and I’d read another chapter—and we’d go through the whole thing again, like—[groaning aloud]. Bit by bit it was like I came to realize that Vietnam wasn’t the exception to the rule: it was the rule. That was the nature of the United States.

What I would nowadays say, I guess, is I learned the nature of US imperialism. The whole notion that people could be citizens rather than subjects of the king—there’s lots to be proud of about the American experiment. But at that moment, I wasn’t finding anything to be proud of. All I was finding out was the horrors of—the part that I had never understood before. But I had to know it. The Auerbachs, if they weren’t reds, they should have been, because they certainly pushed me over a political edge, I suppose.

But I was still a religious pacifist, and we were just killing time for a week or two, or whatever it was, until—some amount of time until—because what Hallinan said is, “Well, your forty-five days is up,” on such and such a day—sometime in October I suppose, or something. But there’s this big Soldiers and Veterans March that’s going to happen. Hallinan worked it out so that three other guys and myself, kind of in the same pattern as the Nine for Peace—he was kind of just playing off of that pattern—were going to ceremoniously turn ourselves in at the Presidio gates at the end of the march.

02-00:58:25 Berglund Sokolov: By then you knew that Sue was going to stay with the Auerbachs?

02-00:58:31 Rowland: No, we were staying with the Auerbachs, but in the meantime we had met and were hanging out with the Farnhams.

02-00:58:39 Berglund Sokolov: Oh, the Farnhams.

02-00:58:39 Rowland: We shifted over to the Farnhams, because Jock Brown and his crowd were in the East Bay, over in Berkeley and the Oakland area. The Clergy and Laymen over in San Francisco—Phil Farnham became my handler, so to speak. It might have been Phil, or somebody, that arranged for us to be able to stay with the Auerbachs, or maybe it was Terry. I don’t remember who made that connection for us, but the Auerbachs took us in.

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I should say one more thing about this, which I found out from Sue shortly before she died. She’s dead—we divorced and went about our lives, but we would see each other because we have a child, my daughter Zarya. And so Sue told me, not long before she died, a story about the Auerbachs that she had never told me before. Of course I went into jail, and it took me a long time to ever get out. But my mom came back to visit again, to make another attempt to connect with me and try and get me back on the straight and narrow, that weekend, when we turned ourselves in to the Presidio. It didn’t work for her to visit me. She didn’t have any way to connect, and the movement wasn’t about to—they’d already been burned on that deal, so it wasn’t like anybody was actually going to tell her where I was, you know?

But she did actually see me in the stockade a few days after the sit-down, and then she connected with Sue. They were driving along, and my mom asked Sue, “Well, so where were you guys staying?” Sue says, “Oh, we were staying with this nice old couple. They took us in.” She says, “Well, where—show me.” Sue pointed out their apartment, the Auerbachs—and my mom reported all that information to the authorities. The Auerbachs turned out to be Canadians. We didn’t know they were Canadians, but they turned out to be Canadians, and they got hounded. What Sue told me was that—and Sue felt really guilty, because she wasn’t planning on—she wasn’t trying to snitch off the Auerbachs.

02-01:00:55 Berglund Sokolov: She thought it was just neutral information that she was—

02-01:00:57 Rowland: Yeah, just neutral information, because from our point of view the Auerbachs—we would have been homeless on the streets waiting for the time to come up, and the Auerbachs gave us safe refuge. But then, because of my mom, the Auerbachs got accused of harboring fugitives, see—or fugitive, singular. They got hounded and eventually they had to leave and go back to Canada, which—you know, I’d sure like to have—I didn’t hear this until just a few years ago, otherwise I would have made an effort to—I’m sure the Auerbachs are long gone and dead by now, but they took us in, and my mom turned them in.

02-01:01:40 Berglund Sokolov: Different people with different ideas about what’s right at the moment.

02-01:01:44 Rowland: Yeah, yeah, yeah—exactly. Well, at any rate, that’s an aside. But so it was time—we marched in the march. Terry had set it up so that the four of us were going to turn ourselves in at the end of the march. We marched in the march—the march was full of soldiers who were now were getting sophisticated enough that they weren’t supposed to march in uniform, although some did. But what they had were these little paper hats, like soda jerk hats. If you were a soldier, in order to let everybody realize how many

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soldiers were there, even though they’re in civilian clothes, you were supposed to put on your little paper hat, see. If you look at photos of those days, there was a sea of paper hats—I mean lots of paper hats were marching in that march that day, as well as some people who were marching in their uniform in defiance of military regulations. We marched, and then at the end of it we got up on a little something or other that Hallinan had arranged, and we gave our little speeches and then stepped across the line in a ceremonial way into military custody.

02-01:03:12 Berglund Sokolov: By this time you also knew that Richard Bunch had been shot.

02-01:03:16 Rowland: Well, exactly, because this was on a Saturday. On Friday we were all kind of caucusing on what the plan for Saturday was, and somebody says look—it was an article in the newspaper—that a prisoner had been shot and there had been a stockade riot, and all that, on Friday night. Hallinan—or maybe it was Phil Farnham—said, “So this is where you’re going. Who knows what’s going on in there. When you get there, why don’t you see if you can’t take it to a higher level?” He said, “You know, rioting is one thing, but that’s a low political level. A more sophisticated level is to have a demonstration or something.” My assignment was to go into the stockade, which everybody assumed I was going to because I was an AWOL, to go into the stockade and see if the prisoners would be interested in doing a sit-down demonstration. The plan was that Hallinan was going to come in on Sunday to visit me, as my lawyer, and he would find out whether or not it was going to happen, and if so, then he would coordinate so that the press would come on Monday— we kind of had the plan at least sketched out a little bit before I ever turned myself in.

But then when I turned myself in, and maybe because my mom, the wife of a lieutenant colonel, was there—or maybe just for random reasons, I don’t know, but they didn’t put me in the stockade. There I found myself on Saturday evening in the SPD, the Special Processing Detachment. The stockade was pretty full, so all the guys that they didn’t think were going to run away, they put them in SPD, which was a holding company, until they could court-martial them or do whatever they had to do, and drum them out of the army or whatever they were going to do. So there I was in the SPD, but my assignment was to go into the stockade and see if I couldn’t organize a sit-down. So, oh shit—what am I going to do about that?

What I did is I walked down to the orderly room, which is like the business office of a military unit, and the old sergeant was sitting there, because twenty-four hours a day the orderly room was staffed with somebody in case there’s an emergency phone call and somebody’s mom has died or—or an attack, and they would marshal all the forces—somebody’s on duty. It was the old sarge who’s sitting down there on duty, sitting there reading a

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Playboy, and it’s nobody else in the orderly room; it’s Saturday night. Nothing’s happening—I mean nothing is happening. So I kind of came in out of the gloom and into the orderly room and walked up to the old sergeant and I said, “I’m refusing to sweep this floor on grounds of conscience.” He totally took the bait. He jumped up, handcuffed me to a chair, and thirty minutes later I was walking into the cellblock—this cellblock with thirty guys, and I announced in a loud voice, “I’m here from the movement to see if we can’t organize something about that guy getting shot.” Here’s all these convicts, you know, who’d never seen me before in life. [laughing] They all go, “Cool.” We all sat down and started having the meeting to figure out what could be done.

02-01:07:02 Berglund Sokolov: Did they bring you into the big cell on the second floor? Is that where they brought you?

02-01:07:08 Rowland: Yeah.

02-01:07:08 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah, yeah.

02-01:07:10 Rowland: Well, there was two big cells, I think, if I remember correctly.

02-01:07:12 Berglund Sokolov: One on each side, probably then.

02-01:07:13 Rowland: One on each side, and I don’t remember which one.

02-01:07:15 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah, I think now there’s just one that’s left, and one is a big room. But there’s one that has the room with the cell kind of around the whole room where you can imagine the bunks being arrayed inside.

02-01:07:26 Rowland: Inside the cell then, yeah, yeah. Nobody had asked me to sweep the floor. There was nothing going on—nobody was doing anything. I refused an imaginary order, and he bit the hook, so I literally tricked my way into the stockade to try and organize what in fact happened.

02-01:07:49 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah. What did—?

02-01:07:52 Rowland: I literally was sent by the movement to do that, and I had to actually finagle my way to do it, and I did it.

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02-01:08:01 Berglund Sokolov: What did you see when you got into the stockade? Do you remember your initial impressions of what it was like in there, what the guys seemed like?

02-01:08:13 Rowland: No, well—you know, I met Keith, and frankly, I don’t think he remembered me from—because he was all focused on the Nine for Peace thing, but I remembered him, and he was in that cell, and so that was quick enough. I had never been in jail before, so it was that whole protocol of slamming of cell doors and marching people here and there and guards telling you what to do or whatever. But—and all the prisoners—but I mean I was more or less on a mission, so I don’t remember exactly. I don’t have a good—I can’t give you a good account of my first impressions, because other than—what really stands out in my mind was just walking in there and announcing that I was there and that I was from the movement—and everybody just thought that was just fine. I think back on that now, and I think you know, if somebody just came in and said, “I’m from the movement, and everybody’d go, “cool,” and shake your hand and just take you in as a brother is kind of—kind of—it shows what the times were like. Soldiers—that march had had a big influence.

02-01:09:32 Berglund Sokolov: And these were all GIs.

02-01:09:33 Rowland: These are all GIs, but the Nine for Peace had happened, the big march had just happened on Saturday, and then here it is Saturday night. I don’t know if I got in there before [Richard] Gentile—and I think Gentile had gone to the march.

Berglund Sokolov: Gentile had gone to the march. He was thrown in right after, so he might have come in right as you were coming in or right after.

02-01:09:55 Rowland: Or right before or right after, but probably—I don’t know. I’m not sure, because I didn’t know him at that point. I was brand new, and I didn’t know anybody really. I only got to—I started getting to know them as we sat around in the meetings, you see. We had to decide whether to do it. Did we think people would do it? People were very angry, and they really wanted to do something, and they were just sick of that stockade anyway, and all the bullshit that was going on. Bunch getting killed was so wrong in their minds. The movement was right: guys did want to take it to a higher level. They didn’t want to just drop it with a riot. They had torn the place up as best they could on Friday night, and how much of that can you do?

All of Saturday they were just sitting around wishing that they could do something else, and I showed up and said, “Here’s the plan.” Everybody goes, “Cool.” The only question is will everybody do it? Everybody knew

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that it was—because I think what had happened is that on Saturday I think that the commandant had read people the—I think they’d had some kind of a formation or something, and he read them the mutiny article, kind of to try and tell them to calm down and don’t get additional charges. You go to the stockade, and the issue, of course, in the stockade is if you’re not cooperative, they can give you a direct order to do something in the stockade—and you can get an additional five years on your sentence for refusing an order. Keith, as a blanket man, had been running around in his blanket—

02-01:11:36 Berglund Sokolov: Refusing to wear his uniform.

02-01:11:36 Rowland: Refusing to wear his uniform and stuff, and he was just like racking up the charges, I imagine. I don’t remember the details of his legal circumstances. A lot of people would go into the stockade and kind of pull in their horns, because they didn’t want to get additional charges on top of their refusal to go to Vietnam, or their desertion, or their AWOL—or whatever it was. You could easily rack up extra charges, and that’s how they kept discipline in the stockade, to the extent that they did.

02-01:12:09 Berglund Sokolov: And that’s why they called it “trap door to Leavenworth.”

02-01:12:10 Rowland: Yeah, really, but Keith never gave in. He went into the stockade, and rather than pull his horns in, like the next thing you know he was refusing to wear his uniform, and he was just carrying on the fight. You see at the demonstrations, people—there’d be a kind of a melee, and as soon as a person gets arrested, they just like mellow out like crazy and just become docile. I think some of the guys got docile in the stockade—but Keith didn’t. He was like the perfect guy to link up with, as it turns out. Plus, he quick enough—in the meeting the question became—well, we’re going to have a list of demands. Somebody’s going to have to stand up and read the demands. They’re going to give us an order to disperse. How are we going to avoid a five year potential sentence for refusing to disperse? That’s why we decided that—well, we’ll just sing, and we’ll sing louder, and that way we can’t hear the order. That was all part of the conscious effort to avoid additional charges. Nobody, I don’t think, really thought that they could charge us with mutiny. I think we more or less pooh-poohed that in our meetings. I don’t think anybody, including myself, probably thought that we were going to be facing the death sentence for our protest. But people really wanted to do it. There was the question of well, are the black guys going to do it? The black guys had a separate meeting and decided that they weren’t going to do it, based on the fact that they knew they’d get way more punishment than everybody else. They brought that back to the general

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meeting, and people said “Okay, we understand that. Cool,” and we included a demand against racism as one of our—I believe we had four—demands.

02-01:13:58 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah.

02-01:14:01 Rowland: Because everybody understood what their circumstances were, and why they wouldn’t do it, and so nobody expected the black guys to step out of line that morning. But the rest of us came up with a plan. There was arguing—and people would go into the different cellblocks, because some guys were not just in that old stockade building, the cement building or whatever they—

02-01:14:32 Berglund Sokolov: Twelve thirteen, the one—

02-01:14:33 Rowland: But there was like a barracks next door where other inmates were, and so back and forth. Some people had, for reasons that I can’t remember now, had access back and forth a little bit through—during the mess hall time and different ways where communication could go back and forth. The issues— were those guys going to do it? What about the other cellblock? And then it was all those details. It was the question of well, who’s going to stand up and read the demands? I was perfectly willing to do it, because I kind of felt like I had been sent in for that, and people—everybody knew that whoever stood up was going to take it in the shorts. But [Walter] Pawlowski said, “I’ll do it.” He was well respected. Pawlowski was a really smart guy. He was really good, really smart.

02-01:15:25 Berglund Sokolov: And that’s Walter, Walter—

02-01:15:27 Rowland: Walter Pawlowski, yeah. When Pawlowski, who was really respected among the other prisoners, when Pawlowski said that he would read the demands, I think that that really helped to make it real. Pawlowski was going to stand up and be the spokesman. We were all going to go out there, we were going to sing so that they couldn’t give us an order—because we wouldn’t be able to hear the order because we were too busy singing.

We kind of had the outline of what was going to happen, and we had agreed on what time, because from our point of view, Hallinan had to be able to coordinate when the press were going to be there, see? In retrospect, I don’t know how we thought that the press were going to get past the front gate, but for some reason we thought that they were going to be able to get in. Hallinan needed to know what the time [would be], which is why we came up with the specific thing of, well, at the roll call—which we knew what time that happened—and the first name, then we’ll all break ranks and go over to sit down. We chose the spot where we were going to sit down

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because that’s where the press would be able to see us through the fence. We were very consciously trying to play to the press that we thought were going to be there, which I kind of promised were going to be there—because that’s what Hallinan told me when I met him on Sunday. He said, “Yes, I’m going to have the press there.” That was the message I brought back to the guys. “Yeah, the press is going to be there. It’s all set,” and it kind of made it official. Well, the press didn’t show up, much to our dismay, on that Monday morning because they were stopped—at least what Hallinan explained to me later is that the press got stopped at the gate. But whether the press even tried to show up, I don’t really know.

But when we went to bed on Sunday night, knowing what the plan was— everybody was kind of excited. Every prisoner in the whole stockade knew what the plan was and knew what the details were—and as it turns out, so did the administration. [laughter] You know, because there’s always some snitch somewhere that’s going to—you know.

So Monday morning we—actually what happened before that, [Larry] Reidel—I think it was Reidel, we were down in the mess hall for breakfast, right before the thing is supposed to happen, and it was like that—long steel tables with little seats that you sit at, or whatever, on both sides of the table. Somebody said something—I think it was Reidel anyway, I mean I hadn’t really learned everybody’s names at that point. But somebody said, across the table, said something that Reidel took personally, and he took his coffee and threw it in the guy’s face, and then he hopped up on the table and grabbed onto this pipe that was attached to the ceiling. He held onto the pipe, and then swung his feet up and kicked the guy right in the face, who was still disoriented from getting the hot coffee thrown in his face. Boy, that was like, exciting. Everybody was kind of tense anyway, and Reidel just went off on this guy, kicked him right in the face. I was wondering “Oh wow, what kind of deal is this?” [laughing]

But then, it’s time to fall out for roll-call formation, so we all went out there, and Reidel was one of the guys that broke ranks and sat down with us. Twenty-eight of us actually sat down, not twenty-seven, but the twenty- eighth guy, whatever his name was—I don’t even know it, but what I heard later was that he immediately got up and left. I don’t even remember him doing this.

02-01:19:14 Berglund Sokolov: He got cold feet.

02-01:19:16 Rowland: But he went in and he said, “I’ll testify against those guys, but you know they’ll kill me, so you’ve got to let me out of the stockade and put me in SPD so that they won’t kill me.” They put him in SPD, and he went AWOL and disappeared and never heard from again, so it was kind of his ticket out

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of the stockade. I can’t hardly hold that against him, for the fact that he broke ranks with us and went back—otherwise it would have been the Presidio 28 instead of the twenty-seven, and I would need a different lucky number, I guess.

So we broke ranks. Nobody knew how many guys were going to do it for sure. Lots of people said they were going to do it and—you know, if you’re twenty-seven out of a hundred-and-however-many people were in the stockade, it wasn’t that bad of a percentage. Because we already knew that the black prisoners weren’t going to do it. But at any rate, we broke ranks, walked over to the place where we had decided to sit down so that the press would be able to see us through the fence, and linked arms up and started singing “We Shall Overcome.” Keith remembers that we did, at some point, try to sing another song, “This Land is Your Land,” or something.

02-01:20:32 Berglund Sokolov: “America the Beautiful?”

02-01:20:34 Rowland: Well, you know, I don’t really remember that part, and maybe we tried that—I don’t know if we really tried that. What I remember is that we had decided to sing “We Shall Overcome,” because that one was easy. That’s pretty easy to learn.

02-01:20:44 Berglund Sokolov: And it was from civil rights movement stuff, so people knew it.

02-01:20:47 Rowland: Everybody knew the civil rights movement and the demonstrations, and so that was easy enough. I had gone to the hootenannies, and you’d think that I would have known the words of some of those other songs, and kind of at a certain point did suggest that we sing “This Land is Your Land,” but nobody—even I didn’t even remember the words, frankly. It was kind of tense, and I suppose they just blew it off of my head. We tried a few lines of a few different songs, and they would just peter off. We’d always just go back to “We Shall Overcome,” because we had that one down. And sure enough, the Commandant came out to read us the mutiny order, or whatever, and we just drowned him out and just hunkered down and sang a little louder.

We’d formed a circle, and I was kind of sitting on one edge of the circle. I’ve never looked at the old photos to see if you can tell that I changed position. But at a certain point some of the other guys said, “Rowland, come sit in the center of the circle,” and so I moved actually, my position into the—a little bit further into the circle. Some guy showed up and started taking our pictures from every angle, and we knew that that was the evidence guy, but we were so full of it that we were like grinning at him and posing and flashing the peace signs and whatever—we were having a good

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time at that point. It’s like right before battle or something, you kind of get nervous before the thing, but once you’re in it, you’re in it. It’s like a fight, you know? When you get nervous, you’re scared, but once you’re in it, you’re in it, and you’re in the moment—and so then things just go along at their own pace and you’re not scared anymore.

02-01:22:31 Berglund Sokolov: You guys actually thought, at that point, that by making your demands known and imploring military authority to do something about what had been going on in the stockade, that something might change?

02-01:22:47 Rowland: Yes. In that sense, we believed in the system, although frankly, I have to say that we were really trying to play to the press. I don’t think we really thought that the—formally what we were doing was demanding that we see somebody in the command structure to present our demands to him. But I don’t believe that we actually thought that presenting our demands to somebody in the command structure was going to really do any good. Because there was a “process.” You could put in these little chits to complain.

02-01:23:22 Berglund Sokolov: Didn’t they call them 501s, or five something? Yeah.

02-01:23:23 Rowland: Or something—whatever they were called, but anyhow, if you had some—

02-01:23:26 Berglund Sokolov: A grievance of some kind.

02-01:23:26 Rowland: —grievance or something, you could say whatever, and people had done tons of those. And so in the meetings everybody knew that the command structure wasn’t going to really be all that—

02-01:23:40 Berglund Sokolov: Responsive.

02-01:23:41 Rowland: Responsive, I guess, is the word, to whatever our demands were going to be. But if Hallinan got the press there, then this was going to be punching them right in the eye, and that’s what we were really going for. But we had a little charade to go through, where we demanded to see whoever it was, and then read our demands. And Pawlowski stood up and read the demands, which they didn’t even want to hear and didn’t pay any attention to. But there was no press, so we just had to keep it going, because we kind of thought—well, any minute now the press is going to show up, because that was the plan. So we had to—“Well, what do we do now?” “Let’s keep singing.” We just kept singing, and in the meantime, of course, the stockade commandant went out and started yacking over the loudspeaker of the cop car, and the fire truck

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showed up and we said oh, are we going to—everybody knew about fire trucks squirting demonstrators in Birmingham or all those kinds of things. Everybody knew what the fire trucks were there for. So, “Oh, they’re going to squirt us, and [groaning aloud] oh man, that’s how this ends,” but that didn’t happen.

All of a sudden here comes all of these MPs with their gas masks. “Oh, they’re going to teargas us.” But what are you going to do? We didn’t really have an exit plan. We hadn’t thought about how to end the demonstration. In retrospect, we just didn’t think about that part for some reason. We’d overlooked that detail in our plan. Without an exit strategy, or anything, we just kept singing—which worked out fine. Because eventually the firemen— what we heard later, didn’t know it at the time—was that the firemen refused to squirt us. And the MPs—of course they had to do whatever they were told to do, but they didn’t teargas us.

The first few guys to get picked up—Reidel was one of them—we said, “Let’s go limp when they come to pick us up,” because it was clear that that was going to happen, we said, “Let’s go limp.” The first few guys did; they went limp. They picked him up, and they were carrying him face down, and we said, “Oh man, if they drop you, they’re going to drop you right on your face, those assholes.” At a certain point somebody says, they picked him up, and he says, “I’ll just walk in.” [laughing] Because nobody wanted to get dropped on their face. We hadn’t thought about that, and so kind of after that I think most people—and in all honesty, I can’t remember if I went limp or walked in. You’d think I would remember that, and I don’t. But our concern, at that point, was we didn’t want them dropping us on our face. They took us all in to one of the big cellblocks upstairs and stuck us up against the wall. In one of the photos, you can see us all kind of up against the wall. The MPs are kind of on this side, and we’re on this side, in kind of a standoff—and everybody’s kind of trying to figure out what to do, what’s going to happen next. And then it was over.

02-01:26:52 Berglund Sokolov: When they brought you guys in they strip-searched you, didn’t they?

02-01:26:57 Rowland: Probably, because they’d strip-search us at every opportunity. That’s such a standard part of confinement that—I don’t know what they thought—we were going to be bringing in some blades of grass or something? [laughing]

02-01:27:09 Berglund Sokolov: Right, right. I mean you’d been out for just an hour or so, right?

02-01:27:13 Rowland: Right, you know, exactly. But you know, we got strip-searched before and after visits and every—strip-searching was such a part of confinement. I was not used to all that yet, because I had just—I only showed up on Saturday

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night, and now it’s Monday morning, so I’d only really had not much more than twenty-four hours in the stockade.

02-01:27:34 Berglund Sokolov: Let’s talk a little about what happens next. From the sit-down, you’re back in the stockade, and then kind of the legal gears start turning, right? What’s going to happen, what’s going to happen to you? What’s going to happen to the other guys?

02-01:27:53 Rowland: We didn’t know.

02-01:27:54 Berglund Sokolov: What choices are you going to make about what you’re facing?

02-01:27:58 Rowland: Well, none of that immediately. They threw us in the cell block, and it wasn’t like they were consulting us about what they were doing or—they were busy in their own meetings trying to decide how they were going to handle it, you know, and whether or not to pursue mutiny charges or whatever, I don’t know. We weren’t privy to any of that. Just in the stockade. We were kind of pumped up at that point. We were proud of the fact that we had—we pulled it off. We had pulled it off—and yeah, the press hadn’t shown up, which was quite disappointing, but we really felt like we had pulled it off and were sort of—and nothing had come down yet to say what was going to happen to us, so there was a little bit of nervousness that way. But in a sense, the great relief was that we had all acted together, had done what we said we would do. The anticipation before the demonstration—that’s where the terror was. Once we started the demonstration, I kind of think that people more or less rose to the occasion.

A lot of times people will actually be better than what they think they’re capable of. I saw that during the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. People went down to the protest with the idea of just showing up for a protest, and then all of a sudden there they were on the barricades, and they were like turned into heroes. Sometimes people will be—[cell phone ringtone]

02-01:29:22 Berglund Sokolov: I thought I’d turned that off. I’m so sorry.

02-01:29:26 Rowland: I think people—they’ll exceed their own expectations of themselves. I think that every guy that walked out of that formation and went and sat down, had exceeded their own expectations for themselves, and at that point felt like a hero, I think. There we were in the cellblock, and we felt like heroes. We had punched them right in the eye, you know? It’s kind of a weird thing for a pacifist, because at that point I considered myself a pacifist, so maybe I might not have used that metaphor. I might have—but so there we were.

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It was only at that point, of course, that we looked around to figure out who had joined us. In a way, so many guys had said they were, or some had said they weren’t, but now we could kind of take stock of who, in fact, had sat down, and look around, and wow. Eventually the word came down, I don’t remember, within a day or so the word came down that said that they were charging us with mutiny. Of course people kind of shit a brick about that, because it’s a capital crime. We were still pretty defiant, and we didn’t think that they could pull it off. But because they were charging us with mutiny— and that’s a capital crime—then we had to be maximum security prisoners. Up until then, maximum security at the Presidio Stockade was those boxes down there; a few on one side and a couple on the other side, and that was maximum security. Everything else was sort of medium or minimum security. Because we were going to be maximum security, they had to keep us confined in the cellblock, and they just made one of those upper cellblocks our cellblock. They still had to take us down to let us eat and stuff, but we did everything as a group after that.

02-01:31:17 Berglund Sokolov: Hmm.

02-01:31:19 Rowland: That allowed us to really bond in a way that we—if they had scattered us through the population, then those guys who thought it was the dumbest idea ever would have made some of us probably feel bad about it. But because we were all bound together and kept in that one cellblock together, as maximum security prisoners, it also meant we didn’t have to go on shotgun detail or any of those other details, because we were maximum security. They couldn’t just take us out and march us around and tell us to chop firewood or do any of the little tedious—pick weeds out of some colonel’s lawn or whatever they were using those details for. I never went on a single shotgun detail, because less than two days after I was in the stockade, I was a maximum-security prisoner, and until I went to Leavenworth I continued to be a maximum-security prisoner. I did go, actually, to the bullpen. After the trials, and before we went to Leavenworth, I went out to the bullpen a few times, where they had this big giant fence, and they had all the firewood that the officers would burn in their homes, and we would—they would give us these—a maul or maybe it was just wedges, I can’t remember, and a hammer with a steel handle. It was very inefficient. But that way you couldn’t break it, and then we’d split firewood with the shotgun guards around. We did do that a little bit for a couple days. But other than that, I never went on a shotgun detail, never had to stare down the barrel of the shotgun, because we were maximum-security prisoners.

We stayed in that cellblock and bonded, you know? We kind of started learning who each person was, and it was kind of a gnarly crowd, with quite an array of people—but we were there together. When it came down that we were going to be facing mutiny charges—okay, we were facing mutiny

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charges. Quick enough, once people realized they actually were going to get charged with mutiny, why—then, of course, people needed a lawyer.

02-01:33:38 Berglund Sokolov: Right.

02-01:33:40 Rowland: Hallinan said he would be our lawyer, and Hallinan really was the instigator in a lot of ways. The truth is that the brains behind the whole thing was Farnham and Hallinan, I think. But now we needed lawyers, and at first everybody was going to have Hallinan as a lawyer, although later pressure mounted quite a bit, because he was a red, and people were facing such severe charges that some people’s families hired a civilian attorney. You get a military attorney anyway, but nobody had any real faith in the military attorneys. Ultimately, seventeen of us, I think, were going to be represented by Hallinan, and the others were going to be represented by various other attorneys. But then three of Hallinan’s clients—Keith and Pawlowski and Lindy Blake—the three of them all escaped. Other people escaped—like Gentile escaped a couple times. People escaped and then got caught and brought back or whatever, but the three that escaped and never came back was Mather and Pawlowski and Lindy Blake. [interruption in recording]

02-01:35:04 Farrell: We’re back.

02-01:35:06 Berglund Sokolov: Great.

02-01:35:07 Rowland: Okay.

02-01:35:07 Berglund Sokolov: Let’s pick up, Randy, with what starts to happen with the legal process or processes after you get back into the stockade. You’re there with the guys; you realize that they are actually going to charge you with mutiny.

02-01:35:26 Rowland: At that point we were the leaf blowing in front of the wind. It was out of our control. We got a chance at our, I guess at the Article 32 hearing—or at some point I guess we must have been able to say guilty or not guilty. I don’t remember exactly when we would have said that, but probably at the Article 32 hearing. But other than that, the whole thing was out of our control. The question that we could decide was who was going to be our lawyer. We could decide whether to plead guilty or not guilty, which of course we wanted to fight it.

There were other issues though. For instance, for the guys that were being represented by Hallinan, he said, “Well, the only way that I’m going to be able to bring in stockade conditions into this thing is if we have this whole

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legal strategy where we’re going to say that you were temporarily insane, caused by the stockade conditions, so it’s not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.” And you know, we felt like heroes. We felt like we were fighting them tooth and nail, and we were willing to take our blows—not that anybody wanted to spend the rest of their life in jail or go to the gallows or something of that sort. But it was a fair fight, and we had hit them hard, and now they were going to hit us, and we were going to take it, because we didn’t have any choice. That legal strategy, really, none of us liked it, because it was like, “Oh, we’ve got to say that we were crazy?”

But Hallinan’s thing was, “Hey, if you want to talk about stockade conditions, if your original demonstration was about stockade conditions and you want that to get out there in the public eye, then this is the strategy. This is the only way we’re going to be able to do that.” We sucked it up, but it was kind of like a mark of the determination of the mutineers, as we rather proudly started calling ourselves, that we bought into that, because none of us wanted to say that were insane for having sat down and sang “We Shall Overcome,” and done the thing that we did, you know? That was a very conscious, very sensible, very sane, and very determined kind of thing. And boy, we didn’t want—we just didn’t want to insult our action by pleading insanity.

But Hallinan was right, and those guys that stuck with Hallinan, even though he was being red-baited like crazy, and everybody knew that by going with Hallinan they could go to jail for a much longer time—at least that’s what we were being told, is that, “If you stick with Hallinan, then you’re going to get the book thrown at you.” People who stuck with Hallinan—at least seventeen of us did—and then when he said, “Here’s what we’re going to have to plead temporary insanity,” nobody wanted to do it, but we stepped up and did it.

It did take on a life of its own, which none of us liked at all, and as the trial in Fort Ord went on, and all that—we had to all get—army psychiatrists interviewed us, civilian psychiatrists interviewed us, and with each one of them we had to pretend to be crazy, so to speak. On the one hand it was like this clown act for the civilian ones, but even for them we had to kind of, you know, give them something, so that they’d be able to go and testify on our behalf. When the army ones came, tried to say that we weren’t insane, we had to more or less convince them that we were, to the extent that we—we were not sophisticated. We didn’t know anything about psychiatry or that kind of stuff. But we played it as best we could, because we weren’t done punching them in the eye yet, see. If that was what it was going to take to get stockade conditions out in the open, then we were going to follow through with our original impulse, because we were in a fight, and the fight wasn’t over yet. That’s kind of the way it worked out.

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And so we accepted that, and it was also—it really—kind of a testament of our faith in Hallinan, who—because he was a fighter. The whole notion of, well, you don’t want to hire a lawyer that’s going to be on your side who isn’t a fighter, because the whole point is you’re in a fight.

02-01:39:58 Berglund Sokolov: Right.

02-01:39:59 Rowland: You want a guy that’s going to go out there and just rip them apart. And Hallinan was that guy. When our trial started, and Hallinan was up there— like he was calling the lifers “lifers,” and apparently didn’t realize that that’s kind of a derogatory term. You know, he just kind of giving them shit like crazy—I mean it was—we loved that. We loved that part.

But the legal process, you know, there’s different steps. The Article 32 hearing—I think it was Capt. [Richard J.] Millard or somebody—I can’t remember what his name was. But you know, he actually recommended no mutiny charges—so it was like “Ah, great.” Then the Brass disregarded his recommendation, so it was up and down and up and down. Emotionally, of course, that’s taxing, because about the time you thought you were getting off, then they decided to press on. In the military, and lots of places, an old tradition in and among sailors in the navy, and sea captains and stuff, where the captain’s rule was law. As soon as the ship starts sailing, they find some sailor who has made some minor infraction and they whip the shit out of him as an example to everyone else. And then you don’t disobey anymore. We were the whipping boys, and we were the guys that the army had selected to come down on, and we understood, at a certain point, what was going on.

02-01:41:38 Berglund Sokolov: What was the sentence that you ultimately got, Randy?

02-01:41:42 Rowland: Oh, mine was—I don’t even remember exactly—maybe a year and a half, or fifteen months maybe, or something. It was pretty mild, considering that the first guys got sixteen years. I was supposed to have been in that first group that went to trial, but the first day of trial I was yellow as a lemon because I had hepatitis. Hallinan looks at me and he stands up to the judge and says, “This guy can’t go to trial—look at him.” I was bright yellow; I had full-on hepatitis. It was very obvious, and even the trial judge said, “Send him over to the hospital.” I got separated away from those first few guys, and I’m sure they must have picked those guys for some reason. I don’t know why they picked the other guys that they picked, but I was one of the ringleaders. I wasn’t trying to pretend like I hadn’t played the role that I had played, other than I was very careful because I didn’t want to get Hallinan in trouble.

And also, everybody was kind of proud of the whole notion in the cellblock meetings that there wasn’t going to be any leaders. There’s not going to be

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any ringleaders. Nobody’s going to snitch anybody off. We’re all leaders, kind of like an anarchist thing, except nobody was sophisticated enough to think of it as anarchist, but you know, the whole idea was that if there’s no ring leaders, then nobody can take the fall for that. If there was a decision, it was sort of like a spontaneous decision, or we all decided it, or everybody’s a leader or nobody’s a leader, with the exception of Pawlowski, who was going to stand up and read the demands. Everybody knew that that was putting him at significant risk, but for everybody else, it was no ringleaders. I’m sure the army had decided who were the ringleaders, and who they were going to go for, and I was in that first group that was supposed to go to trial, and just by happenstance I couldn’t.

02-01:43:53 Berglund Sokolov: You were ultimately, after going to Fort Ord for trial, coming back to the Presidio for a time to the stockade here, you were sent to Leavenworth?

02-01:44:04 Rowland: And then I was sent to Leavenworth, right.

02-01:44:06 Berglund Sokolov: How much time did you do at Leavenworth?

02-01:44:10 Rowland: I don’t know. I mean I honestly don’t, I can’t tell you that exactly. I did a year and a half of total confinement—

02-01:44:16 Berglund Sokolov: Total.

02-01:44:17 Rowland: —is what I did. I had, in the meantime I was court-martialed for AWOL, given six months, the maximum sentence, plus whatever I was going to get from the mutiny. By the time the mutiny trial had started, I had already been court-martialed for the AWOL, and so I was already doing time for that. Other guys who had done more severe things, like refused to go to Vietnam or whatever, you could get two or three years, or whatever, like Keith had— he—I don’t know, he was facing—

02-01:44:51 Berglund Sokolov: I think he had four years by the time of the sit-down.

02-01:44:53 Rowland: Maybe.

02-01:44:54 Berglund Sokolov: Or something like that.

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02-01:44:54 Rowland: Right. That he had already accumulated a fair amount of years, and now whatever was going to be the add-on from the mutiny was kind like—it was the way that works.

02-01:45:04 Berglund Sokolov: So let’s take a couple minutes, while we have a little bit of time left in our session today, since we’re right upon the fiftieth anniversary of the Presidio 27. Tomorrow is the anniversary of Richard Bunch’s shooting here by a guard, his death. This weekend marks the anniversary of both the GI and Vets March for Peace, and the [Presidio] 27 sit-down. Reflections, thoughts, fifty years out—what you’d like people to take away from this experience?

02-01:45:43 Rowland: Well, I think—

02-01:45:45 Berglund Sokolov: What you want people to remember?

02-01:45:48 Rowland: Think about MLK saying, “I’ve been to the mountain.” There’s been, in my life, only a few mountaintop experiences. I look back at that demonstration in the Presidio stockade as one of those mountaintop experiences. I think that I personally—and the people around me—performed better than we thought we could, exceeded our own expectations for ourselves. A lot of what made the difference, of course, is the army’s overreaction. I think that for me, one of the take-aways is that the way movements work is sort of like waves breaking against the citadel. Every wave causes its effect, but it’s the accumulation of all of those waves that finally knocks a structure down. The army’s overreaction allowed our particular thing to have more of an impact than it otherwise would have. There were other people who did much more heroic things against the war, both within the military and in civilian life— tons of people that did all kinds of things. It was the accumulation of all of those things that brought the war to an end, that changed America in many ways.

I entered the movement, because of antiwar stuff, but in the meantime, while I was in Leavenworth was the first time I ever heard of the women’s movement. Prisoners were debating it. One of the conscientious objectors that I was doing time with had a backwards line on the question of women, and I was so surprised, because you know, you would have thought that he would have been better. But the women’s movement came up, and people hadn’t had a chance to sort that stuff out. We were a bunch of male convicts, debating the question of the women’s movement, and the equality of women and all that stuff while we were in the penitentiary. [laughing] That was kind of our introduction to it. I remember Sue came in once and the fad was men were supposed to express our feelings or whatever, and she says, “Well, I want you to express your feelings and tell me what your fears are, and all

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that.” You know, I was in Leavenworth. And then I said, “Okay.” I kind of—it freaked her out. Boy, I never did that again, you know? [laughter]

02-01:48:31 Berglund Sokolov: Be careful what you ask for, right?

02-01:48:33 Rowland: Yeah, I mean, you want to know what I’m worried about? Here’s what it is. [laughing] I went in a religious pacifist, and I came out a red. That’s the truth of the matter. Hallinan being an open communist had kind of moved me in that direction.

One of the guys that I got [to be] friends with when I was in Leavenworth also influenced me. You’d sit there in the evenings in the cellblocks. It was penitentiary style, where you’ve got the tiers, and then you’ve got the third tier is actually the ground floor. The ones below that are segregation cells. We’d sit there in the third tier, which is where the floor space was in front of the cells, and my buddy had become a sort of an intellectual communist, because he had gotten this book about the Russian Revolution. The book was all the cables from the US embassy in Moscow, 1917, that they sent back. Of course the embassies were the spies in other countries, about what’s going on internally. The book was all of the declassified cables from the American embassy in Moscow, telling the story of the Russian Revolution. He had started reading this book; he found it in the stacks in the library in whatever college he was going to, somewhere in California. He got so excited about it that he quit going to class, just so he could read the book and study the Russian revolution. And then, of course, once he quit going to class, he got drafted. But by then he had been won over, and he says, “Well, I’m a communist,” because he’d fallen in love with the revolution, and so he refused to get on the plane. At his trial, where he’s facing the five years, he stood up to the judge and he says, “I didn’t go because I’m a communist, and I wasn’t going to go fight against my fellow communists.” Well, he got five years—of course he got the maximum sentence—and so he was doing five years.

We would sit there, and I would argue, from the religious pacifist viewpoint. The question was always “how are we going to make a better society? How are we going to get to the promised land?” My notion was that we’re going to ask people to be nice and religious, and be pacifistic, and all that kind of stuff—peace, love, dove. His thing was different. He says, “You know, they’ve been trying that for a few thousand years now, and that really hasn’t worked out so well. But the communists have got a different idea, which is actually not a communist idea—it’s what cultural anthropologists say, which is: “being determines consciousness.” What we’re going to do is we’re going to make a better society, and as people grow up in that better society, they will be better people. If you go through that cycle a few times, then you actually can get to the place where people are being nice to each other. If

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you grow up in an angry kind of ugly society, then you’re going to be an angry, ugly kind of person. If you grow up in a decent society where you’d be sharing and whatever,” he says, “that’s the dream.” And he won me over. His argument was better than mine.

Plus, there was this other guy, Carl Mobley, this African American guy who had shot his commander in Vietnam and was doing time for murder. He was my assistant in the prison clinic, which is where I worked. Carl Mobley, within six months of hitting Leavenworth, he had organized the Black Prisoners’ Union, or whatever it was called, the black prisoners’ organization—and that kind of thing. Up until then I had thought that Russia was the model, because Hallinan was in the CPUSA. Carl Mobley came in and he says, “No man,” because he was like the New Left, right? He says, “No man, the Chinese are the model. The Russians—they sold out.” By the time I left Leavenworth, I was kind of a Maoist. He could signify the Red Book—this guy could chant out the Red Book in the same way that signifiers do, and it was like—none of us had a Red Book in there, but he had memorized the red book, and he could just signify the Red Book. Talk about a force to be reckoned with. There it was, the quotations of Chairman Mao out of the mouth of Carl Mobley, the guy who had killed his commander in Vietnam. I was influenced. [laughing]

02-01:52:58 Berglund Sokolov: Yeah. One more question before we wrap up—since part of the events this weekend are commemoration for the surviving Presidio 27, their families, that community, another part is for the general public. What do you hope that the public will take away from learning more about this story and this history?

02-01:53:23 Rowland: You know, there’s an old adage that says you never know how strong you’re going to be till you’re in hot water. I think it was actually Reagan’s wife or somebody that said that, but it’s a good thing: People are like tea bags. You never know how strong they’re going to be till they’re in hot water. Well, I think that the take-away really is that people have to fight their fights, and sometimes they’re lucky enough that they actually land a strong blow. And sometimes you fight your fight, and it’s a small blow—and you never know that upfront. You only really find that out after the fight’s over. But I really think that in these times, we’re in kind of a battle for the soul of America, and the future of the world really, and humanity, and it’s the fight for the fate of humanity—in the sense of like global warming and all of the issues that are facing humanity.

My personal feeling is that I’m hoping that people will draw inspiration and just to recognize what—I’ve got to tell you a story. I was working with this radical vets group years ago, and it was like about the time that the men’s movement started. There was some conference going on in Seattle of the

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men’s movement, and all these guys went to the conference. We didn’t think much of that shit, but that didn’t matter. They were all sitting around drumming and I don’t know what they were doing. But the organizers of the conference had invited people to be at the resource tables outside in the hall at this university where the conference was going on, and so there it was, our radical vets group as a resource table. As the guys came out of the conference, they would drift along the resource tables and we would talk to them. It was about the time that the Rambo movie had come out. The guys come out and inevitably they would say—they would apologize for not being vets, and we’d say, pfffft—“Don’t apologize for not being a vet. We’re the antiwar vets.” They would also say something about how much they hated the fact that their kids loved Rambo. After enough guys went by, I started saying, “Well, what did you do during the war?” Then they’d start telling me about all this heroic stuff they’d done as antiwar activists—really good stuff. I said, “Well, did you ever tell your kids that?” They’d say, “No.” I said, “Well, then, of course they love Rambo, because they don’t know that their own daddy was a hero in stopping the war.” That experience, of just hearing guy after guy after guy apologize for not being a vet, and then complain because his kids love Rambo, and had never told his kids, his own children, the heroic stories of their antiwar activities—which were pretty strong stories, a lot of them.

I realized that you know, we have an obligation to model what resistance is supposed to look like. Not the details of it, but just the idea—and people have to have heroes from the good side. Ever after that, I’ve never felt hesitant to talk about, openly about my—I mean I never felt too hesitant about it anyway, frankly. But I always felt like I had a final obligation. Not only did I do what we did, but then I felt that I had an obligation to tell the story, so that other people wouldn’t love Rambo, so that they could have something else.

There’s an old adage we used to say: first you fight the battle, and then you fight the battle of summation. Rambo was sort of part of the battle of summation. I actually got my head caved in down in LA when—around a different movie, but where you’re fighting the battle of summation and a verdict on the war. American people, by and large, came up with a verdict on the Vietnam war, but ever since then—and to this day—we’ve been fighting that battle of summation, and there’s no time off for good behavior for that. You’ve got to keep fighting it, because otherwise, the assholes are going to sum up that it was our finest hour, when in fact it was such an eye- opener for my generation. So many of us, of course, are still activists to this day. What I’m hoping, I guess, for this weekend is that we’ll just stand up, admit what we did, tell the story, in hopes that people will see oh, well that’s what you’re supposed to do. You’ve got to resist.

I went to this museum in Berlin. There’s this museum that’s the museum of the resistance [German Resistance Memorial Center], and it’s all about

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people who resisted Nazism. And in the museum they have early resisters and late resisters, and the guy who tried to kill Hitler, and all the different kinds of resistance. The bottom line for the museum was there’s never a bad time to resist, and there’s never really a wrong way to resist, and all the various kinds of resistances are important—and the most important thing is to resist. I take away from that museum that message, and that’s the message of the Presidio mutiny, I think, is we did what we did. But there’s no bad way to resist, and this is just one story in many, many stories of resistance.

02-01:59:04 Berglund Sokolov: Terrific. I think we’ll end there for today.

[End of Interview]