The following is one chapter from Christian Men of Science by George Mulfinger and Julia Mulfinger Orozco, Ambassador Emerald International, 2001, reproduced with permission.
Other chapter biographies in this book include Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle, Michael Faraday, Lord Kelvin, Samuel F. B. Morse, James Clerk Maxwell, and Henry Morris. These easily readable accounts contain human-interest events, struggles, failures, and accomplishments.
DR. WALT BROWN
(1937-2025)
Mechanical Engineer
Air Force Colonel
“Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.”
– Ephesians 6:10,11
The doctor pulled the stethoscope out of his ears and left it dangling around his neck. He told fourteen-year-old Walt to button his shirt and come to his desk. He looked at Mr. and Mrs. Brown and then at Walt before he spoke. “Yes, I hear the murmur,” he said. “But we heart specialists see these cases. You can still have a full life, Walt, just not as active as the rest. Why, we have similar cases on record of people who have lived to be thirty-six years old!” he said, trying to encourage them. But his words fell flat. The Browns had hoped for better news than this.
Well, Walt thought to himself as they left the doctor’s office, at least I have about twenty years left. His heart murmur had been diagnosed when he was a toddler and he was tired of the restrictions that had gone on ever since. He had always had to sit out of physical education classes at school. When he played baseball with his friends, he was allowed to swing the bat, but someone else had to run the bases for him. Sometimes, when he thought his parents wouldn’t find out, he would run the bases himself. The most vigorous activity that his parents allowed him was a game of golf, which he played often and well.
Walt enjoyed competition and had found he could compete in other areas besides sports. He became a good public speaker and won several state contests while in high school. At first he was so scared when he spoke in front of people that he had to wear baggy pants to hide his shaking legs.
While the other boys were spending their time at sports practice, Walt participated in the high school Chess Club. He had taught himself to play chess when he was in fifth grade. He had been too sick to go to school one day, so he sat in bed, thumbing through the World Book Encyclopedia. He stopped when he came to the “Chess” entry and saw the picture of the chessboard.
After reading about chess, he figured he could play it. He got a piece of paper and made a crude chess board by drawing eight columns and eight rows. Then he tore out pieces of paper and made pawns, kings, queens, knights, rooks, and bishops. Now in high school, chess was his passion. He would spend Friday and Saturday evenings playing chess with friends. He wasn’t much of a reader, but he often went downtown to the library to find chess books so that he could improve his strategy.
The chess coach was also the geometry teacher, and Walt was his top math student. This teacher pushed Walt with extra challenges. He also encouraged his bright students to go on to one of the military academies. But that was out of the question for Walt because of his heart condition.
When Walt was seventeen, he went for his annual checkup with Dr. Miller. “I can’t hear the murmur!” the doctor said. So he lifted the restrictions on sports. After seventeen years of little physical activity, Walt reveled in the freedom. He tried boxing and running and found to his surprise that he was a good runner. He could easily run five miles and leave his athletic running partners huffing behind him. Now he realized that he just might be able to go to a military academy.
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1
Walt’s Family
Walt was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the oldest of three children. When Walt was in elementary school, the family moved to Toledo, Ohio. Mr. Brown was a salesman for Hallmark greeting cards and later a real estate agent. Walt’s family was a typical American family of the mid 1900s. Mr. and Mrs. Brown, both graduates of a Methodist college, were well read and well liked by all. They encouraged their children to pursue their individual talents.
The Browns attended a Methodist church each week and brought their two sons and daughter up with Biblical ethics and attitudes. When Walt was a teenager, he met people who were preaching the gospel and their words slowly registered with him. His decision to follow Christ was actually made over a period of time. As time passed, his conviction and faith in Christ grew stronger.
Applying to the Military
One Saturday when Walt was a senior in high school, he was walking downtown with his friend Dave. They had just stopped by the library and Walt had checked out a few more chess books.
Dave and Walt were headed back home when they walked by the office of Congressman Frazier Reams. They suddenly remembered an announcement at school that Congressman Reams was accepting applications to the military academies. “Let’s check it out,” Dave said.
So, a month later, they were taking several tests with another hundred applicants. With the combination of the written and oral tests, Walt ended up in first place. So he got to choose which military academy he wanted to attend—Army, Navy, Air Force, or Coast Guard.
For Walt the choice was obvious. The challenge and prestige of West Point, the Army’s academy, had always attracted him. He wanted to go to West Point because he felt it was the best, the most rigorous and most challenging. But he still had to pass West Point’s physical test, mental test, and medical test. The mental test was no problem for him; he worried, though, that the military might not accept him because of his history with the heart murmur. Walt informed the military doctors of the earlier diagnosis, but they thoroughly checked him and said it was no problem.
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West Point
Walt Brown entered West Point on July 5, 1955. After he had been there for one hour, he thought he had made the biggest mistake of his life! What a shock this was for a seventeen-year-old boy who had never been away from home. Where was the “glory and the honor of the Corps” that he had heard so much about? He wished he could just walk away from this “nightmare.” What am I doing here? he wondered. Whenever the question arose, he reminded himself that he was here in the military to help his neighbors—those who were subjected to bullies.
The first two months were called “Beast Barracks”—a fitting name, he found out, for the two months of drills and grueling physical workouts before academics began. He had so much to learn and couldn’t seem to do anything right. Taking apart a rifle was a mystery. And he had to do it quickly in total darkness.
Even marching was difficult. Sometimes he couldn’t react to the commands fast enough and was left behind. “Mr. Brown, get with it, dumb smack!” the upperclassman barked. “You need more practice, so instead of having free time, I want you to report to my room, and we will work on it.”
There was never enough time to do what he needed to do. His math courses came easily, but he had difficulty with the courses that involved long reading assignments. He had to read the New York Times every day and keep current with the news in case he was asked to recite the news at meals. If he didn’t know the news, he would have to visit each upperclassman who sat at his table and recite the news.
This plebe system was a merciless plan to heap stress on the new cadets, or “plebes” as they were called. (Plebe means “common people” in Latin, and it was used in a derogatory sense at West Point.) The upperclassmen would make a plebe feel inadequate and clumsy. If he did something wrong, then everyone would look at him and would find something else wrong. It was a vicious snowball effect, and inexperienced plebes found themselves sleep deprived and buried in demerits.
Walt racked up demerits right and left—having lint in his rifle, not getting a haircut that week, failing room inspection, having dusty shoes or dirty fingernails, hiding clean laundry instead of taking the time to fold it neatly and stack it in his locker. Later Walt realized this constant nit-picking was good preparation for what was ahead in the Army, because there would be situations in which he would have to function under even greater stress.
Plebes were allowed a certain number of demerits each month, but after that, each demerit meant one hour of walking “punishment tours.” Many times Walt had to walk tours—walking back and forth in a lane, one hour at a time, in his full uniform carrying his rifle. At one point he had thirty hours of tours to walk. Fortunately, a visiting European prince saved his skin by pardoning all cadets’ offenses. (West Point allowed visiting royalty or heads-of-state to “pardon” cadets serving punishments.)
He wanted so badly that first semester to resign or be kicked out. He watched with envy when a classmate failed or resigned and had to leave. One thousand cadets had started in his class, but only six hundred would finish four years later. He was sorely tempted to deliberately fail Russian, his worst subject, so that he would be sent home. He knew he could do well in all other subjects, but if he failed one subject, he was out. As much as he wanted to go home, though, Walt could never bring himself to put down a deliberately wrong answer. When his grades were posted at the end of the first semester, he was very disappointed to see that he had passed Russian. He had passed with the lowest possible grade. One more wrong answer and he might have been sent home.
A Welcome Rest
Late in his first semester, Walt was helping build a “Beat Navy” sign for the upcoming Army-Navy football game. The makeshift platform he was standing on gave way, and he fell ten feet onto a concrete porch, fracturing his pelvis.
The doctor determined that he didn’t need a cast, but he would have to spend two months in bed. Normally, two months in bed would have been torture; but Walt found they were a blessing, a welcome vacation from the oppressive plebe system. Now he could get plenty of sleep and eat peaceful meals. He didn’t have to worry about eating properly—sitting on the first three inches of his chair, his back perfectly straight, looking down at his plate unless he was being spoken to.
And he finally had time to study, because he wasn’t earning demerits and walking tours. His professors were surprised that he now did better in his schoolwork even though he couldn’t attend classes. Walt’s stay in the hospital refreshed him, and when he got out, he could keep up with his academics, and he wasn’t overwhelmed by the plebe system.
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A Paratrooper and A Ranger
After he graduated from West Point, Walt had his heart set on being an Air Force pilot. But he failed the eye exam. It was a huge disappointment when he wasn’t allowed to fly, and he had to settle for going into the Army. Months later, he found out that his vision had improved considerably. He had just been suffering eyestrain from all the studying, and it disappeared when he was away from the books. But God used this disappointment with the eye test to change the course of Walt’s life. Naturally, he couldn’t see through the disappointment into the future, to see how God would use him in the Army and prepare him to serve Him in a different capacity.
Fresh out of West Point, Walt went to Fort Benning in western Georgia and learned to be a paratrooper—to jump out of a plane in full fighting gear with a parachute on his back. He started out jumping off thirty-four-foot towers with a harness attached to him. He learned the crucial tuck position so that he wouldn’t get whiplash when he jumped out of a plane and the winds hit him at one hundred miles an hour. But that was an easy course compared to what followed.
Next he went to Ranger School. There Walt learned hand-to-hand combat and went through challenging obstacle courses. The Rangers are the Army’s most elite, trained to act and react effectively under intense combat stress. The goal of Ranger School is to develop leaders who are mentally and physically tough and self-disciplined. Surrender is not a word in the Ranger vocabulary. The training is so realistic that a trainee might lose his life. Several rangers drowned during training a year after Walt was there.
Whenever a dangerous mission needs to be accomplished swiftly, the Army calls on the Rangers. A Ranger mission is typically behind enemy lines. It is obviously dangerous and might involve raids, ambushes, prisoner snatches, or disrupting enemy communications and supplies. The classic WWII Ranger mission was to scale the cliffs of Normandy and knock out guns that would be firing on the Allied landing craft.
After the classroom training came the jungle phase and then the mountain phase of Ranger School. For the jungle phase, they went to northern Florida to learn how to fight and survive under harsh conditions. It was winter and temperatures were sometimes below freezing. Walt got an average of two hours of sleep a night and half a meal a day during the three-week jungle phase. Rangers had to function far beyond their natural stamina and abilities.
During the jungle phase, Rangers learned to cross rivers using a special technique. Each six-man team picked its best swimmer to cross the river with a rope tied around his waist. He found the tallest, sturdiest tree and tied the rope as high as he could. Then the men on the other shore pulled the rope tight and tied it around another tree. These team members then “monkeywalked” across the rope, carrying the swimmer’s clothes and weapons to him.
Walt, unfortunately for him, was the best swimmer of his team. He had swum competitively at West Point and had turned down an opportunity to train with the Olympic team in the Pentathlon event. But right now, northern Florida was experiencing a sudden cold spell, and the wind-chill temperature was seventeen degrees. Standing in front of the swiftly flowing Yellow River, he suddenly wished he weren’t such a good swimmer.
It was an exhausting swim as he bucked the current and hauled the rope, but he completed it successfully. His only comfort was knowing that one of his teammates would do the return swim when it came time to repeat the technique back across the river.
But when the time came, all his teammates insisted they couldn’t make the swim. “I’m no good, Walt. I’d never make it,” they all said. So again, Walt started swimming across the Yellow River—believing he would probably be killed.
By this time, he had been in the freezing water for five hours, and he was overcome by the cold current and exhaustion. He was swept down river where another team was doing the same drill. This is it, he thought. I’m going to die. But at that moment he saw the other team’s rope. He reached up, grabbed it, and slowly worked his way to shore.
An instructor, immaculately dressed, was standing on the shore, waiting to chew him out for doing the drill incorrectly. As Walt stood shaking in the freezing water, relieved to be alive, the instructor yelled, “Ranger, stop shivering! It’s all in your mind!”
Marriage
Walt was beginning to think girls were a nuisance—they were silly and just took up one’s time. But that changed suddenly and permanently when he met Peggy Hill during his last year at West Point. Walt married Peggy twenty months later, in June of 1960. They went to live at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. She was a Christian and had grown up in a military family. Her father, an Army Colonel, was in charge of Army Space Projects at the Pentagon.
Peggy understood the nature of Army life, and she cheerfully accompanied Walt on the frequent moves. They moved fourteen times in seventeen years. Meeting so many interesting people and experiencing new things more than compensated for the inconveniences of moving so often.
People think of the Army as a place for hard-drinking, loose-living men. But the Browns always found themselves in a wholesome environment, living near other Army families who were friendly and supportive, even if they weren’t Christians. At most bases where they lived, there was a good group of Christians they could fellowship with. Walt found that his policy of never drinking alcoholic beverages was not a hindrance in the Army. It brought him a certain respect, not disdain.
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Getting a Masters Degree
Brown chose to transfer into a technically oriented branch of the Army—the Ordnance Corps. This branch dealt with the Army’s equipment, and he felt sure he could find interesting things there.
He was excited to learn that the Ordnance Corps would send him to get a master’s degree. Engineering fascinated him, so he went to study mechanical engineering at New Mexico State University. At New Mexico State, he found that his mechanical engineering courses were interesting but not difficult, so he also took many physics and math courses.
Overcoming a Reading Problem
He also found that he was very weak in vocabulary because he had avoided reading in the past. With his characteristic self-discipline, he overcame this reading deficiency. He took several reading courses and added 6,000 words to his vocabulary by studying the dictionary.1
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White Sands Missile Range
Right after he got his master’s degree, Brown went to White Sands Missile Range to oversee testing of three of the Army’s missile systems. It was located just over a mountain pass, about forty miles from New Mexico State. Before he arrived, the testing at White Sands had revealed a horrible problem with the Littlejohn missile. Every tenth missile or so would fall several miles short. Of course, it was intolerable to have a nuclear weapon miss its target by a couple of miles, especially falling short, because it might fall on the heads of your own troops.
At the time, the Littlejohn missile was the Army’s best hope of blunting a Soviet attack. This was the early 1960s, and tensions in Europe were mounting. Something had to be done to keep Russian tanks from rolling across Germany. And it seemed that the Littlejohn would keep them at bay. But until the “short round” problem was fixed, the missile could not be used. Over the last two years the Army had spent millions of dollars trying to figure out the cause of the short rounds. All the civilian scientists and engineers that had been called in to help were baffled. It seemed that millions more would be needed for testing different possible causes.
One morning Brown was on the firing range a few hours early because he was in charge of firing that day. He noticed two men setting up an elaborate camera system. Out of curiosity, he went over to talk to them and found that they were part of a civilian engineering firm that was developing a new type of camera. They explained their photographic technique to Brown and invited him to come by their office and look around.
A few weeks later, he walked by their office and remembered their invitation to stop by. As they were showing him around, they mentioned in passing that something strange had shown up on the film they took that day—some fuzzy stuff was below the missile.
Brown asked them to enlarge the picture. He took into account the distortion from the experimental film and was able to calculate the size of the largest fragment of the fuzzy stuff. It was a hexagonal nut that must have fallen from the missile’s shoe. The shoe was a big block of metal that guided the missile along the launch rail. When the missile ignited and shot off the rail, the shoe was supposed to kick off.
He called his office and had them look in the records to find out whether anything strange had happened that day. It turned out that the photographed missile was one of the short rounds. As he walked back to his office, he wondered what the relationship between a short round and a missing nut was. Brown called in his chief engineer, who explained how losing the nut would keep the missile’s shoe on. If the nut were missing, the spring that ejected the shoe wouldn’t activate. The shoe would stay attached. Brown thought maybe the missile was carrying this shoe downrange, causing the missile to fall several miles short of its target.
He had his office look back at the records of the recovery crew to see whether shoes had been found for the short rounds. (Shoes were generally found about a hundred feet downrange whenever the missile flew correctly.)
Just as he thought, whenever there was a short round, they didn’t find a shoe.
The next day Brown had a crew dig the short round out of the ground at the point of impact. Was the shoe still attached? No. But everyone could see the hole in the missile’s skin where the shoe had been attached. It had been ripped by the great aerodynamic forces that tore the shoe off during flight.
So in less than two days, Brown solved the problem, and the two-year testing program was terminated. He had found that when the Littlejohn missile was shipped in a crate from the manufacturing plant, vibrations sometimes loosened the nut. If the nut fell off, the shoe didn’t eject. The missile then had to carry this nonstreamlined hunk of metal downrange, and the extra drag caused the Littlejohn to fall miles short.
The fix was so simple that it cost less than a nickel per missile. When the nut was screwed on at the manufacturing plant, they had to make sure it could never come loose. They took a hammer and “pinged” the nut so that it was permanently attached. As a double check, launch crews checked the shoe and its nut just before launch.
The Littlejohn missile was returned to the troops in Europe immediately. Brown didn’t think much about solving the short round problem because it happened so fast. But his superiors noticed how quickly he had solved this problem that had stumped the best engineers for two years. And they saw that he had saved the Army a good deal of money. The short round incident went on his Officer Efficiency Report and the Army would later reward him with an early promotion to Major.
Ph.D. in the Army?
One day the thought occurred to Brown that he could get a Ph.D. in engineering. He didn’t care about the degree or the prestige, but the subject matter fascinated him. He knew that the two best science and engineering schools were Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech). He wanted to study at one of them.
But the Army had never assigned an officer to get a Ph.D. The Air Force and the Navy had, but not the Army. The Army’s philosophy was that when a Ph.D. was needed, they would hire a civilian. Brown figured that if he got a fellowship that paid for the schooling and was accepted at one of the world’s two best graduate schools, then the Army couldn’t refuse. As required, he asked for permission from the Army to apply for the National Science Fellowship.2 This fellowship, while not as prestigious as the Rhodes scholarship, was far more valuable financially.
This was such a new idea for the Army—an officer asking to get a Ph.D. using a National Science Fellowship—that they sent out a high-ranking official from the Pentagon to interview Brown. This official liked the idea and decided to approve.
So Brown applied and scored in the 99.9 percentile in the quantitative part of the National Science Fellowship test. Fellowships were awarded based on ability, and Brown certainly had the ability to handle the subject matter. Meanwhile, both MIT and Cal Tech had accepted him. Brown picked MIT because he thought it was the best science and engineering school in the world.
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MIT
The Army gave the final permission, and the Browns moved to Boston so that Brown could study at MIT. They arrived with two children; two years later another baby was born.
He finished his Ph.D. in record time—two and a quarter years. Most people took three to five years to finish a doctorate. Brown was in a hurry because he knew the Army was losing patience with him. A Pentagon personnel officer would often call and say, “Brown, when are you going to finish up there? We are having to send some officers back to Vietnam for the third time. Here you are having a nice time going to school. We want to send you to Vietnam. You need to get back into a proper career pattern.”
“I’ll do the best I can, sir,” he promised. “I’m working as hard as I can.” And he was. Ever since arriving at MIT, he had stopped watching television and reading the newspaper and worked at an intense pace.
Vietnam
When he finished at MIT, he knew he was going to Vietnam. It was the only assignment in his career he didn’t get to pick. But he didn’t mind going. He realized how terrorized the South Vietnamese people were. Much controversy surrounded America’s involvement there, but Brown saw it as a simple question of helping his neighbor. He knew the atrocities that the Viet Cong soldiers were inflicting on innocent villagers.
Brown was stationed at Cu Chi, thirty-five miles northwest of Saigon. But the Army didn’t know what to do with a Ph.D. in the middle of Vietnam. Brown had little actual experience in the Ordnance Corps because he had been going to school. They scratched their heads and ended up giving him a staff position—being a Division Material Officer.
When Brown reported to his unit, the Colonel commanding his brigade interviewed him. The Colonel looked up after reading Brown’s record. “I have never in my life seen anyone so ill-prepared to take the job you’ve got!” he said, unable to hide his disgust. “You have no experience at all. I can’t understand why you were sent here. Brown, you better hit the ground running hard!”
Brown did his job well, and this Colonel quickly became one of his biggest supporters. As the Division Material Officer, Brown had five captains and several other men working for him. Their job was to make sure that all the equipment of the division worked. They had to keep everything in repair—tanks, rifles, artillery, helicopters, radar, and radios. And they had to coordinate getting replacement parts shipped over so that few pieces of equipment would be sidelined for a lack of spare parts.
One morning, the division commander called him in and showed him a dozen muddy rifles on the floor. “We had a patrol out last night. They were ambushed, and eight men were killed because their rifles did not work. This is happening all over Vietnam. Fix this problem, Brown!”
And so Brown, the cadet who had trouble taking a rifle apart, would have to identify the problem. He did a lot of testing. He found that the rifle was actually a good weapon, but different cleaning techniques were needed. Brown conducted dozens of classes for key maintenance people who then taught their soldiers these cleaning techniques. Reports of jammed rifles ceased.
Each day there were new problems for Brown to solve. He found that Vietnam was a demanding assignment. The first several months he got four hours of sleep a night and ended up in the hospital with pneumonia. While recuperating, he noticed what an outstanding hospital they had—much like the M.A.S.H. unit that was popularized by the television series. These doctors and dentists are usually underutilized, Brown thought. Why not use them to help the local people?
He mentioned it to his boss who was enthusiastic about the idea. So, every Wednesday that year, Brown gathered a group of doctors and several soldiers for security, and they headed down the road to the village of Phouc Hiep.3
At night the Viet Cong terrorized this village. The village chief had to sleep in a different bed every night because he was never safe. His son had been killed one night—his throat slit while he was sleeping in bed.
Only one young man in the village spoke English, a grade school teacher named Lam Van Hai. (In Vietnam, the names run backwards, so his first name was “Hai.”) The villagers looked forward to the weekly visit from the Americans, and Hai, Brown’s translator, organized little programs for the kids to perform for the soldiers. Hai and Brown became friends, and Peggy wrote several letters to Hai so that he could practice his English.
One day the doctors were busy with other patients and asked Brown to help a little girl with a fever. “Here, take this little girl and give her a cold bath,” a doctor said. Brown picked her up and gently lowered her into the cool water. She screamed, and her cry sounded just like his daughter’s when he had given her a cool bath for a fever. As he held this little girl, he thought, We are just like these people. We laugh alike, and we cry alike.
As Brown got to know the Vietnamese people, he came to love them. He saw that racial distinctions were artificial. He realized that there is only one race—the human race.4 And he found that the stereotypes about Southeast Asians were false. It was completely false that they thought life was cheap, that they somehow didn’t hurt as much as we did when one of their own died
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Inventions
The Viet Cong soldiers would hide in underground tunnels, and this was a serious problem in Vietnam. Cu Chi, where Brown was stationed, was famous for its tunnels. The Americans were afraid the Viet Cong soldiers would tunnel into their compound at night. The tunnels were such a problem that Brown spent a lot of time thinking about it and came up with a way to detect them.
It was such a simple idea that anyone could learn to do it in five minutes. He took about fifteen feet of long, skinny cleaning rods for rifles. (Thousands of them were sitting in the warehouses he supervised. They were about a foot long and could be screwed together to any length desired.) At the end of this fifteen-foot rod, he had machinists fabricate a large, sharp tip. A soldier would push the rod into the ground, and if a tunnel was underneath, there would suddenly be no resistance and the rod would pop through. A tunnel was confirmed by squirting in water from a hand-operated fire extinguisher and listening for the splash of water on the bottom of the tunnel. If the water squirted back in your face, it wasn’t a tunnel.
Another invention of Brown’s was an anti-mine device. He saw the gruesome destruction from the mines that the Viet Cong planted in the roads. He was haunted by the sight of an armored personnel carrier blowing up with eleven men inside and seeing the flesh hanging from the walls of the wreckage. Something had to be done about the mines, Brown thought. With the help of some welders in the unit, he built a device to be pushed by a tank recovery vehicle. The mine was set off by the device—not a tank or person. The device was heavy enough to set off a mine, but weak enough to break cleanly at a few joints so the mine damaged only part of the device. Then the soldiers could rebuild it quickly with spare parts that they carried.
This anti-mine device was getting better with each prototype Brown built. But a new commander came in and told him to stop his side projects. Brown wasn’t neglecting any of his duties, and he felt that this mine detector was very important. But the commander thought Brown was eating up resources and needed to focus on his assigned duties.
It was a great disappointment for Brown to give up those projects. Sometimes he felt he should have stayed in Vietnam and perfected his anti-mine device and taught more units to detect tunnels. Some encouraged him to volunteer for a second year and go to a unit that did nothing but scientific work. But Peggy was home with the three little children, and Brown needed to go home. He also wondered how many other superiors would squelch anything innovative or want him to do only what made them look good.
So he left Vietnam after his one-year assignment, but he could never get the people out of his mind. Later when America pulled out of Vietnam, Brown was troubled. He worried about Lam Van Hai because he had been friendly to the Americans. Brown knew about the concentration camps for those who helped the United States. He would often talk to Peggy about Hai and wonder what had happened to him. Year after year he couldn’t get him out of his mind. But there wasn’t any word from Hai.
Bible Study
After coming home from Vietnam, Brown spent a year at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas—a school for Majors and Lieutenant Colonels who were expected to advance. He was one of the youngest officers selected for this school. Here, for the first time, the Bible came alive for him. There had usually been a strong Christian influence on the bases where the Browns lived, and they had always attended church and Bible studies; but Brown had not studied the Bible for himself. His family had not read the Bible together when he was growing up, and he had not formed the habit of personal Bible study. When he did read the Bible for himself, he usually read the New Testament. He felt comfortable in the New Testament, but the Old Testament troubled him, so he rarely read it.
One of the things that stirred his interest in the Bible was a sermon he heard a classmate preach at the base chapel. The sermon, entitled “It is Written,” described many of the Bible’s fulfilled prophecies. This impressed Brown, and he began to study the Bible. The chaplain there encouraged him in his Bible study and gave him a set of commentaries.
As he studied, Brown became fascinated with the Bible. It was no longer a dry book, but the vibrant, life-changing Word of God. A few years later he began teaching an adult Sunday School class.
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Benét Labs
After Fort Leavenworth, he was invited to be the Director of Benét Laboratories near Albany, New York. This was one of the Army’s research, development, and engineering laboratories that was responsible for developing complex armament systems. As the supervisor of 450 people, Brown had to make sure these civilian scientists and engineers were doing work helpful to the Army. Many of them, because of the highly technical nature of their work, were not used to being supervised. It was a busy, challenging job that he enjoyed.
But one day Brown decided he wanted to try teaching. He had always thought that he would enjoy teaching, but he had never had a chance to do it. He called a friend at the Air Force Academy and asked whether there were any openings. The next day he got a call from the personnel director of the math department saying that he was hired. Usually they would have flown him out for an interview, but they recognized that his background was very appropriate. So the Browns moved to Colorado.
What About Noah’s Ark?
Whenever the family moved, Peggy would take the kids to visit grandparents. Then Brown would report to the next assignment, sign in, begin work, and wait for quarters. It would have been too difficult and expensive to live in motels with the children.
So in 1970, he put Peggy and the kids on a plane and drove from Albany, New York, to the Air Force Academy in Colorado. Driving across Kansas, he was getting sleepy and bored. The roads were flat and straight, and there was nothing to grab his interest in the passing scenery. He turned on the radio and flipped through the stations. He stopped the dial when he found a Christian station talking about Noah’s Ark. The program featured interviews with people who claimed that Noah’s Ark had been sighted on Mount Ararat, which rises almost 17,000 feet above sea level. As he listened, he thought, How in the world could Noah’s Ark reach that elevation?
The Rocky Mountains were just beginning to come into view as he drove along. He tried to imagine an object large enough to fill a football stadium sitting up there on one of the summits because it had floated there. Impossible! When the program ended, he pulled off the road and jotted down the name and address of the radio station.
The very first night he was at the Air Force Academy, he wrote a letter to the radio station asking who their sources were and how he could reach them. Within a few weeks, they wrote back and gave him names and addresses. He called one of the contacts on the list, Jim Lee, a man who traveled across the country giving lectures about the effort to find Noah’s Ark.5 Brown invited him to stay at his home whenever he was passing through.
Jim Lee visited the Browns several times. He and Brown would stay up late into the night talking about the possibility that the Ark could be there. The logistics of it all stumped Brown’s engineering mind. “Where did all that water come from?” Brown asked Jim. “You’ve got to be lame in the head to think that all the mountains were really covered with water.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Jim said. “Maybe the water came from outer space.” “Maybe so.” Brown said. “But then where did all the water go afterwards?”
Brown saw other problems. How could so many animals fit in the Ark? How could the freshwater fish survive if the flood waters were salt water? And how did the plants survive?6
Why, that part of the Bible had to be wrong, he thought. The Old Testament troubled him because there were parts of it that didn’t seem scientifically sound. The New Testament made a lot of sense to him, and he heartily accepted Christ’s teaching. (It never dawned on him, though, that Christ himself had talked about Noah as a literal historical figure.)
For the next two years, he read everything he could find about the Ark and talked to many “Ark hunters.” The possibility that Noah’s Ark was actually buried on Mount Ararat and that the global flood had occurred was growing in his mind.
He had always thought the fossil record was the strongest evidence for evolution—which he had passively accepted. But now he began to wonder whether perhaps the flood laid down the fossils. If water sloshed all over the earth for a year, that would explain why fossils of sea life are at the tops of all the major mountain ranges—something geologists had known for more than two hundred years. If fossils had been laid down rapidly in Noah’s flood, then fossils were no longer evidence for evolution. (In fact, fossils must be buried rapidly or else the animal or plant’s shape won’t be preserved.)
What then was the evidence for evolution? he wondered. The more he struggled with this question and studied it, the more amazed he became at the lack of evidence supporting evolution. To his surprise he found that the scientific evidence actually supported creation. By 1972, Brown was convinced that creation and a global flood were the only logical positions.
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Benét Labs
He believes that the entire Bible, in the original, is accurate in every detail and that God put every detail there for a purpose. He is fascinated by the analogies to Christ throughout the Bible. His favorite is the parallel between Christ and the Ark. They were both designed by God and freely available to sinful people. And they both provided the only refuge from a terrible judgment. Tragically, though, people scoff today at their need of salvation in Jesus Christ, just as the people scoffed in Noah’s day at the thought of water falling out of the sky.7
Completing the Family
While in Vietnam, Brown had seen orphans sleeping on the street on pieces of cardboard. His heart had gone out to them. Later, when he and Peggy decided they were ready for another child, they began the adoption process—the interviews, the home study, the paper work. They initially thought God would lead them to a child from Southeast Asia. But God had other plans for them and gave them a baby girl from Colorado.
The adoption process never troubled the Browns. They knew they were not at the mercy of a social worker or government agency. They were confident that God would give them the child He wanted for them. They saw how God orchestrated every amazing detail, and, through their move to the Air Force Academy in Colorado, He put their family together.
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As A Teacher
At the Air Force Academy, Brown was an Army major teaching on an exchange program. (The Army had lent him to the Air Force.) After a year, the Air Force Academy invited him to stay on as a tenured professor. He quickly accepted. The family was very happy there even though their living quarters were cramped with four children and a dog. This was a wholesome place to raise a family, and they enjoyed good Christian fellowship.
But there was a hitch to the offer. He would have to leave the Army and be permanently assigned to the Air Force. This required an interservice transfer and high-level maneuvers in the Defense Department. If Brown had initiated it, it would have never gone through. But the Air Force Academy had clout and generally got what it wanted. So one day Brown was told to hang up his green uniform and start wearing a blue uniform. Soon he was placed in charge of thirty-five professors who were teaching calculus to freshmen. He felt at home in the Air Force because the two services were similar.8
Three years later, the Air Force sent him off to the Air War College for a year so that they could get him current with what the Air Force was doing. He was wearing a blue suit now and had an impressive background, but how much did he really know about the Air Force? The officers who are sent to the War College are the ones they think might become generals. Brown finished at the War College as a distinguished graduate.
The next year the Air War College invited Brown back to give a lecture on operations research, sometimes called systems analysis. These are the mathematical techniques that the military was starting to use to make important decisions. (This is not to say that all decision making is purely mathematical, but there are often quantifiable aspects that can be worked through before experience and subjective factors are considered.)
Brown was now in charge of the Operations Research Division at the Air Force Academy, and he understood these techniques and their applications well. The War College liked his lecture so much that he was invited to join the faculty. So after five happy years in Colorado, he left his tenured position at the Air Force Academy and moved the family to the War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. Peggy’s father had died recently, and this move would bring the Browns closer to Peggy’s mother.
Air War College
The Air War College was one of five war colleges in the United States. Their mission was to prepare the world’s best strategic leaders by stimulating innovative thinking on critical military issues. All military services sent their best senior officers to one of the five. Also present were senior officials from other federal agencies and outstanding officers from forty other nations. Each student brought diverse experiences and backgrounds. National figures lectured each day—a Marine general, a senator, the Deputy Secretary of Defense. These lectures were followed by thought-provoking discussion groups.
Brown was thirty-nine when he came to teach at the Air War College. Almost all the students were older than he. Brown was in charge of the curriculum concerning science, technology, and decision making. He also lectured on operations research and taught an elective course in computers. He had never had a course in computers, but he had always kept current with computer technology. Brown had often had to learn a new computer system because he could see how it would help him at a new job.
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Getting into the Creation Movement
In the evenings when supper was over, Walt and Peggy would stay at the table talking. Walt would share with her the amazing things he was discovering in his search for the truth about creation. Peggy listened quietly, but didn’t share Walt’s enthusiasm about his new hobby, even though she could see how compelled he was by the scientific evidence.
She knew many fine Christians who believed in evolution. In fact, she and Walt had believed in theistic evolution all these years, assuming that God had used evolution to create the universe. Theistic evolution had been a comfortable compromise. It gave a sense of scientific respectability and, at the same time, it satisfied an inward conviction that there must be a Creator.
After one of their evening conversations, she asked “What difference does it really make?”
So Walt addressed the theological implications. “Why do we need a savior?” he asked.
Peggy replied, “To save us from our sin.”
Then Walt explained, “If evolution happened, death was already occurring before man evolved. But if death came before man, and was not a consequence of Adam’s sin, then sin is a fiction. And if sin is a fiction, then why do we need Christ to save us from our sin?”
Suddenly, it made sense to Peggy. It seemed so obvious, but she had never considered it before. Like many others who had passively accepted theistic evolution, she had not realized the theological implications. But now she saw how evolution completely undermined the need for a Savior. And she saw what an unsatisfactory compromise theistic evolution is. If the Genesis account is not a factual depiction of events, then the entire Bible was not completely true, and that means that it is not the ultimate authority. From then on, Peggy was an eager supporter of Walt’s creation study.
Brown had been teaching at the War College for several years and was offered a splendid job as the Director of the Air Force Geophysics Laboratory near Boston. He seriously considered this job because it would put him around experts in geology and geophysics, even if they were evolutionists. Brown was now very interested in geology because of his study of the global flood. His investigation of creation and the flood had started as scientific curiosity, but as he saw the implications, it grew into a passionate hobby.
Unexpectedly one day, Brown’s superior, a two-star general, called him into his office to sign papers that would send him to the laboratory. Brown had to think fast. He had reached full colonel rapidly.9 But he wanted more time to devote to his creation study, and he wanted to help get the creation message out. He politely turned down the offer to go to the Geophysics Laboratory and asked to get out of the military at the first opportunity. So in 1980, after twenty-one years in uniform, he retired from the Air Force as a full colonel.
Dr. Brown was astonished to see that much scientific evidence was poorly disseminated and that young people were taught such erroneous science about origins. He saw that critical thinking skills were not being fully developed in our classrooms. Students were being told what to think, not being taught how to think. Science lost its excitement in this stifling atmosphere. Dr. Brown had seen for himself that the scientific evidence overwhelmingly favored creation and a global flood. If thinking people were allowed to see all the evidence, they could reach their own logical conclusions.
Dr. Brown’s Hydroplate Theory
As Dr. Brown thought about the feasibility of the flood, he realized that the Genesis flood was literally an earthshaking event, far more catastrophic than almost anyone had imagined. He was startled by the violence of the event.
When he first thought about the flood, he had been stumped by the mechanism of it all. Yet he saw that the geological evidence corresponded to a devastating, worldwide flood. So where did so much water come from? And where did it go?
As he pondered these questions and studied the Biblical and scientific details, a theory for the mechanism of the flood began to gel in his mind. It became clear to Dr. Brown how the gigantic flood of Noah’s day would explain many mysterious features on earth—features that few people realize are not explained by current science. Many of these major features fit into place beautifully if the flood waters came from under the earth’s crust—from worldwide, interconnected chambers that erupted violently as “the fountains of the great deep.”
Dr. Brown calls his theory of the flood the hydroplate theory. It is a mature and detailed theory, complete with many predictions of what science should uncover in the future if his theory is correct. Some of Dr. Brown’s published predictions have already come true. He believes that successful predictions are the best test of a theory’s strength and fruitfulness; scientists who are unwilling to make and publish predictions show a lack of scientific rigor and confidence. “A weak theory will produce few predictions,” he says. “If theories could not be published unless they included numerous details and specific predictions, we would be mercifully spared many distractions and false ideas.”
In 1993 Dr. Brown was asked to narrate a five-minute animation of his hydroplate theory for CBS television. CBS television executives had noticed the interest that the public has in Noah’s Ark, and they aired a two-hour special on Noah’s Ark. That program was seen by 43 million Americans and Canadians. Feedback from Dr. Brown’s portion of that program was overwhelmingly positive.
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Seminars and Debates
After retiring from the military, Dr. Brown moved to the Chicago area and began giving creation seminars and debating evolutionists. He prepared strenuously for his seminars and debates. He always assumed that several people in the audience knew more about a topic than he did, and he didn’t want to disappoint them. He forced himself to be very broad because people would ask questions concerning the Bible, genetics, astronomy, physics, geology, or chemistry. Dr. Brown’s training as an engineer gave him the tools to explore many disciplines. Engineers ask questions and look for realistic solutions. By definition, engineering—sometimes called applied science—deals with making science useful to people. And that is exactly what Dr. Brown did in his seminars.
His main challenge was to present technical matters understandably to a general audience. He applied the same techniques he had used when he taught math and walked his students through complicated equations. He used demonstrations and simple thought experiments to get his points across.
Dr. Brown’s purpose in debating evolutionists is to try to get the real scientific evidence aired. A month ahead of time he sends a summary of everything he plans to say so that the evolutionist will be prepared. If necessary, Dr. Brown is willing to be embarrassed in a public forum if an opponent can catch him saying something wrong. Then he will be able to correct it, and his case is strengthened. Dr. Brown does not have contempt or disdain for those who believe in evolution. On the contrary, he has great compassion for them, because he was once in their shoes.
In his debates, he never uses the word prove. Unlike mathematics, science cannot prove something because all the evidence is not in. But he can raise or lower the plausibility of an idea. So the debate topic is simply “Does the scientific evidence favor evolution or creation?”
For seminars, Dr. Brown traveled across the United States and Canada driving a van and pulling a trailer full of seminar props. He received hundreds of invitations to speak at schools or on radio and television, but to save travel time, he generally accepted only those in the city hosting the seminar. One school appearance near Seattle was vigorously opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), an organization famous for its antibiblical efforts. His appearance generated a media ruckus throughout the western United States. When Dr. Brown showed up to speak and saw the reporters gathered, he smiled at the many TV cameras and said, “I want to thank the ACLU for doing such a good job of promoting this program.”
The seminar work was encouraging. Dr. Brown was surprised to see what an effective preevangelistic tool the creation science topic is for unbelievers. Many people have told him they had a real problem with origins, and they did not believe the Bible was credible. But the seminars removed those obstacles. For some, this confidence in the Bible leads to the understanding that Scripture is reliable and pertinent. For others, it leads to salvation.
Crossraods
The seminar program was gaining ground until another creationist organization published an inaccurate account of Dr. Brown’s work. Unfortunately, there has been much division within the creation movement and instead of concentrating their criticism on the opposition—the theistic evolutionists and the atheistic evolutionists—they have splintered into factions and often undermine each other’s work. This hostility from fellow creationists has baffled Dr. Brown. It usually turns out that these critics have not bothered to study his hydroplate theory. They are just repeating what they heard someone else say.
Since the interest in seminars was waning, Dr. Brown saw no need to remain in Chicago. He was there because it was centrally located for his seminar travels. So in 1985, he moved his family to Phoenix, Arizona, where they could be closer to his parents. This was a discouraging time in his life as he wondered how he would support his family and what he would do next.
He decided to devote himself to studying geology from the evolutionists’ perspective. He realized that most creationists don’t study what the evolutionists are saying—seeing their reasoning and going through their calculations. He knew that a good lawyer knows the other case as well as the opposing lawyer knows it. A solid knowledge of geology would help him build a stronger case for creation.
So Peggy found a teaching job and Walt signed up to study geology at Arizona State University. Dr. Robert S. Dietz, one of the world’s leading geologists, taught there. Several years earlier in 1981, Dr. Brown had given a lecture on creation at Arizona State after the university had been unable to find an evolutionist debater. Days before the lecture, Dr. Dietz asked if he could comment after the lecture. He talked for ten minutes giving his reasons why he thought Dr. Brown was wrong. Then Dr. Brown challenged him to a written, purely scientific debate—no religion allowed. Earlier that day when Dr. Brown had lunch with Dr. Dietz, Dr. Dietz had flatly refused to participate in a written debate. But now that he was in front of this large audience, he agreed. The audience applauded and the newspaper featured the upcoming written debate.
Dr. Brown and Dr. Dietz exchanged a few cordial phone calls, working out the rules of the written debate. A month later, though, Dr. Dietz called. “I’ve tried writing something on this,” he said, “and there is no way you can avoid religion. I can’t do it.”
“Are you backing out, Dr. Dietz?”
“I guess so,” he said. “You can’t deal with the subject without getting into religion.”
“You sure can,” Dr. Brown said. “I will.” But Dr. Dietz backed out. (Since then, no evolutionist has taken up Dr. Brown’s well-known offer for a written, publishable, purely scientific debate.)
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Learning Geology
Now that Dr. Brown would be walking the halls of the geology department, he decided he had better say hello to Dr. Dietz. By now, Dr. Brown knew exactly who Robert S. Dietz was. He was the leading atheist of the Southwest, completely hostile to creationists. He was also a world-famous geologist, one of the founders of the plate tectonic theory—one of the most significant theories of the twentieth century in the opinion of most scientists.
Dr. Brown went to Dr. Dietz’s office and told him he was there to learn geology from Dr. Dietz’s perspective. Oddly enough, that was the beginning of their friendship. Dr. Dietz offered to meet with Dr. Brown each Wednesday afternoon for several hours of discussion. They spent hundreds of hours discussing geology, comparing Dr. Dietz’s plate tectonic theory and Dr. Brown’s hydroplate theory. After their private sessions, they went down to the Wednesday afternoon geology forum and listened to a visiting geology speaker. Sometimes Dr. Dietz would invite Dr. Brown out to eat with the guest speaker.
In private, Dr. Dietz would give straight, honest answers. He would say things that he would never repeat publicly. When he saw a draft of Dr. Brown’s book, he went through every point and acknowledged, “Yes … that’s a problem for evolution. Well, we might have an answer to this point. Yes … there are gaps in the fossil record.”
But when they were on radio programs together as creationists versus evolutionists, Dr. Dietz couldn’t be trusted. Once Dr. Brown brought up the gaps in the fossil record. “Oh, that’s not a problem at all,” Dr. Dietz said. “We’ve got lots of intermediate forms.”
During the commercial break, when Dr. Brown reminded Dr. Dietz that he knew there were many gaps, Dr. Dietz just laughed.
Geology
Dr. Brown spent several years studying geology. His background in engineering gave him a strong grasp of the math and physics involved in geological processes. He found that while geologists are skilled at describing what they see, most don’t pause to figure out the mechanics and the feasibility of their theories. They talk about long periods of time and think that the sheer amount of time glosses over the mechanical difficulties of what they are describing. They don’t concentrate on energy, forces, causes, and effects. But Dr. Brown brought a fresh mindset to his study of geology. He thought as an engineer, a mathematician firmly grounded in physics.
There is also a not-so-subtle arrogance in the entrenched geology establishment. They resent an “outsider” intruding in their field. This sounds similar to the criticism that Lord Kelvin received when he waded into the geological age controversy with the geologists of his day. Interestingly, the founders of modern geology, men who have contributed greatly to conventional geological thinking, were not even trained as geologists.10
Since the 1800s, geologists have tried to rule out all global catastrophes. Actually, they were opposed to the Bible, but they didn’t want to seem closed-minded by disallowing only a global flood; so they ruled out all catastrophes. They proposed a principle of gradualism (uniformitarianism) that said only gradual processes going on today could tell us about the past. But by ignoring the possibility of a global catastrophe, they have stifled true study of the facts.
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Grand Canyon
Dr. Brown lived near the Grand Canyon and frequently took trips to study it. He also studied the Grand Canyon with a leading expert at Arizona State, but this professor preferred not to deal with the origin of the canyon. Dr. Brown often pondered the mechanism that must have formed this great canyon, one of the seven wonders of the natural world. He studied maps of Utah and Arizona and suspected that a huge lake, or a series of lakes, had breached their natural boundaries and carved the canyon in a few weeks. He realized that a fault had to be in a certain place if he was correct, but the state geologist, a man Dr. Brown once had supper with, checked his files and found no fault was there. (A fault is a crack in the ground along which the opposite sides have slipped in relation to each other.)
“This Is Going to Ruin Meg’s Wedding”
But Dr. Brown wouldn’t listen. He had to go see this fault right away. He kissed Peggy goodbye early the next morning and told her to ask the park rangers to send out a search aircraft if he wasn’t back by noon the third day. He arrived at the canyon at sunrise and stopped at the park ranger’s office where he filled out the forms to get permission to go into the “backcountry.”
He parked his van near the rim of Ryder Canyon, a remote side canyon of the Grand Canyon. He soon found the fault he was looking for, but he wanted to trace it from one cliff system, down across the Colorado River, through Ryder Canyon, and up to the cliff system on the other side. He worked his way along the fault, down a deep slit in the ground, and descended into Ryder Canyon. He was loaded with his backpack, his camera, and his drinking water. He had brought gallons of water—more than the park rangers recommended. He spent a strenuous day taking pictures and exploring along the dangerously steep side of the canyon.
Late that hot June afternoon, he decided to head back. He had taken longer than he intended because he was so fascinated by what he was discovering. His water had run out hours before, and he was very thirsty. He turned around, found the slit, and headed back up. But after half a mile, the slit came to a dead end. It was a box canyon, not the incline he remembered coming down. What went wrong? he thought. How did I ever get here?
Several times he retraced his steps and tried to find where he had made the wrong turn, but he couldn’t figure out what had happened. Am I losing my mind? he asked himself. He walked back and forth in the box canyon, wondering how he was going to get out.
It seemed that he was not going to find where he had made the wrong turn. So he considered two options. Should he lie down in the shade, try to minimize his growing dehydration, and spend the night in the canyon, hoping that the rescue aircraft would spot him late the next day? Or should he try to retrace his path along a very strenuous, steep slope and risk falling off a cliff? By now, his tongue was sticking to the sides of his cheeks, and his legs were shaking from dehydration.
He thought about his daughter’s wedding in a couple of days. If I don’t get out of here, this is really going to mess up Meg’s wedding. He thought of Psalm 23 as he paced back and forth, and the words “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death” began to take on a grim reality. He went through the Psalm many times and found comfort in the phrase “for thou art with me.”
I need to find a way out, he decided. In his backpack was fifty feet of rope that he had purchased at a hardware store several days before. He took the rope out to see whether he could use it to get out of this canyon. He saw an overhanging rock and thought that perhaps he could hook the center of the rope around it. After several throws, the rope finally hooked around the rock. Then he grabbed both ends of the rope, put his feet on the side of the canyon, and “walked” up the vertical side. When he got out of the box canyon, he looked around, and everything made sense. Thirty feet away was the parallel slit he had gone down. An hour later, he rested by his van, drinking water and thanking the Lord for making a way out of this valley of the shadow of death.
He got home in the wee hours of the morning. Peggy woke up and asked how it went. When he told her what had happened, she said, “Walt Brown! You have to promise me that you will never do that again!”
“I promise,” he said solemnly. He knew that he had been unwise to go exploring alone. He had been so excited about the fault that he had disregarded the Ranger buddy system, always to be with a friend in case one needs help. But his other Ranger training had helped him get out.
In 1988, Dr. Brown confirmed his theory about the origin of the Grand Canyon with other field studies. The huge lakes, whose waters suddenly broke through their natural dam and carved the Grand Canyon after the flood, no longer exist. But northeast of the canyon Dr. Brown found unmistakable traces of the water and its rapid escape.11
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In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood
Dr. Brown’s move to Phoenix was a crucial turning point in his life. If he had continued with the seminar work full-time, as he had originally hoped, he wouldn’t have had time to study geology and work on his book. Although his seminars had been useful in getting out the creation message, Dr. Brown’s book has reached a much wider audience.
His book, In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood, more closely resembles an encyclopedia than any other kind of book. Here he summarizes the evidences for creation and explains his hydroplate theory of the flood. Based on this theory, he has found that twenty-five major features of the earth can be explained logically. Scientists who have taken the time to understand the theory have often converted to flood geology, because Dr. Brown gives them a scientifically acceptable approach that is intellectually satisfying. Scientists are struck by diverse problems the hydroplate theory solves.12
Dr. Brown plays a vital function in the creation ministry. He keeps current with the latest scientific data and analyzes the implications for creation and publishes it in a format that lay readers can understand. Early on he decided not to write a lot of books. He felt he needed to improve and expand his original book that had started out as a guide for those attending his seminars. In this guide he had summarized the evidences for creation and against evolution so that people weren’t frantically taking notes. Then people who hadn’t been to the seminar started asking for copies. So every few years, Dr. Brown has had to publish a new edition. Each edition has been larger and more popular.
In the Beginning has now reached the seventh edition and is widely in demand because it is the most complete reference work covering the broad subject of origins from a scientific standpoint.13 For scientists who want to follow his calculations, he has included technical notes explaining how he arrived at his conclusions. But the pictures and graphics make it interesting for young people, and the explanations are understandable to lay people. The entire book is meticulously footnoted so that a reader can delve into the sources and not just take Dr. Brown at his word.
His book is on his website, and anyone can access the complete volume from there or print it out at no cost.14 When people ask Dr. Brown how he can earn any money if he makes his book free to everyone, he replies, “My purpose is not to make money. My purpose is to get the information out. Nothing could make me happier than if this evolution problem ended and I was unemployed. I would probably take up golf again.”
Dr. Brown receives much mail from people who have read his book or visited his website. About five percent of the feedback is negative, and Dr. Brown carefully considers each hostile letter to see whether it is pointing out an error of his. If it does, he is grateful for the helpful criticism. But the vast majority of the mail is encouraging and motivates him to continue with his ministry.
One day while opening the mail, Dr. Brown found a letter from Hai Lam, his friend from Vietnam! Thirty-three years after Walt Brown left Vietnam, Hai found him! He had suffered a great deal because of his involvement with the Americans. After two failed attempts to escape Vietnam, Hai did finally make it to America and was living in California with his wife and three children.
In his letter to the Browns, Hai enclosed a water-stained picture that he had kept all those years. It was a picture of himself and Dr. Brown standing in the village of Phouc Hiep. A few months later, Hai sat in the Brown’s living room, smiling at his long lost friend, saying, “I so happy. I so happy.”
Too Busy to Retire
Dr. Brown is the proud grandfather of eight grandchildren and enjoys a close relationship with his four children, his parents, and his large extended family. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona, the home of many retirees. He is at the age when he could retire and spend his time traveling or playing golf like many of his generation. But he is much too busy to sit back and relax. Every day he is in his office, reading science journals, researching, corresponding, and meeting with visitors. He is always adding to his book, strengthening and clarifying his case.15
His wife Peggy has always been a supportive companion, but now she has become his most valuable asset in his work. When she saw that he was getting buried by his correspondence and not having time to devote to study, she resigned her teaching job to take care of his office work.
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A Different Battle
Where is the creation-evolution controversy headed? According to Dr. Brown, “The battle will be won by ‘grass roots’ science education, not in courts, legislatures, boards of education, or church councils. Yes, today evolutionists generally control higher education, science journals, and the media. But the scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports creation and a global flood. Throughout the history of science, whenever controversies have raged, the side with scientific evidence has always prevailed. Our task, then, is educating the public. What we have to do to win this battle, is not to preach to people who already believe as we do, but to people who have questions, people who disagree.”16
Dr. Brown continues to “fight the good fight of faith.” He marvels how God uses every experience in our lives to equip us for His service. Looking back, he realizes that West Point, Ranger School, and MIT each taught important lessons for his present work. Who would have ever thought that infantry training had anything to do with telling the world about the Creator? Yet the skills and discipline he learned from his military training have prepared him to be a soldier in a different battle. He is a living example of God’s warrior in Ephesians 6, strong in the Lord and in the power of His might, equipped with the whole armor of God so that he can stand against the wiles of the devil.