Robert A. Seiple (Class of 1965) oral history and papers relating to the Vietnam War (AMS.1U.S6)

Biographical/Historical note

Robert A. "Bob" Seiple grew up in the small town of Harmony, New Jersey in the 1950s (born 1942). He and his older brother were the first in his family to attend college. He was encouraged by a Brown football coach to apply to Brown University and arrived in Providence in the fall of 1961. As a small town boy with a close-knit and deeply religious community, he experienced some culture shock on campus. “My faith was and is important and I never had to argue it into existence until I came to Brown University,” Seiple recalled. “The articulation and the formation of faith to someone else, a real skeptic, was not something I ever wrestled with in Harmony.” He played lacrosse and was a member of the football team, playing as a starter from his sophomore year onwards. He graduated in 1965 with a degree in American Literature.

In the summer of 1965 Seiple went to Europe and on the boat coming home he met his future wife, Margaret Ann Goebel. Over the next three months he corresponded with Margaret Ann while he worked in the Brown University admissions office. When he received a letter from his draft board, he decided to join the Marine Corps as an officer to avoid being drafted. Robert started Officer Candidate School (OCS) at the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia in January 1966 and was commissioned in July 1966. Letters from Seiple’s parents, family, pastors and school children arrived almost daily and smoothed his difficult transition to military life. The letters from him to his parents are in the collections and describe his routines, feelings and accomplishments. He finished 3rd out of a class that started out at 248 men. Subsequently being offered infantry or aviation training, Robert felt he should take advantage of the flight training, even though he felt his athleticism would have served him well as an infantry officer. He was informed he would be a naval aviator in the A-6. He was sent to a five-week pre-flight school and a 16 week navigation course at the Naval Air School in Pensacola, Florida. Between Quantico and his assignment in Florida, he married Margaret Ann on May 14, 1965 in a military wedding. “So we were married. The war was on. I was in training and there was no question in anybody’s mind, my wife or mine, that as soon as the training was done I would get into a squadron and be sent overseas.”

From a tarmac in Moline, Illinois in the pouring rain in October 1967, having been married a year and a half, Robert said goodbye to Margaret Ann, who was six months pregnant. He was taken to the west coast, then to the Philippines and on to Japan. At Okinawa he had a few days of orientation and was then sent to Da Nang, Vietnam. There he had a one day reunion with his older brother William C. Seiple (Bill), who had just completed his deployment in the infantry. Robert noticed a war-weariness and worldliness he had never noticed in Bill before. He could only imagine the intensity of what Bill had faced and what he was going to experience in the coming months and first questioned whether he’d live to go home.

Seiple’s life in Vietnam is chronicled through his letters home to his parents and family in Harmony, New Jersey and in his book, “A Missing Peace: Vietnam: finally healing the pain (InterVarsity Press, 1992). Other details are filled in through his oral history interview with Professor Beth Taylor in 2011. His letters show an early and increasing skepticism of the military strategy for the war which turns to cynicism. During his tour of duty he flew three hundred flights as bombardier/navigator, which earned him a total of twenty-eight Air Medals, a Vietnam Campaign Medal with five battle stars, the Navy Commendation award and the Distinguished Flying Cross. He writes “it wasn’t any quest for honors that motivated me. Neither did I have a strong drive to fight. Flying was simply the best way I knew how to cope with the unavoidable pressures of combat. The more missions I flew, the more time I spent flying and preparing to fly, the faster the days and weeks seemed to pass.” The aviators would talk among themselves about the military strategy asking “Is there any target in North Vietnam worth dying for? And the answer was no.”

During his tour, Seiple took a special training session in “highly classified nuclear this and that” in Japan with some unofficial R&R (February 1968); additional instruction and unofficial R&R in the Philippines (April 1968), an official R&R in Hawaii, getting reacquainted with his wife and meeting his first son, Chris, for the first time (May 1968); and jungle survival training in the Philippines (August 1968).

Seiple considers his time in Vietnam as the single richest year of experience in his life, maturing him, and teaching him much about himself and his faith. He survived his tour and returned to Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina in November 1968. He served the remaining year of his Marine Corps duty as an instructor (with the rank of Captain) for other bombardier/navigators. He felt this time allowed him to “decompress” from the stresses of Vietnam as he was sequestered in this major military installation. In 1969, changes in popular culture shocked him during a trip to Harvard Square for a job interview.

In his personal life back in the states, he “had to relearn what it was like to be a husband, and learn how to be a father” to his son, Chris, who later served in the Marine Corps. It took a while for them to get to know each other. He and Margaret Ann had a second child, a daughter, Amy, while he was at Cherry Point, and he enjoyed parenting. They had a third child, son, Jesse in the mid-1970s.

After the Marines, Seiple took a job selling building supplies, holding a sales territory in Michigan. He learned he had a natural sales ability, but he didn’t want to sell inanimate objects. He took a position again in Brown University’s admissions office for a year and a half. When he arrived back at Brown in 1971, he felt the changes among the students, campus and academic cultures and his own maturity and could relate more to the class that graduated in 1950 than to the group that graduated in 1970. He also recognized that Vietnam was a subject no one wanted to acknowledge. Soon he realized his long-held dream of becoming an athletic director for a Division I school taking a role as assistant athletic director and then director. Unexpectedly to Seiple, it brought him little personal fulfillment and he felt a call to do more. He ended up as Brown University’s vice president for development in charge of a five-year $158-million capital campaign. The campaign raised $182 million, exceeding its goal, and this position propelled him into other positions.

Wanting to put his faith into practice, Seiple accepted a call to become President of Eastern College and Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1983 (now merged as Palmer Theological Seminary). The schools’ single purpose was summed up in the motto: “The whole Gospel for the whole world.”

Over the next four years he gained new insights into the meaning of that motto and learned much about Christian concern and compassion and to see not with his eyes, “but with my heart.” Through Brown alum, Chuck Coulson, Seiple was persuaded to become a candidate for the position of president of World Vision, the largest private relief and development agency in the world. After accepting that role, he returned to Vietnam with a very different agenda than before: to help achieve something positive there. He worked there for eleven years and then went to the State Department becoming the first Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, for two years (1999-2001). This position, established by the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, was created to promote religious freedom worldwide, promote reconciliation in places where conflict had been implemented along religious lines and ensure that the religious freedom issue was woven into the fabric of U.S. foreign policy. He purposefully left this position before the end of the Clinton term. With his wife Margaret Ann, they then founded the Institute for Global Engagement, which works in the area of religious freedom, and is described as an applied think tank: doing a lot of reflection, writing – presenting points of view - but also tying their ideas to humanitarian fieldwork operations. When he had left World Vision, he felt it had spent its efforts on grassroots, in the “trenches” and in the churches. When he was in the State Department, the attention was spent with ambassadors and presidents. The Institute for Global Engagement tried to work top down and bottom up concurrently and it turned out to be a successful methodology. They wanted to make sure their faith would work in difficult places so they went to work in places like Laos, China, Vietnam, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan developing relationships of trust, striving for the biblical concept of reconciliation. In addition to multiple publications, he also made numerous appearances in defense of religious freedoms.

In 2007 he was serving as president and CEO of Council of America's First Freedom and on the Executive Committee of Denver Seminary. He has served as Vice President and is President of the Board of the International Religious Liberty Association (as of 2015).

Awards include:

• 1994 "Churchman of the Year" Award from Religious Heritage America
• 1995 Doctorate of Public Service by Gordon College (one of eight honorary degrees he has received)
• 1995 "Independent Award" from Brown University
• 1995 U. S. Secretary of State's Distinguished Public Service Award

Publications include:

• One life at a time: making a world of difference (Word Publishing, 1990)
• A Missing Peace: Vietnam: finally healing the pain (InterVarsity Press, 1992, ISBN 9780830812943)
• Ambassadors of Hope: how Christians can respond to the world's toughest problems (InterVarsity Press, ©2004)
• The separation of church and hate (In: Fides et libertas, ISSN 1940-6924, Nº 2007, 2007 (pages 112-119))
• Christianity, Human Rights and a Theology that touches the Ground (Cambridge University Press, ©2010