I thank the head of school for an exceptional introduction, 35 percent of which is probably true, but by diplomatic standards, that's more than good enough. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow St. Andreans, I know what you are all thinking. I can literally hear your thoughts from here: She has done it again. The head of school has brought another old geezer before us to talk about the Paleolithic Age at St. Andrew’s before there were automobiles, telephones, or televisions. Maybe that's true, but I will tell you also, smarty pantses, that this is not the first time that I have ever stood at this pulpit and addressed the student body here at St. Andrew’s.

The last time was in the spring of 1969, when I was selected through some mysterious process to read the lesson at an evening service. Not being an idiot, I came into the Chapel before dinner and opened the very large Bible that was sitting right here. I found after much search the section of the Bible where the lesson was to be read. For some reason, I think it was one of St. Paul's lessons, Letters to the Corinthians. Fine. I even put a 3-by-5 card there to mark the place, just in case a divine breeze blew through and the pages turned. After dinner, we all assemble at the appropriate moment. I march up to this precise location. I take a deep breath. I look down at the Bible and there before me is a page that does not contain anything related to St. Paul or his letters to the Corinthians.

I was somewhat concerned because I did not at that time have a clue as to where I might find this particular passage. After turning the page once in one direction and once in the other, and looking out at the faces of about 200 people, 195 of whom wanted nothing more than for me to finish so that this service would end, I decided that I would read from the text of whatever page I was on. So I did. I noted that this ended the lesson and I returned to my seat. At which point the chaplain of St. Andrew’s at that time, a gentleman named Sandy Ogliby, stood up. He came to the pulpit. He flipped a couple of pages in the Bible and he said, "That was not St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians. Here begins St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians." I have not been invited back to speak in this Chapel until this evening. You have been appropriately warned.

Ladies and gentlemen, I actually had some difficulty—despite the fact that I'm a native Texan and I speak all the time—deciding what I would talk about. My first thought was that I would entertain you with fascinating stories about life at St. Andrew’s in the late 1960s and 1970. I could have told you about Walden Pell, the first headmaster of St. Andrew’s who would come by the campus once a month or so and actually would talk to us lowly students. I could even have talked about Alexis Felix DuPont Jr., the son of the founder, who was often here. We called him "Uncle Dupy" behind his back, never to his face.

I could have talked to you about the football and wrestling teams that went more than two years straight undefeated, or the crew that won the Stotesbury Regatta in 1970. I could have told you about us rascals in the Class of 1970 who one night went out and picked up the automobile belonging to a not particularly popular teacher at that time, carried it around to the front of the building, walked it up into the cloisters and left it there. Yes, there are six steps that must be navigated in order for that car to drive back down and out. We thought that was uproariously funny.

I could have even talked about the legendary revolt of the Class of 1970 over the haircut rule. Yes, we decided collectively we would allow our hair to grow so long that when combed straightforward, it would in fact cover some of the eyebrow. Never let it be said that we did not fight the just battles and the just causes in the late 1960s.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I could have told you all those stories, but then I said for you, this would be kind of like your parents telling you that you had to go have dinner with your grandfather and listen to him drone on for an hour about all the things that he did when he was a kid, and you don't deserve that. I mean, you've done nothing to offend me. I see no reason why I should subject you to that.

So my next idea was talk a little bit about my 39 years in the Foreign Service, the diplomatic service of the United States of America. That's pretty cool, right? I had some great adventures during my 39 years. I could have told you honestly, in fact, about 1982, when I was a very young Foreign Service Officer and my grouchy old ambassador, somewhat similar to then-assistant headmaster, Bill Cameron, said to me one day, "Brownfield, I want you to solve the case of the murders of the four American church women, three Maryknoll nuns and one lay sister who had been murdered in El Salvador in 1981.” I of course have never been a police officer, a detective. I was not even a lawyer. However, what the ambassador says, the ambassador gets, and I spent about two months walking through every dirty dark street in the city of San Salvador talking to every thug I could find to get a list of suspects.

I finally recruited a young man who was in the National Guard of El Salvador who agreed to be wired with—wait for it—a Walkman. For those of you under the age of 40, a Walkman was the height of technology in the 1980s. It's a portable cassette tape player, but it also had a record function. So the lieutenant went out, he invited the suspected sergeant to go drinking with him, and he came back the next day with a confession and the names of everyone who participated in the murder. That was pretty cool. I felt pretty good about it. I was 28 years old by that particular point in time, and I thought, “Hey, this career isn't so bad after all.”

Or I could have told you about 2008, 26 years later, when I was the ambassador to Columbia; my problem there was in fact not people who had been murdered, but people who were in fact being held prisoner by the Colombian guerillas, the [Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia.]

There were three U.S. government contractors who had been held for five and a half years in the jungle, and we could not find them, far less rescue them. In the course of those five and a half years, we came up with a surprisingly brilliant plan. The first part of it was to use electronic communications equipment to intervene in the guerillas’ communication system, and then begin to issue orders over the radio to the field commanders to move all of their hostages to a designated location. We then created a fictitious NGO on the then fairly new Internet, and we gave the fake NGO a website. We had a bunch of names of people that were in the NGO, and in fact we then staffed up seven officers of the Colombian Army, as well as four of two helicopter pilots and two engineers who had become the NGO, that flew to the guerilla camp and rescued not just our three Americans, but a French woman hostage, and 11 Colombians for a total of 15, allowing me to say, as I say again right now, “The coolest deception operation perhaps in the history of mankind since Ulysses brought the Trojan horse into the city of Troy.” Is that cool? Yes, of course. It's cool.

But then I realized, hey, it sounds a little bit self-serving. It sounds a little bit self-adulatory. Maybe that's not a good way to proceed either. So I concluded, finally, what I will do is talk to you all, and by you all, I mean the students of St. Andrew’s. Everyone else is welcome to listen, but I will be speaking to the students now and will offer the lessons that I believe either one of those kind of dialogue lines might have offered us.

In the words of the great American poet Bob Dylan, ladies and gentlemen, the times, they are a changin’. And my stories, which would've gone from 1970, when we moved cars around in the middle of the night; to 1982 ,when we used a Walkman to solve murder cases; to 2008, when we had a much more sophisticated satellite communication system and phony organizations on the Internet; to 2025 ,and Lord knows what you all are doing these days.

The point is the world is actually moving fairly briskly around us. And in particular, Class of 2026, in six short months, you are going to be marching out there certified as educated young adults to begin to operate in that funky new world. And I will tell you ladies and gents, here in the United States and, quite frankly through much of the rest of the world, this is a more complicated world than I have ever seen before—and I've been around for a fairly long time, if you haven't sensed it already. I have vague memories as a boy of Lyndon Johnson running his mushroom cloud advertisement that torpedoed the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater in 1964. Or Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon and his dirty tricks, which basically won him the presidency against both Hubert Humphrey in ’68 and McGovern in ’72.

I was in the State Department when Ronald Reagan won the 1980 election and when his people, the Reagan oughts, came to the State Department. I said, “This is the most hostile takeover of the U.S. government that I have ever seen in my life and suspect I ever will see.” And that was true until last January, when we're actually seeing it come from the other side. So ladies and gentlemen, when I say I don't think I have seen the nation as divided, as tribal, as uncompromising, as suspicious of its institutions as “us versus them” as I see it right now, you ought to be a little bit worried. But I have good news, and it is this, St. Andreans: you are going to be better prepared for this world than the overwhelming majority of your counterparts, your friends, those who have gone through the educational process in a different way or a different place.

And it's not just because of the classes that you attend and the courses that you take, although they are all exceptionally important. It is because you are living, in essence, in a microcosm here in St. Andrew's of that outside world. Hundreds of people who are not all the same people, different people, different backgrounds, different histories, different philosophies, different approaches to life. They're all right here. And as you learn to deal with the annoying guy two rooms down who won't shut up and is just a genuine pain in the ear, you are actually learning a lesson. That opinionated girl who just won't stop offering her opinions on your athletic team is exceptionally annoying perhaps until you discover she has a 125-mile-an-hour blast of the ball into the net at which point you conclude, well, maybe I'll try to find a way to work with her. The person who tells off-color or nasty jokes, you've got to figure out how to deal with that sort of person here at a point where you've got some flexibility in terms of how you deal with other people.

At the end of the day, ladies and gentlemen, as you deal with these issues, problems, and people at St. Andrew's, you're learning to deal with life. Once you leave St. Andrew's, you will of course depart this institution as well-educated scholars, but you will also discover that you're better-prepared for life than you perhaps thought you would be. And let me tell you a secret, that is the real strength of St. Andrew’s yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

At some point, I guarantee you'll all hear this from the head of school between now and graduation: “I’m proud of you,” she will say. And may I suggest to you two things: One, it will be true. She will be proud of you. And even more important, she will be proud of how you have learned the lessons of life at St. Andrew's. So don't just make the head of school proud. Make us all proud. Good luck, Godspeed, and at the most difficult times imaginable, please always remember the words of the great American philosopher, Yogi Berra: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”