Living in a Time of Momentous Change How the Dartmouth Class of 1967 Met the Challengesof Vietnam, The Human Rights Movement and So Much Else 1967 2017 LIVING THROUGH MOMENTOUS CHANGE 158 DARTMOUTH COLLEGE Living Through Momentous Change Part 2 Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, Sexual Orientation, Dartmouth College, and So Much Else CLASS OF 1967 159 LIVING THROUGH MOMENTOUS CHANGE What Happened Since 1967 Tony Amriati After graduation I have never been an active par- would be any kind of military threat to the U.S. ticipant in the life of the Class of ’67. Nonetheless, The fact that we were supporting what was clearly I have always considered the education and experi- a thoroughly corrupt government in the South did ence I received at Dartmouth as one of the pivotal little to inspire any feeling of duty or patriotism in moments in the formation of the person I am now. me and probably not in many others as well. After the famous “summer of love” in 1967, I con- After leaving Hopkins in 1970, I moved to New York tinued my education at Johns Hopkins University and took a number of jobs unrelated to my study of in Baltimore in the field of Romance languages. This Romance languages. enabled me to live for about 18 months in Spain in Then, in 1973, and quite by accident, I was offered the late 1960s and to observe a dictatorship at first a job in New York as a shipbroker, chartering tankers hand that some described as brutal and others as to carry crude oil and petroleum products world- benevolent. Even though I never finished my doc- wide. This job later became a career that ended when toral dissertation nor obtained the PhD I had set I reached my 67th birthday. out to gain, I was fortunate to develop an almost native fluency in the Spanish language and to gain There are probably not even as many as a thousand important insights into Spanish culture and society. tanker brokers in the world, so it is a small club, to say the least. Honesty is very important, and one During my time at Johns Hopkins, the draft was a transgression is enough to get you excluded for life. major issue, and after exhausting all of my appeals between my 24th and 25th birthdays, it was a case It was in the context of tanker brokering that my of either going into the Army (or even possibly to interest in world affairs really blossomed. I started Vietnam) or taking drastic action. I selected the my career in the autumn of 1973 during the onset latter alternative. of the Arab oil embargo, which was an interesting example of the lack of understanding the U.S. had After a careful scrutiny of the U.S. Army medical regarding what was going on in a number of Middle regulations, which were available at Johns Hopkins Eastern countries, a lack of understanding that at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library (conveniently seems to be continuing totally unabated today. a depository for U.S. Government documents), my colleagues and I in the department of Romance lan- guages discovered an interesting piece of bibliope- dantic graffiti regarding who could and who could not be admitted into the United States armed forces. It turned out that anyone with braces on their teeth (referred to as ‘fixed dental appliances’ in military speak) would not be eligible for induction. Realizing that I had been suffering from a maloc- clusion all of my life, I engaged the services of a competent orthodontist and was thereafter reject- ed when I attended my physical at Fort Holabird outside Baltimore. In addition to not wanting to be drafted, I, like many others at the time, was deeply opposed to the involvement of the United States in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and for the first time in my life, after having grown up on a rather rosy picture of American foreign policy in the wake of WWII, I began to understand that perhaps we were not as good as our schools and history books described us. The news we did see from Vietnam was, in my opinion, grim, and it seemed to me that it would have been impossible for any reasonable person to accept the concept of the domino theory or that the takeover of all of Vietnam by Ho Chi Minh Tony and Kari Amriati and granddaughter LIVING THROUGH MOMENTOUS CHANGE 160 DARTMOUTH COLLEGE the wider world around them. Certainly, the behav- ior of the U.S. vis-à-vis Chile, for example, did little to create good relations. The prolonged U.S. occu- pation of Panama is a wound that has yet to heal. In general, the perception of the U.S. in most Latin American countries is one of an arrogant, meddling, sanctimonious, and my-way-or-the-highway neighbor. I believe that this perception has led to the forma- tion of UNASUR (Union of South American Nations) as a means of weakening the divide-and-conquer strategy that has traditionally been implemented by the U.S. in the region. To me, it looks like most Latin American countries would like to have good relations with the U.S. but only if those relations are based upon equality and true mutual respect rather than upon the Monroe Doctrine. By the time I had reached my mid-50s and had lived in Norway for over 20 years, it became clear to me that it was unlikely that I would ever return Sunset from Tony Amriati’s home south of Oslo to the States again to live or to work. I and my fam- ily (and almost everyone else in Norway as well) had In 1975, I met and married my wife, Kari, a beauti- an excellent quality of life that I realized would ful and charming Norwegian girl, who had taken a have been far more difficult to attain in the U.S. job with a Norwegian shipowner with offices in By this time George W. Bush was president, the New York. As a result of this, I was given responsi- Iraq war was raging, the war on terrorism was in bility for the Scandinavian market by my company full swing, and the country appeared to be hope- and began to take Norwegian language classes. lessly divided. In 1981 I was offered a job by a Norwegian ship- For me, as a child of the 1960s, it was hard to fath- broking company in Oslo, and we decided to move om that there was little in the way of mass demon- to Norway. We have been here ever since, and our strations or an alternative lifestyle that emerged in children grew up as Norwegians. reaction to the turmoil that seemed to be every- Upon coming to work in Norway, I found that my where. I was particularly disappointed to see that fluency in Spanish provided an opportunity for me few congressmen seemed interested in opposing U.S. to create my own market segment. I have been to foreign policy and that the so-called liberal press Venezuela over 40 times and have had the oppor- tunity to participate in several long-term transporta- In general, the perception of the U.S. tion projects with Venezuelan petroleum producers. I even had the opportunity to meet president Hugo in most Latin American countries is Chavez while acting as the representative of one of one of an arrogant, meddling, sanctimonious, Norway’s largest tanker owners. and my-way-or-the-highway neighbor. Additionally, I worked as a tanker transportation Tony Amriati consultant for the Panama Canal Authority and was involved in preparing a study in connection with (which really had become a corporate press) was so the expansion of the Panama Canal. tame in reporting what “the war on terror” was real- A few years ago, the company I worked for was hired ly all about. to create a new transportation business model for The extreme privatization of military functions to the Chilean national oil company, ENAP, and as a companies like Blackwater and KBR/Halliburton result, I was able to spend about a month in Chile also reminded me of the close ties between gov- gathering information and interviewing personnel. ernment and industry, which are a hallmark of fas- In addition to these major projects, I have also taken cist societies. business trips to and concluded contracts with In addition to these disturbing observations, I didn’t clients in Ecuador, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Peru. feel that American any longer, and even though Working a great deal with Latin America gave me a my wife and I continued to speak English at home, unique perspective on how others see the U.S. and most of my business was conducted in Norwegian CLASS OF 1967 161 LIVING THROUGH MOMENTOUS CHANGE or Spanish. Even though I was reading U.S. news- papers on the Internet, I was also reading and lis- tening to a great deal of Norwegian news as well as reading a number of Spanish-language newspapers. My perspective had changed, and I realized that my life had become very different from what it might have been had we stayed in the States. It was at this point that I decided to apply for Nor- wegian citizenship. A condition for attaining Norwe- gian nationality is that you must relinquish your previous nationality. Launching a motor tanker outside Tokyo in 2006. I subsequently found out that the State Department Tony in top row, #6 from the right. wants to know a great deal about you if you decide to renounce your U.S.