SAN DIEGO, Calif. (Tribune News Service) — Nearly five decades before Robert Brewer served as U.S. attorney in San Diego, he was an Army Ranger who, late one evening, found himself as the lone American embedded with South Vietnamese troops when they were attacked and surrounded by North Vietnamese enemies.

At one point during the dark of night, North Vietnamese soldiers shouted that they would let their outnumbered adversaries escape unharmed in exchange for handing over Brewer, who was advising a company of South Vietnamese rangers. The South Vietnamese troops refused despite suffering heavy losses — 17 killed and 14 wounded — during a 15-hour firefight. When the sun rose the next morning, the air support Brewer had called for finally arrived in the form of eight Army helicopters.

“I’ll never forget it — eight helicopters make a lot of noise,” Brewer recalled in an interview this week. He also still remembers the exact words he briefly exchanged over the radio with one of the approaching pilots, and how close he came to meeting his end that morning in September 1970.

“If they had arrived an hour later, I wouldn’t be talking to you today,” he said. “But for them, we would have been overrun.”

For his actions, Brewer, 79, was awarded the Silver Star, the third-highest military decoration. He also earned two Bronze Stars, among other honors, for his time in combat. Despite serving just four years in the Army, his 15 months in combat in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were so eventful that last week, he was inducted into the Army Ranger Hall of Fame during a ceremony at Fort Benning, Ga.

“Rangers have a very historic lineage … and Bob is the crème de la crème,” Patrick Gallagher, Brewer’s friend of 55 years and a retired Army Green Beret, said over the phone.

While the first official Ranger battalion was formed in 1942, the Rangers trace their lineage back to at least the 1750s. The Ranger Hall of Fame was established in 1992, and just 15 former Rangers are inducted into the prestigious group each year, with this year’s class including a retired general, two retired colonels and others who spent decades in the Army. Brewer is credited in his official Hall of Fame biography for both “his extraordinary service in the U.S. Army and his distinguished career in both federal and civilian legal fields,” which included serving as U.S. attorney in San Diego during President Donald Trump’s first term.

Gallagher, who attended the June 25 induction ceremony, crossed paths with Brewer for just a few months in early 1970 while both men were stationed in Germany. Gallagher had just left Vietnam, and Brewer was about to deploy there. But that brief overlap sparked a lifelong friendship, and Gallagher watched from afar over the years as Brewer gained prominence in the San Diego legal community.

“He was obviously successful in his military career and incredibly successful his entire legal career,” Gallagher said. “He was a spectacular, smart, bright, decisive attorney.”

Brewer, a New York native who has lived the majority of his adult life in San Diego, remained in the Army reserves for five years after he left active service, including while earning his law degree in 1975 from the University of San Diego. He spent seven years as a prosecutor in Los Angeles, then nearly 40 years as a civil litigator and white-collar defense attorney in San Diego at several large firms before serving as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California from 2019 to 2021.

Larry Chaney, a retired Army Ranger who was wounded in combat in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm, works as a legal administrative specialist at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Diego. Chaney didn’t know Brewer or much about his background when he was confirmed by the Senate and took over the office, but Chaney saw that his new boss wore a Silver Star lapel pin. Soon, Chaney had dug into Brewer’s military history and was awestruck.

“I’m a Ranger myself and I don’t impress easily, but I saw his military profile and said ‘This is a walking hero in our midst,’” Chaney said. “This guy is a badass.”

Chaney nominated Brewer for the Ranger Hall of Fame and also attended last week’s ceremony.

“He’s just an incredible man and was an incredible leader here at the U.S. Attorney’s Office,” Chaney said. “I’m so proud to have served under him … He’s a great man, a great motivating leader. I’m still in awe of him.”

Chaney promised Brewer during his stint as U.S. attorney that he’d one day be in the Ranger Hall of Fame. Brewer didn’t feel he was worthy of such an honor.

It took three tries through the nomination process, but earlier this year Brewer was picked to join the select group, which now has just more than 500 members.

“The Rangers have an incredible history,” Brewer said, specifically mentioning four officers — Robert Rogers, Frank Merrill, William Darby and James Rudder — who are considered something like the founding fathers of the Rangers. “To be in the same organization with these four legends is just incredibly meaningful for me.”

Brewer, who is now of counsel at the firm Seltzer Caplan McMahon Vitek, might have never joined the Rangers if not for the death of his father while he was attending St. Lawrence University in upstate New York. Brewer was already in the Reserve Officers Training Corps, but to pay the last two years of his tuition, he sought and was awarded an ROTC scholarship that required a four-year Army commitment.

Four days after he graduated in 1968, he reported for an infantry officer training course. That was soon followed by airborne training and then Ranger school, a notoriously grueling nine-week program that includes three weeks each at Fort Benning, in the mountains of Georgia, and in the swamps of Florida.

Within a week of arriving in Vietnam in late April 1970, he was sent with South Vietnamese troops into Cambodia. The revelation that the war was spreading and American troops such as Brewer were in Cambodia sparked massive protests back home, including at Kent State University, where Ohio National Guard troops shot into a crowd of campus demonstrators, killing four and wounding nine.

In December 1970, a few months after the firefight that earned him the Silver Star Medal, Brewer was assigned to Military Assistance Command, Vietnam — Studies and Observations Group. Better known as MOCSAG, it was a highly classified special operations task force made up of personnel from every U.S. military branch and the CIA, and was responsible for unconventional warfare in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

“MACSOG was the best of the best, and I was so honored to be a part of it,” Brewer said. “We planned and conducted reconnaissance into Laos and Cambodia. To the outside world, we didn’t have any people in those two countries, and we were ordered never to talk about it for 30 years. We were officially never there.”

Upon returning stateside, Brewer was hospitalized at Naval Medical Center San Diego for a parasite he’d acquired in the jungle. He fell in love with the city, eventually making it his home.

He credits much of the success of his legal career in San Diego to his time as a Ranger.

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