It wasn’t always that way. Lieutenant Colonel Louis “Bud” Musil was a hands-on kind of dad. He was up at five a.m. cooking chicken gizzards (for the extra protein) before my swim meets in San Francisco. He made sure our cocker spaniel, Penny, flew across the Atlantic Ocean with us, no matter the cost. And he and my mother dragged our tiny, whining bodies to every temple, museum and monument across Europe and Southeast Asia, including the World War II concentration camp memorial in Dachau, Germany when I was ten. Because Bud Musil was no “ugly American.” He wanted to make sure we saw the good, the bad and the ugly in the world; the causes and consequences of war, not just the platitudes. He joined every cross-cultural friendship group he could find. To this day, my heart skips a beat every time I pass an airport, and I detest nationalism. Cultural preservation is one thing – but there’s a very thin line between patriotism and xenophobia. When I was seven, my father went to Vietnam for a year. He was a military lawyer assigned to a combat unit with the 173rd Airborne Brigade “Sky Soldiers,” during some of the bloodiest battles of the war. He slept on a cot in a tent that also served as their legal office and courtroom. His duties ranged from investigating U.S. war crimes to managing the debts of soldiers struggling to stay alive in the North Vietnamese Army (NVA)covered hills of the Central Highlands. In ten months, he tried 103 courts-martial and
reviewed 942 Article Fifteens (if a military member gets into trouble for a minor offense and it does not require a judicial hearing, Article 15 of the UCMJ allows for the commanding officer to decide the innocence or guilt and administer the punishment to the offender, if necessary), then focused on rehabilitating the convicted, saving many a military career.
Apparently, he did a decent job. In a recommendation for a Bronze Star, an eyewitness claimed Bud Musil’s approach “was marked by a maturity, wisdom, fairness, and understanding of human nature in a degree rarely found in individuals of his age and experience.” The eyewitness said he had an “intense interest in judiciously safeguarding both [the] rights of the individual and the interests of the United States Government” and was truly a “soldier’s advocate.”
Maj. Bud Musil on board a helicopter in Vietnam, circa 1967-1968.
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Fall 2020
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