by Scott Brown
But I stuck it out. I knew some of it was payback. I was a Boston College Law School grad about to take the bar, I was a model—you could still pick up a magazine and see my face or catch me in a commercial—and here I was, in the infantry, in the woods. I had driven down in a nice car, a gold Dodge Daytona, and I had a Canadian girlfriend, so when other guys were going on leave to cruise the bars in Columbus, Georgia, I had the cash to fly up to Montreal for the weekend. I was a little older than most of the other guys too, and yet I was still winning a lot of the athletic competitions. They should have busted my chops. If the stories had been reversed, I would have been sorely tempted to do the same.
We were all officers in the infantry course, and nearly all of the men here were commissioned through ROTC. Some were being trained to go on active duty, to lead their soldiers into battle in some other part of the world. Others would return home to serve in the National Guard or Reserves. On many of our exercises, I learned a tremendous amount about tactics, logistics, battle skills, leadership, POW awareness, and even first aid. We spent hours and hours in the field, honing our skills to become infantry officers. When I finished my training, I was assigned to a headquarters company in Boston. I held the rank of second lieutenant and was now the number two officer, behind the company commander, Captain Valente. We had a great group. Whenever the Regular Army officers came to evaluate us on our field training, we always did well. Too well. We were one of the higher-ranked companies, and Captain Valente knew that I was a kind of hard-charging guy, and he could delegate a lot of the field training setup and details to me. It was not in his interest to see me promoted out of his company into something else.
My way out came when the Guard downsized. I was in the Yankee Division, about ten thousand to twelve thousand people, but in the downsizing, we were cut from a division to a brigade. The Guard did away with the headquarters company and the infantry, so I had to change branches. I became a quartermaster officer. I went to quartermaster advanced school one summer and came back as a company commander, personally responsible for millions of dollars of equipment and for all our training. But by then, I was married with two kids. It was becoming less enticing to spend weekends in the woods. I looked into military intelligence, and then realized that the smartest thing I could do would be to start doing in the military what I did in civilian life, work as a lawyer. So I applied to become a judge advocate general (JAG) legal officer. I was accepted and did my training down at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, surrounded by a treasure trove of history. I had been promoted to a captain in the Guard and served primarily as a defense lawyer, which meant that when people in the military did stupid stuff, I was the guy they called.
My first-ever rotation as a JAG lawyer was in Fort Drum, in the northwestern corner of upstate New York. Not long after I had arrived, I got a call at 3 a.m. and heard, “Hi, sir, we’ve got a couple of guys who jumped off into the water and were trying to swim to Canada.” I was sound asleep at the Fort Drum Inn. I said, “Yeah, right,” and then the phone rang again. The guys were tankers, meaning they drove around in tanks. Tanks are hot; the men in a tank sweat, and when they get out, they’re often dehydrated—a condition that makes their alcohol tolerance go down. When these two guys got off maneuvers, they headed up to Alexandria Bay, on the St. Lawrence River, and started drinking beer at a place with a power hour and all the beer and hard liquor you can drink for about $10 a head. They went inside, drank, then went out back to pee on the lawn and saw a couple of three-story paddle boat pleasure cruisers. In their unit, one soldier’s nickname was “Pirate”; the other was called something like “Long John Silver,” and he said, “Hey, Pirate, let’s go steal the boat.”
They untied the moorings, got into the cabin, and tried to switch the boat on. But the engine wouldn’t turn over. They were a kill switch away from getting power. But without the moorings, the boat had drifted away from the dock. So now they had an unmoored boat that they couldn’t steer and it was moving down the river. They banged into other docks and hit boats, until they finally ran aground. By that point, they were sober enough to realize that they were in big trouble. They saw the cops coming and they jumped overboard with the idea that they would swim across to Canada. But they were still too drunk to do that. The cops picked them up, booked them, and took them to the county jail in Watertown, New York; and because they were Army guys, they called the base, which then called me. CNN cameras were already on the scene and all the local stations had turned up to cover the aftermath; an event like this was big news.
I was working on the case with Major Karen McNutt, a great lawyer and a mentor of mine, and soon afterward, I headed over to Watertown to consult with the two soldiers in the jail. They were brought into a holding room wearing orange jumpsuits. And they were laughing. “Oh, how ya doing, sir?” they said when they saw me, completely cracking up. And I said, “I don’t know what the hell you guys are laughing about. This is my first case as a JAG.” That was technically true. Of course, I had been a practicing attorney for about ten years, and this was an outside case, not a military case, so I knew what I was doing. But that got their attention. All the color drained from their faces and suddenly they were very focused. Both guys were Desert Storm veterans, one was highly decorated, and in the end, for their military punishment, they had their ranks reduced and were heavily penalized.
The civilian case against them had a happier ending. When I went over to the Watertown courthouse one evening to meet with the judge, I saw a guy going in wearing a T-shirt from NAPA Auto Parts. He looked like a nice guy and I said hi. Ten minutes later, I’m meeting with the judge, and it was the NAPA Auto Parts guy. He may have even been a judge part-time. We began talking, and he asked me where I was headed next, and I told him I was going to Newark, New York (a small town in the western part of the state), to visit my uncle Tom and my aunt Linda, my dad’s sister. I had seen her every once in a while since I was about ten. The judge asked me for Tom’s last name, and I said, “McHugh.” Tom McHugh was a detective and about seven feet tall, and the judge knew him. We talked some more, and he dismissed the case against the two soldiers. They were only required to pay a fine. “They sound like young guys who made a really stupid mistake,” he told me. But, he added, “Get them out of here and don’t have them come back.”
I had many more military cases after that, including hundreds of separation boards for drug use, where the first thing I tried to ascertain was whether the accused had ever been high and around or, God forbid, working with a loaded weapon. But I also remembered Judge Zoll, and I investigated whether the guy or woman sitting in front of me deserved a second chance. I got the reputation as the lawyer to seek out if there was a problem, because I always tried to go the extra mile for my clients, the soldiers. So I was very much surprised when I had one soldier come up to me, a sergeant first class from Massachusetts who had been in the service for seventeen years. And he began by saying, “I did it. Kick me out. I don’t care.” I responded, “You’ve been in seventeen years. I’m not just going to kick you out. Instead, why don’t you tell me your story?” So he began.
He’d been married for most of his time in the Guard, but his wife had left him to join a cult, had shaved her head, the whole thing. Then his house burned down, and he lost everything. Then his daughter was raped. All within a span of two months. Then he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He was beyond distraught and beyond caring. He went out drinking with his friends. Someone passed around a joint, and he thought, “Why not, who cares?” I listened to him and to his despair, and I worried that if the Guard—the last thing that he had to hold on to—kicked him out, the guy might actually kill himself. He ended his story by saying, “Do whatever you want. I don’t care.”
I told him that the only thing I wanted him to do was to tell his story before the drug board—five people, two officers and three enlisted men or women. By the time the sergeant had finished speaking at his hearing
, all the board members were either crying or trying to hold back their tears. Then I made my argument. I said the National Guard talks about how we are a family, how we watch over our men and women when they go away. Well, here’s a guy who has been through some rough things, any one of which no one should have to go through in a lifetime. He’s had all of them happen to him in a matter of months. He obviously needs our help, and we’re going to kick him out? Are you kidding me? The board voted to maintain him, he got help, and he finished his career in the Guard and retired.
Some of the most difficult days I had were the mobilization exercises: I had to prepare men and women, some young and some no longer young, to go overseas, and after 9/11, to go overseas to war. I’ve been to Paraguay and Kazakhstan for important duty, but I’ve never been mobilized myself for extended deployment, at home or overseas. For myself, and for other of my friends in the Guard, there’s a feeling of somehow not doing our part because we have not been called to extended active duty. For years, I’ve wished that I too could go over and serve, but, like all soldiers, I go where I am ordered. I do know that the classes I’ve taught on how to legally defend our U.S. soldiers or on how to treat POWs matter to our men and women in uniform who are going into the field.
It’s ironic, but today when we fight as a nation, military lawyers are some of the first ones to go into a war zone and the last ones out. When we go into countries to stage our troops, we need lawyers to establish contracts for buying food and buying gas, to understand and follow the host country’s rules and regulations, its customs and courtesies—even something as basic as what type of photos married couples can send each other. In the United States, a wife can send a husband a naked picture of herself, but in some host countries, that would be illegal. Lawyers have to familiarize soldiers with the rules, the customs, and the courtesies. At the end of a conflict, it’s lawyers who finalize any reparations, conclude any contracts, do all the things that come with being a twenty-first-century army. Military lawyers are also responsible for making sure that if there are any problems or infractions, our soldiers are treated under our laws, not under another country’s laws.
I was one of the soldier-lawyers who stayed home to help our men and women prepare for war. I was, for all intents and purposes, one cog in a many-geared machine. Before Guardsmen and Guardswomen are sent into today’s combat zones, lawyers like me check their wills, powers of attorney, and other legal matters. It’s the lawyer’s job to review all their documentation in case they are killed or wounded. I was working on that type of legal intake one afternoon when a big, muscular guy, maybe six foot five or six, came in, the kind of guy who needs a specially made uniform because his arms are so massive. He had muscles on his shoulders, his neck, even his elbows. He looked like a trainer or a bodyguard, in great shape, with a flattop. And he looked like the type of guy who, if he needed to, could rip your head off.
At first, as I was starting on the list of questions, he seemed kind of cocky. But there was a bit of an emotional air about him, just under the surface. To my mind, something was clearly wrong. I asked him if he was married, if he had any kids. And he started to tear up, small tears running down his cheeks. He told me that he had just gotten married, just had a kid. He said, “I’ll go through that wall. I’ll kill anybody. You tell me to jump, I’ll do whatever you want. But I’m afraid if I die, my kid will never know me, and if I go away, my wife is going to leave me and I will never see my kid.” And he kept right on crying. There are sections in manuals that instruct us on what to do in these types of situations, but I simply grabbed his hand, looked him right in the eye, and said, “What would you like me to do?” He said, “I don’t know.” I went straight to the unit chaplain and to the appropriate support groups. I told them what was going on, and we made sure that the soldier remained in constant contact with his wife and that the family services groups were involved with his wife and baby during his full twelve-month deployment, that they would help her with whatever she needed, even if it was a babysitter.
Twelve months later, when he came back, he specifically sought me out to tell me that he and his wife were “solid,” and their baby was solid. And he wanted to say thanks. I remember him picking me up off the floor and the resounding crack that my back made as he hugged me and said, “Thank you.”
Photo Insert
My first basketball photo, surrounded by my father’s trophies.
Courtesy of the author.
Me, about age one, around the time my parents separated.
Courtesy of the author.
In my Webelos uniform with my sister Leeann.
Courtesy of the author.
My parents, C. Bruce Brown and Judy Rugg, about the time they married, in Rye Beach, New Hampshire.
Courtesy of the author.
My mother, Judy, in June of 1967.
Courtesy of the author.
My father, Bruce, cooking in his kitchen. We have almost no photos of us when I was young.
Courtesy of the author.
My grandparents Philip and Bertha Rugg, who were a constant source of love and inspiration to me.
Courtesy of the author.
Me with my grandfather. By the time I was in college, I towered over him.
Courtesy of the author.
My father’s coal-fired boat, the Sabino, on the water around Newburyport. I am the skinny kid sitting on the lower rail. I was about thirteen.
Courtesy of the author.
One of my summer junior league basketball teams. Many of my teammates have remained life-long friends. I am in the top row, on the right, holding two trophies.
Courtesy of Fay Foto Service
Out-maneuvering an opponent during a hard-fought summer-league game at Dom Savio.
Courtesy of the author.
I was known on the court for speed and scoring.
Courtesy of Fay Foto Service
Basketball was my ticket to Tufts University, where by my senior year I had scored nearly one thousand points in four seasons and had become cocaptain.
Courtesy of Tufts University
My freshman-year team. I am seated next to Coach John White. Many of my teammates went on to highly successful careers.
Courtesy of Tufts University
My letter from Helen Gurley Brown announcing that I had won Cosmopolitan magazine’s centerfold contest. My sister Leeann sent in my nomination.
Courtesy of the author.
A high-fashion ad for Egon von Furstenberg.
Courtesy of Ed Bennett
Gail and I pose during our first modeling assignment together. Away from the camera, we had eyes only for each other.
Courtesy of Cathy Copeland, Cathy Copeland Art and Design
My modeling card is a complete 1980s flashback.
Courtesy of the author.
Gail’s modeling card.
Courtesy of Jean Renard, Phil Porcella, Robert Kaufman
I was incredibly proud to join the National Guard and to serve.
Courtesy of the author.
Taking a break during infantry basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia.
Courtesy of the author.
On our wedding day, with my parents. We did not do a full family photo with all the relatives. There were too many conflicts.
Courtesy of the author.
I am grateful that my grandparents lived to see me happily married, with a family of my own.
Courtesy of the author.
One of many moments of happiness with my new bride.
Courtesy of the author.
In Aruba on our honeymoon.
Courtesy of the author.
Ayla in a Snugli. I was overjoyed to be a dad.
Courtesy of the author.
Gail’s morning news job had her out of the house before 3 a.m. Sleep for all my girls was precious.
Courtesy of the author.
