Brian was born into a Southern Baptist family in upstate New York. He was a religious fundamentalist and reactionary Republican. He was supportive of the U.S. War in Viet Nam, but he didn’t want to go there. He received his draft notice before he finished law school, was made a 2nd Lieutenant in the Air Force, and was sent to the Mekong Delta where he was the officer in charge of a 40-member airbase security detachment assigned to protect a South Vietnamese Airbase.

The airbase commander asked 2nd Lt Willson to go with a Vietnamese lieutenant to assess the effectiveness of bombing in nearby villages. At the first village they went to he could not believe what he was seeing. He thought there had been a horrible mistake. The village was totally destroyed and the ground littered with hundreds of bodies of dead and dying people.

He came upon the body of a woman with three dead children still in her arms. They were burned by napalm and their bodies mutilated by bomb shrapnel. Her eyes were open and although she was dead she was nevertheless staring straight into his eyes. That was his first epiphany — that he and the dead woman were the same; they were one; there was no separation.

Later, he discovered that the total destruction of the village was not an accident, but in fact had been carefully planned. Furthermore, every one of the sixty-plus villages in the province were going to be destroyed by bombing by the South Vietnamese Air Force, because it was said that the people in the province were sympathetic toward the Vietcong, and there may be some Vietcong hiding in the villages. There is much more. Brian’s book is called, Blood on the Tracks: The Life and Times of S. Brian Willson

Or buy ‘Blood on the Tracks” here:

A copy will be available at the Bandon Library.

A brief autobiography:
http://www.brianwillson.com/autobiography/