I was on a NROTC scholarship at Duke. The summer of our freshman year they put me on a tin can, the U.S. Forest B. Royal (now decommissioned thank goodness), for a people-to-people program in Northern Europe. What should have been a pleasure wasn’t. It seemed to me like a summer camp gone very wrong indeed. So at that point I started thinking about taking the Marine Corps option available to ten percent of the NROTC’s. My impression of the Corps at the time, formed entirely from conversations with my freshman roommate, Al Kyle, was that young officers mostly hung around the O-Club pool. (I didn’t know enough to take into account the fact that Al was seeing this from the perspective of a General’s kid.) Anyhow, it was true for me that I didn’t really enjoy any of the training I received as a ROTC until I got to Marine Officer’s Training School and then Jump School at Ft. Benning. (Several of us at Duke were allowed to volunteer for this for some odd reason I never understood, but always appreciated.) So I was comfortable I had made the right choice.
Most of the subjects we were taught at TBS, while obviously important, didn’t interest me at all. The only ones that did were those that offered little peeks at the culture, tradition, and language of the Vietnamese people. I decide, after just a few weeks, that what I really wanted to do was to be an interpreter/translator, and, when my scores on the language aptitude test came back high, I thought that would be my ticket in to the training. So I went to see some forgettable Major, test scores in hand, and asked him if he could arrange for me to go to Vietnamese Language School after TBS. In words I’ll never forget, he said, “Lieutenant, you can go to Language School after you’ve killed a few [derisive term for the Vietnamese people].” This experience was so disheartening to me that it soured me on TBS and, at the time, on the Corps. I just wanted to wait out my commitment and get out. So it was a great surprise that about nine months later, in a tent in Dong Ha in the 9th Motor Transport Battalion of the 3rd Marine Division, responsible for the security of convoys all along Dong Ha and having gotten to know all the bases along the Route really well, I realized that I loved what I was doing: loved my job, loved my colleagues, loved my men, and loved Vietnam.
There was a very kind, thoughtful, and effective Major in the Battalion, Major Stanley, who arranged for me to be partially assigned to Civic Action at the Battalion level, given a jeep, a driver, and a translator, and freed to do or to provide whatever seemed most needed: Med Caps, irrigation and water filtration systems, rice thrashers, reimbursements for water buffalos we shot by mistake, and any supplies we could wrangle (okay, sometimes steal) from friendly (or unsuspecting) Supply Officers. Along with a couple of doctors we also set up a temporary hospital to do cleft lip repairs on Montagnard kids (who otherwise would be shunned by their villages).
I couldn’t have been happier and asked to extend my tour, but the Corps refused and sent me instead to the Supply Center in Albany, Georgia, to become first the battalion training officer and then a company commander. Mostly, however, I got involved in local little theater and music off base, and just put in the rest of my time.
I’ll be very brief here because I’m going on a bit. Out of the Corps, then to law school, a few years of practice, a fellowship in D.C. for an advance degree, and then an appointment to the faculty at Mercer Law School in Macon, Georgia, first as Director of Clinical Programs, later Associate Dean, and then as a classroom teacher for a total of about thirty-five years.
There was lots of work on ABA or State Bar of Georgia commissions, committees, task forces, and so forth – most of this on ethical, legal education, or death penalty issues — and lots of work with various non-profits in Macon (especially my church, St. James Episcopal) and in Georgia generally – most of the non-profit work was on environmental, historic preservation, or homeless issues. But primarily I thought of myself as a law professor and legal scholar, and spent a lot of time giving talks at other schools.
Other than books, you can find most of my writings online at http://ssrn.com/author=54430 . I retired a few years back. In October, 2014, the Law Review at Mercer hosted a symposium – a “festschrift” as it is call in academia – on my writings which will be published sometime this spring. Such a generous, lovely, and, well overwhelming ending it was to a delightful career.
My wife and I and our animals live on a mountain out in the woods from a very small town in the middle of Vermont. She consults and writes; I do very little other than take care of the place, hike, write a little, and try to be as good an audience as I can for artists of all sorts.
Our daughter, Sorrel, takes care of the three grandchildren, a few hours away from us in Massachusetts, and does quite a lot of work with Cycle for Survival, a cancer research fundraising non-profit. My son, Lanier, is a music professor at California State University in Monterey and, if I may say so myself, a very good composer. He also is involved in homeless issues. All of us, including the grandchildren, play fantasy baseball together.
20 March 1944 – 8 November 2001
