There It Is: A Canadian in the Vietnam War There were two events in Les Brown’s life that made him pick up a pen and start writing about a part of his life he’d tried to forget. It was the stormy winter day in 1995 when Brown saw a part of his life end right before his eyes. A part-time cattle farmer

For years, Brown had been farming in the spare hours he had after working in the office at Edelweiss or driving the mail truck. Keeping busy, he had never taken the time to go back to his past, to figure out why he never quite felt like anyone else for almost thirty years. But now had to make a decision – either build again or take it as a sign of change. He chose the latter.

Then, two years later, Brown welcomed his new and only daughter, Jacqueline, into the world. He felt a new energy he didn’t know he had, staying up late at night to feed his daughter and answer her cries. It was during those late hours that he started writing, reliving the worst part of his life between bottles of milk.

It’s past noon and I’m already late. Through mid-April mud and snow, I make my way up the steep hill, trying to spot Les Brown’s farm on Newcommon Road. After almost six months of near-harassment on the phone, Brown has finally agreed to an interview about his upcoming book, There It Is: A Canadian in the Vietnam War, a retelling of Brown’s own experiences in the war. He and his wife Rosanne have invited me to lunch at their home.

Suddenly, I realize I’ve taken a wrong turn at the bridge, heading left when I should have gone right. But there’s no turning back on a slushy dirt road with no snowtires. I keep heading down the road.

I’m almost back at the bridge when I notice a yellow truck following me down the road. I pull over, and get out of the car. The truck pulls up behind me.

“Hi, I’m Les,” says the truck driver. “You must be Maria.”

We headed back to Weedy Hill Farm, the 90-acre spread in Farrellton Brown bought with his first wife Nancy in 1977. As we head up the driveway (nearly falling over from deep snowdrifts) I notice the farmhouse is on a small hill, surrounded by grazing pastures that are bordered by the rolling Gatineau Hills. You can literally see for miles.

For Brown, who was born in Montreal and spent most of his childhood in Wakefield, the Gatineau Hills have always been a paradise for him. His mother, Joy Brown, was born and raised in Wakefield with her parents, Archie and Addie Brown. His parents, who met at the Club House dance hall in Wakefield after the Second World War, married and moved to the United States in 1957 when Les was eight years old. But he would always visit his grandparents in Wakefield.

“I considered it my home more than Montreal,” he says.

He grew up in Los Angeles a “legal alien” fixing up old cars, surfing and hanging out with his buddies. It wouldn’t be long before Browns normal teenage life would come to a crashing halt.

As we speak, there are constant interruptions. Brown’s phone is ringing off the hook – mainly calls from his publicist at McClelland and Stewart to schedule interviews in the coming weeks with the CBC Morning Show in Toronto, the interview program Bynon on Global. He looks at a calendar on the wall, and scribbles a few notes in a small notebook he keeps in his pocket. “Do you know him?” the slightly apprehensive author asks me, pointing to a date in his notebook marked, “National Post – Noah Richler.”

Yes, I reply. He’s the son of Canadian author Mordecai Richler. Brown seems impressed, then back to apprehensive. Brown, even in answering my questions, is very reserved. I can’t imagine how he will deal with all the TV cameras in Toronto. I ask if all the publicity about his book bothers him. It does, he admits, but it’s now part of the job.

The phone rings again. This time its Phil Nolan, a good friend of Brown’s and a cameraman for Global Television who lives in Chelsea. He pitches the idea of doing a documentary about Canadian Vietnam vets who return to the country where they fought. Brown seems uncomfortable and doesn’t seem to like the idea. After hearing about his experiences in the war, I can understand his reluctance.

Brown was actually drafted by the United States Army in May of 1969 at the age of twenty, although he knew it was coming since he was eighteen. His life in L.A. was coming to an end.

“What we found out from living there was even though I was a Canadian citizen, and so was my brother, by law we had to register for the draft,” he remembers.

He tried to avoid it, making a plan with a friend in 1968 to leave L.A. for Wakefield. He stayed four months, bailing hay for $1 an hour for a local farmer before getting home sick. His girlfriend, Nancy, had stayed down south, and Brown missed his family too. He left Wakefield, returning to L.A. and the “draft problem.”

“I didn’t want to go underground, to sort of break the law,” he says. “I answered the call. Reluctantly, mind you, but I did go.”

He says most draftees were desperate to get out of it, finding either a medical reason not to go, a college deferment, or simply dodged the draft by leaving the country. Brown tried college by enrolling in a junior college, but soon dropped out. There was also the influence of his father, a WWII veteran, who believed the draft was part of a person’s duty. Brown soon felt the draft was inevitable.

“You had to pick one (way out) and deal with the consequences,” he explains. “Mine was to sort of allow the draft to happen. I was reluctant and didn’t want to go to war. I didn’t understand the war... But it was the law.” 

Brown refused to enlist, as some draftees did to avoid becoming foot soldiers. As a Canadian citizen, Brown hoped the army would place him in a non-combat job. He was wrong. He ended up on the front lines of the Vietnam War.

“They got it backwards. They took all the most reluctant guys and made them the “grunts” – The infantrymen.” he says. “And then the really gung-ho guys, they placed them in offices and stuff like that.”

After five months of training, Brown was shipped off to the jungles of Vietnam, first to serve six months in the south near Lai Khe, then the rest of his one-year tour of duty up north near the Shau Valley, a stronghold of the communist North Vietnamese Army (NVA).

The jungle was hell for Brown. In the book, he remembers feeling like just another body the American army was feeding to its rapidly deteriorating war. An average day was spent “humping” or walking through the bush on search and destroy missions. He carried 70-80 pounds of weapons and food with him at all times.

But faulty equipment, neglect, and the constant fear of being “blown away” soon played heavy on his mind. Chaos seemed to reign even within the army. It took more than counting the days left of his one-year sentence that got him through the months to come – with easy access to pot and heroin, many of his buddies became hard-core drug addicts in trying to cope with everyday horror of life in Vietnam.

“Initially, when I got there, I was frozen with fear, petrified with fear, to the point where I really couldn’t function. My body was fading fast.,” he says. “And I think every soldier does the same thing – eventually, at different times for different people, you come to the realization that, you are indeed going to die... I just accepted my own death. And then after that, you’re sort of okay. Because you’ve sorted that one out and you can move on.”

The book recounts the events Brown still can’t talk about openly: his first glimpse at a dead body, the first time he shot at “the enemy,” the numerous shellings by NVA which nearly killed him, trying to keep his friend, who was high on heroin, from shooting another soldier.
 

“One operation our platoon went on lasted 29 days,” he writes in one passage. “We kept receiving aerial resupply, and the higher ups just left us out there till we either made contact or died of disease. Guys were hurtin’ with jungle rot, cellulitis, ringworm, immersion foot, and plain old exposure. Most of us were so exhausted, that we just went through the motions; pick ‘em up, put ‘em down. We were delirious with fatigue and naturally security suffered. Death was almost a welcome change to more of the same deprivation. I was beginning to believe the grunts had two powerful enemies: the NVA and the U.S. Army.”

Brown finally returned to L.A. in 1971 after serving his last six months of his two year draftee term at Fort Bening, Georgia. But post-war life was far from what he knew before being drafted:

“My plan had always been to simply do my time and slip through the cracks,” he writes near the end of the book, “Physically, my plan had worked, but mentally, I was really suffering. All feelings had one common thread: guilt. I felt guilty for going to Vietnam, for allowing the army to have my body, for reluctantly pursuing a war I thought was nuts, for eventually abandoning my grunt brothers and, mostly, for surviving when others did not. I had not been blown away or even slightly wounded when many others had. For decades, for decades I would blame myself for the very existence of the war in Vietnam.”

Brown married his longtime girlfriend Nancy and tried to become a police officer with the L.A.P.D., but hated his job. In 1977, he moved to Farrellton, working two jobs plus cattle farming.

Moving to the farm and changing direction with his life helped Brown cope with the trauma, but he had reminders of Vietnam in flashbacks and nightmares. The couple adopted their son Jason in 1981, and continued their mixed farming operation.

Brown and his wife eventually divorced. In 1989, he married Rosanne Pommier, a native of Cornwall, and had a son, Michael. Nicholas was born in 1995, around the same time Brown was interviewed by his friend Phil Nolan, a Global Television cameraman, for a story about Canadian Vietnam vets. Brown was introduced to members of Canadian Vietnam Veterans Ottawa, finally meeting people he knew would understand what he was going through.

Encouraged by Rosanne, Brown started seeking professional help from Ottawa psychiatrist Dr. Grasimos I. Kambites, a specialist in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder who suffered from PTSD himself. The manuscript became a form of therapy for Brown, who showed it to Nolan.

Impressed with the work, Nolan showed it to his father, Brian, a Korean War vet and author of several military books, who brought it to the attention of Douglas Gibson, head of the McClelland and Stewart publishing house. Kambites wrote a letter to Gibson, telling him of the importance of the book. Gibson phoned the first-time author and invited him to send over the manuscript. McClelland and Stewart picked up the book, and after months of editing and rewriting, the book is due out in stores April 29.

Back to the Brown farm, Les and I go outside to snap some photos. He shows me around the farm as three-year-old Nicholas follows behind us, finding it hard to keep up. He pauses in front of the collapsed barn while I take a picture, telling me the story of the day it was lifted off by a gust of wind and dropped back down. It was a catalyst for change, he says.

The story strangely mirrors Brown’s own experiences, in a way. He was scooped up from his idyllic life and dropped in the middle of a war zone, a hell he barely survived. After making his way home through the guilt he still carries, Brown is still searching for answers. He is still picking up the pieces. 

Buy Les Brown's book There It Is: A Canadian in the Vietnam War now and save upto 30%!