In November of 1967, I was a senior in college. Kevin Brooks was a lieutenant in the DMZ.
Last year around this time I posted a last-minute diary about an improbable story that happened at Christmastime in Vietnam in 1967. I am posting the story again, because this has been a rough year. I need hope right now and this story reminds me how one person can make a huge impact in the world even when it seems impossible and that no one could possibly be listening. It inspires me still. Small acts of kindness created their own wind and rippled across half a century. I have added the backstory of how it all came to pass.
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Many of us here remember another time when our country was falling apart. Go back to November, 1967.
The Vietnam War was escalating out of control. Tens of thousands of demonstrators marched on the Pentagon the month before. Many of them got involved in a riot and battled MPs for hours. Cops beat the crap out of them, the National Guard shot people, and the country spiraled into madness.
MPs at the Pentagon surrounded by protestors, October 21 1967. Shortly thereafter a riot broke out that lasted for hours. Hundreds of arrests were made.
Families turned against each other over the war, and could not speak a single word to each other without shouting.
Colleges and universities erupted in protests, marches, draft card burning, sit-ins, teach-ins. The military was not welcome on college campuses.
University of Wisconsin protest 1967
Meanwhile, somewhere on an isolated hill southeast of Con Thien in the highlands of Vietnam, sat Charlie Company, First Battalion, 3rd Marines.
For 3 days in November the Marines baked in the heat during the day and froze at night, while hour by hour their morale ebbed away. They knew about the anti-war demonstrations on college campuses and didn’t have much sympathy. And Christmas was coming and they felt alone and forgotten.
There was a lieutenant in Charlie Company sitting on that hill, Lieutenant Kevin Brooks, who decided he had to do something it. Not give a speech, although I’m imagine he did. He decided to do something crazy. He and his radio operator, Sgt. Ken Broadbent, sat in their foxhole and concocted a crazy scheme.
We’ll write letters asking for help at Christmastime for Charlie Company.
And we’ll mail the letter to college campuses.
That idea was insane. That was the last place you should ask for help.
Lieutenant Brooks had gone to a Catholic men’s college in New York (Manhattan College) –so he decided they would write to Catholic colleges in the New York area. But only women’s colleges. He was sure the girls would help them.
He didn’t actually know if anyone would help them. He didn’t actually know anybody at these colleges. He didn’t even have the addresses of the colleges. Not only that, it was almost too late. It was close to Thanksgiving. There was barely a month before Christmas. The letters had to travel 11,000 miles from a war zone in the middle of nowhere to a bunch of strangers.
They did it anyway.
He and his radio operator sat in their foxhole writing a dozen letters to complete strangers and addressed them to “president of the student council”.
I was a senior at a small Catholic women’s college in New York, the College of New Rochelle. I happened to be president of the student body, so when a letter arrived at the college addressed to “President of the Student Council”, it came to me.
I did not recognize the sender. But I recognized a military return address – my roommate was an Air Force brat, and we had written letters to each other over holidays and such. So I knew this was from someone in the military.
The letter was from a Marine lieutenant stationed in the DMZ. He was asking for my help.
In his letter the lieutenant told me that the common comforts of life were a dream to his Marines — things like a shower, a dry bed, decent drinking water. They were on continuous operations 20 to 25 days of each month. The Christmas season did not change that. The feelings of loneliness, frustration and isolation were magnified during the Christmas season.
The Marines knew about the demonstrations and protests against the war on college campuses. It was very upsetting to them.
He asked for my help anyway.
My classmates were mostly working class girls who were first generation college, the daughters of cops and firemen and military, from first or second generation immigrant families. All of us knew someone in the military fighting in Vietnam. Many of us were becoming increasingly distressed by that war, for moral reasons of course, but also because our brothers and fathers and uncles and cousins were the ones fighting it.
The Lieutenant knew my college. He had attended Manhattan College in the Bronx and had become friends with some of the girls from CNR back in the day. He felt like he knew us. He believed we would help them.
He had a simple request.
Please send us Christmas cookies.
His letter was an insane shot in the dark. Sending a letter from a remote war zone and asking for help from a possibly hostile recipient 11,000 miles away. With college finals and the holidays right around the corner. Impossible.
The night I received his letter, I read it to my assembled classmates at dinnertime (attendance at dinner was mandatory). I told them the Marines needed our help. I posted the letter on the Bulletin Board. The letter still has the pinholes where I stuck it to the board.
Girls lined up at the pay phones in the dorms that night to tell their parents and families. The next day they told their dayhop friends. The word spread like wildfire. Dozens of my classmates and their families baked Christmas cookies, wrapped the boxes in Christmas wrapping paper and mailed them to Vietnam.
Months later, a letter arrived with some pictures.
I tucked the lieutenant’s letter away in a box. But the pictures he sent were lost to time.
That is not the end of the story.
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Half a century passed. We grew up. We married, had children and grandchildren. The Vietnam War faded from public consciousness.
Then in 2018, as I sorted through my stuff in preparation for my 50th College Reunion, I came across the lieutenant’s letter. It snapped me back fifty years like it was yesterday.
I wondered if my Lieutenant had survived the war. I wondered what had happened to him. If he did survive, would he even remember that Christmas?
I went looking for him.
With a great deal of discombobulated internet sleuthing and the help of a wonderful Marine I found an old address for him.
I wrote to him. I enclosed a copy of his letter.
I expressed my gratitude to him and his men for their service and thanked him for reaching out to us all those years ago.
I had no idea if he was still alive, if the letter would reach him if he was, and/or if he would just throw away an unsolicited letter from an unknown pen pal in California.
Time passed. No response.
Then, the night before I was to leave for the East Coast, my computer pinged. An email. He had written back to me.
My letter had come as a complete shock to him. He could not believe that I would remember that once upon a time we had baked cookies for a bunch of hot, dirty, thirsty Marines at Christmastime.
But he clearly remembered.
Dear Adrienne,
WOW! Where to start? I wish I knew the name of your local Marine who was able to locate my current address because I owe him at least a beer, and probably more.
Your letter, which I only got ten minutes ago, was a stunning surprise, something that I couldn’t have imagined even in a dream.
After 50 years, I never thought for a moment that anyone would even remember baking cookies for a bunch of hot, dirty, thirsty Marines when they probably could have been getting ready for finals or shopping for Christmas presents for their family and friends. Your letter put the entire event into a perspective that I could only imagine when all the packages arrived in December, 1967.
Thank you for taking the time to write it, thank you for being so candid about the conflicts that I’m sure many felt about the war and, most importantly, thank you on behalf of everyone in Charlie Company for doing what you and your classmates did to brighten our Christmas so enormously.
We stayed in touch. He had more surprises for me.
Throughout his tour, he had kept a small notebook in his shirt pocket. In his little notebook he had written down the names of all my classmates who had baked cookies for them. Through all the mud, the monsoons, the mortars, the patrols and 50 years after the war, the notebooks had survived. And he had saved them.
Saving a letter of no more than minor importance for more than 50 years certainly identifies you as a bit of a “pack rat” but I plead guilty to having the same issue. As evidence of that, here is a list of girls from CNR who, in 1968, were not only nice enough to bake cookies for us but also nice enough to include their name and address so that we could send a thank you note. (No Marine was given a package unless he promised to write to whomever sent it.)
And the cookies. What happened to the cookies?
The cookies made it by helicopter to their tiny outpost in the DMZ. They arrived on Christmas Eve, 1967.
Over one hundred and fifty-three packages of Christmas cookies.
And he had copies of the pictures I had lost.
One of the many cots holding Charlie Company’s Christmas Cookies. There were so many packages that every single one of the 153 Marines in Charlie Company got his own.
Christmas Eve, 1967: A Marine Helicopter delivers 12 bags filled with Christmas packages for Charlie Company.
Lt Perry Gesell Gives out Christmas Cookies to the 2nd Platoon, December 26 1967.
1st Platoon gets some cookies too.
It is now almost 60 years since a letter from a stranger landed in my college mailbox. But it has had a profound effect on me.
Platoon Sergeant giving out Christmas Cookies to the 1st Platoon
Kindness has a long memory. The power of the small acts of kindness by a group of strangers to a company of lonely Marines persisted across half a century, and helped in some small way to heal the infinite wounds of that terrible war.
And it helps me answer the question that my children have asked me: what difference can one person make in a world controlled by forces so much more powerful and bigger than me?
You never know if and when or how the one act you do will make a difference. The letter, the phone call, the march. It is an act of faith, and belief, that somehow it matters. I have no idea if anyone except my family and the close friends I will harass will read this story…. but still, I have to tell it.
Sometimes you want to give up. Your boat seems so small. But you can’t.
Kevin Brooks didn’t know what would happen when he and and his radio operator wrote letters in a foxhole and sent them out into the unknown. What they wanted to happen was impossible: That the letters would actually be received. That the strangers would read the letter, share the letter, act on the letter, and that somehow, miraculously, 153 packages of Christmas cookies would appear for Charlie Company in the middle of Vietnam on Christmas Eve.
Or that the surviving members of Charlie Company would remember what these college girls did for them a half a century earlier to make that Christmas a bit more merry. Or that the cookie-baking college girls would thank Lieutenant Brooks 50 years later for reaching out to them for help.
I think about the power of a simple act of asking for help when you need it most. And of not being afraid to ask for help from a most unlikely place. Kevin Brooks had no idea if anyone would read his letters or just throw them away.
But if you don’t ask, I guarantee you this: nothing will happen. But when you do ask, very often help will be given. And joyfully.
One of the last things Lieutenant Brooks wrote to me 50 years later is this:
I guess I’m still pretty stunned at the impact that one letter, written more than 50 years ago, can have.
Thank you again for your kindness and long memory. When I meet with my fellow Marines in September, I assure you that we will gratefully remember what you and your classmates did for us 50 years ago and toast your kindness.
Even after 50 years, “thank you” doesn’t seem to be enough.
Cpl Ken Broadbent (L) and Lt. Kevin Brooks (R) in their foxhole, hatching their cookie-baking scheme
Kevin Patrick Brooks, 1944-April 3, 2020
Kevin Patrick Brooks, USMC (Ret.)
Kevin Brooks retired from the Marine Corps as a colonel and continued to be a leader and an advocate for Marine Corps families. We lost him to the Coronavirus in 2020 and the world lost a truly good man.
Rest in peace, my friend.
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My son and I have a youtube channel (and now a substack) called “Talking Politics with Mom.” Thanks to everyone in the wonderful Kos community for supporting us on that journey. I am still learning this foreign language of social media -it’s daunting to me. But if I learned anything from this story, it’s that every voice makes a difference. Thank you all again.
