Barry J. Kowalski ’66
(1st Lieutenant, U.S. Marine Corps, 1967–1970)
Born August 26, 1944–the day after Allied Forces liberated Paris–Barry Kowalski’s life was already inseparably intertwined with the US military. His father was in London at the time, directing the United States’ demilitarization policy towards Germany and went on to serve as Deputy Chief of Civil Affairs in Japan. Barry grew up mostly in the DC suburb of Alexandria, Virginia, as his father won a seat as democratic congressman for Connecticut after retiring from the Army when Barry was 14. He knew from a young age that he wanted to attend an elite school like his father, who had graduated from West Point and MIT before attending Columbia. “I went to Brown primarily because I wanted to go to a school away from home—an Ivy League school on the East Coast, and that’s where I ended up,” he says.
Barry arrived at Brown in the fall of 1962, moving into a dorm sandwiched between fraternity houses on Wriston Quad. He quickly joined the track team as a broad jumper, but quit after a record-setting 22 foot jump he feared he would “never get close to again.” He and his roommate joined Psi Upsilon fraternity in the spring of 1963, where he met chapter president Derek Cheseborough, a charismatic leader who was constantly seeking adventure. “Life was something to be played,” Barry recalls. When Cheseborough was drafted to Vietnam in 1965, he left a pot of money for his friends at local watering hole T he Crystal Tap. For at least a year, “I’d just give my name, and the bartender, of course, knew me after awhile, and I was one of maybe thirty names on a list that got free beer on Derek Chesborough’s tab,” Berry remembers.
Barry was also friendly with a few guys in ROTC, including classmate David Taylor
’66. Most of the ROTC students Barry knew were dissatisfied with the program. They
found its drill practices and GPA requirements a burden—as did Barry, when he joined
the Air Force ROTC for a few weeks freshman year. While he had always supported the military, Barry opposed the war from the very beginning. Instead he planned out a future in politics, including enrolling at the Columbus School of Law at Catholic University after graduating from Brown in 1966.
But as President Johnson began escalating the war in Vietnam, Barry felt increasingly guilty that he could so easily avoid the draft. “It was easy to get a letter from a doctor if you came from an influential, wealthy family or a middle class well-to-do family,” he explains. While Barry’s plans to attend law school that fall made him exempt, it seemed unfair to him that “other people who were not as fortunate as I was were getting drafted and going over to war,” he says. At the same time, Barry was tired of school. It didn’t interest him, and he hated the idea of being financially dependent upon his parents while in law school. A combination of Barry’s discomfort with the draft, disinterest in graduate school, and desire to carry on his family’s tradition of military service led Barry to join the Marines in August 1966.
Unlike most Marines, Barry wasn’t interested in fighting. He wanted a non-combat position as a transport, communications, or supply officer—Military Operations Specialists (MOS) for short. He knew that while most marines requested combat positions in the infantry or artillery, about half of every officer class was typically assigned to non-combat MOS positions. So Barry reasoned that if he trained as a marine officer and then requested an MOS position, he would get it automatically. “That seemed like a pretty good deal, especially given the fact that I intended once I got out of the service to go into politics,” says Barry. He could even position himself as antiwar, with the credibility of having served as a Marine officer.
However, three weeks into Officer Training school, Barry got his first experience of casualty. He received a phone call from Brown telling him that Derek Cheseborough had been killed in action. “Here was a close friend and somebody I had looked up to in lots of ways—and loved. I literally loved him and he was dead.” For Barry, Derek’s death was sobering. “I was about to go, I knew, where he was going. And that I could be dead too.” Moreover, to Barry’s chagrin, nearly his entire Basic class were given commissions as infantry officers.
He had gotten married in June of 1967, and recalls “I will never forget having to go home and tell my then wife, who was pregnant, that I had just gotten orders to Vietnam infantry.” Going into battle had never been part of the equation for Barry, and the news was devastating. “I had realized at that point that I had made a mistake, in terms of my own philosophical beliefs, that going to Vietnam, being an Infantry officer, having to kill people, having to give orders to kill people was something I just couldn’t agree with philosophically,” he says. For Barry, the war in Vietnam was being fought for politics, not morals. “I didn’t want to get killed in a war that was, in my view, not a righteous war.”
He remembers the flight to Vietnam, when he was 22 years old and wracked with fear. “At every stop I would stop in and talk to a base legal officer and go over my options again.” Each time he realized he had no options. “The Marine Corps had a very clever way of handling guys like me. No one would ever say ‘no’ to me when I’d say, ‘Gosh, couldn’t we do something else with me rather than make me an infantry officer?” Each time the officer, usually a major, a captain or maybe a lieutenant colonel would say, “‘Well, you know, okay. Just go to Okinawa and talk to them there.’ And then it would be, ‘Just go to Da Nang and talk to them there.’ And they just moved you along.
Ultimately, Barry says, “the next guy” was a Lieutenant Colonel at Cam Lo Bridge, where Barry met his new Battalion. “Then I was suddenly out of a helicopter wearing these brand new green—what we called utilities—which were combat clothing, with my gun and my helmet and all my gear… I find the battalion CP and I report on in to this lieutenant colonel and I begin my speech with him about my concerns.” “He listened somewhat impatiently to me while he chewed on a cigar out of the corner of his mouth and ultimately he said to me, ‘Mr. Kowalski…you have got two choices.’ He says, ‘You either go take command of the 3rd Platoon in Lima Company—of the 3rd Battalion—the 3rd Marines, or I will take you out back and shoot you.’ And I remember thinking at the time, you know they are not going to shoot me. At the same time I wasn’t sure…it worked and I wandered down the road and took over the 3rd Platoon of the Lima Company.”
He was a Lieutenant, in command of 40 men. Suddenly, “nothing much else mattered,” he says. “You did your job. You tried to keep those guys alive—and yourself alive—and it became very simple.” Barry was only a few years older than most of his men, sometimes the same age, he says. “The lieutenant was the guy that everybody turned to and counted on. As a result of that you rose to the occasion…. I certainly never did anything heroic in Vietnam, I don’t think, but I always did my job and I always took care of my men and tried to keep them alive. That meant sometimes having to give orders that caused other people’s deaths but that was the way it is. That was the world I became immersed in, very instantaneously. It’s like falling into a swimming pool. One minute you are in the reality of twenty-one years of life and then suddenly you are in this unreal situation where you are giving orders to kill people and giving orders to try to keep people alive.”
Years later, at a reunion dinner he hosted for his platoon, Barry remembers one of his former men saying, “‘Lieutenant Kowalski, there is one thing you can say about you, you never volunteered us for nothing.’ I said, ‘Alright, that’s why we all made it home and that’s what I want on my tombstone: ‘I never volunteered them for nothing.’ And that was my object. We were going to get through that but we weren’t going to take on any more risk than we had to. So I felt pretty good about that backhanded compliment.”
Day to day life meant learning to accept discomfort. “I didn’t have a bath for three months,” Barry recalls. “You are always tired. You are always wet. From when I was first there [in November], it was the monsoons…I don’t know if I was ever colder than I was in Vietnam in my life, because you get to be 45, 50 degrees and rainy and wet and you can’t get warm.” The summer was just as bad. “You couldn’t ever get enough water when the heat was out. You were always thirsty…If a fire fight would break out, you wouldn’t have water for awhile because they couldn’t get water to you and you couldn’t get to water because if you tried to get to water you would get shot,” he says. During one firefight, he went three days without water. “Boy, third day without water you don’t think of anything else except trying to get a drink,” he remembers.
After six months in combat, Barry got sick and was sent to a hospital ship for a month. During that time, his wife gave birth to a daughter, Kelly, on Father’s day (June 18) 1968. He returned to the field as an advisor to the Revolutionary Development Cadre, a counter-Vietcong effort to politicize the countryside. He advised a Vietnamese major in charge of 1500 people: “It was probably the best time that I had ever had in my life—age twenty-three, responsible, advising a guy that was in his mid thirties, trying to make people think that our side was the good guy’s side….We built wells and villages. We built schools. I had a brick factory, which made bricks by baking them in the sun… And I would go out and got to know the Vietnamese people as a result of that very, very well.” As he got to the end of his service however, Barry still had doubts about the war. “’Damn, I was right,” he remembers thinking, “Everything I instinctively thought about this war is absolutely right. I was right to think that it was a mistake. I was right to think that there is never going to be a success over here.’”
Before long, however, he was on his way home. “I will never forget the airplane ride. You get on…a Delta airlines with flight attendants, the whole works…a plane full of Marines who had been in Vietnam for a year and it was flight attendants giving us drinks and [cigarettes…]. And then, as the plane went down the runway it was instantaneously a dead silence on the plane, not a word, and everything quieted. And you knew everybody was thinking exactly the same thing you were thinking, which was “Are we going to make it up in the air? Are we going to get out of here?” And just that quick review of, in your brain, what you went through for a year. And when the wheels left the pavement, as soon as you felt them leave the pavement, there was this spontaneous cheer that went up that everybody—it just came out of their throats simultaneously. I don’t ever remember being quite as happy in my life as that moment.” Within a month of returning, Barry was stationed at Camp Lejeune for his second and final year of service.
Barry knows his transition back home was easier than some other soldiers’. “I don’t think I got psychologically damaged by it or physically damaged and so it turned out to be a very positive experience for me.”… “I don’t feel that I was traumatized by it. And I think, in large part—maybe me as a person, but also I was older. I was 22, 23 years old in experience as opposed to 18, 19. I think that makes a difference.” Barry entered law school in 1970, the beginning of the illustrious political career he had dreamed of.
In 1980, he joined the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice where he “prosecute[d] federal crimes where someone has, in the course of the crime, interfered with the constitutional rights of another person.” This lead him to being one of four lead prosecutors on one of the most famous cases of its kind: “I prosecuted the police officers in Los Angeles who beat Rodney King and the federal trial that came after the state trial.”
After the Rodney King trial, Barry did the last investigation for the Department of Justice of the Martin Luther King assassination. Then, after 9/11, he was put in charge of directing all investigations and prosecutions “where Muslims and Arabs were being targeted after 9/11—the first time they became victims of hate crimes.” Now, he says, “I work on old cold cases from the south where we have still got suspects alive who killed people for racial reasons back in the 60s.”