| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Brenda Hollis Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
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You came back to the United States after this tour of duty [in the Peace Corps], and what did you do then?
I went back to Ohio, and went back to the university; took a few more courses in liberal arts, in psychology mostly. I thought for a time I wanted to get an advanced degree in psychology. But then my sister, who had been in the Air Force as an enlisted woman, talked to an Air Force recruiter about me, and talked to me about the Air Force. I decided I would meet with a recruiter, and he offered me a position as an intelligence officer, which I was interested in. So I decided to go into the Air Force.
One of your tours of duty was in Thailand as part of the Vietnam War.
That's correct. Yes, I was at the Eighth Tact Fighter Wing in Ubon, Royal Thai Air Force Base.
As an intelligence officer, what did you do there?
I was an air intelligence officer, so I was involved in briefing air crews before they flew missions into Vietnam and Laos, and also in debriefing them when they came back, and working on the plans for the major bombing missions into the north, and reporting information up to the higher command.
What impressions or conclusions were you left with by that tour of duty in that war?
I think the basic thing that I was left with was the commitment of the people who were carrying out the mission, and the commitment to do the right thing in the situations, and the commitment that what we were doing there was the right thing. People may disagree with that, and certainly reasonable minds may differ on that. But what I saw were committed people who were putting themselves at risk carrying out missions because they believed that the overall goal was worth doing, both for the people in the area and for the United States.
Has your thinking changed in light of the historical experience after that war, or is that an unfair question to ask?
I don't think my thinking has changed about what I just talked about. The relative strengths or weaknesses of the argument for our involvement, I think my thinking has changed since then. But I play a lot of sports, and I know that it's always possible to call a perfect game after the game has been played. I would say that my thinking has changed, in terms of our overall involvement, but not in terms of the experience I had with the individuals who were involved in our effort there.
After that tour of duty, under what circumstances did you wind up going to law school?
I got an early release from active duty. At the end of the Vietnam conflict, they had trained an awful lot of intelligence officers; we were over-staffed in intelligence officers. And at that time, certainly in the intelligence field, women didn't, in my estimation, have as fair an opportunity as they should have had. So I got an early release from active duty, but I maintained my commission and went into the Air Force Reserve, into the intelligence service. I went back to Denver. I had trained there to become an intelligence officer, and basically fell in love with the state. So I went back there, and I discovered, not really to my surprise, that in the job market there weren't a lot of jobs for people who had been Peace Corps volunteers and Air Force intelligence officers. So I was looking for a job, and then a friend of mine that I played sports with told me that the law school admission test was going to be given soon; I signed up just in time to take it, and did well enough to go to the University of Denver, the school I wanted to attend because I wanted to stay in Denver.
What in the law school curriculum attracted you most -- all of it, some of it?
To be quite honest, and I think the University of Denver is a good school, so I'm not at all trying to undermine the school, but it was the location that made we want to go to the University of Denver. I wanted to stay in Denver. But once I was involved in the law school, there were a variety of courses that I enjoyed. The ones I enjoyed the most were the international law courses, and the courses that had to do with criminal procedure, criminal evidence.
So then you completed your law work and you went back into the Air Force?
Yes. Some of the people that I went to law school with were actually being funded by the military to go to law school, and they talked to me about going back into the Air Force as a judge advocate. So after I had finished law school and was admitted to the bar in Colorado, I interviewed with the Air Force again, and they asked me to come back in as a judge advocate. So then I began my career as a judge advocate.
And this would have been in what year?
I went back onto the Air Force in 1978 or '79, a long time ago.
In the Judge Advocates Corps, in this first phase, what sort of litigation did you undertake?
My first two assignments were at the base level as an assistant staff judge advocate. I was involved in a broad variety of legal work. My first assignment, I was involved in one court-martial case, where I was the assistant to the lead attorney as a prosecutor. My second assignment was a remote tour to Korea, where I was an assistant staff judge advocate. I was involved in two or three more cases there, decided that that's what I liked and seemed to have some talent for, so I requested that my next tour from there would be as a circuit trial counsel at Lowry Air Force Base, again, in Colorado. The Air Force actually had divided the world up into geographic judicial circuits, and in each circuit there was a headquarters where there were full-time judges, full-time prosecutors who prosecuted the most serious crimes within the circuit, and full-time defense attorneys who were lead counsels on the most serious crimes within a circuit. So when I left Korea, I went back to that job as a circuit trial counsel.
As a prosecutor?
As a prosecutor.
Would you move around as cases came up?
Exactly. We're very much like being a circuit rider before, and we had a very big geographic circuit, including all of the northern tier bases -- bases in Montana, Wyoming -- also into the Southwest; even, when I first went in, in the upper peninsula of Michigan. We would travel to these bases, finish the preparation for these cases, prosecute them, and then move on to our next base. It was a lot of travel, between 180 and 220 days a year that we would travel.
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