Oral history interview with Carol Louise Pollack, 2014

              1
WOMEN VETERANS HISTORICAL PROJECT
ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Carol Louise Pollack
INTERVIEWER: Therese Strohmer
DATE: April 18, 2014
[Begin Interview]
TS: Today is April 18, 2014. My name is Therese Strohmer. I'm at the home of Carol Pollack in West Jefferson, North Carolina on a beautiful day—could be sunnier—to conduct an oral history interview for the Women Veterans Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina of Greensboro. Carol, could you please state your name the way that you'd like it to read on your collection?
CP: Carol Louise Pollack.
TS: Okay. Well, Carol why don't we start off by having you tell me when and where you were born?
CP: I was born October 10, 1939, in a place called Mankato, Minnesota, which is not very far from Le Sueur, Minnesota, home of Green Giant peas and corn and, yes, there is a Jolly Green Giant who does live in the valley. The elves I've never seen. When I was about six years old my family decided that another winter spent in Minnesota was just not going to happen so we moved to Texas. We moved to Houston, stayed there for about six months, maybe a little longer, and then my parents bought twenty acres outside of a little town called Winnie, which was fifteen miles from the Gulf of Mexico, somewhere between Houston and Beaumont, Texas, and it was flat and it was miserable and it had bugs and it was just yuck, but that's where I grew up. It had some good points and some bad points, but—
TS: Did you have any siblings?
CP: I was the youngest. I had a sister thirteen years older, a brother twelve years older, a brother ten years older, and then me, and so everyone always wonders, "Well, why is there this big gap between you and your brother?"
And I remember distinctly one time, I guess I was just starting puberty and getting a little mouthy, and I said to my mother one time, "You just never wanted me anyway."
Well, that was a mistake, because she says, "Then why did I go—have to go to bed for five months so you could be born?" Because I was born premature, a breach birth, 2
and a blue baby, and I was a little-bitty thing, and I didn't have any eyebrows, I didn't have any fingernails, I didn't have toenails, I wa—just kind of pathetic.
[Blue Baby Syndrome is a term used to describe newborns with cyanotic conditions]
TS: [chuckles]
CP: But there's more to that story but we won't go into that. But she said that she had had about sixteen to eighteen miscarriages from the time that my—next youngest brother and me. And so, what happened was she knew that she didn't carry babies very well, and maybe two or three months along and she would always abort them, and when I was still there on the fourth month, or somewhere around there and I was still there, she thought, "Well, maybe there's a chance."
And went to see the doctor and the doctor told her, "Yeah, but you can't do anything."
TS: Bed rest?
CP: So he let her wander around for another couple weeks and then told her she had to go to bed until I was born, and so that's what happened. So she reminded me of that, quite frankly, that, "Yes, I did want you, or I could have just thrown you out in the outhouse with all the others," so I keep thinking that there was a reason that I was born and I don't—just don't know what it is yet.
TS: There you go. Now, you said as a young girl it was—growing up in Texas, it was—you were out on a farm—where—
CP: Well, we didn't have a farm, we just had twenty acres of land.
TS: Okay.
CP: My dad was a carpenter, my mother was a stay-at-home mom.
TS: Okay.
CP: And she had a garden and she raised chickens, and then she got the bright idea that she wanted to be a nurse and, of course, they wouldn't accept her if she was over fifty so when she was forty-nine she decided to be an LPN; Licensed Practical Nurse. And so, she went to college which left me at home to take care of my dad, and because she was twenty-six miles away and she was going to school and she had to rent a hou—rent a room.
TS: Oh, she stayed there.
3
CP: And she stayed there, yeah, because we only had one vehicle. Well, that was when I decided I was not going to be a housewife, because I did not particularly like having to cook meals by myself.
TS: How old were you when your mom went to be the LPN?
CP: Sixteen.
TS: Okay.
CP: But it was just I—the entire thing was—I used to help her out a little bit but it never was my full responsibility, and washing clothes with a washing machine you had to fill manually with hot water, and you have the rinse tubs you have to fill, and then you have to go put the clothes on the line, and then you have to iron them. And my dad just loved to wear khakis, and if you have never ironed khakis you just have no idea what ironing is, because you have to starch them and then you have to iron them—and they're wet when you iron them—and you think that you got them ironed but by the time you get to the next leg the first one is all wrinkled again because it really wasn't dry and you thought it was, and so I just hated it. And my mom was one of these little housewives that thinks that you also iron the handkerchiefs, so.
TS: So you had to.
CP: And I just really didn't like that, so I decided I was going to go and become educated.
TS: Well, before you become educated tell me about what kind of schooling you had. I mean, like, elementary school and things like that.
CP: Well, we had an elementary school and a middle school; what we called junior high and then high school.
TS: Okay.
CP: Yeah.
TS: Did you like school?
CP: In a way. I—I loved reading. We—I grew up at a time when we really didn't have TV until I was maybe about fourteen, fifteen years old. We got our first TV. And there was nothing out there. I would get on—I'd walk down to catch the bus and walk through a big cow pasture. And then when they were having their calves and things and the neighbors who own the cows would send the two boys down on horses and they would never let me ride the horse. They would never put me on the horse, they made me walk, but I—they were there to protect me from the mama cows who were very protective of their babies and they would have stomped me into hamburger, so I—that's how I would go down and 4
catch the school bus. Then they would meet me at—in the evening and walk me home, and so I—I really couldn't participate in very many extra-curricular activities—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Because of the distance?
CP: —having only one vehicle.
TS: Oh, okay.
CP: And we were too far from the school for me to walk, and I didn't have any real close neighbors that went to school, so it wasn't like they could pick me up and take me anywhere.
TS: Right.
CP: So I read a lot.
TS: Okay.
CP: I think the greatest achievement of my entire life was learning to read, and I read everything, and my mom, even though we didn't have much money, believed in education, and I think she liked to read because she found the money somehow to buy World Book Encyclopedias. And so, I would sit there and start at A, and I read all the way through Z of the World Book Encyclopedias, which made me a very obnoxious child.
TS: Why is that?
CP: Because I know a little bit about everything and not a whole lot about anything. And my mom had finally gotten all us kids together for Christmas one year, and they loved oyster stew, and I wouldn't eat oyster stew, because we were right on the Gulf of Mexico and mom would go get five or six big bags of oysters and then shuck them and she would make oyster stew, and everybody was eating them and I wouldn't eat them; I'd have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And finally my sister got really ticked off at me—the one who's thirteen years older—and said, "Why won't you eat the oyster stew?"
And I said, "Because I don't like oysters and I don't like all the stuff inside of them."
She says, "There's nothing inside of them, it's just meat."
I said, "There is a liver, there is a stomach, there is a spleen," and I went on explaining to her what was inside this oyster, and I said I'm not going to sit there and chew up all this—all these guts and stuff inside that chunk of slimy— 5
And of course, she got very upset with me and I—and she said, "Oh, you're lying." And I went off and I got my World Book Encyclopedia and came back with oysters and there was the diagram of the oyster with all the stuff in it, and she just got really upset with me and she says, "Nobody cares about the anatomy of an oyster." And so that became the family joke.
TS: [chuckles]
CP: Whenever I would start expounding and saying, "but," and I, "but," because I knew, and I wouldn't argue unless I was absolutely positively sure I was right, because I could back it up, and if I—the minute that I would say, "but", and then she'd say, "No one cares about the anatomy of an oyster." It didn't make any difference what the subject was, that meant shut up, so.
TS: [chuckles]
CP: But I did—I really enjoyed that and—but I really, like I said, did not get to participate in very many extra-curricular activities. If the school was sponsoring something and they really wanted me they would come after me and—and I did find out that I did have a talent, and it was extemporaneous speaking, and so they—
TS: Did you enter some contests for that?
CP: Yes, and I won the school contest and then I won the county contest and I got to go to state and I came in second in extemporaneous speaking. And what they would do is, they would take things like Time Magazine and Newsweek and everything like that—current things—and then they would put you in a room and they'd give you these magazines for an hour and a half or so, and you had no idea what the question was going to be. It was kind of like Miss America, where they plop—suddenly throw something at you and you had so many minutes to speak on the subject, and I came in second for state so I thought, "Oh, well this is—this is really great." So I've never had a fear of public speaking. I mean, I was in my glory. Then again, I think going back to this, "Well, if I know it—"
TS: [chuckles]
CP: "—I'm not afraid to mention it."
TS: Right. There you go.
CP: And if I don't know it, I just—I'm not going to talk about it, so.
TS: Yeah.
CP: Yeah. 6
TS: Well, do you remember anything—So you were a very young girl during World War II. Do you remember anything from that war?
CP: Yes, I was jilted by a sailor.
TS: Jilted?
CP: Yes. My brother was—My oldest brother, Lloyd, had joined the navy and his buddy had joined the navy, and they came home on leave and they were in their little sailor uniforms. I have a picture of me with both of them, and I was in a little sailor outfit. And when they were ready to go back we went down to the Green Mill Bar, which was the local bar there, and—
TS: So were you like four or five years old, or something like that?
CP: Yeah, I was about five.
TS: Okay.
CP: It was right before we came to Texas. And I remember sitting up on the bar and the—a popular song at that time was "Now is the Hour" and I—it's a very short song and I was—I—I learned it real quick, and so I was singing it, and he was singing it, and he said, "I will come back and marry you some day."
And I said, "Okay." I mean, at five, I mean, this seemed like a good idea.
TS: [chuckles]
CP: Well, I not only never saw him again, I obviously did not marry him, so I said jilted by a sailor at the age of five was a pretty traumatic experience.
TS: [chuckles]
CP: So, yeah.
TS: Yeah.
CP: That's one of the big highlights of—of everything, and so yeah, I remember everybody talking about the war, and my other brother joined the Merchant Marines, and my mom actually, the first time that she had gone to Texas before we moved there, worked in a airplane manufacturing plant—
TS: Okay.
CP: —in Fort Worth, Texas, but we didn't go to Fort Worth, we went on all the way down to Houston.
7
TS: Houston, right.
CP: [unclear]
TS: Why'd she pick Texas to—
CP: It was pretty [far] south.
TS: Okay.
CP: I mean—
TS: Get as—Get away from Minnesota.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
CP: When you look at Minnesota and you go south there's Texas; there—there's just no—no two ways about it.
TS: There you go.
CP: Yeah.
TS: So it—Did—Was your father in the service at all?
CP: No.
TS: So your two brothers, one Merchant Marine, and navy, okay.
CP: Yes.
TS: All right, so then as you—did you have any thoughts about [U.S.] President [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt or [First Lady of the U.S. Anna] Eleanor Roosevelt or the—
CP: I thought they were nice people.
TS: Yeah.
CP: And I remember listening on the radio, and the—
TS: Fireside chats.
8
CP: —different things, the fireside chats, and—and we always kept up on the news and what was happening, and so—yeah, yeah. To me it was pretty impressive, and then my sister had married a guy who was in the army.
[The fireside chats were a series of radio addresses given by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt between 1934 and 1944.]
TS: Okay.
CP: And so, we kept track of him, making sure he was okay, and—so, yeah.
TS: Everybody made it home safe?
CP: Everybody made it home safe.
TS: Okay.
CP: Yeah. Now my dad, although he didn't go in the—in the army or anything, he had seven brothers and six of them served, but because he was the oldest boy in the—and lived on a farm and the parents had died, that made him head of the household and they didn't have him—they allowed him to stay at home.
TS: So he wasn't drafted.
CP: So he was not drafted, yeah.
TS: I see.
CP: [unclear]
TS: He had an exemption.
CP: Yeah.
TS: I see.
CP: Which kind of upset him because everybody else got to be a hero and he didn't, so.
TS: Yeah.
CP: He's our hero.
9
TS: Now, you—Okay, so you're back at—We're back sixteen years old and you're taking care of your dad, being the housewife for him while your mom's off getting her LPN, and you—you had started to say you decided to get an education.
CP: Yeah. One of the things—a little insert here is—because I wanted to go to college, that put me in a different category because they had two—
TS: At school?
CP: —things—
TS: You mean at—in—
CP: —in the high school
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: —in high school? Yes.
CP: If you weren't going to college you took the—the shop and homemaking and you took all of—so how to sew and how to cook and all that kind of stuff—
TS: Yes.
CP: —and if you wanted to [go to] college then you had to take the algebra, and the—all the other things to get you into college. So I decided I wanted to go to college so I wasn't taking the girlie stuff, I was taking the guy stuff. The guy stuff—who happened to be my bus driver; he was also the football coach; he was also the math teacher. He made my life hell because I was the only girl in the class.
TS: Which class was that?
CP: Algebra.
TS: Okay.
CP: And he would sit there and he would say, "Anybody want to hear a good story?"
"Yeah!"
"Oh, I forgot, I can't. We have a girl here."
Well—So all the boys hated my guts because they wouldn't get to hear the good stories because this girl was here. Then he would send me up to the [chalk]board, and do his—a program, that we hadn't—we hadn't discussed yet; none of us had learned it. And he would put these numbers up on the board. "Now, solve it." Well, of course, I had no idea even how to do it, and then he would just say, "What? You can't do it? Aren't girls 10
stupid." And then he would go up and, "Well, it's very simple. All you had to do was—," and then he would work out the pro—problem and everything, and I'd be sitting there with the tears streaming down my face and everything; about how stupid I was because I couldn't do math.
Well, he set me up for failure every single time, and I guess somebody found out about this because I got sent over to a—an old lady who—teacher—who was also teaching math named Miss Geelan[?] who had to have been a hundred and twenty, and she had a crutch, and she had a couple boys—a bunch of boys in her class, too, and they were always trying to make fun of her and hide her crutch and she'd just walk up and whack them across the head with the crutch. And so, then they stole a crutch. It was—It was all kinds of fun and games there, but I still, for years and years and years and years and years, had this fear of math.
TS: Right, a phobia probably.
CP: Oh, complete—I just can't do it; I just can't do it.
TS: Yes.
CP: You know what? Now I think it's pretty fascinating. I said, "Gee, I could have learned that." Now, of course, when I went to college and graduate school I just went, "I still have to take math." And I got through it so I guess I was okay. It was just that fear.
But because I didn't take the—the home economics and all that stuff, it was still mandatory for all the girls to take the Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow test. Okay, that was mandatory, so I had to take the test. Guess who won? And to this day, I have my Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow pin, which is a she—sheaf of wheat with a little pendant, which is a heart, with a—and in the heart there is a little house and on the back it says "Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow."
Well, the other girls were just furious because they had taken two years of home economics and they didn't win anything, and how could I win something when I hadn't taken any of that and learned how to bake bananas and all the other stuff they were learning. I said, "I was doing it; I was cooking; I was ironing; I was washing clothes; I know how long hamburger will last in a refrigerator," I—nine ways to make something.
[Starting in 1955, high school seniors across American elected to take a 50-minute exam as part of "The Betty Crocker Search for the All-American Homemaker of Tomorrow" scholarship program]
TS: [chuckles] You were doing it—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
11
CP: I was doing it, yeah.
TS: —not just studying it, right.
CP: Yeah.
TS: Yeah.
CP: And so I—I just breezed right through that.
TS: Yeah.
CP: That was pretty interesting, so yeah.
TS: When—When did you graduate from high school?
CP: Nineteen fifty-eight.
TS: Nineteen fifty-eight. Now, did you ever have any—You say you didn't do many extra-curriculars, but did you go to any of the sock hops or anything like that?
CP: I went to the prom by myself.
TS: Okay.
CP: And I—Mom sometimes cleaned house for one of the rich ladies in town and—who had a friend who had a daughter that was two years ahead of me in school so we weren't so—socially at all connected, and I got her leftover clothes, which was fine with me; I could never have afforded those clothes. And I got this prom dress to wear and mom was insisting I was going to that prom one way or another and I was insisting I wasn't; "Yes, you are."
My mom bought me a corsage for a wrist—my wrist corsage. Well, I was humiliated, but she took me there and dumped me off, made me go, and it was only later that somebody said, "Well, I would have taken you." Another guy, "Well, I would have taken you." In some ways I think they were a little bit afraid of me. I'm not sure why, but it was just like, "Well, I didn't know nobody was going to take you; I would have taken you," So, yeah, no—no social life at all.
TS: Well, did you listen to any music or—
CP: Just what was on the radio.
TS: Yeah? Do you remember what kind of music was playing then?
CP: Well, not a whole bunch. It was nice music, I remember that, but—
12
TS: Do you have, like, big—big band or anything?
CP: We had a little big band and had things like Perry Como and that group.
TS: Yes.
CP: And it was only when I got to college that I became very much aware—
TS: Okay.
CP: —because you have college roommates and their little radios are going full blast and they all have stereos and—
TS: Yeah.
CP: —the good old 45's [vinyl recordings] and they've got—they're listening to Elvis Presley and all this good stuff so, yeah, yeah.
TS: Well, when you decided that you were going to go to college did you have an idea of what it was you wanted to study?
CP: Oh, that was interesting. Of course I didn't.
TS: [chuckles] You did not?
CP: And again, you take another test; they have all these tests that you get to take. I don't know if you still get to take them or not, but one of them was this—figure out what it is that you would be good at, and I got—I mean, it was about eight or ten pages, and I was filling it all out; "Would you rather this or would you rather that, and if you had your choice, would you do this, would you do that," type thing. And I got through and I walked in for the results and the counselor looked at me and he says, "Well," he says, "we've narrowed it down to two things."
I said, "What?"
He said, "You're either going to be a forest ranger or a traffic cop."
[chuckles] I said, "What?"
And he says, "Well, according to these results, you like to be outside and you like to direct others."
I just, "Okay," so. But I—I like to doodle, and I like to draw and stuff, so I decided I'd take art, and then I also thought, "Well—" I—I figured you really didn't make any money doing that, that was more of a hobby, and I then got a degree in secondary education, so I had two majors.
TS: Art and Secondary Education?
CP: Yeah.
13
TS: Where'd you go to college at?
CP: Lamar State College of Technology, Beaumont, Texas, which is now Lamar University.
TS: Okay. And when—When did you enter that college?
CP: [Nineteen] fifty-nine.
TS: Fifty-nine? And when did you graduate?
CP: Six—Well, I went straight from there to the [United States] Marine Corps, so.
TS: Did—But did you graduate?
CP: Yeah.
TS: So sixty—
CP: Sixty—
TS: Sixty-four?
CP: Sixty-three or sixty-four.
TS: Okay, sixty-three. And so—
CP: Fifty-eight, '59, '60, '61, '62, '63—Yeah, because I had a double major and I ha—it took me—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: So five.
CP: —a little longer, yeah.
TS: So a couple things are happening, then, in that period. You have [U.S.] President [Robert Fitzgerald] Kennedy was—[Dwight David "Ike"] Eisenhower to President Kennedy. Did you have any thoughts on either of those two presidents?
CP: Well, actually I was out in MCRD [Marine Corps Recruiting Depot] San Diego when JFK was president, and so then—yeah, I thought it was—I thought he was great when I was out there, and had his picture on a—you always have your Commander in Chief's picture up somewhere in your office so we had his—the picture up there and everything, and, yeah. 14
TS: What'd you think—Do you remember hearing about his assassination?
CP: Oh, yes, yes. That was really a shock.
TS: Where were you at?
CP: I remember being in my office and somebody came in and said, "Let's find a TV. Let's find some place that has a TV." And we went—And, of course, it took a little while for it to get out that he wa—that he had been killed, so.
TS: Yeah.
CP: That came as a big shock.
TS: Right. Now, did you're—You're talking in the 60's, too, about [the] Cuban Missile Crisis. Did you ever have any worries about nuclear war and things like that?
CP: Not really. I remember when I was in—it's—it's [sic] kind of all runs together—
TS: [chuckles]
CP: —because it's been so long ago.
TS: Right.
CP: I'll be seventy-five in October, and I said I have periods of my life that are just as clear as can be, and then I have these soupy areas because I guess not a whole bunch happened and it just all inter—intermingles. Then I have others where it's very, very vivid and yeah, okay. I guess these little milestones that stick with you a whole lot more than others.
TS: That could be.
CP: And I've—And when someone will say, "Well, where were you on—"
"Well, I don't know. I—I think I was—" Then later I said, "Well, no, I couldn't have been. It had to have been—"
TS: Yeah.
CP: "—this other time I was probably there."
TS: Right.
CP: But somebody will jog my memory or something and I say, "Oh, yeah, I remember now, yeah, where—where I was," so. 15
TS: So you didn't—Did you do any duck and cover in school or anything like that?
CP: Yes, I remember having to crawl under the desk.
TS: Yes.
CP: And then when—While I was in the service I went to Mc—Fort McClellan, Alabama to Nuclear, Biological, Chemical Warfare School [U.S. Army Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear School], where I learned that that's not going to really help you very much, and even now when someone says, "Well, if we're going to get bombed by Al-Qaeda, or something like that, and there's going to be nuclear bombs dropped and all that, and you put the duct tape around the windows and all—you—"
Come on. You know that is not going to help you one little bit. It'll give you something to do—maybe take your mind off the fact that you're probably going to die—but it's not going to do a darned thing."
In fact, I said, "If you have any sense at all, you hope that you get blown up, because," I said, "I can't think of anything worse than dying of radiation poisoning."
TS: Yes.
CP: I said, "Little—," I said, "You die in pieces," So I said, "I would just as soon say, 'boom'—okay, that's it."
TS: You're gone.
CP: Yeah. I said, "I don't want to prolong it," and when I see on TV these preppers; the ones that are getting ready for the big invasion and all the stuff they're going to do, and how they're hoarding the food and they're doing this, that, and the other, and they are so dumb. They are just—I just feel so sorry for them all; they're just wasting money. They're just pro—prolonging the inevitable. And now I notice on TV it's all these people that are—have survived and how they're surviving even more. Well, that's so unrealistic. It's just—
TS: Right.
CP: —unbelievable.
TS: Well, did you have—Let me go back to when you were in college—
CP: Okay.
TS: —and you are—you're going through that. Was that a good experience for you; college?
CP: It was pretty interesting. I still didn't get to socialize very much—
TS: No? 16
CP: —because I had to help pay my way in. And so, I had two jobs; I worked in the cafeteria, and I also—which was very ironical—I had to—I got a job cleaning up after the home economic majors, and they would go in and dirty every pot and pan in the whole world making their magnificent concoctions, and I had to go and clean all up behind them and wash all their pots and pans and all that kind of stuff, and it just—Trying to get away from something like that—
TS: [chuckles]
CP: —and that was how I would put myself through college.
TS: Yeah.
CP: Yeah.
TS: Well, when did you start thinking about the services?
CP: Well, I—One, I didn't—I admired my teachers and I think that's why I thought secondary education would be a good thing for me, and I enjoyed getting up in front of people and talking, and I thought, "I know how important it was for me to learn," and I wanted to share that with other people, and so I thought education is really good.
So the very last course that I had was at Davy Crockett Junior High School [Beaumont, Texas] where I did my student teaching, which was a kind of a reform school, in that the kids that got thrown out of the regular schools because they were too disruptive, they said, "Well, let's just put them all in one school," And so, these were not the cream of the crop type kids to begin with, and believe it or not, I was also teaching remedial reading there and art. Now, trying to teach remedial reading—
TS: Now, was this as a—I'm sorry, Carol—Was this as a student teaching?
CP: As a student teaching.
TS: Okay, okay.
CP: Yes, as a student teacher I—I was teaching remedial reading and art to these little juvenile delinquents, which is probably not the best things they wanted to do any—anyway, but I really did a pretty good job, I thought. They gave me a present when I left, and a—a real pretty crystal necklace and earrings and how much they liked me and everything, and so I felt good about that. But the thing that, I guess, the nail in the coffin was my student instructor came out, the one who was the normal teacher, and she says, "Come out in the hall, I want you to mop up some blood before the bell rings."
And I walked out and the—two or three of the kids in shop had gotten into a fight and one pulled a knife on the other one and sliced him open, and he's leaning against the wall holding his insides together while we're waiting for the ambulance to come. And I am—there's a stream—little strip of blood coming from the shop all the way up to the 17
door, where they're going to bring the ambulance, and I'm there with a mop and some—and a bucket trying to clean up all the blood, so I thought, "Is this something I really want to do?"
That afternoon I went back to the student union at the college and I saw this poster, and it was a poster of a woman Marine officer and it said "You too could be a Marine officer" and she looked so pretty and she looked so nice in that uniform and she was smiling.
And I thought, "What are you smiling about, lady?" Well, there were postcards there so I took a postcard and filled it out. Next thing I know recruiter had contacted me, and I went and talked to the recruiter, and you got to go to [Marine Corps Base] Quantico, Virginia, and I was in Beaumont, Texas, and I had no plans for the summer anyway, and I thought, "Well, at least I'll get a free trip and maybe go see Washington, D.C. or something."
TS: Was this a summer of your—before your senior year, then, maybe?
CP: Oh, no, no, I was—
TS: You're—You had graduated?
CP: I was taking my—Yeah, it's my very last class.
TS: Okay, so you were—it was the summer—
CP: My student teaching was my very last class.
TS: I got it, okay, so you—you were going to be graduating.
CP: So the minute that I finished student teaching I would get my diploma.
TS: Gotcha, okay.
CP: So I thought, "Okay, so I can—I could do that. I should be graduated by then." And so, I signed up, they told me to report, and I did, and they sent me by airplane to someplace, when then some other people picked me up and took me to Quantico and I went through my basi—my candidate school, and then once I com—committed myself to the Marine Corps as an officer, then they sent me to basics school to finish out my officer training, and that's how I became a Marine officer.
TS: Now, you had said something about when they sent you first to Quantico you got to take—before you committed they took you on a tour of Washington, D.C.
CP: Yes.
TS: That's what you told me before—
18
[Speaking Simultaneously]
CP: Yes
TS: —we started the tape.
CP: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
TS: You want to tell that?
CP: Well, sure, that was when I—when we were in candidate school, right before we had to make our decision as to whether or not we wanted to be a Marine or not, because once we signed on the dotted line and we said our oath of office we were—they owned us; we now became government property. So we thought, "Okay, all right, no problem."
Well, they took us up to Washington, D.C. First thing was the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which, of course, if anyone has ever seen it, is very moving, and you get a lump in your throat. Now, we've been through all this Marine Corps history jazz during candidate school, so suddenly here we see the Marine Memorial which is this greater than life-size picture of the raising of the flag on Mt. Suribachi in Iwo Jima, and that brings a tear to your eye, and it was getting—getting dark and the sun was beginning to set. They whipped us over to “8th & I," which is a Marine barracks in Washington, D.C., and they had what they called a sunset parade, and it is absolutely the most awe-inspiring thing you ever saw in your life. And it was just gorgeous and they have the Silent Drill Team [Marine Corps Silent Drill Platoon] and you got thirty people in perfect unison, throwing their guns in the air and clap, clap, slap, slap, and all that good stuff, and they were dropping it. And it was so amazing, and we got through there and they took us to a reception. At the reception while all this is still fresh in our mind, now here was our piece of paper—Do you want to sign up?—and, of course, we all signed up and said, “Yes, we all want to be Marine officers." And then you wake up the next morning and you—“What have I done?" But I didn't regret it.
TS: Well, by then you had probably thought a lot about becoming a Marine.
CP: Oh, yeah.
TS: Right?
CP: Sure.
TS: And so, what did your family think about your decision?
CP: Well, they were all for me doing whatever I wanted to do that I thought I could be a success at.
19
TS: Yeah. Was there anybody surprised?
CP: Everybody.
TS: Everybody was surprised but they still supported you, is that what you mean?
CP: Yeah.
TS: Yeah.
CP: Because I really had never talked about wanting to travel, never wanting to leave or anything like that. I never sat around—"I can't wait to get out of this godforsaken place," or—or anything. I was just sort of went—go with the flow, so.
TS: When did you think that you wanted to do something different?
CP: I knew I didn't want to stay in Beaumont, Texas, and I wasn't sure at this point if I really wanted a career in teaching.
TS: After that incident?
CP: Yeah.
TS: Yeah.
CP: And I thought, "Well, I haven't tried much in my life; I want to get out and find out what else there is out there."
TS: Did you want to have, kind of, an adventure, too, do you think?
CP: Yes, I thought it would be an adventure because I knew I wouldn't be stuck in one place very long, that they would move you around, and I thought, "Well, that's good."
TS: That was a big draw, you think?
CP: That was a big draw, that they—you weren't on the move constantly, but you were—you really can't get too bored if you're going to—if you know that within two or three years you're going somewhere else, and that's what's really nice about the military. When someone says, "Oh, I—it would just be horrible."
And I said, "It is not unbearable. It's not unbearable, for the simple reason is, if you work for some jerk, one of you is getting transferred. That jerk may leave and someone may really nice may come back." And I said, "You may have a crummy job and they move you and suddenly you got a really good job." So I said, "It—You just sit there and say, 'It's just a matter of time, it's just a matter of time. I can handle this; I can handle this, '" and you do. It's a—It's—Things will always change and that's what I really liked about it. 20
And one of the things I found out that I like most about the military, when someone says, "Oh, I would never be able to be in the military. That's just absolutely horrible."
I said, "I found horrible when I got out and I had to join the real world," and I said, "There is no rhyme or reason for anything on the outside world, and everybody marches to their own drum except they're all going in different directions and they have no idea who to follow; they don't know what the rules are." I said, "You cannot get into trouble when you're in the military unless you want to, because everything is set out in rules and regulations, yeah, but if you don't break them you can't get into trouble."
I said, "When I got out into the civilian world I found out because there were no rules, it was an arbitrary decision all the time. If here you came in and your boss had had a bad day and his wife had ser—served him burnt toast for breakfast, and he comes in and he's in a bad mood and you say, 'Good morning, sir, how are you today?' 'It's none of your you-know-what business, and that is disrespectful to even ask—You're fired; you're gone.'" They have—do not have to give you a single reason why you are gone. You are gone.
And I said, "To me, that was the most ridiculous way to run a railroad." To be—And I said, "I would much rather have some control over my life by knowing when I was going to get in trouble and what the consequences were than to have someone arbitrarily decide." And so, that was a big eye-opening thing for me.
TS: What about—Did you look at any of the other services besides Marine Corps?
CP: Well, back—I had looked at the—the air force because I thought that was pretty—pretty neat. It was a new serv—it was new—it was newer than the other services and they seemed to have a lot of money and they got to fly crazy airplanes and I thought that would be fun, and blue's a nice color. Well, at the time that I was thinking about it, I had never said I want to be an officer, I just wanted to join. Well, my eyes were too bad. Even though they were correctible 20/20 with glasses, no.
TS: For the—For the air force they were too bad—
CP: Yeah.
TS: —but not for the Marine Corps?
CP: Oh, yeah. But if you're an officer it didn't make a difference. It was only the enlisteds that that rule applied to, so the fact that I was willing to become an officer, oh, yeah, as long as it's correctable, that's okay.
TS: Was it the same for the air force at that time, too, or—
CP: Yeah, I think so because I found out later—“We—Oh, we wanted you; we wanted you so bad." They said I was way up in the five percentile and they had never had anyone—all this—they—I think they tell that to everybody, but if you were just so off the chart on all 21
this stuff, and—“We had such high hopes for you, and we really wanted you and then w—you didn't pass the eye exam."
The reason I had kind of figured I hadn't was because they put you in this little smock like they always do and they put you up on the op—on the table—examining table—and they had taken the glasses off and put them somewhere, and he says, "Okay," he says, "look at the eye chart and tell me—read—read it."
And I remember looking around the room going, "Where?"
TS: “Where's the eye chart?"
CP: Yeah, because it was white walls with a white chart, and there were other things on the walls but I couldn't tell what in the heck they were. And he says, "Right there, it's right in front of you. That's the eye chart."
And I'm squinting and I said, "It is?" And you fail right then and there. And I put my glasses on, "Oh, yeah, E—E, T, F, G, S, T;" I just went right on down the line. S He said, 'No, no, no. Sorry, no, we can't—"
TS: Right.
CP: But that was when I was going to enlist.
TS: Right.
CP: But as an officer candidate I would have—they would have waived that.
TS: Let you. Well, tell me a little bit about basic training. Did you do basic training first and then the officer training, or which did you do—
CP: Well, candidate training, yes, that's where you learn to march—
TS: Okay.
CP: —and all the other good stuff.
TS: How was that for you?
CP: And how to clean, how to make a bunk.
TS: You had that down because you had your little Betty Crocker award.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
CP: Homemaker of Tomorrow.
22
TS: Yes.
CP: No, I didn't know how to make a bunk.
TS: Okay.
CP: That's different, you have to use the hospital corners and all that good stuff. Have to be able to drop a quarter and have it bounce and all that bit, but—and I really wasn't fond of housework; I've never been fond of housework. There was anything I could do in my life as long as it did not involve housework, and so it just seemed like I just keep going from housework to housework to housework, but even in the service and, of course, we would have to go and clean the latrines—which we called the heads because we used navy terminology when you're in the Marine Corps—and with a toothbrush, and you get down on your hands and knees—every little crevice and every little thing—and they have white collar inspections and they go around really with—with white gloves, and they go around all the cornices and all the tops of the doors, and every little place that you just—no one in God's green earth would even look, they're going to look, and heaven—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Well, they know where the dust is at so that's [unclear]—
CP: Well, they know whether you don't want to clean.
TS: That's right; that's right.
CP: So, yeah, and then after you get your—knowing how to march and how to stand and how to stand for long periods of time, and when to salute and when not to salute, a little bit of mi—military history, physical education. The things that a lot of the boys went through except that the ladies were not expected to have the physical abilities that the men have, thank God. Women are not lumpy men, and this is what a lot of people keep thinking; "Well, they're just lumpy men."
No, we are not lumpy men. Men's entire physiology is completely different than that of a woman, and if you don't believe it, join the military where you've got male DIs [drill instructors] who keep thinking that all they have to do is just modify their approach to things and things are going to be just fine. One of them was the rifle range. We had to learn to shoot a pistol, we had to learn to—which is—I have some good stories on that. But the—But the rifle range, they would make you lie prone. Well, when you've got bumps in the front, it's kind of hard to be prone, and then you have to get all the way down and hold the rifle in front of you and you have to be able to sight all the way down the little thing. Of course, if you wear glasses that makes it even harder. And it just bugged the heck out of them that you were not flat enough on the ground, and they would insist that you be flat on the ground to the point where they—this one put his knee right between my shoulder blades and put all his weight on it to smoosh me into the ground so 23
I would be low enough to meet his specifications on how I should be able to shoot. And with the sling around it, which was cutting in everywhere, it was miserable. So you're sitting there trying not to cry and the tears are rolling down your face and they're yelling at you, and they did not use the—the type of profanity that they used on the male recruits because this was a no-no, and besides that we were officer candidates and you had to be a little nicer to us, but they could make "ladies" sound like the dirtiest language you ever heard in your life.
"All right, you ladies."
“Oh no, we're in trouble now."
And what was really a shock was when we graduated from candidate school, and the very next Monday we show up for officer basic school. We are now commissioned officers; we have little gold bars on our epaulets. We are officers, they are enlisted, and now all of a sudden it was, "Ma'am, would you do this? Ma'am, respectfully, would you do that?" And we're still terrified of them, we're still going [makes noise], like this, and then suddenly it dawns on us that they are completely turned around and—and treating us with the utmost respect, and I kind of miss the old way; it was—But it—it was a—it was a learning curve.
TS: Now, did you have male trainers for both your candidate school and the basic?
CP: Yes.
TS: All—All men doing that?
CP: No, we had female plat—platoon—Well, we had captains and lieutenants that were already commissioned for candidate school.
TS: Okay.
CP: But we still had male DIs—
TS: I see.
CP: —to teach us the finer things of marching and—
TS: Yeah.
CP: —all that good stuff. And then we—I had the same DIs when we went into officer candidate school—I mean officer basic school.
TS: Right.
CP: They just sort of followed us along and so, of course, they were used to us and we were used to them but we only had one—one class a year.
TS: Of officers? Oh, in the Marines? 24
CP: Now, let me give you a little example. At the time I went in, the women Marines could only be 2% of the number of people in the Marine Corps. Out of that 2%, only 10% could be officers. That made us a very tiny minority. So we had almost sixty people in my candidate class, which was about—that’s—was max [maximum]. You could not have any more people coming into the Marine Corps—female—so we only had one course a year, where the men had four courses a year.
TS: Were you finding that—How were you finding your acclimation to the Marine Corps during your training sessions?
CP: Once you get over the initial shock that this is not in Kansas anymore, you're—you're okay. Like I said, once they tell you this is what you can do and what you can't do and you just go ahead and do what you're supposed to do, it's not a problem.
TS: Was there anything that was particularly difficult, either physically or emotionally?
CP: I've never been a physical person. To me—I never played sports. I tried. When I was in high school they made you go out for sports for P—PE [physical education], and so we would play basketball and softball and volleyball, stuff like that. Well, volleyball was not good. I got a ball smashed in my face and my glasses, they had to use—they had to call the custodian to come out with two pairs of pliers and straighten out the frames to get them off my nose because it had just smashed it right into the nose and they couldn't pull my glasses off. And so, I really looked terrible, did not duck when I should have, and I got smashed pretty good. So I became terrified of the volleyball smashing me in the face. Softball, I couldn't hit very well and about the most I could do was if they—if I got a walk, and I get to walk because their pitchers weren't that good either. But I remember this one time when they asked me—they said, "What position did you play in softball?"
Well, you always played work up[?], so you got to play other position[s], and I said, "Well," I said, "my—my fondest memory is I was third base."
And they said, "Oh, you played third base."
And I said, "No, I was the third base."
And they said, "How did that happen?"
And I said, "Well, I was on third base, and this lady, this—one of my cohorts—I don't know—I don't remember exactly—I think if I had run to third base or I was at third base, all I know is that Nancy, who was a hefty girl—she was big-boned, she outweighed me by a good sixty, seventy pounds, she was solid muscle—she came tearing around that—those—those bases, and I remember they threw the ball at me, and I was trying to catch the ball, and they kept telling her, “You've got to—You've got to get on third, you've got to get on third!" Well, I was on third. So she just knocked me down and stomped on me going around, and sure enough, I mean, I was on my back and she stomped me right in the middle of the stomach and everything else, as she's running to home. And I'm laying there trying to catch my breath and I couldn't catch my breath and I’m wheezing my last—and they're telling me to get up because I was holding up the game and all that, and they were mad at me about that. Well, I'm sorry, but I was third base. [chuckles] She had—I was on top of it and she was supposed to be on third; she 25
was. So that—My—My sports thing was not good. So the thing is, is that when they want to do physical stuff in the Marine Corps, that was way low priority for me.
TS: Yeah.
CP: I did the minimum the best I could and tried, and tried, and tried, but I did not do anything.
TS: No. Well, you didn't—at—at that time you didn't have that—like you said, as much physical exertion as—
CP: Yeah.
TS: —they do now.
CP: Would I, could I get through the Marine Corps today? No. Would I get in the front door? Nope.
TS: [chuckles] Well, you never know, Carol.
CP: Could I get as far as the recruiter? Nope.
TS: [chuckles] Well, tell me then about how you got—what they decided, or what you decided you were going to do for your career—or for your job, not necessarily a career at that time.
CP: What? I'm sorry, I don't understand.
TS: Well, what job did you get in the Marine Corps?
CP: Oh, well, I started off—because of my educational background, they thought it—art—“Let's put her in audio-visual—" because we did all the charts and graphics and things for presentations so—and it was a film library and everything so that's when I got to MCRD, San Diego—
TS: Okay.
CP: —and—Marine Corps Recruit Depot. And then, of course, because I was an officer and Vietnam was really getting swinging, they were moving out a lot of male officers [unclear] they needed them so—elsewhere. So they had a lot of these little sections that were—now had no officers in them, and some of them were as many as fifty, sixty people in them and some of them only had two or three people in them. So the women officers that were stationed there would get all these as additional duties, so even though you had a primary duty, you might have five or six other little duties that you got to go do. And so, I was a training aids[?] officer but I—I had a major over me—male—who was getting 26
his doctorate so he was never there. I was supposed to lie for him, tell them that he was off on official business when I knew he was at the library at the college doing his thing, but I—I was a good little Marine and I tried to do the best I could.
I was swimming pool officer. Being an officer and knowing what you're supposed to do, I decided one day that I would go inspect the swimming pool, so I told my staff sergeant at the training aid [unclear] to take me over there, because this parade field was a half a mile long and women officers always had to wear high heels. Now, this is a long way to go on asphalt and cement, takes a long time, and I said, "I want to go over there." And we were not allowed to drive the golf carts. Only the enlisted men could drive the golf carts so if I wanted to go anywhere he had to take me.
Well, he tried his darnedest—"Now—Now, Lieutenant, why don’t we call Sergeant Cowey[?] and let him know that you're coming."
"No, it wouldn't be a surprise inspection; I want to go now."
"Okay." So he took me, and he says, "Well, let me let Sergeant—let me tell Sergeant Cowey you're here." He was a big Hawaiian, which was—
TS: Which one? The one driving or the one—
CP: No—
TS: —you were going to see?
CP: Howey—Cowey, and I guess that's because he swam a lot, so he got to be in charge of the swimming pool.
Well, I knew recruits were being trained, I'd seen training pictures, so I told Sergeant Cowey, I says, "I'm here to inspect the pool."
And he goes, "No, Ma'am. Respectfully request you come at another time."
And I went, "Sergeant Cowey, I am here to inspect the pool; I am going to inspect the pool."
He looked at me and he said, "Yes, Ma'am," dutiful young man that he was. I go around this baffle, which they have where you can't look directly in, and there are two platoons of naked men. Naked as the day they were born. I turned around and come right back out, [chuckles] and both of them are looking at me, trying not to laugh, and he says, "Do they pass your their inspection, Ma'am?"
"Why didn't you tell me?"
He says, "You didn't ask."
TS: [chuckles]
CP: "I told you to come back at a different time."
I said, "They're not wearing anything."
He says, "No, they're not."
"But I saw the training films."
He said, "They wear things in the training films but," he says, "in real life, recruits do not wear anything in the swimming pools."
"Oh." So I became one of the educated right then and there. 27
TS: I guess so. [chuckles]
CP: That was one of the little highlights.
TS: Right.
CP: The joys of—
TS: Yeah.
CP: —being an officer.
TS: So how did you—How were you taking to the Marine Corps? Where you enjoying it at this point?
CP: Well, I had a lot of enjoyment. There were—It's a learning curve. It's like a lot of things, you make a lot of little mistakes and things because you really don't know the ropes yet, and so far, though, I thought it was kind of fun.
TS: What were your housing conditions like?
CP: Well, I—They give you what they call an allowance—a housing allowance, and you can go—you can either stay—they really didn't have any on-base housing at MCRD San Diego so—it's just too crowded a city for them to have a lot of land so we had to find apartments, and so they subsidized our apartments. So I started off in a little tiny studio apartment and had a table with two chairs, and—and it was furnished—so I had two plates, two cups, two pans. [both chuckle] It wa—It was interesting. I should have—should have never gone beyond that.
TS: Why?
CP: Because then I got a bigger studio and that was one where I ended up with four plates, and four cups, and four—stuff, and then I begin decorating and I begin getting—buying things. And then I got one bedroom apartment. Well, now you have to go buy more stuff, such as bedding, and a—and a bedspread, and towels, and sheets, and pillowcases, and more stuff. And I said—And every time—And then I go to a two-bedroom apartment, and then a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment, and I said, "You keep accumulating." Well, when the first year that I was there, and I had to move three times— which are different stories which are quite interesting—but it was very easy. Two suitcases and a cardboard box. You put it in your car, you moved. As time goes on, now you need to have help to move.
TS: Right.
CP: Friends with trucks. [chuckles] 28
TS: You keep having to fill it up depending on the size that you get.
CP: Nature abhors a vacuum. As long as there is a room to put something you're going to find something to put in it.
TS: So what are your interesting stories about having to move?
CP: One of them was, I was in this really cute little one-bedroom apartment, and the bedrooms backed up to each other but I—apartments are like that, and I came down with something; I don't know what it was but I felt crummy and—Now, there had been stuff going on at night; I understood; between men and women. And it got to be a little loud occasionally and banging against the—the wall between us and everything—the headboard, I think. Anyway, I came home about two o'clock and I laid down in my— took a couple aspirin and I was trying to rest, and I could hear this—this whining and this moaning and this groaning and this bumping and all this good kind of stuff, and the dog was barking, and the cat was meowing, and the bird was screaming, and all this stuff is going on, and I just couldn't take it anymore, and I got up and walked over to the wall and I'm banging on it with my fist screaming, "Shut up, just shut up! For once, just shut up!" I says, "Night after night," I says, "I have to listen to this. I am—I am sick, I am tired, I'm—All I want is some rest. Could you just let me go to sleep?" And there was this dead silence; absolute dead silence; not a single sound.
And I hear this, "No! No!" Pow! And I could hear someone getting slapped, and this woman is crying and screaming and everything else. A guy is beating her—beating her up. Well, I didn't know what was going on but at least they stopped all that. I went back to bed. Next morning I was getting ready to go to work and this woman is standing there with a couple black eyes, a busted lip. She looked at me like this and she says, "You had better move."
And I said, "Why?"
She says—She says, "Because of what happened." She says, "My friends will come and you're going to get slashed tires every night," she says, "and you—I cannot vouch for your safety."
And I said, "Well, what did I do?"
She says, "Why did you do what you did the other day?"
And I said, "Because it's true." I said, "I'm sorry," I said, "but I was just sick and I—" I said, "All this noise all the time."
And she says, "Do you know who that was?"
And I said, "No."
She said, "That was my husband."
"So?"
"He just got back from deployment."
TS: Oh.
CP: He had been at sea, and she and her little cohorts were running a prostitution ring, and so all these nights that I thought it was a husband and wife, it really wasn't. So when he 29
came and he heard me accusing her of night after night after night, it kind of ticked him off a little bit. I thought, "It's time to leave." So that was one of my—Yeah, I better get out.
TS: Right.
CP: [chuckles]
TS: That's a pretty good reason to move, I think.
CP: I think so too.
TS: Yeah, yeah. Now, how about your—Did you eat—Did you get allowances to eat off the post, or—
CP: I don't remember getting food allowance. I just remember the housing allowance.
TS: Did you—Did you eat on—on your base then?
CP: Well, if you were on a base you still had to pay for your food—
TS: Okay.
CP: —if you belonged to the bachelor officers' quarters.
TS: Okay.
CP: If you lived there you had to buy their meal tickets, whatever it is, and it was so much a month and—and when you had breakfast you gave them one, another ticket for lunch, another one for dinner.
TS: Then it was—So it was, like, at the officers club that you could eat?
CP: Yes, yes.
TS: Did—How did you—How'd you like the food?
CP: Delicious.
TS: Yeah?
CP: Those cooks are good.
TS: Yeah.
30
CP: Yeah. Anyone who complains about military food really—I think the MREs [Meals Ready to Eat], they call them now, are probably not the best in the world, but, I mean, as far as what they feed you, they believe in food. They also believe that you're going to work it off, and, unfortunately, if you're not in combat and you're not training every day, you don't work it off, but you're still used to eating like that and that's why you see so many overweight military, is because, "Hey, we're not working it off." [both chuckle]
TS: That's right. Well, what—How did you think about your pay at that time?
CP: Well, the pay was actually not that bad. I think my first—I think I made [$]14,000 a year.
TS: As an officer?
CP: Yeah, yeah.
TS: How would that have compared to the civilian world for you at that time as a woman?
CP: Oh, that was way high. Yeah.
TS: Was that a draw for you at all, for being in the Marine Corps?
CP: I had never really thought about that part of it.
TS: No?
CP: No.
TS: Because it just was, like, your first job, really, right?
CP: One of the things—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Well, not—not your first job. I mean your first job after college.
CP: One of the things, though, about being an officer which I hadn't thought about is, as an enlisted person they give you your uniforms when you start out. Three sets of uniforms, all kinds of stuff. As an officer you have to buy them, and not only that but they have to be tailor-made, so when you're going in and you are getting tailor-made clothes out of the finest materials, and it's made individually to fit you perfectly, and you're paying beau coups of money—because I remember my—just my regular uniform, which was— consisted of a shirt, which we called a blouse, and a skirt, and a jacket. The blouse we could buy off the rack, those were not tailor-made, but the uniforms themselves were tailor-made; $120. That is a lot of money for one, and then when you get to the dress 31
blues, and then we had our summer white—dress whites—and all the other things, a lot of what you were paying for was just trying to keep clothes on your back.
TS: Yeah.
CP: And it always had to be so perfect. Every barracks that you go into in—in—I can only speak for the Marine Corps—is on your way out there is a full length mirror and you were supposed to stop and look and make sure everything was perfect before you walked out that door, and we used to get so frustrated with our instructors in candidate school, is because as much as we tried, and, I mean, we—Wisk [laundry detergent]; that's what we discovered; Wisk. And I—Even today—I use Tide [laundry detergent] all the time and then something comes up and I go get some Wisk and it takes care of it. But we had to wash, by hand, our—our shirts and everything. The rest we had to have dry cleaned.
But they would come in, and we would be in class sitting down, and we would get up and, of course, you'd get little wrinkles in your rear, and they came in, they never had a wrinkle. We could not understand it; how they would work all day long and never get wrinkled. It dawned on us as we got toward the end of the program; we found out why. There were three of them for each—each group of women. They took turns going out to do stuff. They never sat down. They—They had a room where they had an ironing board, and if they did sit down before they came back they would iron out their shirt—their skirt—and come back so there were no wrinkles and then fuss at us because, "You have a wrinkle under your rear." I said—So it was pretty pathetic. [both chuckle]
TS: Well, now, how was your—how were your relationships between you and your peers? Did you mostly work with other women or men or—
CP: Well, during candidate course we worked and—
TS: Well, after that—
CP: —basic school—
TS: But after you got out.
CP: Once we got out of training—
TS: Yes.
CP: —you were just a Marine. That's it. Once a Marine, always a Marine. From the time you—you're there—so you are peers and you get along okay except we had a problem, and the problem was, like when I went out to MSRD San Diego, we had these old gunnery sergeants; grizzled old gunnery sergeants been in since year one, nearing retirement, had never even seen a woman Marine. Not only were they seeing women Marines but they had suddenly found out there was such a thing as Marine officers that no one had ever told them about. And one of them, which was kind of an interesting story, is that I got to be GED [General Education Development] Officer. I told you we get 32
these strange little additional duties. And so, they told me where to go and I went down and I walked in and there was—there were two desks, and I'm basically a nice person I keep thinking, but you had to keep a certain element of superiority all the time as an officer or they'd run right over you. I walked in and this gunny was sitting there with his feet up on the desk, leaning back, kind of looked at me and says, "What do you want, sweetie?"
Now, his little cohort in crime was a lance corporal who was a little bit more astute and much younger, and he goes "[makes noise]," and kind of looks away. Uh-oh.
And I said, "Well, the first thing you can do," I said, "is get your feet off my desk and stand up when I come—walk in that room."
And he said, "Now, why would I want to do that?"
I said, "Because, one," I said, "I'm an officer; two, you are sitting at the desk that I am now going to commandeer. I am officer in charge of the GED section."
His jaw dropped, he looked at me, he looked at his little fella who was sitting here like this, hands folded. "Yes, ma'am."
I said, "From now on," I said, "where you are is my desk." I said, "I want you to take all your personal things out of there. I want everything that belongs to you out of my desk. I want everything that belongs to you that's on top of that desk off. I want my desk when I come in tomorrow morning.
And he says, "Well, where am I supposed to sit?"
I said, "I don't know." I said, "I understand," I said, "that Marines are really good at finding things." I said, "I guess you're just going to have to go find a desk."
And he looked at this little lance corporal and he says, "You heard her. Get your stuff of the desk, I'm going to use yours."
I said, "No, you're not. Didn't you hear me?" I said, "He keeps his desk." I said, "You find yourself a desk."
"Where do you want me to put it?"
I said, "I don't care, but that is going to be where I'm going to be sitting. Right where it is; right where it stands." I came to work the next day, there was a third desk, and he was at it with all his stuff. His little lance corporal was still at his original place with his desk, and I had my desk, which I did not use that often because I had other duties to do, but it was just a shock to this poor man, and I found this very often many places the first, maybe, four or five years that I was in, that there were people who had no idea there were women officers. They might have seen an enlisted woman once in a while but it was just a shock to them.
TS: Did you find—So, like, this particular gunnery sergeant, did he shape up after that and not give you any guff or—
CP: We had at truce.
TS: Yeah?
CP: I mean, I wasn't mean to him and he—he—I don't know what he said about me when my back was turned, I don't really care, but while I was there he was respectful enough and—We didn't—We wouldn't—I don't send him Christmas cards, let's put it like that. We 33
just—it was—"Okay, fine, this is the way it's going to be," and he would report to me and tell me what they were doing and how many had come in, how many were trained, who got their GEDs, who didn't, and I went, "Okay," and I—that—that was it; that was just—They had to have an officer in charge.
TS: So it was like just a professional relationship then, just—
CP: Very totally professional.
TS: Yeah.
CP: It was about the only thing that you could have. I was Top Secret Material Control Officer at three different stations—three different places.
TS: This was in San Diego?
CP: Not in S—Yes, in San Diego, I got to the first—the first time.
TS: Yes.
CP: And then [Marine Corps Base] Quantico [Virginia] and then [Marine Corps Base] Camp Lejeune [North Carolina], so—
TS: Okay.
CP: So all three of those places I ended up Top Secret Material Control Officer—No. Quantico, MCRD San Diego, and Oahu [Marine Corps Base Hawaii].
TS: Okay, Hawaii.
CP: When I—When I was in Hawaii. Is that—They put you in these areas that have no windows, you have one way in, one way out, doors, top security, and when you're locked up with somebody for eight, ten hours a day, you get to know them pretty good. And I had one other officer who was usually over me, and we would be in the same room for hours and hours and hours, and we got to be—I don't know if it was friends, but confidants, because he would tell me things that I'm sure that his mother even didn't have no idea what was going on, and I'm sure his wife didn't know. And I would tell him things, because I knew he wasn't going to go any further. But we would just sit there, because there really wasn't that much to do as a Top Secret Material Control Officer. You got the stuff in, you logged it in, you made sure it was accounted for, you gave it a number, you knew where it was, you made sure that whoever was supposed to see it saw it, if they weren't supposed to see it, they didn't get to see it, all that. And that was where I really learned that maybe things have changed. I'm not going to do this as a blanket statement or anything, but while I was doing these things—Never trust the news. Never trust what's happening on TV, don't ever trust what you read in a newspaper. It's all a lie. Downright lie. It's not so much that they deceive you, it's that they just don't tell you, so 34
people are s—putting their own spin on things. Well, if this is this, and this is this, this must be this, and this is what we're going to report on. Probably not.
TS: Do you have an example?
CP: No.
TS: No?
CP: Well, not right off my—top of my head, but it was always interesting to go home and watch the news and now us know, really, what the situation was. "Now, why are they reporting it that way?" But then, most of the people that were in the military, whether they had a—a top secret clearance or not, just knew from their buddies and things, because the buddies would tell them what was going on, and there were some atrocities that really went on that I just—but we never heard of them.
TS: Is this during Vietnam?
CP: But—But the ones that we did hear about—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: My Lai [Massacre]?
CP: —were bad enough.
TS: Like My Lai?
[The My Lai Massacre was the Vietnam War mass killing of between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians by United States Army soldiers in South Vietnam on March 16, 1968]
CP: Yeah.
TS: Yes.
CP: Those—Those were bad enough, but it was also surprising to us that—how they would pick and choose which ones they were going to release or who was going to find out about it. It was just sort of like, "Well, what about this other situation?"
"No, no, no, that never got out."
"Oh, okay." So—But—
TS: What did you think about all that? 35
CP: There was a reason for it. First of all, Vietnam, as you well remember—or maybe not, you're young—was a terrible time. Should we have been in there? Probably not. Should we have ever gone there? Probably not. Did we make a difference? Probably not. Or should we be proud of it? Probably not. There are many "probably nots." At the same time, it is the decisions that were made at the time to do this and to follow through [on] our decisions that were made, and as a good citizen, as a member of the military, you are commanders. When they tell you to do something, you do it; you follow the orders.
Now, you do not have to follow orders that are illegal. That's one of the first things they tell you; if it's an illegal order, you are under no obligation to do it. Like, if your commanding officer was mad at your bunkmate and said, "Shoot him," no, you're not going to shoot your bunkmate. That would be totally illogical.
But there were lots of things that were bad during this period of time. The morale was bad mostly because of the press, and I think that this is where the press got a bad rap, was because you had all these people that were going to Canada so they wouldn't get drafted, you had all these college kids that were storming every place they could with their pickets and everything, and denouncing how mean and rotten and lousy the—the soldiers were over there beating up on all these poor Vietnamese who were trying to kill everybody, and who were, because they were no saints, believe me. They were doing some horrible things to their own people; it was just horrible. I mean, really, really, bad that made what we did look like a picnic. Really, we did not sit there and torture and torture and torture and torture and torture these people and little kids and say, "Oh, you're going to—We're mad at you because you did this, so let's—okay, we got your baby there, cut off a finger at a time; cut off a toe at a time; blind it; cut off its tongue." The baby is trying to scream and the mother is standing there watching all this kind of stuff. Oh no, you never hear that. But some soldier shoots this mother with the baby in her hands and the baby dies, he is suddenly the worst creature that ever came down the pike, and we're going to hate all the military.
And that was where it was unfair, is that when these guys came back from a lot of this, and they were under a lot of stress—and they were over there for long periods of time, also, and they were not under the best of circumstances over there—the hate that they faced when they came back. Today when you talk to a lot of male Vietnam veterans, and you ask them, "Well, tell me about yours—"
"No."
You ask a family relative, "Well, what happened over there?"
"Nothing."
"You going to talk about your experiences?"
"No."
They won't. They won't discuss it, and it's not that they didn't feel anything and it's not that they didn't care. They did care, but they also knew that they would be judged and that was what the saddest thing is. We have such honor and respect for World War I; such honor and respect and joy for World War II veterans. Oh, a World War II veteran, ninety-four years old and he is a hero. Yay! Yes, he is. Korea, oh yeah, these guys—the Chosin—frozen Chosin. [Battle of Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War] What they went through there, these are heroes. Vietnam. Baby killers, rapist, nasty people. They 36
should all be thrown off the face of the earth. There's a place in hell for those people in uniform. That is the sad part that I see.
Then, all of a sudden, we get into a nice war again. [chuckles] We hardly get into any trouble anymore, but what do we do?
TS: Which war are you talking about?
CP: Well, Afghanistan and Iraq.
TS: Yes.
CP: But now we're heroes again. The news—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: But there—But there—
CP: The news—
TS: But they report things that have—
CP: Yeah, but—
TS: —[unclear] the atrocities.
CP: — the news people and everything—
TS: Yes.
CP: —these brave soldiers coming back, and the families—every time a father comes home, the little kid and momma are there, and the little kid runs over and you've got the news people there with their cameras; "Isn't this [unclear]? I cry every time I see this." Ha. Yes, I think it's wonderful, I really do, but not like them coming back from Vietnam.
TS: But don't you think that's a lesson that they learned from Vietnam, and how they—the media portrayed that? Instead of portraying the soldiers, they're—they talk more about policy now?
CP: I think that it—that—that probably did. They realized that if you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem, and that when something starts feeding on itself it just feeds and feeds and feeds, and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and you can't control it; you can't control it. And so, I think that that may be part of it. Also, today, with the technology we have.
37
TS: Right.
CP: You can't hide anything.
TS: [chuckles] Right.
CP: I mean, everybody has a cell phone; everybody takes pictures; everybody takes [unclear]—
TS: Not everybody has a cell phone apparently.
CP: I don't have a cell phone.
TS: [laughs] [unclear]
CP: But I mean, it's so funny. I can remember when I was growing up, I mean, you would sit there and have some horrible disaster in California and I was in Texas. We might hear about it two weeks later. Here you're watching the news—"Breaking news, here is, live from Sacramento, big col—big collision, bridge falls, nine people killed."
And you're sitting here going, "Oh, okay." It's instantaneous.
TS: Yes, it is instan—it is instantaneous.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
CP: All this stuff. And then you've got the people now in the war zones too, are—they're all sitting there with their cell phones and they're recording things, and they're leaving messages and sending messages to everybody back home, so it's—There aren't any secrets anymore. [chuckles]
TS: Well, I wanted to ask you a little bit more—I was just looking—like, you were—You were in the Marine Corps during pretty much all of our hot involvement with the Vietnam War.
CP: Yes.
TS: And so—And you were stationed at San Diego and [Marine Corps Air Station] Cherry Point [North Carolina], and Quantico. Now, did you come in contact with soldiers returning or going to Vietnam?
CP: Oh, yeah.
TS: Because you—you—no Marine Corps women were over in Vietnam—
38
CP: No.
TS: —I don't believe, right.
CP: Oh, yeah, we—constantly. Not so much MCRD because that's a training—it's mostly for training.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: That's Quantico, or which one—MCRD.
CP: MCRD; that was San Diego.
TS: Okay, San Diego.
CP: See, on the east coast it's [Marine Corps Recruit Depot] Parris Island [South Carolina]—
TS: Right.
CP: —on the West Coast it's San Diego.
TS: Okay.
CP: So that's the difference. Marine—Your west coast Marines and east coast Marines.
TS: So what kind of, like, personal contact did you have with the war?
CP: People coming and going. You asked me about them coming and going. We—We watched them while they were being deployed; we watched them when they came back. Mine was mostly—in the early years were single men yet—they were not married yet, and someone asked me one time why I never got married and I said, "Well," I said, "because for a while, if you got to like somebody they'd probably get killed."
And they said, "What?"
And I said, "Well," I said, "we—we're like brothers and sisters mostly." I said, "There was hardly ever any romance between us because we knew each other too well."
I was not that impressed with the male Marines, they were cute and everything else, but not like the school teachers and the nurses, they're all—"I want to be married to a Marine officer, they're so wonderful."
We just looked at them and—"Oh God, can you believe she believes that?" We just—We were just not that impressed because we were one, but it was—it was kind of interesting.
But they would—they would come back, or they were ready to go, and here you had spent maybe three, four, five months with them, and you'd go to movies, and you 39
would sit around and shoot the bull, and you'd go to dinners, and you'd go to different people's houses.
TS: You mean, like, dating?
CP: Well, it was more like group dating.
TS: Group dating, okay.
CP: You went to someone's house and they had a cookout and—
TS: Lots of people were there, I see.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
CP: —lots of people were there, and a lot of them did kind of pair up a little bit, and you would maybe have somebody that would start coming over on their own—they wouldn't wait for the group—and you got to be really close and everything. And so, we had this—this one guy and he was really a nice guy, and he started coming over and everything and then he had to go to Vietnam, and I was looking forward to him coming home because maybe something would come of this, and he was killed; killed in combat.
Okay, about five months later another one of my little buddies that I got real close to, met his parents, all his—met his siblings, had a lot in common, talked what he wanted in life, I told him what I wanted in life, they were kind of comparable. And so, well, we can probably get along real well and he went to Vietnam and got killed. Same thing with an airlin—air—with a pilot. He went over, got shot down, he was killed.
Well, that can almost make you think like, "Don't like anybody," because if you really get to like them that's their death warrant; the black widow and you're not even a—married, you're just—So don't learn to like somebody that much.
TS: How—But—How did you cope with that at the time? I mean, you're talking now, from a perspective of—How many years are we talking?—six—fifty years in so—in some sense?
CP: Yeah.
TS: Fifty years ago.
CP: Fifty years ago.
TS: So at the time you're in your twenties, right?
CP: Yeah, this—this picture's—I'm twenty-four.
40
TS: Okay, so you're—you're in your twenties and you're getting close to some of the guys and they—and you find out that they have been killed in Vietnam. At the time, what—what did you think then?
CP: You grieve like you would any of your other friends and your buddies and your family members. It's the same grief. We might not have had an intimacy or anything that would be—make it much deeper, but it was still this feeling of loss—
TS: Yes.
CP: —of things that might have been, and I think that that's—that's the biggest thing, is what have—what might have been, and you find that today in the military, too; the military families and wives and things when they—when they see hubby going off down the road and, "Is this going to be the last time I see him?" He may not even be killed in combat. The plane could go down, the ship could go down, it could be an accident, it could be something, but he's not there, and they're going to have that same loss whether you're killed in—in combat or you're killed in an accident, or anything else, the loss is still there.
TS: Have you been to the Vietnam [Veterans] Memorial [Washington, DC]?
CP: I have not.
TS: No? Have you wanted to go?
CP: I would want to but physically I can't.
TS: Okay.
CP: I mean, I am not going to go in a wheelchair. [chuckles]
TS: No?
CP: No, I mean, I wouldn't—I wouldn't put that burden on anybody.
TS: But they have those—the—what do they call the flights that they—where they take veterans to the Memorial. Have you ever looked at any of those?
CP: Yes and no.
TS: Yeah.
CP: But I do not do good walking long distances or standing long—long time and—
TS: Yeah.
CP: —stuff like that, so. My—My travel days are pretty limited right now. 41
TS: Yeah. Well, you've got a beautiful here—view here, Carol—
CP: I know.
TS: —for sure.
CP: Closer to heaven; you're up in the mountains.
TS: Yeah, it does look closer to heaven up here. Well, do you have any—So when you went from San Diego then you—you ended up—your next assignment was in Cherry Point.
CP: Right.
TS: What were some memories that you have from your Cherry Point assignment?
CP: Well, airplanes.
TS: Airplanes, okay.
CP: [laughs]
TS: Because that is a—
CP: From traffic to airplanes.
TS: The air station, right?
CP: Yeah, MCAS, yeah. It was hard getting used to, is because this is a training facility and I was in an officer in charge of the link trainers.
TS: Oh, the link trainers, okay.
CP: Yes, and some people know what link trainers are, some people don't know what link trainers are.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Well, describe them for people who are maybe not familiar—
CP: Well, this is where the pilots learn to fly their airplanes; this is where the gunners learn to gun; this is where the bombers learn to bomb; all that is there. There's—They're flight simulators, only they're very fancy ones, and so they are in these big buildings—they're sort of like sound stages—and they have all this electronic equipment; much better today 42
than back then. That—It was more like the early video games, but still. One of the big things was, "Let's go bomb the officers club."
"Okay."
TS: [chuckles]
CP: Because you had the topography and you would—it would be like you were really flying over, and then you would, like, release the bombs and then it would electronically tell you how close you got, and did you miss it completely and all that, and I really enjoyed the link trainers because once in a while I would get to go play with the airplanes. And I remember there was one time when I was—nobody was scheduled that I could see, and I was up there and had had one of the—one of the enlisted guys with me to—to run the—the program. And I was in there and I was in one of the fighter jets and I was just having a good time, and I was flying along, and all of a sudden this pilot who wanted to get some—his training flights training time in, walks in to where I am and he says, "Get out of there," he says, "I need to get my fli—my—my training time in."
And I says, "How dare you come aboard my plane at 45,000 feet and tell me to get out of here." It was a little banter like that.
And he says, "Then land it," because he didn't want to take over in mid-flight either.
So I said, "Okay." I said, "I'll just show you how good I am." Well, I'm landing the plane and, of course, came in and he's sitting there and he's watching the instruments and my little cohort in crime was sitting there watching the instruments and I felt so good about that. I got off, I said, "See?" I said, "No problem at all."
And he says, "Yeah, you landed twelve feet below the deck."
TS: [chuckles]
CP: "Oh." Which meant I was—I'd crashed.
TS: Exactly. [both laugh]
CP: "Yeah," he says, "you—you did real well," he says, "you landed twelve feet below the deck."
I said, "Oh, God." So then after that, the rule was don't let her go up and play with the airplanes very often, so.
TS: Sounds like maybe you needed the practice, though.
CP: I know. Who knows? I might have been one of the first female fighter pilots or something.
TS: That's right.
CP: Yeah.
43
TS: That's right. Oh, I was going to ask you one more thing about Vietnam was—maybe more than one thing, but did you ever feel like you should go there and serve over there?
CP: No.
TS: No?
CP: I hate to say that, but I was not one of these—"Yeah, let's go fight."
TS: Well, not necessarily fight but—
CP: Just to go, no, no.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: —administrative work or something over there?
CP: No, because I felt that I was doing my job here. "Free A Man To Fight," that was our mot—that was our motto. That was the whole reason we were allowed in to begin with, was because the men felt a certain resentment if they joined the Marine Corps and they're supposed to be the greatest fighting force in the world and they're stuck behind a desk, because they have no chance of promotion. They have no chance of making it big time because they are stuck doing menial jobs, and so the fact that we were coming in, and we were taking over these jobs to allow them to go over and make a name for themselves, it was very appreciated by them, and you'd see them and they would say, "Oh, I got orders. I get to go."
"Yay, you get to go."
"Who's taking my place?"
"She is."
"Oh, great! You're going to love it." But they were thrilled that we were coming. They were just, "Oh boy, we get to go fight," so no, I wou—I wouldn't have thought—I guess I hadn't really thought about it, but—to take one of their little—little slots away from them, an opportunity to go—go be famous or something, no, I was a very generous person in that respect; "I'll let you go."
TS: There you go. How did you like Cherry Point then?
CP: I loved Cherry Point.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Once you got used to the planes. 44
CP: It was fun. They'd go out and chase the deer off the runway and birds off the runway and—and you get used to the airplane sounds and the—and the jets taking off and landing and it was—it was—it was kind of fun. And you got used to the pilots, and I swear, the—I don't know—This was a time when there was this perfume out. I never used it myself but it was called Imprevu [by Coty], and this was supposed to be the—the perfume that you just absolutely adored, it was just wonderful. Well, they would spray their facemask with it because they used the same facemask. You didn't have your own sanitary facemask when you were flying, you just—Oh, Joe was using it and he's sweating all over inside and then Tom uses it and he's sweating all over inside. Well, it got a little gamey after a while having this mask, and I did have to go through— because I wanted to ride in the planes, that I had to go through the pressure training and you wear the pressure suit and you go through the—slipped my mind right now, but the one that shows the pressure and you're going—get the bends when you go down.
TS: Okay.
CP: You know what I—
TS: Decompression.
CP: Decompression chamber, and we had to go through all that training and everything so it was—it was kind of fun and interesting.
TS: Did you get to go up in the planes then?
CP: Yes.
TS: Which ones did you get to fly in?
CP: I got to fl—I got to fly in the [McDonnell Douglas F-4] Phantom which was my favoritest plane in the whole world because I thought it was absolutely wonderful.
TS: Now, that's a jet, right?
CP: Oh, yeah.
TS: Yeah.
CP: Oh, yeah, and that's—that's the evil-looking one before the Stealth came out. It's the one that's real long and it's got those wings—
TS: Swept back wings?
45
CP: Swept back wings and the kind of little curvy little—looks like a—like it's going to eat you up, and fast, and loud, and really good. That was my dream. I said, "Just—Just get me up there. Just once, just once." So they took me up, but not for real long.
TS: Yeah.
CP: For—I got to ride in the Phantom; I got to ride in the Phantom.
TS: That's pretty neat.
CP: Yeah. And one of my favorite stories is—at Cherry Point was, two of the pilots that I knew that were idiots—and that's what I really say, they are complete idiots. [unclear] Top Gun and all this; the heroes and everything. Well, I'm sure at 40,000 feet they know what they're doing. It's probably the rarified air or something; all that oxygen and Imprevu in their mask or something. They pretty much know what they're doing. The minute their feet hit the ground their brains turn to noodles. That's about the only thing I can think of. They drank; they were drunk all the time. One of their—their favorite things was the WOQ—or the BOQ [Bachelor Officer Quarters], and they would have these parties, and one of the guys passed out and leaned him up against the wall and they would take all their empty beer cans and build a fence around him, and then when it would get about six, seven stories high, then they would just leave him there and in the morning he'd wake up and he would be surrounded by all these beer cans in a place where he doesn't even remember being. It was—It was always kind of fun. But the—they were idiots.
Well, anyway, these two idiots—really nice guys ordinarily—were sent to Norfolk to pick up the first of new airplanes, and it was called the A-6A [Grumman A-6 Intruder], and the A-6A was a new radar-type airplane, had a big—It was ugly. To me, it looked like a big horsefly. It was just—There was no grace to it whatsoever. But they were—the Marines were getting the very first for the Marine Corps, and these guys were going to go each pick up an airplane and fly it back to MCAS Cherry Point. They got to Norfolk just fine, thank you very much, get in their brand new six million dollar aircraft each, take off—which from Norfolk to MCAS is probably an hour and a half flying in a jet—they crashed mid-air into each other.
TS: Into each other?
CP: Oh, yes, because we have something new and it's so wonderful and let's play war games up here, and I'll go after you, and then can you go after me, and we're going to have this big fun time, and one of them comes up too close and gets underneath the other plane and they crash. And, of course, they both ejected, and they landed safely, and I thought—this old saying, the captain goes down with the ship, because it costs too much for him to have to replace it so you might as well die, and I thought, "They've got to punish these two. They each ruined a six million dollar aircraft because they were horsing around up there. They should be reduced in rank, they should be fined, they should be thrown in jail, they're co—they're totally incompetent." You know what punishment they got?
46
TS: I do not.
CP: They were chastised, and at the same time they were told, "Thank God you didn't land in civilian housing." That they kept those planes from crashing into civilian housing, they were considered heroic, that they had saved the military all this grief. It's okay to ruin the airplanes as sea, they went down in the ocean, but they could have very easily landed in civilian housing, and "Good boys, good boys."
And I'm just going, "I can't believe it." [chuckles] But—But it—That was—It was fun.
TS: That was it; that's all they got; a slap on the wrist then?
CP: Yeah, a slap on the wrist, and—and then a citation—Thank God—
TS: Oh.
CP: —that you kept the planes from falling into the—into civilian housing, yeah.
TS: Right.
CP: Yeah, so whenever I see things on the news about some military person doing some stupid thing like that, and I'm just—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Right.
CP: —thinking—
TS: You're wondering what really is the real story is, right?
CP: Yeah, well, gee, he didn't land in civilian housing, he probably got a meritorious master promotion out of that. It's just sort of—
TS: Well, what—Tell me about, like, when you're in Cherry Point. Describe a typical day. If you—you had one.
CP: Get up, have breakfast, that's always fun. Marines live on coffee.
TS: Apparently still do.
CP: Yeah. [both chuckle]
TS: Because when I met you you'd already had five cups of coffee, I think. 47
CP: Yeah, and then I was on decaf.
TS: That's right.
CP: Not the best coffee in the world, which is another story where I learned to leave the coffee pot alone. But it was just like you have to have your—your coffee, your breakfast, and then you go to work and you have your coffee there, and then you have it all day long and then you go home and—
TS: Well, what kind of work are you doing?
CP: Well, whatever needs to be done.
TS: What's your title at this point, in Cherry Point?
CP: I was still at Cherry Point; I was still a training aids officer.
TS: Okay.
CP: Because the links were training.
TS: Oh, right. Okay.
CP: Yeah, so I was still training—and I was not the "boss boss;" we had a lieutenant colonel who was in charge of the links.
TS: What was your rank here?
CP: At that time I was still a lieutenant.
TS: Lieutenant, okay.
CP: And then there was a major, and then there was a captain, and then there was me, and then there were a couple other lieutenants under me yet. But my job, basically, was making sure that the scheduling and everything for the training was done properly and that somebody wasn't getting more hours than—than somebody else and that everything was being run fair and square.
TS: I see, okay.
CP: So that was my job, yeah.
TS: Got it. And then—So like a—Pretty much like a 9:00 [a.m.] to 5:00 [p.m] or 8:00 to 4:00 or 8:00 to 3:00 or something.
48
CP: We had regular hours because we didn't run the links during the night.
TS: Right.
CP: We just—That was during normal working hours.
TS: So what'd you do on your off-duty time?
CP: Watched TV, read, go visit somebody else in their—wherever they lived or go to the club.
TS: Yeah.
CP: Go to a movie; go to Hardee's [Food Systems, Inc.]. That's where we discovered Hardee's.
TS: Okay.
CP: Hardee's is an east coast hamburger joint, and when we were at MCAS Cherry Point, that was the only place to go. It was the only fast food restaurant, was Hardee's. And you'd—you'd go out the gate and you went down the road for about two miles and there was—there was a Hardee's, and you'd go in there and get your hamburger and everything and then you'd go back home.
TS: [chuckles]
CP: I mean, this was it. They didn't have other restaurants. I don't know why not because you had plenty of people on the base but they ate most of the time—
TS: Well, what time—what year are we talking about, like the late sixties, early seventies yet?
CP: That was still the early sixties.
TS: Earl—yeah, mid-sixties.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
CP: Sixty-four—Probably '67. I must have gone to Cherry Point in '67, '68.
TS: Okay.
CP: Because I spent three years in San Diego.
49
TS: Okay.
CP: And then I spent two years at MCAS Cherry Point.
TS: So '67, '68—So you were—We're getting on to, like, counter-culture movement in the country.
CP: When I got—When—On my way to Hawaii—
TS: Right.
CP: —I'm driving cross-country. I got pretty good driving cross-country, but I was [going to?] take my car to San Francisco and then they were going to ship it over to Hawaii. Well, I got outside[?] of San Francisco. I ended up getting there a day early, which was an excitement all in itself, that trip, with—with perils along the way. But I get to San Francisco, and this was Haight-Ashbury, and this was—in fact, on the—the play that was right then and there was—What in the heck was that?
TS: A play?
CP: Huh?
TS: A play?
CP: A play.
TS: Like Hair, or—
CP: Hair; Hair. Hair was playing in San Francisco so I thought, well, as long as I'm in San Francisco I'm going to go see Hair, so I got my ticket. Trying to go and get the ticket you are literally crawling over all these hippies. I mean, they're on the streets, they're laid out, they're sleeping everywhere, they're singing, they're dancing, they're—they're just—these are real people. And I went to see Hair, got out and, of course, I am not a city girl. I had no idea what to do. I knew I had to get back to Marine Memorial which was a hotel, and—which really catered to military and I had had it for the night the night before, and I was—had it for another night I thought. Well, I went to see Hair, and my regret, if one wants to have a regret, is I didn't go up on the stage at the end of the play, because they invited everybody to come up on the stage with the actors and dance to "Let the Sunshine In." They had no clothes on. This is another one of these things where nobody was—
TS: No clothes, right.
CP: But, the thing when you're watching it, the strobe lights, they're going all the time and you can't really see anything because everything's either light, light, dark, dark, dark, dark—
50
TS: Right.
CP: —light, light, light, dark, dark, dark, and people were going up there and dancing with these actors up on the stage and I kept thinking, "Carol, they don't know you from diddly-squat, you could go up there and dance; you really could."
TS: [chuckles]
CP: "You're an officer in the Marine Corps." Officers in the Marine Corps do not go up there and dance with a bunch of naked people on a stage no matter what so I didn't go. Well, then—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: So you had your two voices talking to you, huh?
CP: Yeah, and reason and sanity overcame.
TS: [chuckles]
CP: But I regret that, that I can say—that is—
TS: You do?
CP: I really do.
TS: Now, would you have taken your clothes off?
CP: Oh, heavens, no.
TS: Okay.
CP: But I mean, it was just being up there.
TS: Dancing with them, I got it.
CP: Nobody else took their clothes off, they just—
TS: Well, I don't know, I bet some of them did.
CP: Well, maybe they did, but I mean, they had at least enough nerve to go up there and do it.
TS: Yeah.
End of Part One. Interview continues in Part Two.