Page 8 - Access Magazine 2023

KARLTON COOKS-UP A
BY DOUGLAS HOAGLAND
On Sept. 11, 2001, Karlton Brown heard pounding on his door as he rested in his room at Fort Drum Army base in upstate New York. When Brown answered, another solider told him to get ready to deploy to New York City.
Terrorists had just flown two airplanes into the World Trade Center. The United States was at war. “My heart was beating out of my chest,” Brown recalls today, almost 22 years after 9/11.
8 California State University, FRESNO
KARLTON BROWN
Since that fateful day, much has changed for Brown. He journeyed from the barracks at Fort Drum to the Veterans Education Program at Fresno State with many stops in between. There were complications along the way, but success, too. He completed the Veterans Education Program, enrolled at Fresno State and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in social science. It was a definite accomplishment since his teenage self hadn’t cared much about school, much to his parents’ frustration.
Brown, 42, enlisted in the Army after gradu- ating from high school in Virginia. “A series of unfortunate events drove me to the point of either going into the military or becoming a statistic,” he says. The Army made him a food service specialist assigned to a field artillery unit in Fort Drum’s 10th Mountain Division.
It didn’t make any difference on 9/11 that his regular job was in a kitchen. “You’re a solider first,” Brown says. So after being rousted from his barracks, he stood with his M-16 rifle in the assembly area at Fort Drum, ready to deploy.
As Brown watched buses fill with sol- diers and drive away, his mind raced. The American military would soon invade Afghanistan.
Several years after being discharged, Brown moved from New York to Delaware and finally to Los Angeles with his sister. He decided to return to school when they came to Fresno in 2007 for his sister’s work. Brown took courses at Fresno City College and eventually a friend told him about the
Veterans Education Program. “I was like, ‘OK, I’ll give it a shot, but I don’t know if they’ll take me.’ The friend assured him: “You’ll be OK. They’re there to help people.”
Brown found that to be true. “It was way better than anything I’d ever experienced in school. We had a lot of one-on-one with teachers, and they really cared if we learned or not. That’s how it’s supposed to be.”
Singling out one outstanding professor in the program is impossible, Brown says.
“They were all collectively damn good. I’m not going to lie. It was the most fun I’ve ever had in school.”
Part of that resulted from camaraderie with other veterans in the program. “We all had that military commonality. We knew how to speak to each other. It was like, ‘I gotta watch your back like you watch mine.’ That doesn’t change from the battlefield to the books.”
As he worked on his degree, Brown dealt with illness (he got Covid), injury (suffered playing basketball), and meeting the expec- tations of different professors. Now that he has his degree, he’s interested in making documentaries that touch on anthropology, travel and food. “I like talking to people who are knowledgeable about their culture and how food exemplifies that culture.”
Looking back on his experience at Fresno State, Brown is grateful to the people in the Veterans Education Program who support- ed him. “They didn’t believe in me in vain.”