Against All Odds

by Scott Brown

  Once I knew that Larry was gone for good, I stopped coming around as much. I stayed in school as long as possible, until the very end of exams, leaving late for breaks and coming back early. There was only a small space for me in my mom’s new place, just enough room to crash, but I also needed the distance. I was tired, spent, worn-out down to the bone. I had lived my entire life under the shadow of other men and other choices, choices made before I was even born.

  My sophomore year two other things happened: I scored 35 points in one game over Bowdoin, and I fell in love. Her name was Pam; she was from Lexington, Massachusetts; and she was a tall, dark-haired tennis player. Her parents were divorced, and she was from a very athletic family. Sports and familial chaos, albeit on a far more manageable scale. We were almost inseparable. I would hang out around the tennis courts in the center of the campus and watch her play; she would come to my games and cheer. We shared meals, gym time, and runs, and I could talk to her just enough about the chaos with Larry. At the start of our junior year we moved into a house off campus with about six other people, in one of the blocks of narrow, boxy rentals that owed their existence to the steady influx of Tufts students—with marred walls and used furniture, and the smell of old food and stale beer. We thought that we were mature and independent, and we had long, serious conversations about getting engaged and married. I could see my life mapped out, down to kids and a dog waiting for me by our front door. We spent a lot of our free time at her Armenian grandma’s, eating traditional cooking. But Pam’s mother especially didn’t want us to settle down. She was forever trying to discourage me and to encourage Pam to try new things. One of those things was six months in England. We wrote, and I flew over to visit, my first trip ever that did not involve basketball or Junior Classical League, but from the moment I arrived, I could feel that the ground had shifted. It looked as though she was dating other people. For two twenty-year-olds, an ocean provided too much time and distance. Sadly, our relationship ended, albeit amicably, soon after she returned.

  I was a good shooter on the team, with a chance the next year to be voted in as captain. The school paper called me “Downtown Scotty Brown” because I liked to shoot so far away from the basket. And I had found my path. I was making the dean’s list for my grades, and I had run for the student senate. My platform was halting tuition increases, being more responsible about how student fees, particularly social fees, were spent, and improving dormitory safety, including fire and theft precautions. “I won’t promise to change everything,” I wrote for my statement, “but I will promise to be a sincere, active representative of our student body. Please consider me!!!” I was number forty-five on the ballot, out of fifty-seven candidates, and I won.

  But the most important thing I did wasn’t in school. It was on December 29, 1979, in the middle of my junior year, when Pam was gone. That day, I went to the armory at Camp Curtis Guild to officially register to join the Army National Guard.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Cosmo Guy

  In February 1978, while I was a college freshman, a huge nor’easter rumbled up the coast of New England. The storm began as a tropical cyclone off the coast of South Carolina, and as it rotated north, an Arctic cold front merged with the rain. The water turned to snow, but it never lost its tropical orientation. It arrived in New England as a blizzard with hurricane-force winds. Across Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the snow fell for thirty-three hours, coming down so fast and furiously that cars were literally trapped on the roads, blocked by blowing drifts. Some 3,500 vehicles were abandoned in the middle of streets and highways. People became trapped in their cars, some dying because the snow’s rapid accumulation blocked the tailpipes and the carbon monoxide fumes killed them. Thousands of homes and businesses lost electricity, heat, and water. Snowdrifts piled up as high as fifteen feet. All road traffic was banned and Governor Michael Dukakis called out the National Guard to help clear the highways so snowplows could pass.

  The Guard was my first experience with the military, aside from my neighbors in Malden who had served in Vietnam. I watched the images of the Guard members in the bitter cold, rescuing the stranded, clearing the roads, and I was really impressed. So much so that the following Thanksgiving when I saw one of the local Guard commanders at the Wakefield–Melrose football game, it was all that I wanted to talk about. He told me I should think about joining and began trying to recruit me. At the time, I was largely thinking about how my mother and Leeann could get out of the house on June Circle, away from Larry’s reach. But I kept the idea in the back of my mind. By the fall of 1979, I was ready. Fifty-two Americans had been captured and were being held as hostages in Iran. Then, on December 25, 1979, troops from the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. For me, that sealed the deal.

  I was determined to graduate from college and to play my final basketball season, but I wanted to join the military. I wanted to serve. Here were men whom I could admire, men whose job it was to protect others as the normal course of their lives. There were so many undercurrents behind my decision, many of which I never would have recognized then. But standing in that armory, I felt I belonged. I signed my papers, knowing that if I were called to active duty, I would go. And if I stuck it out with the Guard, I had the added bonus of knowing that it paid a salary to those who participated. From my days scooping vomit, from my every summer painting houses or mowing lawns or doing whatever odd jobs I could scrounge, I knew that a couple of thousand dollars might be the difference between going on to some kind of graduate school, probably law school, or not going.

  At Tufts, Coach White was shocked. With the Guard, I was expected to spend my summers training. How could I play basketball? How would I practice over the long summer months? I hadn’t really thought of that; I’d just assumed that I could play, and the Guard hadn’t dissuaded me. My parents, who never weighed in on anything, each independently asked me, “What the hell are you doing?” But my mind was made up.

  I was supposed to report for two months of basic training in June, at Fort Dix in New Jersey, where I would be joining Bravo Company, the Third Battalion (BRAVO 1-3). Fort Dix was where thousands of U.S. troops had trained before being deployed to Vietnam. The base had even built a mock Vietnamese village on its grounds. I wanted to be a top-notch soldier, and I decided to train for basic training. To prepare, every day I ran the three-mile loop around the lake in Wakefield with a full backpack or a duffel bag and I did a ton of push-ups, sit-ups, and pull-ups, so that on day one, I would be ready.

  We arrived at Fort Dix just at the start of the Guard’s efforts to fully integrate female soldiers, so on our part of the base, in my barracks, the top floor was for women and the bottom two were for men. The drill sergeants came down hard on us, threatening that if we got any of the women pregnant or were caught hanging around with them, we would be out of the military. There was no fraternization at all, although over the summer, a few of the drill sergeants did try to move in on some of the more attractive female recruits.

  I quickly became a favorite target for the drill sergeants because I was a college guy entering basic training as a private first class, and not the typical Guard recruit. It was a little bit like my years with Coach Lane—the sergeants could yell at me first. On one of my very first mornings, I was standing in the front row when a six-foot-four drill sergeant walked up to me. He was African-American and sewn across the front of his uniform was his name, “Brown.” I gave him a little smile. I didn’t say anything—I just turned up the edges of my mouth quickly, in a kind of “Hi, how ya doing?” expression. But the military is not for smiley guys. He immediately called over to the other drill sergeant, “Jonesy, come here.” The two of them started circling me like a couple of sharks. “Jonesy, do you notice anything about this young soldier?” “Yeah, I do,” came the reply. “His last name is Brown.” “That’s right,” said the drill sergeant. “What’s my name, Jonesy?” “Brown.” At that moment, Sergeant Brown looked me right
in the eye and said, “You know, I think we’re related, PFC Brown. No, PFC Brown, I know we’re related. We have a distant relation in our family and as a result Mom told me to look out for you. So I’m going to do just that. I’m going to be all over your shit every single day.” And I said, “OK, drill sergeant.”

  He paused. “Hey, Brown, you know what? Why don’t you get down and give me ten?” So I dropped down and banged out ten quick push-ups. And I said, “Permission to recover, drill sergeant?” He said, “No, no, no. Why don’t you get down and give me fifty?” And I dropped down and banged those out too. That caught Sergeant Brown’s eye. The next time the drill sergeants told everyone else in the group to give them ten, I would have to drop down and give fifty or one hundred. From that moment on, when it came to me, Sergeant Brown was always watching.

  Basic training was a daily competition in the humid New Jersey heat. We awoke at 4 a.m. to do push-ups, sit-ups, running, and drilling. We ran in our combat boots—I did a five-minute mile in them. Back then, it didn’t matter if the boot’s soles were hard or if the seams cut blisters or if the skin on the bottom of our feet peeled off in long white strips. We ran in those boots every day. Five thirty a.m. until six was the time to do what was called “shit, shower, and shave.” At 6 a.m., we were in the mess hall, shoveling food into our mouths. If you ate too slowly, the sergeants came over and made you dump your plate. Then we were off to training.

  During our exercises, we learned how to fire rifles (like the M-16), shoot pistols, and hurl grenades. We learned how to bivouac, set up tents, and navigate in the woods. We crawled in the mud beneath ropes as live fire whistled over us. We jumped logs and rappelled down walls—everything you see in the movies—except that I and all the other recruits were in the front row, caked with dirt and dust, mosquitoes biting every inch of our exposed skin. And the weapons in our hands were real.

  Because I had over two years of college when I joined, I was inducted into the Guard as a private first class, and when I arrived at Fort Dix, I was put in charge of a platoon, about eighty people. Most of the recruits were two or three years younger than me; they were primarily African-American, Hispanic, and southern kids. There were a bunch of kids in my group from the Appalachian mountains, kids who came from West Virginia coal and Virginia and Kentucky tobacco country, who grew up in hills and canyons and for whom New Jersey was a very long way from home. I had never set foot in the South, not even Florida, and I could barely understand a word they spoke, but no one could outshoot them with a gun. Especially the guys from Alabama. They could hit any target—the easy ones probably with their eyes closed.

  And like me with my basketball, living in Larry’s house on June Circle, some of them were looking for any way out of the place that they called home.

  Leading these men was one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life. I was the guy they came to with their personal problems, who made sure when they went on leave that they came back and didn’t get into any trouble, who spent part of his evening getting everything organized for the next morning at 4 a.m. I had to lead. Leadership required not falling prey to certain facets of military culture in 1980. Chief among them was what many called “buddy-fucking,” a phrase that has almost no equivalent in civilian life. In the do-or-die culture of the Army, it meant people who are nice to your face but who are trying to screw you behind your back. Any officer of any rank, even a private first class like me, heard it and worried about it almost from the moment he or she stepped on base at Fort Dix.

  If you were a platoon leader, you got your own quarters, as opposed to having to bunk in a group with the rest of the men, and all the platoon leaders, including me, slept with footlockers or chairs in front of their doors. At night, some of the recruits who wanted to cause trouble would have what they called blanket parties. They’d come in, pull a blanket over your head so that you couldn’t see, and pummel you. The first time I went out on leave, I came back to find my room trashed, my stuff ripped up and soiled. I cleaned it up without a word. After that, I hid my stuff whenever I went away. It was part of the nature of the beast, a military still demoralized after Vietnam, still trying to find its way.

  I, in turn, also pushed the envelope. I tormented my drill sergeants because I struck up a flirtatious friendship with one of the female trainees, a southern girl with brown hair and crystal blue eyes. The sergeants made it their personal challenge to catch me, and I made it my personal quest not to get caught. We’d sing together in church on Sundays just for a chance to hold hands, and the sergeants would threaten me with KP duty or say that they were going to take away my leave. We’d wink at each other, we pushed every rule to the edge, but we never got caught. Then came the sit-up contest.

  One part of our daily training was physical training, PT, which included sit-ups. Each morning, we would drop to the ground in a group, men and women, and be expected to crank them out. We started with one hundred, then went to two hundred, then three hundred. Other trainees dropped out, but I kept going, as did my quasi-girlfriend with the crystal blue eyes. Soon we were up to five hundred sit-ups, then six. Now the drill sergeants were interested. They were clustered around in their combat boots and fatigues and brown T-shirts stained with sweat. And they were egging us on—who is better, Brown or the girl? Who’s better? If they could have peeled off a wad of cash and made wagers, I’m sure they would have. I kept going, and she kept going. We laid our backs against the hard ground and then pulled up our torsos, contracting our stomach muscles one by one. The ground began to scrape against my spine and chafe against my tailbone. My eyes stung from the perspiration dripping off my forehead, but I kept my hands locked behind my head. I didn’t even try to wipe it off. We got to 1,500. Neither of us would quit, and a crowd was watching. Sometime after we had crossed the 2,000 mark, she gave up. I managed five more and then collapsed, my tailbone raw and bleeding, my entire backside and stomach writhing in pain. And even after that, we kept flirting and pushing the envelope. It was my outlet for the summer. That, and basketball.

  In the summer of 1980, Fort Dix was still a training base for regular U.S. troops, and during my free time, I would sneak away from the basic training camp to go play basketball with the men in the Regular Army. I kept my basketball sneakers hidden away in the bottom of my laundry bag and my shorts and T-shirt on underneath my uniform. While the other recruits were out drinking, I was hustling up basketball games, spending a couple of hours on the court.

  After my two months were over, I had earned some awards—including a distinguished athlete award and the “Trainee of the Cycle” citation, given to me out of five hundred soldiers—but the biggest one I got, I could never pin on my uniform. When the summer was over, Sergeant Brown came up to me and said, “Anytime you want to go to war, son, I’m with you. You’re a college guy, you won awards. You’re squared away. If you became an officer, I’d follow you anywhere. You have the makings of a great soldier.”

  Sergeant Brown got me thinking about training to be an officer. When I returned to Tufts, I looked into doing ROTC, and I began in the simultaneous membership program (SMP). I was in both the Guard and ROTC, doing both at the same time. When I joined ROTC, I got promoted to sergeant E-5. And my training would begin in earnest after my graduation.

  Not long after the start of college, it became clear that I had stopped growing. I was six foot one, but I was not going to tower over anyone. Most of my opponents could look down on me. Even my father was taller. There were not many six-foot shooting guards in the NBA from the New England Small College Athletic Conference. I might have been able to play for a season or two in the European leagues, but a professional basketball career was nothing but a pipe dream. I was in my third season as a starter on the Tufts team, and I had learned to play smart, to beat my opponents by thinking two and three moves ahead of them with the ball. If they had height, I went for speed, for consistency, and for muscle memory as I spun the ball toward the net from t
he corners of the court. I began my senior year with a shooting slump, but by the time my last season ended, I could boast of three college games when I shot 35 points overall in each individual game. The last of them was against Brandeis: I brought home the win with a final-second shot at the buzzer, from thirty feet away. I was closing in on having scored one thousand points over the course of my Tufts career; my final figure was 965. I had been picked as the team’s cocaptain, and I was considered one of the best outside shooters in New England’s Division III. In the locker room, I even persuaded my teammates, who had very different taste in music, to listen to Queen. Sometimes, to warm up, we would blast “We Will Rock You.”

  But I had a life off the court as well. I joined the jazz choir at Tufts, where rehearsals were at 7 a.m. I joined in part because one of my buddies, Rich Edlin, was a member of the choir and he convinced me that the six girls in it were all gorgeous. We performed in clubs around Boston, we would go out singing and drinking, and a few times afterward, we stood outside the dorms of some of our female friends and serenaded them. As word of our impromptu midnight serenades spread, we began to get requests. Friends and even strangers would leave notes or messages on our answering machines and ask us to sing outside Wren Hall or some other spot at 12:15 a.m. By the time I graduated, these singing events had become a tradition.

  The singing was an outlet for the tension of the court and for the inevitable question of what came next. As I had done in high school when I played the role of Patrick in Mame, I appeared in a college production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, playing one of the leads, Hero. My intellectual life blossomed. The guy who once worked to get a B-minus in Political Parties now had a 3.5 average. My favorite class was Yiddish Literature with Professor Sol Gittleman, where we read the classics of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Sholem Aleichem. I had joined a fraternity, Zeta Psi, which had a combination of jocks, intellectual kids, and theater kids. Some of the fraternities were all sports, like football or sailing, but Zeta Psi was a mix, without being cliquey. We had guys in ROTC, guys who were going to be engineers or lawyers. And I, the guy who once stole a suit to wear to a dance, was the Rush chairman.