The Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical Project

Therese Strohmer:

This is Therese Strohmer, today is October 14th, 2010. I’m in High Point, North Carolina with Maria Felger Wayne. This is an oral history interview for the Women’s Veterans Historical Project at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Maria, why don’t you go ahead and say how you would like your name on your collection?

Maria Wayne:

Maria Felger Wayne.

TS:

Okay, great, let’s check that out. [recording paused] Well, Maria, thank you very much for letting me come and visit you today. Why don’t you start out by telling me when and where you were born?

MW:

I was born in Van Wert, Ohio in 1964.

TS:

And what kind of town is Van—Van Wert?

MW:

Very small town. It’s the type of community where there’s a lot of factories, and a lot of people seem to grow up and work at the factories or possibly maybe go off into the military.

TS:

Whereabouts in Ohio is that? I’m not familiar with that area.

MW:

Well, it almost sits on the border. It’s a northwestern part, almost sits on the border close to Fort Wayne, Indiana.

TS:

Oh, okay.

MW:

Also close to Lima, Ohio.

TS:

Okay, I see. I’m trying to picture, you know, with Michigan, I always try to picture that in my head.

MW:

Right.

TS:

What—do you have any brothers or sisters?

MW:

Come from a family of seven, and I’m the youngest in the family. My dad was a truck driver and my mom worked at a factory.

TS:

Oh, what kind of factory did she work in?

MW:

It was called Federal Mogul, which—I’m not sure that even exists anymore, but what they actually manufactured were the seals that go onto truck tires, and when I was in the military, we even used those same seals that came out of her—her factory.

TS:

Is that right?

MW:

Military was one of the biggest buyers, yes, exactly, yeah.

TS:

Now, you were probably one of the few people that recognized that, right?

MW:

Exactly, right, yeah.

TS:

That’s interesting. And so your dad was a truck driver, so was he coming and going all the time, or?

MW:

He was a long-haul truck driver, so he was gone, generally, for a good three to seven days a week, and he had to work hard to support seven kids.

TS:

Oh yeah, yeah.

MW:

Neither he or my mom graduated from high school, he quit high school when he was in the ninth grade, and my mom did as well. She had a younger brother and sister to take care of, because her mom had passed away.

TS:

Oh, I see, okay.

MW:

So they were very hard workers, and they had a lot of children, but they—they knew it was their responsibility to support them.

TS:

Well, tell me a little bit about growing up then, in this small town, being the youngest of seven kids. What—how did—what were the others, you had brothers and sisters, or what?

MW:

It was challenging, because I had three sisters and three brothers. My mom and dad had a boy first, boy-girl, boy-girl, boy-girl, every year in a row. As a matter of fact, two of them are the same age for three weeks, that’s how closely they had them together, and then four years later, they had me. What was interesting about it is that all of my sisters were very smart, straight-A students, and our whole family—they were very athletic or very musically inclined. So I had every teacher that my brothers and sisters had, so the first thing they would say, the first day of school every year, was “Oh, you’re Stephanie’s sister, you’re just going to be a joy, oh, I bet you’re going to get straight As.” So—I had these expectations that I had to live up to, and I didn’t always do that. [laughs]

TS:

I understand. I actually come from a family of seven, too, although I’m not the youngest.

MW:

Ah.

TS:

So—my brother Patrick is.

MW:

But they did set—for the most part, they set good examples for me, and I—by their behavior, I knew what was pleasing to my mom and to my dad, and I never wanted to disappoint them.

TS:

Ah. Well, then—so what kind of things did you do as a kid growing up in this small town?

MW:

Well, we lived on a farm, so I was quite the tomboy, wore overalls a lot. My brothers, like I said, they were very athletic, they were wrestlers, they were state wrestlers, very good. So I hung out with them a lot, mowed yards with them, cleaned windows with them. They always had small—small jobs to do. I liked hanging out with them better than I liked hanging out with my sisters, actually.

TS:

Why is that?

MW:

They were fun! They did stuff. [laughter]

TS:

What were your sisters doing?

MW:

There was always a competition with something, you know. How many push-ups can you do or, you know, can you climb up on this, or who can jump the furthest down off of something. And my sisters were more into—I don’t know, make-up and pretty and—stuff like that, that I really didn’t care a whole lot about. [laughs]

TS:

Wasn’t as interesting.

MW:

Right, exactly. And also, I—I liked hanging around with my dad. When he was gone, I would feed the animals. I had no problems getting in with the pigs or with the cows and just doing what needed to be done. I enjoyed it.

TS:

So what kind of farm was it, then?

MW:

Well, it was a—we had crops, which we would rotate every year. Soybeans, corn, that’s pretty prevalent up in the Midwest. And then we also had cows, pigs, chickens, sheep, goats—and we would normally have a good thirty, forty pigs at a time, and the same thing with the cows. It wasn’t a huge farm, it was only about—I think about forty acres or so. But that’s also how, you know, my family made money.

TS:

Well, yeah, I mean, with your dad and your mom both working and having a farm and seven kids.

MW:

Uh-huh. They were expensive.

TS:

Did you do anything like 4-H, or—

MW:

No, I didn’t actually. I did not do the 4-H, that didn’t—I was always in sports.

TS:

Oh, okay.

MW:

So I was a—a gymnast, and I played the piano, and did well at both of them, and when I got into what was called junior high back then, I decided to get into diving. One meter and three meter springboard diving, and really took off well with that, and that—sports pretty much occupied my time.

TS:

Oh, neat. So let’s talk about school, then, a little bit. What—where did you go to school at?

MW:

Van Wert—well, actually, this is interesting, I went to Anthony Wayne Elementary School. My husband’s name is Anthony Wayne, I don’t know if you caught that.

TS:

Oh yeah, that’s right, okay.

MW:

And then it was Van Wert Junior—or, Van Wert Junior High School and then Van Wert High School.

TS:

Okay.

MW:

There was only one middle school and one high school—

TS:

Right, in the area.

MW:

Right.

TS:

So did you have—did you like school?

MW:

Oh, I did. I liked school a lot, I liked the teachers, I liked the social part of it, I liked school, I enjoyed it. I was one of those types where I felt just fine getting up and going to school every morning.

TS:

Did you have any particular teacher that, you know, stood out to you that you remember?

MW:

One, my English high school teacher, her name was Mrs. Holt. Amazing woman, just—the way she touched people, she could bring out the best in anyone, I think. And people—you know, the kids looked forward to going to her class every day.

TS:

Yeah. Is she one of the ones who said “Oh, you know, your sister so-and-so”? You know? “You’re the youngest of that family, you’re going to be just fine.”?

MW:

Well, actually, she had not taught them, so she did not know—maybe that’s why I liked her so much. [laughs]

TS:

There you go. I see, might be. So you didn’t have that background baggage kind of stuff.

MW:

No, I guess—no, not at that point, I didn’t.

TS:

Well, that’s interesting. Did you have a favorite class or subject that you enjoyed?

MW:

I liked English. Always enjoyed the English language. As a matter of fact, my—I had a teacher my eighth grade year who corrected me one time when I was giving an answer in class. And I guess rather than being upset about that, I understood that she was trying to teach me proper grammar, and I guess coming from the family that I came from, proper grammar wasn’t always used, [laughs] and I really didn’t know any differently, so it—I’m glad that she did that, though, because it really helped me a lot, it helped me, you know, improve my grades, and it helped me do some things in life that maybe I wouldn’t have been able to. She just had a—she had an impact on me.

TS:

That’s really neat. Now, when did you get involved in gymnastics, then?

MW:

Oh, when I was very little. I don’t know if you remember Olga Korbut?

TS:

Oh, yeah.

MW:

She was a Russian gymnast—

TS:

--seventy-two.

MW:

Seventy-two, absolutely. I had started in gymnastics prior to that, but I wanted to be just like her, when I saw her, and I just thought she was the greatest, and I would put posters of her up in my bedroom, and my dad even built me a floor balance beam, so I could practice my walkovers and back handsprings on there, and—it was pretty neat, I thought I had a pretty valuable commodity, having a balance beam at my home.

TS:

Don’t think many young girls probably at that time did.

MW:

No, he had to sand it and sand it and sand it to make sure my hands wouldn’t get splinters on it.

TS:

Wow. Well, how’d you do in gymnastics, then?

MW:

I did well, and then I competed in high school, on the high school team, and like I said, I enjoyed it well enough, but I went into the diving and I excelled even further, that I got a diving scholarship for college.

TS:

Oh, wow! Well, your gymnastics probably was real useful for diving—

MW:

It was. A natural transition, I mean, it was so—another girl who was a diver said “Hey, why don’t you come, you know, to the—to the pool,” because I swam, and I also taught swim lessons and lifeguarded, that’s how I made money during the summer. She said “Well, why don’t you come and try out for the diving team, or just come see what it’s about.” And, you know, because I would flip around, but I had no training off the diving board, and I did, and it just came naturally, and I liked it a lot, it was fun.

TS:

That’s really cool. Now, did you have any kind of social activities that you did?

MW:

Yes. I participated in a lot of things. Christianship of Fellow Athletes [Fellowship of Christian Athletes?], gosh, what else did I do? I think I participated in the Catholic youth group and the Methodist youth group [laughing], I cheerleaded[sic]—

TS:

You were very busy.

MW:

I was busy, I kept myself busy, and I always had some type of part-time job, during the winter I would normally work at the YMCA or the YWCA. I taught—like I said, I taught the swimming classes or I lifeguarded, but I also taught private lessons for gymnastics and diving. People like my dentist, he had a little boy, his name was Danny, he was seven years old. He wanted to do gymnastics, so I would go to his house, twice a week, I’d ride my bike. That’s the only transportation I had, was my bike. My parents didn’t take us everywhere, that’s not how it was done back then, plus they were working. I’d ride my bike over to his house, and I would give him probably like a half hour on the diving board, they had a pool in their yard, and then we’d go inside and I’d give him a half hour of gymnastic lessons, and that’s how I made money. But it was also fun, I really enjoyed it a lot.

TS:

Yeah, I’m thinking, now it explains why you might have a larger size pool back here.

MW:

I grew up dreaming of having one.

TS:

[laughs] It’s beautiful. So when—did you have any particular ideas of what you wanted to do with your education or what your expectations were once you got through school?

MW:

Well, it seems that my parents, you know, both had not completed high school and they were very hard workers, they pretty much told us “We want you to go to college, but you need to excel educationally, scholastically, and you need to excel athletically, you know, those are your options for going to college, you’re going to have to try to figure this out and do it on your own, because we’re not going to be able to—to pay for all of it, or even pay for much of it.”

TS:

And you were the last in the line of them.

MW:

And I was the last one. But my oldest sister, her name was Stephanie, she went off to college when I was in the third grade, and she got a scholarship called the Walter Reed Nursing Army Scholarship, which was, back then, one of the most prestigious scholarships that you could—that you could get. She actually had to have a Congressional letter written and we had some Congresspeople come to our home, to visit with her. So it was pretty much like an appointment to West Point, although they didn’t have West Point at that time.

TS:

What years would that have been?

MW:

That would have been around 1972 or 1973.

TS:

Oh, okay, interesting.

MW:

And she was—she pretty much was like my mom, because my mom worked, and Stephanie took care of us, and—just an angel, just an angelic type of person. She was a very fair person, I guess maybe because she was the second oldest in the family, and having the responsibilities of taking care of us—she was the nice sister, the pleasant sister, the one that always wanted harmony.

TS:

The oldest girl?

MW:

But she—yeah. She was very smart, and she was the type that got all the academic awards at school, the Spanish award, you know, the Summa Cum Laude award, and when she decided she wanted to be a nurse in the army, that’s when I said “I want to be an officer in the army.” And of course—

TS:

You’re in third grade—

MW:

I was in the third grade! And a lot of my family members sort of laughed about it. “Oh, you’re the baby, you’re gonna change your mind, that’s not for you, you’re a little gymnast, I can’t see you wearing an army uniform.” But she went on, you know, and she got her commission, and I never—I never lost sight of that. I grew up knowing that that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to be like her.

TS:

How interesting! How long did your sister serve in the army, then?

MW:

Approximately about eight years, I would say.

TS:

Yeah. Where does she live now?

MW:

Well, actually she passed away.

TS:

Oh, I’m sorry.

MW:

That’s okay. She passed away from Crohn’s Disease almost seventeen years ago, and she had been getting ill, though, actually while she was in the army and that was one of the reasons that she got out.

TS:

That she got out.

MW:

But she got out as a captain, and—

TS:

Is that right?

MW:

Yeah.

TS:

So you both achieved the same rank?

MW:

Yes, exactly. And she was very proud of me, when I, you know, became an officer. She was—she was always a strong supporter of everything I did.

TS:

Yeah, I bet she was.

MW:

And it was nice to talk to her to get insight, especially, you know, back then there weren’t a lot of females in the military, or female officers, and certainly my peers—my officer peers, were rarely females. So it was nice to have a sister who I could call and talk to and, you know, who could give me some insight into some things as they came up.

TS:

Yeah, absolutely, and that was about a ten-year difference between you, approximately?

MW:

Yes, yeah, you’re right.

TS:

Yeah, because ’72, then you went in ‘85ish, right? So—

MW:

Right, and I also had another sister who was in the army.

TS:

Oh, you did?

MW:

Right. Now, she went in, enlisted right after high school, and she did retire as a master sergeant.

TS:

Is that right?

MW:

Yes.

TS:

And what’s her name?

MW:

Josephine. We call her Joey, she was named after my mom, my mother’s name was Josephine. Of course, we had to tease her with that name when she was little, because in Spanish it’s called “Hosephina”, and we would call her “Horse” and she did not like that.

TS:

She did not like that, I’m sure.

MW:

No, no, no, she did not like that. And I had two brothers who were in the army as well.

TS:

Oh, okay. And what are their names and where did they—

MW:

Timothy served—he went in after high school, and Richard, my oldest brother, he went in probably about two or three years after he graduated from high school. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do in life, so it took him a little extra time to decide. And he went to Fort Hood, Texas, and he—he only did four years. And the same as my brother Tim, he did four years, and then he got out.

TS:

So, you have a history of your siblings, do you have any other history with family being in the military?

MW:

My dad served in the Korean War, and I was very proud of him.

TS:

And what service was he in?

MW:

He was in the air force, and he was an aircraft mechanic, and it’s funny because when I was real little, I used to always want a monkey. My dad had pictures of when he was over in Korea holding a little monkey, and I wanted a monkey for a pet so badly and I just don’t know why my parents would never get me one. [laughter]

TS:

You had that picture and that was your goal, huh?

MW:

Yes, it was. Just never happened.

TS:

Well, that’s really neat.

MW:

But my sister Stephanie, she probably was my biggest inspiration for having that goal to begin with, and—you know, even wanting to be pleasing to her, because like I said, she was like a mom to me.

TS:

Well, do you mind if I ask you a few questions about Stephanie?

MW:

No, no!

TS:

Because of the time she was in, was she the first in your family to go and be—

MW:

Yes.

TS:

Besides your father.

MW:

Right, she was the first child to go in.

TS:

She was the first to go in the military.

MW:

Yes.

TS:

Did she tell you what it was like at all, like if she had any—any—you know, as a woman in the 19—early 1970s, in the military, in the army, might have been a lot different from ’85. Do you remember anything about that?

MW:

Well, I’ll say this. Since she was in the medical field, she had it a lot easier—

TS:

Because she was a nurse, right?

MW:

Yes. For instance, she never even had to qualify with her M16 or with her 9 millimeter handgun. Because back then—now, I can’t speak for all the medical units, but the ones that she was in, it just wasn’t important to them. They mainly worked treating—you know, in triage, they mainly worked treating soldiers or she worked at a hospital, and she even never had to wear her combat boots. As a matter of fact, I used to wear her boots. She sent her boots to me, all her leftover ones that she had never used—

TS:

Oh, did she?

MW:

—you know, and she was issued them when she was in the army. She sent them to me. So she had it a little bit easier, so some of those things were hard to compare, but as far as—

TS:

Physically, you mean.

MW:

Yeah. But—yeah, exactly. But as far as it still being predominated by males, that sort—it was sort of equal, you know, for that, so that, again, was an area that she could talk to me about.

TS:

Yeah. What kind of things would she give you advice on?

MW:

I guess the professionalism, especially being a female, you—you have to watch how you conduct yourself, because sometimes the standard might be a little bit higher. You know, a male might be able to say something and no one bats an eye about it, but if a female says something in the same way, they may think that you’re being extremely bossy. So those type of things.

TS:

So how to like be able to cope with that and maybe—she was kind of a mentor, then—

MW:

Yes, exactly.

TS:

—to you, in some ways, as to how to negotiate the—

MW:

Right.

TS:

—the little different—

MW:

And even in my private life, she was a mentor. I mean, she just was. I mean, I looked for—I looked to her for a lot of support, whether it was personally or professionally. Or being a mom, she was a great mom.

TS:

Well, that’s terrific. Well, did you, then, when you—well, you would have been the last, so your brothers would have also been in before you.

MW:

Right.

TS:

Did they give you any advice, too?

MW:

I’d have to be honest and say no, they didn’t. [laughter] Maybe my one brother, I didn’t want his advice.

TS:

Okay.

MW:

He may not have behaved himself really well while he was in the military, so I’ll just leave that at that.

TS:

Did—and—well, you haven’t really gotten into the reasons why you went in, but—and so maybe we’ll do that now. So you were in—you graduated from high school, what did you do after high school?

MW:

Went to Ball State [University].

TS:

Okay.

MW:

And like I said, I was on the diving team, and—

TS:

So you had a scholarship.

MW:

Right, exactly. And really enjoyed college, I thought, oh my goodness, I can’t believe this is so great. You know, here I grew up in this small town and—it was a total different atmosphere.

TS:

What was it that was different?

MW:

Oh, I guess the amount of people. I think back then there were about twenty, twenty-five thousand students and Van Wert didn’t have that many people in it, if I remember right. [Van Wert, Ohio had a population of approximately 11,000 people in 1980] So that was something that was different, and of course, the other thing was the freedom that you had. You know, of course you weren’t around your parents. But knowing that I wanted to be an officer in the military, there were certain things that I knew I had to stay away from, maybe that other college kids might experiment with or they might be involved with. I’m not saying I was a perfect angel, but I also had a goal that I wanted to reach.

TS:

Right.

MW:

And I knew that I had to do certain things to achieve that.

TS:

What kind of things did you have to do, do you think?

MW:

Well, get good grades, for one. Be disciplined, that was one of the biggest things right there. There were a lot of kids who might want to do something on a weeknight rather than do their research papers or whatever was due, and I knew that I had to actually get my things done, and as a matter of fact, one of the other ways that I earned some money in college—I would type up people’s research papers. Charge them a certain amount for that, because there were always those kids that would put it off to the very last night. And then I would also correct papers, you know, go through and proofread and correct the grammatical errors, so that also added on a little bit.

TS:

And so this is like really before word processors were—

MW:

Exactly. And I had a typewriter, and I can’t even remember where I got the typewriter—it may have been a gift in high school, but it was an electric typewriter.

TS:

Right.

MW:

But that was back when you had to use White-Out and—

TS:

The little—

MW:

Yeah, or the little white strips, put those in. [laughter] But for some reason, I never minded. I always pretty much knew when someone’s research paper was—I knew when their paper was due, and they didn’t know when it was due.

TS:

So you could set your schedule.

MW:

So I could plan my schedule knowing that I would be up typing their paper, you know, at twelve o’clock in the morning. [chuckles]

TS:

Oh wow, wow. Well, good that you got paid for it, too.

MW:

Right, exactly.

TS:

So would you say that you were pretty disciplined then even as a child growing up then, or did you—

MW:

Well, I might say that. Now, some of my brothers and sisters might say something other than that. [laughing]

TS:

Well, it’s relative to their life.

MW:

As they saw me as the baby and as being spoiled and—you know, truthfully, I wasn’t spoiled with anything monetarily. You know, flat out was not, because our family just did not have the money. But maybe as I was growing up, my parents had already seen a few things, you know, with the other kids, so maybe they weren’t as tough on me as they were my brothers and sisters, and sometimes older siblings can see that as the younger one being spoiled. [laughter]

TS:

Okay, that makes sense. All right, so you’re—you have the scholarship for diving, you’re going to Ball State, and you have this goal of becoming an army—is it army officer, specifically?

MW:

Right.

TS:

Because of your sister, Stephanie.

MW:

Right.

TS:

So what are you thinking you need to do to get to achieve that?

MW:

Well, actually, my second year on the diving team, I had an accident. I hit my head on the board.

TS:

Ouch!

MW:

And it really did not hurt me, but it hurt me psychologically. I started—I was getting scared, and then I would be very apprehensive when I had to get on the board and do anything backward. And it really played with my mind. I ended up giving up my scholarship and quitting the diving team, and at that point I decided, oh my goodness, how am I going to pay for college? I enlisted in the army, went to basic training, went to AIT [Advanced Individual Training], and had also, in the meantime, gotten some letters from our ROTC department saying “Hey, you know, your GPA is good and it qualifies you for a scholarship, you know, are you interested?” And I was very interested, I thought “Wow, I can still achieve my goal but, you know, the military can pay for my college.”

TS:

So did you drop out of college for that period that you enlisted, then?

MW:

Well, it actually all fell during the summertime, right when college ended, I went to—you know, for the year, I went to my basic training and I went to AIT, Advanced Individual Training, which was in Fort Eustis, Virginia, and it was for transportation, too. So it all fell during the summer months.

TS:

But were you expecting that you weren’t going to go back to college?

MW:

Yes, exactly. Right.

TS:

I see. And then you got those letters and everything kind of turned out, and so they offered you this ROTC scholarship.

MW:

Absolutely, right. And I think the ROTC is one of the best things that happened to me, I think, as a college-age student. I had a very good cadre, and one of them—his name was Major Kelly, he just really stuck out to me. He and I—at that point, I had started running, long-distance, and really enjoyed it, and I don’t know if he just took to me, but for some reason, he was able to bring out the best in me. And probably—maybe build me up in some areas where I had some weaknesses, you know, even psychologically, or even emotionally. And the whole cadre was good at doing that, they—you know, it’s amazing how sometimes certain people can have an impact on your life when you’re twenty years old. And you may not realize it at that time, but you certainly realize it years afterward.

TS:

Right, when you look back and reflect on it. Well, so you’re—so you didn’t have to go into the army as an enlisted, you went back to Ball State?

MW:

Right, right. And became a cadet at that time.

TS:

What was your major, then?

MW:

Business administration and finance.

TS:

Okay. So you had another two years to go?

MW:

Yes.

TS:

Okay. Now what did your—even though you have said that since you were in third grade that you wanted to be a military—army officer.

MW:

Yes.

TS:

How did your family receive that?

MW:

Oh, they thought it was great. But to be honest, I don’t think they thought that I could achieve that.

TS:

Really?

MW:

Yes.

TS:

Why not?

MW:

I guess because I was the youngest one in the family and they just really thought I was going to change my mind. I also—I was very interested in the business world, and I guess they just thought that I was going to go off to college and get a job with some major corporation and just put the army aside and not even think twice about it anymore. But it just always intrigued me, I mean, it was just so interesting and I thought it was neat that my—you know, my sister, she was very much a lady, but she was in the military and did some neat things. And I thought “Wow, I’d love to be airborne, maybe jump out of planes, that would be really neat,” you know, because I liked—I was a gymnast, I was used to doing things that could be a little daredevilish, I guess, you know, for some people, and it didn’t scare me. So I don’t know, I just thought it was interesting, and you could travel as well, and just get to do things that you wouldn’t otherwise get that opportunity, in the civilian life.

TS:

Is it—so you were kind of weighing it, what can I do in the army, what can I do in the civilian life—

MW:

Exactly.

TS:

And what gives me opportunities, and—

MW:

Right, and as a matter of fact, that was even important when it came time to pick my branch when I was graduating from college and I was going to go off to Officer Training School. You have to select a branch, actually, you get to select—back then, you had ten branches, and you could put in order like your top five, depending upon how well you did as a cadet and when you went to advanced camp and got training and evaluated—if you did really well, you’d get your first choice.

My dad and I had some good conversations, and he said, “Whatever you choose, make sure you can do it in the outside world in case you get out.”

And I said “But Dad, I don’t plan on getting out of the army.”

He said “Well, you may not plan on it, but sometimes things in life happen.”

And I was like “No, Dad, I’m going to retire from the military.”

He said “Okay.”

I said “I want to be a helicopter pilot, I want to—” I can’t even think of the name right now. It’s a medevac helicopter, I think it’s a 68—I can’t think of the name, we’ll think of it—we’ll think of it later. But that’s what I wanted to do, because I thought, wow, that sounds really prestigious. I’ll be a helicopter pilot and life will be great.

But he said “But what can you do with that once you get out?”

And I said [makes noise] “Maybe work along the border.”

He said “Well, where else?”

I said “I don’t know.”

He said “Well, that’s what I mean.” He said—oh, it’s a Blackhawk helicopter.

TS:       Oh, Blackhawk, okay.

MW:

Yes, exactly. He said “You need to do something that you can use once you get out of the military.” And we started talking about the different branches and I was interested in the transportation, because my dad was a truck driver. He always said “I don’t ever want you to marry a truck driver, but you can marry the owner of the trucking company.” [laughter] And so anyway, it was between that and quartermaster, and the transportation—I guess it intrigued me because my dad was a truck driver, and I thought it’d be interesting, and I figured hey, if I got out, maybe I could work at a trucking company in operations or something along that line, so that’s why I picked that.

TS:

Okay, so you did this pragmatic choice that your dad was kind of pushing you toward.

MW:

Exactly.

TS:

Okay. All right, so when you finished college, and now you are—did you get sworn in then?

MW:

I did, yes.

TS:

Or commissioned, I guess.

MW:

Right.

TS:

So—because you were already—because you had already enlisted, so.

MW:

Right.

TS:

What happened next?

MW:

Well, I got commissioned, and—well, let me backtrack just a little bit.

TS:

Oh, sure.

MW:

My senior year in high—in college, I got married.

TS:

Oh, okay!

MW:

And also had a child. And I did consider, at one point, not just giving up my commission that was about to happen in about six or eight months, but I considered even maybe quitting college. And of course my dad—[laughs] over the phone, I think I could feel his foot.

He pretty much said “You know, if you quit this now, you probably will never go back, and if you think life is hard right now, just wait ‘til your child is five or ten or fifteen,” he said “You know, you are so close to getting—reaching your dream,” and maybe those aren’t the exact words that he used, but that’s what he was telling me. He pretty much was saying “You know, it’s not that difficult right now. Finish what you started, you will be pleased with yourself, you will be happy. Keep your goal in mind.” And I did, so I—it actually took me five years to graduate from college, which is fine. You know, because I had my child and I did lessen my credit load, I think, you know, rather than taking fifteen or seventeen hours like I would normally do, I took, I think, twelve hours.

TS:

[chuckles] Still had a [unclear]

MW:

[laughs] Yeah, I still had a load. But anyway, so when I got commissioned, I still had another semester of college to complete, and as a matter of fact, my officers training school at Fort Eustis was set for October of that year, and my professors were very, very kind. They allowed me to take my—all of my finals early, several weeks early, and—you know, so I could complete my courses, then I left for my officers’ training school.

TS:

Well, that was really nice.

MW:

It was nice of them to do, and I had to work very hard and study—I mean, because they, at the beginning of the semester, I went to them and I asked them. The dean of students said, you know, I’ll allow you to do this if your professors agree to it. So I went and I asked them and they gave me a schedule and a syllabus as to what needed to be done by what time and it—pretty much it was almost double the work, I guess, because I had to complete in half the time what most people got to complete in a whole semester. But that was what it was, and I’m just glad that they—that they allowed me to do that. That was a nice favor to me.

TS:

Yeah, that’s terrific. Now, did you—was your husband in the military, or how—

MW:

He was.

TS:

At the time you met him?

MW:

Yes, yes, he was, and as a matter of fact, when I went to my officer’s training school, he was at his officer’s training school, down at Fort McClellan, Alabama. He was an MP [military police] officer. And my daughter wasn’t able to be with me during that time, she was only a year and a half old. So that was pretty hard doing that, and I got to see her a few times during those six months, but that was still—that was difficult.

TS:

Yeah.

MW:

But that’s—you know, when you raise your right hand and you take an oath, those are some of the things that you have to do.

TS:

So did you both—did you both stay in the military?

MW:

No, actually, he got out within a few years and I stayed in for a while longer, but he and I ended up getting divorced.

TS:

Okay. So you had—but for a little while, you were both having—he’s—was he kind of a dependent, then, or had he gotten out before then?

MW:

Yes, he became my dependent at one time.

TS:

How was that, did that—was that difficult at all for him, or you, or anything?

MW:

Well, I still remember his Social Security number. [laughter] Military, you have to memorize—well, you should memorize every one of your—you know, all of your dependents’ Social Security numbers. So that’s just one thing that just never goes away, things that you have to remember, you know, about your spouses or your dependants, But it—you know, it was interesting, because after I finished my officers training school, I went to Fort Benning [Georgia] for Airborne School, and that was a three week course. So I still—you know, my daughter still wasn’t with me at that time, and when I got to—my first duty station was Fort Ord [California], and during this time with our country, we were providing some support to Panama, in what we called Operation Nimrod Dancer. We were sending down troops and as a matter of fact, I was a brand new second lieutenant, fresh out of officers training school, fresh out of Airborne School, and they said “We need you go to go Panama.”

 

TS:

What year would this have been?

MW:

This was 1988, if I remember correctly. And I really knew nothing about anything. [laughter]

TS:

How old were you?

MW:

I was twenty-three years old. And all of a sudden, I was in charge of all of these soldiers, as a platoon leader, and—and then I was going to be sent to Panama, and I thought to myself “My goodness, how am I going to learn anything?” And this was again, one of those times where I called my sister. “I have to do this, this, and this, and I don’t know anything about this, this, and this,” and I said “I could pretend, and I’m good at, you know, acting like I know.”

But she said “Well, what about your platoon sergeant?” And at that point, I hadn’t even met him yet. She said “Well, you need to listen to your platoon sergeant, he’s probably been in the military for a good fifteen years, he probably could teach you a thing or two.” And I had heard about my platoon sergeant, I was a little bit scared about him, to be honest, and I hadn’t even met him, but I knew he had a very, very strong personality, and I sort of have a strong personality as well. But when we met each other, I mean, he pretty much told me “Ma’am, you know, keep me in your back pocket and you will do very well,” And he and I just had a wonderful relationship. He was a wonderful man who knew a lot, and knew a lot about a lot of things, not just the military, but knew a lot about life in general. Always good for advice, but he was right, he taught me a lot of things that as a second lieutenant, if you’re willing to listen, you can learn. But your ears have to be open, that’s the biggest thing right there. Because you’re in charge of them, but yet you really don’t have the experience in the military to make all the decisions on your own, but yet you can act like you’re taking over a decision that they suggest to you. You can’t lose your command, you can’t lose your leadership authority, so it’s sort of a fine line.

TS:

Do you have like any example that you can use to explain something—a way that he was helping you in this period, a specific example?

MW:

Sure. We had to do what’s called PMCS, Preventative Maintenance and Checks System, on our trucks, and if I remember correctly, we probably had over fifty trucks, which were five tons, and we also had several tractor trailers in our unit, six or ten, I can’t remember specifically. But every Thursday, we would have to do the PMCS. Well, at Officer Training School, for the transportation school, they really don’t teach you how to do that. They take you to the motor pool, and you stand there, you’re all standing there, pretty much at parade rest and watching while they’re doing it, but we never got to ask questions, you didn’t get to put your hands on it, and I’m the type—I’m a hands-on type of person. If I’m going to teach something, I want to know how to do it first.

So I told him, I said “You know, I’m supposed to be supervising this PMCS and checking off on it, but I don’t even know what I’m checking off on.”

So he said “Ma’am, I’ll tell you what. What I’ll do, we’ll go down to the motor pool, and I’m going to get one of the best soldiers to teach you how to do it. But what I want you to do is to go to him and tell him ‘Hey, I’ve heard a lot of good things about you. Why don’t you show me exactly what you did on your PMCS today?’” And so what I was doing, in effect, was having the soldier show me—and show off, sort of, for me, but I was learning at the same time.

TS:

Without saying “teach me”.

MW:

Exactly. And I mean, it was a good experience. And a lot of times, that’s how my platoon sergeant would teach me. And I caught on to that very well, that a lot of times, you just go up to soldiers, and a lot of these soldiers—great kids, really are great kids, they come from so many different types of backgrounds, but you can make a really good person and a really good soldier out of about anyone, I think. If you motivate them properly. And that’s sort of what it was all about, you motivate them, you praise them, you reward them, you correct them if needed, but if you praise them, they’ll show you anything. Or they’ll do anything for you. And that’s how I learned, a lot of times.

TS:

That’s terrific.

MW:

It was interesting, because I was their female officer, they called me their “ma’am”, and I had this name, Lieutenant Felger Carlton, which is sort of hard to say. They called me—behind my back, “Lieutenant Sunshine” and “the little general”.

TS:

[chuckles]

MW:

Or they’d refer to me, like I said, as their “ma’am”, because my name was so long. But they weren’t used to female officers, so in a lot of ways, not only was I their commanding officer, but I was also sort of a mom to them. I’d bake them chocolate chip cookies when it was their birthday. But they—I mean, they still knew who—you know, who was boss and who wasn’t. But they were very important to me, so I guess being a female, in ways I could probably give them a little bit of emotional support that perhaps they couldn’t get from—had they had a male officer. So that was unique, and they were good kids, they really were.

TS:

Well, I wanted to ask you, we kind of jumped ahead, but—the stories are really interesting. I would like to know what year—when you were in ROTC, did you wear a uniform?

MW:

Yes.

TS:

So what was it like when you finally got to put on your uniform that first time?

MW:

Well, let me say this. When I wore an ROTC uniform, sometimes I’d get teased and made fun of at college, because you have to wear them on certain days. I’d be walking along and people would say “Ooh, ROTC cad-idiot,” or something to that effect.

TS:

Cad-idiot?

MW:

Cad-idiot. It sounded like cadet. They’d call you cad-idiot.

TS:

Okay.

MW:

And I was actually very proud of what I was doing, and I don’t know, for some reason, maybe because I was the youngest out of seven kids and got so much teasing in—I got picked on endlessly when I was little. If I got teased when I was older, it just never bothered me, I could smile, wave, hey, how you doing. Didn’t bother me at all, but when I got to wear my uniform, my real uniform when I got commissioned, it was one of the proudest days in my life. And it still is to this day.

TS:

Who was there when you got commissioned?

MW:

Well, my in-laws were there, and as a matter of fact, my ex-father-in-law pinned one of my ranks on me, and he also commissioned me, because he was a former military officer as well. So that was nice, that was nice to have that. And my mom was there, my daughter was there. My dad wasn’t able to make it, unfortunately, and—since it was down here in North Carolina, because I had transferred colleges, my family members didn’t make it, because they were all still up in the Midwest, or—they’re sort of scattered around, actually, the country and I even have a brother in Canada. So only my mom was able to make it from my family, but the cadre members were there, the other officers and the NCOs who taught us as cadets, and it was a nice time. It was good.

TS:

So what did you think, when you had that uniform on for the first time?

MW:

I felt so proud. I just—it just really, you know, hit me and made me realize that you’re rewarded for hard work, and my dad, you know, who had told me “If you quit now, you may never come back,” it really sank in that day. And I thought to myself, well, gosh, that was actually easy, getting thorough that. [laughs]

TS:

As you look back, right?

MW:

Right.

TS:

Well, that’s terrific.

MW:

But it was pretty neat, and I was excited about getting my first real salute in my uniform. [laughs]

TS:

Oh, okay. Tell me about that. Well, do you remember it?

MW:

I do, it was one of our NCOs, and you know, he stood outside the door purposely, so that when the officers walked out, he’d have to salute us. And you know, I guess that was just something that they did to pump us up a little bit and make us feel good, and also get that first salute. So that was neat. His name was Sergeant First Class Fontaine, I remember him very well.

TS:

Now, did you—you said you went to Panama as one of your first, like assignments, right?

MW:

Yes.

TS:

But I want to ask you too, up to this point, you’ve been through basic training, you went through as enlisted.

MW:

Right.

TS:

You went through—

MW:

AIT.

TS:

AIT, you went through officers training.

MW:

Right.

TS:

And you did something else, you told me too.

MW:

Airborne School.

TS:

Airborne School. And you jumped out of—

MW:

Planes.

TS:

Planes. Helicopters, too, or just planes?

MW:

Well, jumped out of planes, that’s airborne, and then air assault is rappelling out of helicopters.

TS:

Okay. Did you do that too?

MW:

Not at that point.

TS:

But later.

MW:

Exactly.

TS:

Okay. Now, was any of this activity that you’ve done in the army, so far—anything particularly difficult, physically, mentally?

MW:

I don’t know that it was all that difficult. I was in very good physical condition from being an athlete, so when I went through basic training, that was interesting, and it was fun, because you have all these drill sergeants yelling at you all the time, and sometimes they make up the craziest things, because they’re just trying to get your attention, and you can’t sit there and cry. Some girls do, you know, I would imagine some of the boys, you know, will also cry. So you have to have some thick skin, and just sort of laugh about it inside, you can’t laugh about it on the outside—[laughs] but I know the very first day of my basic training, I got in trouble, I got yelled at, because we went into the mess hall to go eat, and when you went in, you had to shout out your Social Security number. Then you had to sign your name. Well, I signed my name, and I picked up what was available to sign my name. Which happened to be a pencil. That’s what was there.

Well, all of a sudden, I hear “Private Felger, who’s Private Felger?”

And I’m like “Here, drill sergeant!”

TS:

Uh-oh.

MW:

            “Whoever told you to sign your name in pencil?”

And I’m trying to say, well, that pencil was right—what was there.

“In the military you only use black ink, you never use anything else, where did you get that pencil!” As if I’d stuffed pencils in my uniform. The pencil was—I bet they put that pencil there.

TS:

[unclear] Yeah, sure.

MW:

Just to see—and that’s what I saw, and that’s what I picked up, and that’s what I signed with. And I thought, oh my goodness, everyone told me, don’t get yourself known the first day, and what have I done? [laughter]

TS:

Did that follow you around at all?

MW:

Oh, no, not really. I was able to shake that off. But they would tease me, because I had college, and so they would say “Ooh, where’s my college graduate?” And I wasn’t a college graduate at that point. Or they’d say “Ooh, where’s my college girl? Oh, where’s Miss Smarty? Come on, where’s Miss Smartypants?” So yeah, they had a name for about everyone. It didn’t matter what you had done in the past, they could find something from it to make fun of you about.

But it—I guess Airborne School, it wasn’t—I wouldn’t say it was hard, because again I felt like I was in really good physical condition, but I was one of the only females, again, in the class, and they made me what’s called a chalk commander, which means that I was in charge of probably thirty, forty other soldiers, and every day for inspection, I would have to make sure their boots were shined, their gear was on right, everything about them was up to par before Sergeant Airborne, that’s what they called the sergeants at Airborne School, before they came and did the inspection. And I was—that also meant I was first out of the plane on every single jump, which I loved. I was never nervous. The very first time that we went up to jump, Sergeant Airborne was hanging out the window, just, you know, just checking everything, he was looking back at me. He wanted me to be nervous so badly, I know he did. He kept smiling, and I would smile right back at him. I was not nervous in any way. Now, the second jump, the next day, I was a little scared, but that first jump, I was so excited, I just couldn’t wait to get out the door.

TS:

Too excited to be scared.

MW:

Yeah, too excited to be scared, and it’s funny, because after we all jumped, I saw some people—I don’t know how else to say it. They wet their pants, okay? [laughs] And they were men. And when we were riding on the aircraft, before we would jump, some people’s faces would start turning green, and they would get sick just from riding in the plane, so they were sick before they even jumped out. So it was fun, I don’t know, I guess I always tried to take on everything as a challenge and since my brothers were so competitive, I sort of was competitive too, so I took on everything as a competitive challenge.

TS:

[chuckles] Now, why were you more nervous on your second one?

MW:

I guess because I knew what to expect, that point.

TS:

Yeah. What was it that made you nervous about it?

MW:

Well, there were actually people who had broken their legs on the first jump.

TS:

On the first jump?

MW:

And that’s always going to happen at Airborne School, the biggest thing is they try to teach you to keep your feet and knees together as you’re going down and when you land, and you do what’s called a PLF [parachute landing fall], and you hit the five points of contact on your body, and you have to practice this for two weeks before they even let you jump out of a plane. And what they’re trying to do is instill, feet and knees together, feet and knees together. Everything you do—as a matter of fact, at Airborne School, if you have to get from point A to point B, you have to double-time all the time, or if you’re just moving, let’s say point A to point B is fifteen feet, you have to bunny hop to that, and what I mean by bunny hop—

TS:

Yes. We get a demonstration, all right.

MW:

You do like this. [sound of hopping] Feet and knees together, you’re not going to walk there, you’re going to bunny hop it. And the reason they make you do that is they’re trying to get you in that position all the time, so when you land, you’re landing like this, with your feet and knees together. Because if you land like this, you break something.

TS:

I see. So she’s showing me with her feet together and her feet apart.

MW:

Exactly. And—

TS:

Is this at Fort Bragg, or—

MW:

That’s at Fort Benning.

TS:

Fort Benning, okay.

MW:

Airborne School’s at Fort Benning. The infantry school. And several people had broken—when I say several, I mean maybe five, five—but five out of four hundred, I mean, that’s still five people. They broke their legs, and—so it really makes you think about what you’re doing, but if you just do what they’ve trained you to do, and don’t overthink it, I guess, you’ll be just fine.

TS:

Right. Now, how was it that you got selected for this school?

MW:

Well, you had to meet certain physical requirements, and I had gotten—back then, it was a three hundred on your PT [physical training] test, that was the highest that you could get. And it—actually, I never got anything under a three hundred the whole time that I was in the military.

TS:

Is that right?

MW:

Yeah, and I got an award at officer’s training school for getting the highest PT score in the class, and so I got selected because of that. And it was neat, because your soldiers, they can appreciate someone who has a little bit of toughness, and especially a female, because a lot of times as a female, you’re sort of looked at as being a little weak just because you’re a female, but arriving at your first duty station having the experience of being enlisted helped tremendously. I mean, I had already gone through basic training just like they did, so we had that in common. I knew what they went through, you know, I got it too. And going to Airborne School, they knew I had a little bit of toughness in me. So—

TS:

You had the wings.

MW:

And I had the wings.

TS:

That’s right.

MW:

And I also got my blood wings, as a matter of fact.

TS:

Now, what’s that?

MW:

Well, when you go to Airborne School, I’m not sure they can do it anymore, it’s probably against the law by now—

TS:

[laughs] Okay.

MW:

But when you get your wings, the commandant and the NCOs will come, and they pin it on you, they pin it right here on your shirt, and they’ll ask you “Do you want blood wings or—”

TS:

Oh, okay.

MW:

I can’t remember what the other word was, and I said “Blood wings”, and what they do, they stick it on you, then they punch you with the palm of their hand and it sticks on you, okay?

TS:

So you’ve got the pins going in you.

MW:

Exactly.

TS:

Right.

MW:

And I got the blood wings. To be honest, it really didn’t hurt, and I think maybe I only got a little hole in one part of my skin.

TS:

[chuckles]

MW:

But I had to get the blood wings, I was all hyped up, and—

TS:

You are very competitive.

MW:

Yeah, exactly. Hey, if other people were doing it, and they looked tough, I was going to have to do it, too.

TS:

[chuckles] Well, that’s terrific.

MW:

So, it was—I’m glad I was able to do that. And then, actually, while I was at Fort Ord, we would have, in our unit, a few slots for different schools, and one of them opened up for Air Assault School. And of course, everyone wanted me to go to Air Assault School.

TS:

Why?

MW:

I don’t know, they wanted their ma’am to wear the—[laughs] to wear those badges.

TS:

I see.

MW:

They just knew I’d graduate, and—so anyway, again, you have to meet a certain physical requirement for it, and it’s a—I think it’s a two-week course, if I remember correctly, it was a two-week course, and that is held at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, or Fort Ord. Back then, Fort Ord actually had the training for it, so I went to the one at Fort Ord. And again, I ended up pretty much being the only female, and they had my number. You wear  numbers, my number was sixty-six.

TS:

[laughs]

MW:

And they would call my number out, they wouldn’t have to see me, but the cadre would say “Sixty-six, find yourself a tree!” And what that meant was, go find a tree, elevate my legs, and do push-ups. They’d say “Sixty-six, find yourself a tree, diamonds.” That meant diamond push-ups, in your position of your hands like this. Or “Sixty-six, wide-arm, find yourself a tree.” I mean, they called my number out all the time. But it was funny, because in the evening, since we took the training at Fort Ord, we didn’t have to stay in the barracks, they’d let us go home in the evening. So I thought one day, I’m going to be wise, okay? They’d always used this term, “you can’t smoke me”. And of course, no—how could anyone smoke them, they’re telling you what to do, blowing the whistle, but you’re the one doing all of the exercise. So I decided, I’m going to be funny. I got a can, a soda can, and I wrote on it “Smoke”, on both sides. And that day, when we got on the bus, they were all yelling at us and calling us all types of, you know, I don’t know what names they were calling, I can’t remember anymore. I held out my can “You can’t smoke me! You can’t smoke me!” Got everyone on the bus to start yelling that. Well, let me tell you, they had something for me the next morning when I went back.

TS:

I bet they did. [laughter] What’d they have for you?

MW:

“Sixty-six, so you say we can’t smoke you? Let’s just see.” But I—it was fun. They never—I would never call it harassment, yeah, they probably gave me a little more attention because I was a female, but I took it—I took it in stride, and so it was sort of motivational to others, because I had a good attitude with it. I wasn’t getting mad or discouraged in any way, it—I guess they were trying to see if I was really tough enough, so.

TS:

What kind of things would they do?

MW:

Well, you learn—well, actually, at Air Assault School, you learn how to rig equipment that’s going to be dropped from helicopters. So you learn how to rig skids of equipment, you learn how to rig a 102 Howitzer, which is a big—do you know what that is, a Howitzer? It’s what you shoot out of.

TS:

Yes.

MW:

You also learn how to rig a Jeep or back then, a Humvee. And you really have to be paying attention to what you do, it’s very important, the chain links when you’re rigging equipment, because you—if it’s not rigged properly, it can fall from the aircraft. And you know, you don’t want that to happen, because you need that to get to the troops who are, you know, in the field or who are in training or who are at war. So it’s a very important mission and it’s very important that you learn everything you can, and you have to learn it exactly the way they teach you, or you’ll fail the school. So there’s—there’s different phases that you go through, and some people, they call them—they fail out of it, at a certain phase, just because they can’t remember how many links to do something. You know, or how many links—it’s all different, depending upon what the equipment is that you’re rigging up. But it’s a hard school, but it’s also hard physically, as well. And so some of the things that we would do, like for instance, every day before we went in to class, well, I shouldn’t say every day, any time we went in to class, we’d have breaks and you’d have to go back in, you’d have to do chin-ups before you went in. And you’d have to put your—you had to carry your weapon around all the time, and you had your rucksack on, and you’re trying to do chin-ups, and back then I weighed, I think, a hundred and five, and the rucksack weighed about thirty-five pounds. [chuckling] So it was—it was difficult, they didn’t make it easy for you, that’s for sure.

TS:

Well, I was going to ask you this question, because of what you’re talking about, all this really physical activity that you had to—I mean, you’re fairly petite, you know, I mean, you are, you’re petite, I don’t know, how tall are you?

MW:

Five-five.

TS:

So you’re five-five.

MW:

Right.

TS:

You don’t have a lot of pounds on you, especially—hundred and five pounds. And so you’re a gymnast—

MW:

Right.

TS:

So you’re very—you’re very athletic, and a lot of knocks on women at this time, in the ‘80s especially, was that they weren’t capable of doing the physical-type things that the men did, and here you are jumping out of airplanes, air assault, you know, all of these physical things—did you feel like you had something to prove, at all?

MW:

I don’t know that I felt like I had something to prove. I think it was more of my competitive nature. Just being around my family and my brothers, who always excelled at every sport that they did. I guess I took it on as competing with myself, I always wanted to do better for myself. And also, I realized very quickly, it was something that I had and that I possessed that I could use as a reward system for my soldiers, and what I mean by that, is that we had to take unit PT test, generally about twice every six months, so four times a year. And we did a two-mile run, back then, you had to see how many push-ups you could do in two minutes, and you had to see how many sit-ups you could do in two minutes. Now, the standards were a little easier for the females, so to me, maxing the highest score on the female level was sort of irrelevant when all of my soldiers were males. I felt like I had to achieve on their level, that’s my personal view on it, I really didn’t care whether females had one standard and males had a standard, because we were all soldiers. So I wanted to achieve on the—actually, I guess, on the male scale.

What I would do is I would tell my soldiers “If you beat me on the two-mile run, I’ll give you a three-day pass.” There weren’t a lot of them who got the three-day pass, because I was pretty fast on that two-mile run. But it was motivational for them, and the ones who did it, they just loved it. I mean, they just absolutely thought that was the best, you know, reward that they could get, and it was nice that I had that ability to use as a reward system for them.

TS:

Right.

MW:

And the same thing with the push-ups and with the sit-ups. I could do more push-ups than most of my male soldiers could. More sit-ups than all of them could, but—really, truthfully, it was probably from the gymnastics, because you have to be so strong on your upper body, and then if you weigh lighter, yeah, I think you should be able to do more sit-ups than a guy. Most men are big, so it’s harder for them.

TS:

They have more trouble with the sit-ups.

MW:

Exactly, yeah.

TS:

In general, I think, than women do.

MW:

Right, yes. But no, it was all—it was fun and it was competitive, but it also was a motivational tool.

TS:

Did you ever feel, though, as—as a woman leader, that you didn’t want to mess up, too? I mean—

MW:

Absolutely.

TS:

Not just as a soldier, but as a woman.

MW:

Absolutely, because since you were female and since there weren’t that many of them, you became known very quickly, and you didn’t want to be known as the one who doesn’t know anything, or who’s not squared away, or who doesn’t know how to lead her soldiers, or who is weak. You didn’t want to be known as that, so I—yeah, I would agree with you, that I felt that I did have an extra incentive, you know, as—being a female, to do better, and to always do well, so I wouldn’t have any negative connotation associated with my name.

TS:

But you would rather [have] had the same standards to meet as the men.

MW:

Yeah, actually, yes.

TS:

Because you think that would have shown that—more of the equality? Or that for the position you were in, it was necessary for the types of things that you did? Why did you feel that way, I guess? Because, you know, there’s a lot of discussion about whether that is necessary in today’s army, in today’s military. Is it really necessary to have these certain standards that are different.

MW:

Well, I’ll say it like this. First of all, I believe that males and females are different, and being in the military, I was able to see that firsthand. I don’t believe females should be in the infantry, and I know that my view is probably different than a lot of other females who are in the military, but because there’s a difference, and I saw it firsthand—For instance, males tend to try to take care of a female. It’s a very natural thing to do. For instance, when I was in the military, a lot of times, we would be hopping up on the five ton trucks and we’d have our rucksacks, it was very normal for a male soldier to pick up my rucksack and throw it up on the truck for me. They weren’t doing it to try to be cute, they weren’t doing it to try to get in good with me, they were doing it because it’s a natural, gentlemanly thing to do, just like opening the door for, you know, a woman as you’re walking in somewhere. I didn’t take that offensively, I would say “Hey, I can get my own rucksack.” But I wouldn’t make a big deal over it. But what I’m trying to say is that females and males are different. Your bodies are different.

The example I gave you a while back ago, when I went to Air Assault School, carrying that rucksack that weighted thirty-five pounds and I weighed a hundred and five, that was about a third of my weight, and that was the requirement. To me, if you can’t meet the requirement, you shouldn’t be—and that’s the good thing about Air Assault School and Airborne School, is that the requirements are the same for the males and the females, and it should be, because you—you know, Air Assault has a mission, and that is to be able to rig supplies to get to soldiers who are in combat. So there shouldn’t be a difference in the standards for the males and the females. But like I said, going back to infantry, I don’t think females should be in it, because I don’t think that a male and female need to be sharing the same foxhole, because their bodies are different, there’s physical—physiological differences, there’s many differences between them.

TS:

It’s interesting, you know, the difference even when—we were in close to the same time.

MW:

Right.

TS:

And now, the kind of activity that women do over in Iraq and Afghanistan—

MW:

Right.

TS:

—and I don’t know how, maybe, those differences have maybe been tightened up a little bit.

MW:

Right.

TS:

You know, with working together so closely, in close quarters and things like that. Maybe differently—so I don’t know if there’s like a generational thing, too.

MW:

And they have to, yeah, but they have to, because all of the support units are comprised of male and female, and both of them, you know, in any job that you have, you should be able to do it as well as your male counterpart, or the same for the, you know, the male. He should be able to do it as well as the female can, and the same for being a leader. I mean, a leader is a leader, whether you’re a male or whether you’re a female, so—some things do flat out do have to be equal, they really do.

TS:

Right, well that’s an interesting discussion. Well, let’s go back to Panama.

MW:

Okay.

TS:

So you—so—it’s nice to have this discussion about this broader look at your experience, so for some specifics, when you were this green lieutenant and your first sergeant—is it your first sergeant?

MW:

He was my platoon sergeant at the time.

TS:

Platoon sergeant is helping you out. So what was it that you had to do in Panama? Because we hadn’t—we were just advising at that point, right?

MW:

Right. Well, what happened is that they said they needed a unit movement officer, which was a transportation officer, and I had gone through what’s called Air Load Planning, which means that I had gotten qualified, certified, to legally, lawfully, and correctly load an aircraft with passengers, which is called pacs[?] in the military, equipment, vehicles, I mean, there’s different tie-down procedures that you have to use and you have to distribute the weight accordingly on the plane, so it flies correctly. And it’s—since you’re working with the air force, the air force has the ultimate responsibility of the overall aircraft, because it’s their aircraft, but you have to do the planning, and you hand it to them, and they just check off on it. And I had gone to that school and gotten qualified, when I first arrived at Fort Ord, and within a matter of weeks is when they said “Hey, we need someone down in Panama.”

They decided to send me. And I’m not exactly—I don’t know exactly why I was picked, but I got the assignment, and the bad thing about it, again, was that—you’ve done the interview with Linda Bray[?], this is when things sort of started to change, but when I was down there, this was my dilemma. I wasn’t able to be with my soldiers. All of my male soldiers were at Camp David [? Clearly Spanish pronunciation of David, “Davide”, but no listing found for this installation], in the northern part of Panama, and I had to stay down by the air force base. And they did that for security reasons, because I was a female. All the soldiers up at Camp David were male and they didn’t want to pose any risk by putting a female in that area. That was very difficult for me, because I wanted to be with my soldiers. I mean, those were my soldiers up there, doing missions every single day, going out on convoys, getting supplies, and I couldn’t be with them.

So that—and I knew that before I got over there, but it was really hard because I would see them sometimes and they didn’t quite understand, other than they just felt the higher-ups, you know, were giving me some little posh job and I was getting over, and the truth was, I wanted to be with them. I didn’t want to be away from them, I mean, because I was their leader, and certainly wasn’t appearing that way, since I got to stay in a nice officer barracks. They were staying up in tents. So it was a lot different, but—

TS:

Did that create any kind of tension at all, you think, in—

MW:

Well, some of them, I know they questioned it, and sometimes the comments that they would make, so I had to sort of clarify for them, okay, this is what I’ve been assigned to do, this is not my choice, but this is what I’ve been assigned to do and I’m going to do the best job, you know, that I can with it. But in the meantime, I will always check on you guys—which I did, I would fly up there, I would take a taxi helicopter, and fly up to go see them, make sure they were okay, you know, just to chit-chat with them a little bit, and you know, check on them. Then I’d go back and do my job.

TS:

So you could visit, but you couldn’t stay?

MW:

Exactly. Exactly.

TS:

Interesting.

MW:

Yeah.

TS:

I actually think Linda had troops that were like in different sections, also, when I talked to her, she had the same sort of things going on, where she couldn’t—she felt the same way as you.

MW:

Right, and as a matter of fact, I know there were some missions, I stayed with an aviation unit, and there were some female helicopter pilots. There were times when they were getting ready to go out on a mission, and it was a live[?] mission, where they were pulled out of the lineup because they were females. I know all that has changed, you know, nowadays, and to be honest, I don’t know why they couldn’t do that back then, because they were in that aircraft by themselves, so it’s not like they were mixing male and female in the same aircraft, they were in their helicopter by themselves. And that was so disappointing to them, it was, because they trained hard. And I mean, just like myself, I did everything my soldiers had to do, I wanted to be with them, you know, leading them, and when you are being trained for a specific job like the helicopter pilots, and then they can’t do it when it comes time to do the mission, you know, to defend your country, it sort of—it hurt their morale. It bothered them.

TS:

So you think maybe it might have been worse on the morale to have them separated from their unit than if they had been able to stay together?

MW:

Well, I guess so, in ways. I mean, you would like to think everyone is above par, that nothing bad is going to happen to a female soldier, but I mean, I do understand why they did that.

TS:

The politics of it, you mean?

MW:

Because—yeah, the politics of it, because I mean, back then, I mean, you did have soldiers and they were predominantly males, who were away from home for weeks at a time, months at a time, and it may not have been the best thing to introduce a female into that scenario. It could have been—I think it really would have been—it could have been difficult, as a brand new second lieutenant, female, being in that position. That could have been difficult. I think I could have done it, but it would have been a little bit difficult.

TS:

Because it would have been a new scenario?

MW:

Exactly, right.

TS:

So were you there when the hostilities broke out?

MW:

No, I wasn’t. I was sent home before then, and—I can’t remember how many months I was over there, to be honest. I knew exactly what was going on, though, and we pretty much knew that something would happen, and as a matter of fact, my husband got deployed immediately, he was there for that. I had just come home, and he was there. So—and all my soldiers, many of them were already over there. We had gone back and forth several times, for the buildup of Operation Just Cause. We had our troops in position ready to do something if we needed to. And—very good learning experience, I’ll tell you that.

TS:

Yeah, I was just going to ask you, what did you learn from this experience?

MW:

Well, like I said, I was a unit movement officer, and I was in charge of all of the soldiers deploying in on the aircraft, and the soldiers deploying out. So we had soldiers—what it was called back then, rotating in and rotating out, and I would have to get that airload craft [aircraft load?] planned, balanced, work in conjunction with the air force, and to be honest, I was in charge of millions of dollars of equipment. And didn’t feel like I knew a whole lot, but apparently I did a good job. [laughing] But I tried to listen to people, and you know, I didn’t have my platoon sergeant there. It was just myself working with air force, so I didn’t have the benefit of working with a platoon sergeant or first sergeant who had fifteen or twenty years of experience, I had to learn very quickly on my own. And to be honest, I was shocked that they put me on that mission without any—I don’t know, without the experience that a lot of people would have had to do that, but I guess they had enough confidence in me that I could do what needed to be done.

TS:

Yeah, I heard many times that—they say in the military, they don’t give you a job unless they feel confident that you’re able—

MW:

Right.

TS:

—to fulfill the mission.

MW:

Right, and—but that’s one of the neat things about being in the military, is that it really can—again, I think sometimes they can bring out the best in you. Sometimes you don’t know that it’s there, but they do, they see it. And I mean, it’s a compliment, it’s a confidence booster to—to do something that you think “Oh my goodness, what am I going to—I don’t even know the first thing about this,” then all of a sudden, you know, five days after that, you can do it in your sleep.

TS:

That’s right. And it’s not like a nine-to-five job.

MW:

Right.

TS:

You do it until it’s done, and—

MW:

Exactly.

TS:

And what was it like joint service, working with the air force?

MW:

Oh, they were excellent. Very professional, and the one neat thing they had was air conditioning. [laughter] The army didn’t have any air conditioning in any of the military posts in Panama.

TS:

Were there any women that you worked with there, or were they all men?

MW:

They were all men.

TS:

They were all men there.

MW:

Right.

TS:

So—this might be a good time to take a short break if you want.

MW:

If you don’t mind, yes, because I have to use the restroom.

TS:

Let’s do that, we’ll continue [unclear], though, all right.

[Recording paused, end of audio file 1, beginning of audio file 2]

TS:

Well thank you for letting me have that little break, I appreciate that.

MW:

Oh, sure.

TS:

I wanted to ask you, too, now that you’re in the military, you’re out at Fort Ord, you’re back from Panama.

MW:

Right.

TS:

What kind of things did you do socially?

MW:

Well, that was one of the nice things about the military. You pretty much have a built-in social life. If a new officer comes into the unit, you have a hail and farewell, you know, if an officer departs you have a hail and farewell. And it’s a get-together, and sometimes you might have a comedian come in, or one time we did a square dance, one time we did a luau, so it was pretty neat. And then even—I liked to do this on Football Sundays, sometimes I would have my soldiers over, and we’d have a big get-together and watch the football game. And even on the holidays, I love to cook, so a lot of time I’ll bring up food, or food that I gave to the soldiers—I’d make Thanksgiving dinner and I would take it in for them. Yeah, they got Thanksgiving dinner from the mess hall, but it wasn’t homemade, so it was nice to go in during that time, because even if they had four days off for Thanksgiving, it didn’t mean they had the money to go home and visit their family. And most of them don’t, so they have to stay on post. So we also had family days, once a month, you have like a pay-day muster, and probably once every three months, we would have a family day, and try to have some type of event where the soldiers, you know, could have games with their family. One time, and I’ll show you a picture of it at some point, they had a pie auction, and the soldiers got to pay money for who they wanted to hit in the face with a pie, and they got me pretty good. [laughs]

TS:

What kind of pie did they [unclear]

MW:

They couldn’t wait for me to show up, oh boy, they were waiting. And it’s funny, because some that I didn’t even know really knew I existed, they weren’t even in my company or in my unit, they were paying money for that pie. [laughs]

TS:

What kind of pie was it that you got?

MW:

Oh, it was a big old cream puff—

TS:

Like meringue?

MW:

Exactly, yeah. And yeah, they got my first sergeant and me. They got us pretty well. You know, everyone was after the first sergeant too. [chuckles]

TS:

Well, it’s interesting how you’re talking about, when I say “social”, and then everything that you’re talking about still is connected to the military.

MW:

It was! There really wasn’t anything that I did on my own or with another group while I was in the military.

TS:

You didn’t do any sports in the military?

MW:

I did, I ran in—they would have different events, 10K races on post, and triathlons and things like that, and I would do the 10Ks, I really enjoyed that a lot.

TS:

So you were a runner for sure.

MW:

Yeah, I was.

TS:

Are you still—do you still run?

MW:

No, I can’t anymore, because of the lupus, and I have chronic joint problems. But no, I loved it, and again, it was normally other soldiers who would say “Hey, there’s going to be a 10K race” or “Hey, a triathlon, do you want to do it?”

And I did a triathlon—one of my female soldier friends said “Hey, there’s this triathlon, you want to do it this weekend?”

I thought, well, goodness, I’m a pretty good swimmer, I’m a good runner, the bicycling, ehh, I don’t know that much about. So I got a Huffy bicycle from one of my NCOs, to borrow, and I’ll tell you, everyone was just passing me by on that bicycle. [laughter] But a lot of times, you just did things for fun. It wasn’t, you know—the 10Ks I was competitive on, but the triathlons and some of the other things that I would do, it was just done as something to do on the weekend, you know, get involved in something. They always had something going on, and I think the military does a good job, they did when I was in, they do a good job of having plenty of events planned, not just for the soldier who’s single, but for the soldiers who are married, and for the ones who have kids, so they can do things inexpensively with their kids. And any time they did something like that, you just go. We had bed races[?], there was a lot of things that we did that was fun.

TS:

[chuckles] Well, now, you talk about family. So you have a daughter, right?

MW:

Right.

TS:

And how is she adjusting to you being in the military? Because she’s getting a little older now.

MW:

Well, she was—actually, when I, you know, when I got sent to Panama, I had to leave her as well, and she went and stayed, you know, with her grandmother. She did well. I—this is also something interesting, in the military, they have daycare centers, and back then, what you paid per week was based upon your rank. Which is sort of a little neat, because obviously, if you’re an officer, you’re making more money than a private or a specialist is, but I’ll tell you one thing, you better be there at six o’clock to pick up your child or else they’ll call the MP [military police] on you. [laughs] You know, I would imagine nowadays, though, they probably have a twenty-four hour daycare. But yeah, she stayed in daycare during that time, and then I think when she was four years old, I put her in a little preschool, which was off post. But I—but then again, most of her classmates, all of their parents were in the military, and I mean, that’s all she knew. She used to love and go and sit in the trucks and—she loved it, and she’d salute me and call me ma’am and—she really liked it when we would drive, you know—we lived on post, but when we drove off and then drove back on after our shopping, they, you know, when you go through the post, they salute you. She used to love to salute them back, that was her highlight of it.

TS:

She’s like a mini you, right, when you were at that age.

MW:

Yes, yeah, exactly.

TS:

But she got to experience it.

MW:

Yeah, exactly, and my son, he was also born when I was in the military. And that was—that was fun, another, I guess another good time. I still ran, while I was pregnant. I ran up until my seventh month, and my soldiers, they were like “Ma’am, when are you going to stop running? Please!”

TS:

Was there a regulation that you didn’t have to run?

MW:

I didn’t have to, no, I wouldn’t have had to, but I still—I liked it, and I felt just fine doing it. The only thing that really made me stop was when you become seven, eight months pregnant, you have to go to the bathroom more often. And that was a problem. [chuckling] Or, there were a lot of horse stalls on that post, and when we’d run by one and you just caught a whiff of that, ooh, and you’re pregnant, that doesn’t do too well with your stomach.

TS:

That’s not a good thing. So did you have any—so, having dependents in the military, how were those issues for you? Did you feel like you were treated well by the services that were offered, and things like that?

MW:

I would think so. The one thing, though, is that you have to have a back-up to the back-up to the back-up babysitter. You really do, because you—you know, going back to when I said you take an oath, you raise your right hand, you need to be responsible, and you need to be ready when you’re called for an alert or if you’re on alert, you have to have those arrangements made and you better have back-ups to those arrangements. You know, if your child’s sick, that doesn’t mean you get to go home and go take care of your child, you have to have someone who’s able to watch that child with that hundred and two degree temperature. But my daughter was in the hospital at one time, and my battalion commander was a very soldier and person-oriented type of person. He went to visit my daughter in the hospital. And I learned from him, this battalion commander, actually, to this day, we’re friends, and you know, we talk to each other on Facebook, but he taught me a lot in life. He wasn’t just a leader and the type who told people what to do. He interacted with them. He knew everyone’s—all of his officers’ birthdays, he knew their anniversaries, he knew their wives’ names, he knew their children’s names, and I learned that from him. And it’s important, because you really are a family when you’re in the military, and I think people do a better job for you when they think that you care, and when you show that you care. So I—having dependents was just fine, as long as you did your job, everyone recognized that family—you know, mission, family, God, all those things are right up there. And everyone—I think they agree with that.

TS:

So you’ve talked about a lot of mentors that you’ve had, and they’ve all been men.

MW:

Yeah, I know, I know. Oh, and there’s one I haven’t talked about, my first sergeant.

TS:

Well, talk about him.

MW:

Awesome man, and I just got to see him this past—I guess it was in April, he’s—he now lives in the state of Washington and he flew here to visit some family, and I drove up to Raleigh. I met him and two of my other NCOs, we just had a great old time talking about the old times and the good times. But he—

TS:

What’s his name?

MW:

His name is Ronnie Lewis, and he was First Sergeant Lewis. We called him Truck, the Truckmaster. He had that company—he just could run anything, I mean, he was the type, he had such great experience and he knew how to talk to the soldiers, and I’ll tell you, they were a little scared of him, but they should be. [chuckling] But he was great at teaching, and he was great at—he didn’t try to purposely embarrass the officers, because you would have brand new second lieutenants coming in who were green and who really didn’t know anything. But he was the type, he was good at taking them aside and sort of setting them straight, and quiet—you know that saying, praise in public, and—I can’t remember the rest of it, but punish in private. [Possibly more commonly “praise in public, criticize/critique in private”]

TS:

[unclear]

MW:

And that’s pretty much the way it was. But he and Sergeant Rock were just really good mentors from me—er, for me, and I think maybe it was not just the way they interacted with me, but the way I saw that they interacted with the soldiers. They made a huge impact on them, because most of them were straight out of high school, or maybe they had gone to college for a few years and weren’t successful at it, they didn’t know what they wanted to do in life. They really had to make men out of these young, young boys. And you know, sometimes I think the soldiers really didn’t realize why they did things a certain way, but they sure do now. I talk to a lot of them on Facebook, I mean, we’re all friends on Facebook, and they’ll say the same thing, you know, Sergeant Rock, Sergeant Lewis, you know, they’ve taught them life-long lessons.

TS:

That’s terrific.

MW:

It is. And they’re wonderful—they’re good human beings.

TS:

Now, did you have, as an officer, you know, with your—who did you command?

MW:

Normally, soldiers at the rank of private, specialist, and then also NCOs, who would be like sergeants or staff sergeants or sergeant first class, some platoons, I was also an executive officer in a company, a battalion adjutant, I don’t know if they have those in the air force or if they’re called that, but a battalion adjutant is a battalion-level job, and normally a battalion consists of three, four hundred soldiers. And I guess if you would compare that to the civilian world, it would be like the human resource director. I was in charge of all the personnel, all of the orders that came out, the promotions, all of the evaluations for the officers, making sure those were typed up correctly and that they were—all the suspenses[?] were made. Accountability, I guess, for personnel, that’s the biggest thing. And their pay, which actually, in the military, one of the biggest things as an officer, you don’t mess with people’s pay, and you don’t mess with their promotions. At all, because that’s their money, that’s their livelihood, that’s their pay, that’s what they’re counting on. So as the battalion adjutant, I was in charge of all of that.

TS:

Make sure all of that stayed smooth.

MW:

Exactly, right.

TS:

Did you ever have to discipline anyone?

MW:

I did.

TS:

How was that? She’s making a face.

MW:

I am. I’m making a face because there were a few soldiers, every once in a while, who would come up positive on a drug test. And back then, if it was a young soldier, you know, a young private, a young specialist, sometimes you’d spank them on the hand, and I might give them extra duty for two or three months. That meant that after the normal workday, they would come up to the orderly room and maybe they’d have to buff the floors, clean, do all types of things for a few hours. And sometimes you’d take away some of their pay, maybe a third of their pay for three months. And generally, that gets their attention. If they’re higher ranking than that, sometimes you demote them, or they’re even put out of the military, but I had this one soldier, one time, and I always remember this more than any of the other incidents. Private Alber[?]. He—great athlete. This kid probably should have been playing football at college somewhere. But anyway, he always did anything that was asked of him, great soldier. He came up positive, cocaine, on a drug test, and I am so anti-drugs, and I was—you know, I’m completely now, but back then, very anti-drugs.

I guess back then, if it were up to me, I may have said “You’re getting out, you’re getting out.” But I saw something in this kid, I just thought, you know, he’s a great kid, he just needs to be in the right place, and hopefully this mentoring and we can get our arms around him, he’s going to do fine, I know he will, he’s not the type I want to put out, I want to keep him, because there’s something with him, I know he’ll do well. And as a matter of fact, it turns out he’s a sergeant first class now, and one of my other soldiers from that same unit saw him in Iraq about two years ago, and I have a picture of both of them together, and it’s really neat seeing him eighteen years afterward, and seeing that he did a good job, he’s had a good career, and—you know, so what if he did something bad when he was young. He learned from it, went on and did good things.

TS:

So you had an opportunity to make a change in behavior, and—

MW:

Absolutely, yes. Yeah. And those are just calls that you have to make when you’re a young officer, because things like that are going to come up, and you know, you’re going to have to discipline your soldiers. You know, it’s just like a child, you love your child, but you have to discipline your child also, and it sort of is like that with your soldiers, it’s part of taking care of them.

TS:

Now, did you have any kind of issues with—between men and women, at all, that went on?

MW:

Not a whole lot, because we rarely had females in our company, because, you know, back then a lot of girls weren’t wanting to be truck drivers. But when I had that job as battalion adjutant, all of a sudden most of my soldiers were females. At that point, I stopped being in charge of so many soldiers, I only had, I think, five or six under me, but they were all females, and they all [groveled?] with each other all the time, and I didn’t like that. [laughs] They’d come in, one of them, she’d want to paint her fingernails red or, you know, just push the limits on all the regulations, and I was constantly having to, like, reel her back in. But I think a lot of it, she did just to see exactly what I would do.

TS:

How far she could push you?

MW:

Yeah, exactly.

TS:

Yeah, so it was that.

MW:

But it’s funny, because I thought the girls always had more stomachaches, more aches of this, more aches of that, than most of the guys ever did. [laughs] And  I was more like the guy, you know, it’s like, oh, okay, yeah, my stomach hurts, but so what. You know, mission—drive on.

TS:

Push through.

MW:

Yeah, exactly.

TS:

That’s interesting.

MW:

Yeah, but no, I would say that—I thought that the males and females, overall, they worked very well with each other. And even as far as the officer level was concerned, I always felt like I was well respected by my male counterparts, and had a lot of respect for them as well.

TS:

So when you had your evaluations, how did those go?

MW:

They went very well, but I’ll be honest with you, my last—one of my last evaluations I had, and I’m still bothered by this to this day, the battalion commander I had at that point, which was not the one that I talked about earlier—I had always gotten what was called a one on my evaluations. And a one—it doesn’t really mean anything unless you know what the center of mass, have you ever heard of that, for an officer evaluation?

TS:

Go ahead and explain that.

MW:

Each battalion commander has a certain amount of ratings available to give their officers. So you may be in the top, let’s just say, you may be in the top five of the best officers he’s ever had, so you may get a one. You may be in the top ten, or you may just be average, so you’re considered center of mass. So anything above center of mass, he’s going to give out very sparingly, because those are reserved for the people who he thinks have the ability to go on and do wonderful things, you know, in the military, you know, go on and be colonels and generals and so forth. I had always gotten a one. But I worked very hard for that one, it was never just given to me, I earned that one. This battalion—this particular battalion commander, I went in to get my evaluation, he had redone it[?]—

TS:

Where were you at? Where were you stationed at?

MW:

I was first lieutenant at this point, and I was at—in Fort Ord, California.

TS:

I see.

MW:

And had done wonderfully, you know, still had performed well, and all of my goals—you have to set your goals, like six months out in advance. You quantify everything, it’s not wishy-washy, you don’t say “Oh, I want to do this.” You have to say how many, what percentage, and at what time you’re going to have achieved that goal.

TS:

Like for what, examples, can you give me some examples?

MW:

Sure, I’ll give you one. Physical fitness. Let’s say I want my soldiers to raise their overall physical fitness average by twelve percent.

TS:

Okay.

MW:

In six months. You quantify it. You don’t say, “Oh, I want to improve it,” you have to give a number to it. So that’s an example. Or I want all my soldiers—or I want four of my soldiers to get qualified in air assault, or I want all of my soldiers to be deployable, meaning that there’s nothing that would keep them back, you know, from being ready to deploy. I had done very well, and I knew I had done very well, and of course my next rater, who was a major, he evaluated me, gave me superior rankings. But my battalion commander gave me a two.

And I questioned him, I said “Sir, I’ve met every goal that I set out to, I’ve achieved everything, which I feel that I deserve a one.”

And his response to me was that he had to give his one to this other lieutenant, I can’t think of his last name, but it was a male. And he said the reason he had to do it was because I was a female, and that as a female, you get promoted easier, because there’s a certain amount of slots available for females just because they’re female.

And I told him, I said “Sir, actually, that doesn’t apply to me, because if I’ve done well enough to achieve that one, it doesn’t matter how many allocations are out there. I think I should get what I deserve.” He wouldn’t change it, and that really bothered me. I had a problem with that, and honestly, I guess there really wasn’t much I could do other than to go to the IG [inspector general?] about it, which I thought about it, but I decided not to, because I thought, hey, this could also sort of ruin my career. Maybe I don’t want that much attention brought onto this, and I was thinking, okay, I’m going to be able to overcome this anyway. But it bothered me, I mean, to the point to where I wasn’t thinking nice things about this guy. I was thinking I’d like to egg his car or something—no, I’m teasing [laughs]. No, but it bothered me professionally.

TS:

Sure. Did you talk to anybody about it, to say, hey, you know, what should I do?

MW:

Just my sister. I called her and talk to her, and I did talk to another officer friend, a male officer who was also on staff. And of course, he just could not believe that I did not get the score that he thought I deserved as well. But again, it was one of those things, I think as a male officer, you know, it would have to be a different example as to why he wasn’t given the one, but there are times when you’re given something in the military, and you think, maybe that’s not what you should get, but that’s the way it is and you accept it and you drive on. It was unfair. That would not cut it in the corporate world, I’ll tell you that, it just flat out wouldn’t.

TS:

No.

MW:

And I can’t ever see myself being like that with anyone, either. I think you get what you deserve, not because there’s a certain allocation for it or not because there’s a certain law for it, I think you get what you justly earned and what you deserve.

TS:

Right, so that was like the—one example of being treated a little bit unfairly.

MW:

Exactly. And to be honest, I think that’s one of the only times I ever felt like I was treated unfairly. I mean, all of my experiences in the military, dealing with soldiers, with NCOs, with officers of my pay grade, officers higher ranking, I always felt like I was treated fair. And well-respected. That really was the only—the only incident. The only thing that still gets me to this day. [laughter]

TS:

Because it sticks out.

MW:

Yeah, exactly. I mean, sure, you’re going to have some people who don’t like you, but that’s—that’s life, you know, you can be in a corporation and someone may not like you, or work for Wal-Mart and someone may not like you.

TS:

In your own family, sometimes.

MW:

Exactly, no kidding. No kidding.

TS:

So, what—so after Fort Ord, where did you go?

MW:

I actually—I got out of active duty and was in a reserve unit for a while after that. I had to get out. I had started to develop a limp, which was really strange considering I was so active and, you know, used to run all the time. But I had injured myself at air assault school. You remember, I told you we had to do these chin-ups before we went into a building every single day. Well, one time I jumped up and another guy jumped up beside me, and his weapon got caught in the back of my strap, my rucksack, and he finished his before I did, and when he jumped down, it like yanked my—like that.

TS:

Oh, yeah, pulled you over.

MW:

Yes, it did, and I tore a ligament in my neck

TS:

Ouch!

MW:

Yeah, it was painful, it really was painful, but I still—there was a week left of the school, I had to finish it. But a few months after that, I started developing some roving pains, and I’d had these roving pains for a while, but then I started having like broken capillaries on my hand, my arm, on my face, started getting some real—some strange things were going on with me, and considering that I felt like I was still in good shape, I didn’t really want to go to the doctor, so—you know, that takes time to do that, you have to go in sick hall and everyone knows that you’re going to the doctor, and that’s not the example I wanted to set. To make a long story short, finally, after about a year of seeing different doctors and specialists, I saw a rheumatologist, and they diagnosed me with lupus, and that’s what was causing a lot of the chronic joint problems I was having. So at that point, I decided, you know, I needed to take care of myself, because if you become undeployable, well, you really can’t have a career in the military after that.

TS:

Right.

MW:

So I got out of the military, and decided to pursue a civilian career.

TS:

So how’d you feel about that decision?

MW:

Oh, it was devastating. I mean, it was devastating, because I had really planned on making the military my life-long career, and I loved it, I loved the interaction, I loved the fast pace of it, the camaraderie, the learning, the competitiveness, I loved all of it. I mean, maybe going to the field all the time, I didn’t love that part as much, but I really did like it, and I felt like hey, this was what I was meant to do. So it was tough, it was a—and even for a few years afterward, it was very tough, adjusting.

You know, especially when I got that first job, you know, with this big company, the president of the company gave me a project to do, and I said “Sir, you know, when is this due?”

And he said “Ah, sometime next week.”

And I’m thinking in my mind “Sometime next week? What do you mean? When is the suspense date?”

TS:

Where’s the deadline? [laughter]

MW:

I normally don’t go home if something is not done. So that really was a big adjustment, but you know what, to be honest, when I got out, getting an interview was one of the hardest things to do, because on my resume, Maria Felger, U.S. Army, Captain, they’re thinking “Female, bossy,” you know, they didn’t know what to expect, and I—someone actually told me, finally, when I got an interview, they said “Wow, you look a lot different than I was expecting.”

And I’m thinking “Well, what did you expect me to look like?” [laughs]

TS:

Did they say?

MW:

Yeah, he said “Well, I thought you’d be this big girl, and tall, and this, and that,”

And I said “Well, it’s—I don’t know, I’m just who I am.”

But I thought—

TS:

Perceptions of what they thought a woman in the military was?

MW:

I guess so, exactly, and you know what, I bet that’s changed, probably, today. You know, since there are more females in the military nowadays. But yeah, it was a very difficult transition.

TS:

So you had kind of a cultural shock?

MW:

Yeah, I mean, even though you asked about the social part earlier, in the military, you have your transition—or, you have your social life built in. There’s always something, there’s something—you know, event planned that you either have to go to or you want to go to. On the civilian side, you have to make your own social life.

TS:

Right.

MW:

So, you know, it was different, and it’s funny, I did a presentation on this several years ago when I worked at FedEx, comparing and contrasting the military, you know, the army, as opposed to civilian life, and I did it based upon the job that I had, I worked in corporate sales, and you know, for instance, in the military, you wake up, you know what you’re going to wear, you have your army uniform, you have your dogtags, you know, you have your ID card in your wallet. You know, in the civilian world, you wake up, well, you might have ten suits to choose from. You know, what color are you going to choose, what necklace are you going to choose, what earrings are you going to—you know, what color of shoes? And everyone loved it, it was really funny, because it is totally different. In the military, a lot of things are just sort of there and you get in the habit of doing it, you know. In the civilian world, sometimes you have to think a little bit harder.

But in the military, you do have to think, you know, I’ve had people tell me “Well, you’re just told what to do all the time in the military.”

I said “Absolutely not.” I said “As a matter of fact, generally as an officer or as a leader, a lot of time you’re not given much information and you have to make a decision based upon the little information you have, and you better hope that it’s a good decision.” So I think they do teach you how to sum up things very quickly and make a decision, you know, based upon what you have.

TS:

Well, they say-some people say that anywhere in the world at midnight, the country is really being run—the military is being run by like twenty year olds.

MW:

Yeah, no kidding. [chuckling]

TS:

And so the responsibility you have at that young age is not necessarily valued in a way that it maybe should be in the civilian world, the experience that you have, the accountability that you have to have and the—responsibility you’re just given as a young—even as a first—second lieutenant, you know, you had—you’re off in Panama, right, when you were just a second lieutenant?

MW:

Yes, exactly! Yeah, brand new.

TS:

And the same thing for, like, enlisted. You know, they’re on those shifts where, something happens in the middle of the night.

MW:

Right. Hey, speaking of, you just said if I was a second lieutenant, when I got promoted to first lieutenant—this was really fun—our unit had this tradition, when you got promoted, you got watered down also, which meant that you got in the front leaning rest position, in the push-up position, and your whole company got to take a water hose and spray you.

TS:

Geez.

MW:

So of course, I have pictures of that, this—this one’s funny, here I am, this is when I’m dry, and look at First Sergeant, he’s on his way, he gets the first spray right there—

TS:

What is that, is that a hose they’ve got there?

MW:

Yeah, they have a hose, and this was my commander, she got to spray me, I think, second. There’s my little daughter right there, and you have to stay in that push-up position the whole entire time.

TS:

And how many of them are spraying you?

MW:

Oh my goodness, they all took a turn. I don’t have pictures of every single one of them.

TS:

Your daughter’s staying back

MW:

Yeah. Oh, no, there she is right there. Someone gave her an egg to break on my head. So she was up there and I’m thinking, what is that? I could hear this little tap-tap-tap, and she—

TS:

They were like “No, smack it down!”

MW:

Yeah, they were telling her “Crack her over the head!” Yeah, because that’s the day they can get a little bit loose, you know, and get back to me, you know, for all the evil that I’ve brought upon them by making them get up early in the morning or do whatever.

TS:

That’s right, that’s funny.

MW:

But—I can’t remember, did I show you the picture of the pink balloons, that—

TS:

Yeah, why don’t you tell—but we did that off tape, talk about that.

MW:

Oh, okay, at my air assault graduation, I think there were about a hundred and five soldiers who started the course. And that’s pretty normal for any air assault class. It’s a two week or three week class, I can’t remember now. But I was one of five females who started off, and by probably the third day, I think I was the only female left, because there’s different testing that you have to go through, different phases. Well, at graduation, there were about sixty, sixty-five of us who graduated, who made it through the course. And it’s a tough course, because at the very end, you have to do a twelve-mile road march with your gear, with your rucksack, with your weapon at what’s called port arms the whole entire time, you cannot drop that weapon, you cannot sling it over your back, you have to carry it like that. So it’s—people fail at that point, because they can’t complete the road march in under three hours, and fortunately I had that good running background and, you know, so I had some endurance in me. It was a little uncomfortable holding a weapon like that, but you know, it’s mind over matter.

TS:

You’re like putting it out in front of you.

MW:

Yeah, exactly, you hold it like that the whole entire time, and they’re riding along beside you in their Humvees to make sure that people are doing what they’re supposed to do, and you know, they’ll snatch you out and say “Hey, you just bolo’d.” Bolo means fail. You know, if you don’t do what you’re supposed to. But anyway, at graduation, it was a big deal, and I knew my whole unit would go out, because they were really proud, but I had one female soldier at the time, and her name is—well, she was Specialist Hartgrove back then, her name is Juanita Hartgrove, I keep in contact with her too. She came out and she was carrying pink balloons and a Minnie Mouse balloon, and I start hearing the snickers in the formation, and I’m just standing there so embarrassed. And I could feel my face turning a thousand shades of red, but fortunately I was wearing camouflage on it, because that’s what we had to do while we were in the course, so no one could see how terribly embarrassed I was. But you know, that was just her way, she was just a girlie girl, and she wanted—I guess she wanted everyone to know that those balloons were for me, and they were proud of me.

TS:

I was just going to say, I bet it was a measure of pride.

MW:

They were, they were very proud of me, and it was a neat experience, it was. I—that’s one of my most fond memories, and just the—I don’t know, just the fact that—I can still see them now, they were about a group of eight of them that walked up and they were all smiling, looking—“There she is, there she is, there’s [unclear], there she is!”

TS:

[chuckles] That’s terrific.

MW:

“There’s our ma’am!”

And it made me feel really good. So that was funny, I have that picture on Facebook and all of them have written a comment on it.

TS:

Well, it’ll be interesting to see if we can get some more of those pictures lined up for you, to see that, so.

MW:

Yeah, you’ll enjoy those.

TS:

Well, you had wanted to make it a career, but because of your lupus, you couldn’t.

MW:

Right.

TS:

And we talked about that. What—you want talk a little bit about the mood of the country at that time, when you were in the military? Because when you went in in ’85 originally, and then you went through your training—

MW:

Right.

TS:

There’s a couple things going on during the Reagan administration. How did you feel about Reagan as president and the things that were happening?

MW:

Well, actually, I would say he’s my favorite president. I loved Reagan. You know, at that point, I may have not been as politically inclined as I am right now, but back then, it was more of, you take an oath to defend your country and you do what the commander in chief tells you to do. So that’s what I fell under. At that point, I never really questioned anything, to be honest. I did what I took an oath to do. And I knew I was a Republican, I knew that much, and I knew that Reagan and Bush, you know, were for a stronger military. Which, of course, when you’re in the military, you think “Oh my gosh, you do need numbers, you need a certain amount of people to achieve your mission.” I’m sorry, your question was—

TS:

No, just what you thought of him. I mean, you’re answering that question.

MW:

Okay.

TS:

And then you were also in—although you didn’t go to the Gulf War, you were in during that period of time. What did you think of Bush Senior, then?

MW:

Well, I think we did what we should have done. I don’t know what other option he really would have had, I think had we not done anything and gone into Kuwait, I think we would have been showing a sign of weakness for our country. So I think he did what we felt—I think he did the best thing. I agree with that, I agreed with it then and I still do to this day.

TS:

And then you had that example in Panama, although you were pulled out just before we went in to snatch Noriega.

MW:

Right.

TS:

And those kind of things, too. So. When you’re looking back at that time, too, there was a—I guess—what’s your views on patriotism, I guess, is what I’m getting at?

MW:

Okay, well, first of all, I see America as being a very strong country, and some of the things we’ve done in our past, I do agree with, because I think if we sit back and don’t do anything to help other third world countries, who are struggling or who have dictators, then that may harm our position as being the world leader. I guess I am a little bothered, sometimes, with the lackadaisical views of some of the younger soldiers nowadays, and I’m not—I don’t mean this as a whole, I just mean some. When you enlist in the military, or even if you enlist in the Guard or the Reserve, and you get called to active duty, that’s one of the things that you signed your name for, and I don’t like it, and I don’t like hearing the complaints about “Well, I only joined the Guard for an education,” because you know, it goes both ways. The military is giving you money to go to college, and you agreed by signing your name and raising your hand and taking that oath, “I will defend the Constitution of the United States against all foreign enemies and domestic,” then you’re saying, hey, I’m part of this, I’m going to do what the commander in chief orders me to do. And I don’t know if it’s just the gender gap right now, or some people just maybe not—they don’t take it seriously enough.

TS:

You mean like a generation gap?

MW:

Yeah, a generational gap, I’m sorry, yeah. I definitely feel, you know, one thing that I think is neat, I work a lot with World War II veterans, whether it’s through the DAV [Disabled American Veterans] or just socializing with them or helping them, you know, get to the hospital—I am glad that a lot of them, over the last, I don’t know, five, eight years, have come out and started talking about their experiences. They’re very proud, and these kids, a lot of them, they were sixteen and seventeen, and they were begging to go, you know, into World War II. They wanted to do that, they wouldn’t have thought of doing anything else. And to see that pride and to see what they just automatically gave up for their country, I think is a really neat thing, and I think we need to hold on to that, and I will—you know, that’s why I am behind what you’ve done with the memorial, with the Women’s Museum, and the interviews, and I know you guys have done a lot with the World War II veterans, and that was your priority, and I’m glad, because that needs to be captured. I think people need to learn from that, and hold that in high regard. Because a lot—I mean, everyone sacrificed back then, the women sacrificed, they went to work to do the men’s jobs that they couldn’t do because they were all overseas. I mean, they had rationed pantyhose, there was a lot of things that they gave up for our country.

TS:

Maybe one of the differences is that there was a draft up until ’73, and then, you know, today it’s all volunteer.

MW:

Right.

TS:

Maybe that’s maybe part of that disconnect.

MW:

Well, that could be, but some of them actually joined up so they wouldn’t get drafted. I mean, some of the stories that I’ve been told.

TS:

Oh, because they wanted to pick their service, you mean?

MW:

Exactly, yeah, they knew, hey, I’ll go navy, maybe I won’t get shot at. [chuckling]

TS:

Yeah, that’s true, that’s true. Well, you know, and the one big controversial thing going on today is the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, and the idea of the repeal of that. Do you have any thoughts on that at all?

MW:

Now you’re asking my—I’m going to have to be honest. And I’m going to try to say this in a tactful way. Along with what I was saying earlier, as far as there are differences in males and females, you stick them in the same foxhole and the female has different things going on with her body than a male does, a unit has to bond cohesively. And it—I think it could be a distraction if there is someone gay who’s in the unit, and it’s so openly known. I mean, there were people who were gay when I was in the military, and there’s a lot of people I know who are. As long as it’s not flaunted, and flaunted openly, then I don’t have a problem with it, but if it is, then it does draw attention to it. So I guess I would rather be under the policies of what I was under when I was in the military as opposed to what they’ve changed them to now.

TS:

Which was what, when you were in?

MW:

Well, I guess I believe most people who openly said that they were gay or homosexual or bisexual when I was in the military, they normally got out of the military. I mean, I’m not—I guess you’re getting into some of my political views or my moral views, and I don’t—

TS:

Well—

MW:

I don’t want to be offensive to anyone, but those are my views.

TS:

Oh, no. Right. Well, it’s just, some people say that we’re serving in a war, and still really two wars, and so what—what role, should we change this policy, because of that?

MW:

I’m not sure we ever really needed to make a policy to begin with, because I think it was just fine. You know, it’s just like, anyone can bring disruption to a unit. Just because you’re gay doesn’t mean you’re not professional, and just because you’re professional doesn’t mean you can’t be gay, do you understand what I’m saying? I just think they should leave it alone, let units decide, let people decide. Let their behavior, let their professionalism, decide.

TS:

Right, because there’s things in place, I guess, for certain behaviors, regardless of whether you’re heterosexual or homosexual.

MW:

Right.

TS:

You think that those would cover those kind of things?

MW:

I think so. I mean, just like—even when I was in, when you’re married, you cannot commit adultery. That’s considered, you know, you’re violating regulation. If you are married, and let’s just say you’re separated, but not legally married [divorced?], you’re not allowed to date. And back when I was in, there were people who were actually put out for that. You know, nowadays, I think they’ve changed it, I don’t know. But they make those regulations for a certain reason, and it’s all so you can be a cohesive unit, and you can go complete your mission if you need to. You can’t have people bickering back and forth about their wives and spouses and stuff like that.

TS:

Well, thank you for talking about those things. And the other thing I was going to ask, too, was—you talked a little bit about women today not being in the infantry. Now, have any of your children been in the military?

MW:

No.

TS:

But if they—your sons or your daughters came to say, you know, Mom, I’d like to join the army, how would you react to that?

MW:

I’d be very proud of it, I really would be. But I hate to say it, I don’t think any of them are army material, and they don’t want to be.

It’s funny, because my youngest daughter, when she was about seven years old, she said one day, “You know, I don’t think I want to do what Mommy did. I just want to go to high school and then go to college and that’s it.”

And we said “Stephanie, we never told you you had to go to school and then go to college and then be in the army,” but for some reason, in her mind, she thought that that’s what she had to grow up and do, and I don’t know why. We never had said that. But I mean—

TS:

Was this your youngest, I mean your oldest?

MW:

Yeah—no, my youngest.

TS:

Oh, your youngest.

MW:

Yeah, the youngest, yeah. But they’re very patriotic, it’s pretty neat, they’ve all been pretty proud of the mama serving in the military. You know, which—and sometimes, that may have been hard to do, because it hasn’t always been, you know—the military—everyone’s not always pro-military. You know, especially during the last several years, with the Iraq and the Afghanistan thing going on, but they’ve always been pretty proud of it.

TS:

Yeah, that’s really cool.

MW:

But they have no—they have no desire to be in the military. But that’s okay, I mean.

TS:

Well, if you had somebody that came up to you and said, whether a niece, a nephew, or just a family friend or something like that, said “Hey, Maria, I’m thinking about joining the military, what kind of advice,” especially like if it was a woman, what kind of advice would you give them?

MW:

Well, I would tell her, get herself in good physical condition. And I would tell that to a male or female, you know. Get yourself in the best physical condition you can get into, so when you go to basic training, the silly stuff will be easy for you. That’s the biggest thing. And the other—I mean, what better way to get on the job training, time management training, discipline, all for free? I mean, it’s a wonderful thing, I mean, and that’s one thing that I will say about soldiers that I had. And this is the neat thing. A lot of them—well, I shouldn’t say a lot, because all of them didn’t get out, but some of them who ended up getting out after their three or four years, and they went back to college—they make the best students. Because they’ve learned how to manage their time, they’ve learned how to be disciplined. Not everyone learns that growing up, you know, just regular growing up, going to middle school, going to high school. Sometimes it needs to be instilled and ingrained in you a little bit. So I think the military, even if you go in for a few years, it can give you a lot that you can use for the rest of your life.

TS:

Do you think it made you any more disciplined or independent than you were before you went in?

MW:

I think so, even though I was pretty independent before, but definitely more disciplined, just for the sake of—in the military, sometimes you do a lot of hurrying up and waiting, hurry up and wait, that’s what they call it, and you know, that sort of teaches you how to not think you need to be fulfilled immediately. And that can apply to anything in life, but seriously, you do, you learn a lot about self-discipline and how to work with people from all walks of life. And that right there is one of my best experiences. Getting to work with people from all walks of life, it doesn’t matter their background, their race, male, female, where they came from, wealthy, poor, their idiosyncrasies, you’re all working for one common mission, and that, to me, is the beauty of it, that it can work.

TS:

Yup, yup, that’s true. Well, did you—[unclear] lost my train of thought there. Oh, do you think your life is any different because you were in the military?

MW:

Absolutely.

TS:

In what ways?

MW:

Well, I guess I mentioned some of the mentors I had, you know, First Sergeant Lewis, Sergeant First Class Rock. Colonel Jones. My life’s different because they taught me a perspective, maybe, that I hadn’t seen before. And in different ways, I guess. First Sergeant Lewis was very good at learning people’s personalities and what ticked for them. One thing that they taught me was that you can’t use the same discipline for everyone, you can’t use the same reward for everyone, because everyone has a different personality, so therefore, sometimes people need a different motivation than the next guy. You know, and sometimes in life, or in growing up in a certain household, you may think that that one, you know, one thing fits all, and that’s not how it is. And in the military, you learn that very quickly, especially because people are from everywhere. You have people from New York, you know, you have people from Alabama. Those personalities are not the same.

TS:

That’s true, that’s true.

MW:

So yeah, I guess they just taught me. Again, I had to be willing to learn and willing to listen, you know, to what they were teaching me, but those were some of the things that they taught. And that I quickly picked up on.

TS:

That’s really terrific. Well, we’ve talked about a ton today.

MW:

Yeah.

TS:

Is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you’d like to add?

MW:

Trying to think of anything—oh, I had both of my older children in a military hospital, and I thought that was sort of neat, because they knew I was an officer when I had them, and like my second one, I remember the nurse telling me “You need to get from this table to that table, now!” [laughter]

TS:

Where’s the compassion?

MW:

Yeah, it’s like—and I could hear other ladies down the hall, screaming, and I wasn’t getting any of that little coddling experience, of course, maybe I wouldn’t have been wailing away anyway, but that just stuck out to me, I thought that was so funny.

TS:

Because you were in the military.

MW:

Yeah, exactly.

TS:

You got treated a little bit more—

MW:

I think so. “You need to move from this table to that table, now.”

TS:

Well, your sister was a nurse, do you think she would have done that?

MW:

I doubt it, I doubt it, she was a real sweetheart, so I’m sure she would have been very compassionate and holding their hand or something.

TS:

Well, that’s great. And I know you said something before we started, that you have used your benefits, like the housing credit and—not that—you’d gotten your college education—well, ROTC, so you kind of did, but not through the GI Bill.

MW:

I did, exactly. I’m also a disabled veteran, so I do go to, you know, with my disease, it’s chronic, so I have to see a doctor, and I’m doing really well right now, so that is great, but I do go to the VA hospital, have a VA doctor, a few of them, and I’m very pleased with the VA medical care that I receive, I mean, like anything else, there’s improvements that could be made, but I think they are wonderful and PTSD and spinal cord injuries, I mean, things that they’ve been dealing with for years that they’ve become the specialist at, because veterans, you know, have built up that history there, and I hope that the VA hospitals and the VA medical centers are kept like they are, and nothing is changed to do away with them, because I have heard talk about that.

TS:

What kind of talk, are they saying might happen?

MW:

Well, I heard that possibly rather than having hospitals and clinics specifically for VA, they’re going to just try to send veterans to regular hospitals.

TS:

You mean like privatize it?

MW:

Exactly, to privatize it. And you know, the first thing that I see wrong with that is like I just said. The VA has expertise, that they have gotten over year and years of experience. Another reason veterans do go there is for the camaraderie. And I think that’s part of the healing process, you know, if you have someone who has a spinal cord injury, a lot of times, they do better if they can go and they can, you know, while they’re being treated, they can talk to fellow soldiers, and they can talk about their experiences with each other. That’s something that you don’t get if you go to a regular hospital, so I think that’s part of—I think that’s part of the healing process, right there.

TS:

So you’ve seen—so how long have you used the VA hospitals?

MW:

Ever since I got out, so I guess a good thirteen years, fifteen years.

TS:

Have you seen any changes in them at all?

MW:

Well, one thing, I guess I see a few more females now. When I first went, I was one of the only females who went. I guess I have seen some changes. The one neat thing that they do is that they put everything on the computer system, when you go in, and I do like that, because I think it’s a little bit more efficient. It’s immediate documentation, and any—when you go in for an appointment, the doctors can pull it up, so I think that is neat.

TS:

You’d have to re-fill out that little [unclear]

MW:

Exactly, yeah, uh-huh, I like that part right there. That’s good. And they’re also building another VA facility in Winston-Salem that’s supposed to be bigger than that—I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, there’s a clinic in Winston-Salem, which I think is pretty big, but they’re building another one, I think it’s supposed to be done within two years, because—you know, the numbers have just increased, so if you don’t go there, people have to go down to Salisbury or up to Raleigh. I actually go to the one in Winston-Salem and the one down in Salisbury.

TS:

How’d you end up in North Carolina?

MW:

My ex-husband used to live here—well, his family lived here, his dad retired from the military, and when I was here, I enjoyed it, I mean I really—I liked the southern hospitality, I liked the weather, you know, coming from Ohio where it snows and you have to shovel your driveway before you go anywhere in the morning, I just, I really like this area, and I wanted to come back to it.

TS:

Oh, neat.

MW:

So I—I enjoyed it. Plus, we also have a home on the coast, and it’s right there close to Camp Lejeune [Marine Corps base] and Cherry Point [Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point], so I, you know, I still like going on post and going to the commissary and talking to the soldiers and all that type of good stuff.

TS:

Having that connection.

MW:

Exactly, yeah.

TS:

Well, that’s really neat.

MW:

Yeah.

TS:

Well, is there anything else you’d like to add? Been a great time, to talk to you.

MW:

I just think it’s neat that we have the technology available today that we didn’t have twenty years ago, because I can keep, you know, in contact with my soldiers.

TS:

Like you were talking about with the Facebook and things like that?

MW:

Exactly, I mean, about all of us are on Facebook, that—this one company that I was a member of, and you know, we’ve had a few who’ve passed away, unfortunately, but it’s been nice to see how my soldiers developed into young men, and it’s funny because they’re not boys anymore and I have such a hard time—they’re grown men now. And they’re like “ma’am”, and sometimes they still call me “ma’am”. “Ma’am, I’m forty years old now, I’m a big—I’m a man now.” Like, yes, you are. But I’ve seen several of them over the last year, I’ve seen some former soldiers, I traveled up when I visited family, I saw one in Ohio, I have a former soldier who’s stationed at Fort Lee, he drove down to Danville to see his grandmother and I drove up and I met him for lunch. You know, I have pictures of all that.

I saw my old battalion commander, an old executive officer, and it’s been really fun catching up with these people, and seeing how their lives turned out, and they—I think they would tell you, too, you know, their lives turned out better for the experiences that they had, and I think one of the neatest things that some of them have said, you know, when I talk to them, they’ll say “You know, ma’am, I would have done anything for you, I would have given you the shirt off my back.” And that means a lot, I mean, that means that we had a good enough relationship and they felt enough confidence in me that I could lead them and they could trust me.

TS:

Right.

MW:

And that’s important to me, because you just don’t get that instantly, you have to earn that. It doesn’t matter what your rank is, I mean, everyone knows what your rank is by just looking at it. But it’s different, you know, as to how they treat you.

TS:

To make that connection.

MW:

Right, exactly.

TS:

Well, that’s good. Well, that might be a good spot to end it on.

MW:

Okey-doke.

TS:

Does that sound all right?

MW:

Yep, that’s just fine. Thank you very much, I appreciate it, I hope I didn’t talk too much.

TS:

No, no, thank you, Maria.

[Recording ends]