Letters and a sign led to a meeting on Good Friday

Imagine meeting your long-distance penpal during that one day when he comes through your town.

Lillian Crowell of Bangor did.

A resident of Eddington for most of her life, Crowell moved to Bangor about 10 years ago when her husband died. She lives quietly, often visiting friends like Doris Davis, a Bangor resident who went with her to a March 29 appointment with destiny at Bangor International Airport.

Crowell decided to write to a soldier in the Gulf after reading an Ann Landers column in the newspaper last fall. The column listed an APO address and asked writers to indicate any preference for the branch of service. “I picked the Army because my late husband was in the Army during World War II,” Crowell said.

Crowell’s letter and thousands of others went to Saudi Arabia, where Sgt. Christopher Brown of B Battery, 4th Battalion, 41st Field Artillery Regiment, 197th Infantry Brigade, picked the Bangor woman’s envelope from a pile of mail.

Brown dated his first letter to Crowell Nov. 20, 1990. Writing in a clear, concise hand, he indicated that he was from Charleston, S.C., and was 28. His unit was “the first heavy unit to hit the ground,” landing in Saudi Arabia on Sept. 1, 1990.

Crowell and Brown maintained their correspondence through the winter. He wrote her four more times; she wrote to him and also sent him homemade cookies that Brown and his troops thoroughly enjoyed.

In the fourth letter that Brown wrote, dated Feb. 6, 1991, Crowell learned that he was black. Referring to some information that Crowell and Davis had sent him about Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, Brown wrote that “I have always respected them both for what they stood for and what they did for my people.”

He sketched two smiley faces in the letter and signed it “Your Friend, Chris.”

In late March, Crowell saw a newspaper notice about troop flights coming through Bangor on their way to Fort Benning, Ga., where Brown was stationed. Although the planes were scheduled to arrive very early on Good Friday (March 29), Crowell asked her niece, Ree Wells of Wilton, and Davis if they’d like to meet the troops.

The three women arrived at BIA about 1:30 a.m. and stayed all night. They did take a short break and went to Dunkin Donuts on Union Street for a cup of coffee. They got back to the airport “just as the sun was rising,” Crowell said.

She, Davis, and Wells took a position across from the pay TVs in the center of the domestic terminal. Crowell stood holding a white cardboard sign on which she’d printed with red paint the words “Sgt. Chris Brown.”

As soldiers from a Fort Benning flight poured into the terminal and along the wire, Crowell held the sign up where the troops could see it. Suddenly, a black soldier looked at the sign and said, “Oh, Chris is coming right back there!”

“I thought, `Gee, I don’t know what he looks like,”‘ Crowell recalled.

Then a black soldier stopped by her and introduced himself. “I’m Sgt. Chris Brown,” he said, a big smile on his face. He hugged the Maine women, then stepped from the line of troops to chat with his fans for a few minutes.

Except for a moment’s absence, he spent the rest of his time at BIA sitting and talking with the three women. Because of the intense noise within the terminal, Wells curled up at Brown’s feet so she could hear him.

“The time went by so fast,” Crowell recalled her disappointment at only having 15 minutes or so to visit with Brown. As he responded to the boarding call, he asked for the sign with his name on it. Then “we gave him big hugs and kisses” as he left, Crowell said.

Afterwards, a fifth letter arrived in the mail from Brown. Dated March 3, 1991, and mailed from Saudi Arabia, this letter was written from somewhere in Iraq after the ground war ended.

“As I sit here now because of the ceasefire I was just reflecting over the past few days and months…” Brown wrote.

After noting his pride in his country and in his troops and what they had accomplished, Brown wrote that “we rumbled across the desert at a furious pace for two days to reach our objectives and cutting off their (the Iraqis’) escape route…”

He described an initial pity for Iraqi POWs and how his feelings toward them changed after thinking about what the Iraqis had done to Kuwait.

“But after we came down a highway and saw so many burning cars and trucks with bodies everywhere, the real horrors of war really set in on me. Mainly because I felt a sense of guilt because we were the ones that unloaded the barrage of artillery rounds at this particular convoy…” Brown wrote.

He tried to answer the question “how do you justify killing” in his letter. “I guess I am thankful that the bodies and destruction I have witness(ed) is not me or my crew,” he wrote.

— By Brian Swartz