| Summary: | (7:04) Mr. Brown tells about his part in acquiring the ace of spades playing cards to use in a type of psychological warfare in Vietnam.Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with Charles Brown
June 27, 2011
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Clint Alley and Rhonda Haygood
Clip 5
Charles Brown: There's one I guess just a interesting, it still is to me how it all got started was a psychological warfare campaign that I guess you could say we initiated it. And it all came from the Star and Stripes newspaper, that's just a newspaper that the military did that's still printed today. A congressman from California wrote an article and he presented this idea to Congress and they liked to laughed him out of the House, I mean, they thought it was the funniest thing that the Viet Cong were superstitious of the ace of spades, statue of a woman—and there was three things, I can't remember what the third one was, but these, they were very superstitious according to this congressman. And he had suggested a campaign of somehow projecting the image of the ace of spades on clouds you know, he, he had an elaborate plan and Congress just really laughed at him. And we were reading the article sitting in our base camp one night, the, the four lieutenants and we looked at a ace of spades from a deck of cards and it happened to be a U.S. Playing Card Company in Cincinnati that made the deck we were looking at and in the center of the ace, and if you look at it today, there's a picture of a statue of a woman. Two things that they were superstitious of. Well, it turned out the statue of the woman is the goddess of freedom on the capital building in Washington. So we said, you know we, we just, how crazy you can get to talking and laughing and cutting up and if we could just have enough aces we would use them as a calling card, a business card. And one thing led to another and I said, “Well, I'll just write the Playing Card Company and see if they'll send us some.” Had no idea what was about to happen but I wrote the letter, sent it to “To Whom it may concern” and it ended up on the desk of the president of the Playing Card Company. We explained what we wanted to do and we didn't know his son had been killed in World War II. He stopped production of the deck of cards, took 1,000 decks off of the production line, had by hand to pull the ace out of each one throw those 1,000 decks away and start production again. And he shipped me a box of 1,000 aces. Well, we passed them out to everybody in the unit and when we would go in the field wherever we went we would leave aces. And just, it still really hadn't caught on to a large extent. It was almost like a joke. It was just something that, I later said it was just a morale booster. The Playing Card Company notified their advertising agency, J.D. Powers Advertising Agency. And I got a letter from them requesting use of the story in advertising. Well, you know, I had to write them a letter back and say, “Okay”. And I, I‟m sure y'all don't remember Bob Considine but it was a syndicated newspaper columnist had, oh goodness, nationwide distribution of his articles everyday in the paper. And Bob Considine picked the story up and ran it for three consecutive days. A three part story. And it, it was called— I've got the articles at home― it's called "On the Line With Bob Considine‟ and he started building the story of how we were using the ace. Other people started writing, just total strangers would write me letters. I, I know that, young girls, now, you know, my picture appeared in a lot of magazines, newspapers. The Florence Times ran a story on it and before I forget it, too, while I was receiving all of this material, when I'd read it I'd just package it up and send it home to Nancy. Just so she could see what was going on. Well I didn't know she was putting it all together in a scrapbook. Still got it today. It got national attention; couple of TV stations carried the story. Other units started requesting aces from the card company and they ended up packaging the aces in decks of fifty-two. There's of course fifty-two cards in a deck, but they would send decks that just had fifty-two aces. And that way we'd, I'd just pass them out a deck at a time. Most of the guys, we had a, a band around our helmet and they would stick the ace in the helmet and, and there's a lot of photographs, especially that I had made with the ace stuck in the helmet, but if you ever watch the movie Platoon, they run around with aces stuck in their helmet.
Clint Alley: Yeah, I've seen that movie.
CB: Apocalypse Now, there's a scene where some soldiers have the ace stuck in their helmet.
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