Oral History Interview with Rachel Ann Brune, 2015

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WOMEN VETERANS HISTORICAL PROJECT
ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Rachel Ann Brune
INTERVIEWER: Therese Strohmer
DATE: 3 April 2015
[Begin Interview]
TS: Today is April 3, 2015. My name is Therese Strohmer. I'm at the home of Rachel Brune in Fayetteville, North Carolina to conduct an oral history interview for the Women Veterans Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Rachel, could you state your name the way you'd like it to read on your collection?
RB: Sure. Rachel A. Brune.
TS: Okay. Well Rachel, why don't you go ahead and start off by telling me a little bit about when and where you were born?
RB: Sure. I was born in Point Pleasant, New Jersey—[coughs] Excuse me—March 19, 1978. I was the first of what would eventually be six children for my parents, so I grew up pretty much always surrounded by people, with a larger than usual family. My parents moved up to northern New Jersey when I was really, really young, and so I pretty much grew up in Sussex County, which is not what people think of when they think of New Jersey. They think of the Shore, or Hoboken; right by the city. And where I lived it was the Appalachian Mountains, dairy farms, corn farms, the Sussex County Farm and Horse Show, Girl Scouts, camping, things like that. So growing up was a lot of my mom kicking us out of the house. [chuckles]
TS: [chuckles] "Get outside," right?
RB: Absolutely, which—I—made me sad because I just wanted to sit in my room and read all the time, but my mom was like, "No, you must go outside and play." We grew up without a television, which was heresy in some circles, but again, we had to go and entertain ourselves.
TS: Now, you said you were the oldest?
RB: Yes.
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TS: How close were your siblings to you in age?
RB: We were all about two years apart.
TS: Okay.
RB: Myself, then there was my brother, and then four sisters after that.
TS: Okay.
RB: So. [chuckles]
TS: Your brother's a lone wolf then, huh?
RB: He—You know what? Everybody was like, "Oh poor—your poor brother," but he was the only one growing up who had his own room.
TS: Oh. [chuckles]
RB: [chuckles] I'm just go—I'm just going to say that. [laughs]
TS: Flat out say it, okay. Well, I can appreciate that kind of privacy. That's awesome. So, what did your folks, then, do for a living?
RB: My dad was—He always worked in, I guess you would call them nowadays, information sciences. When he—When I was first born he was finishing his master's degree in clarinet performance from, I believe, Rutgers [University]. And—
TS: What kind of performance?
RB: Clarinet.
TS: Oh, the clarinet? Oh, okay.
RB: Yes. And so, of course, when I came along though—no, no, let me back up. He was finishing his Master of Library Science.
TS: Okay.
RB: Somewhere in there—I'm a little hazy on the timeline but—
TS: That's okay. That's his story.
RB: He—Yes, those are the—So, he has those degrees, because he always wanted to be a musician. Then when we all started coming along he had to actually make some money.
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TS: Right.
RB: So he—When I was growing up he was a—like, a researcher. He was Google [Internet search engine] before the World Wide Web came along, and he worked for a variety of firms. He also had his own firm at this—at one time. And then I also remember him doing a lot of working weekends at various college libraries. So—
TS: So he got his library science in there.
RB: Yes.
TS: Yeah. That's neat.
RB: I mean, it was neat. When you're—When you're a little book nerd, that's like the best job in the world. [chuckles]
TS: That's right.
RB: You're like, "Hey, I want to grow up to be just like my dad!" [chuckles]
TS: No kidding.
RB: My mom, she wa—She stayed home with us until, I think, I was maybe ten. She had a few jobs working at daycares, and then she also was a music teacher. And when I was—Like, the first job that I was really old enough to remember her having was she started a daycare in the house. And so, there was just all kids all the time, and a lot of the kids who came for daycare also came with their older siblings. So really, it was like the biggest play date ever for us.
TS: [chuckles]
RB: So that was a lot of fun, and sh—since then she's always had that sort of job, teaching music. Right now she—my dad is semi-retired, my mom is teaching music at el—at two elementary schools up in New York; they're Catholic schools. So—And also, they both have music students. So lots of music, lots of kids, all of the time. I don't really know what boredom is because I've—when I was a teenager I'd be like, "I'm so bored," but really what it meant was, "I'm so lazy and I don't want to do anything."
TS: Right. [chuckles]
RB: But I've always been able to entertain myself pretty easily.
TS: Now, did you play any musical instruments?
RB: I played piano, I studied voice, and I picked up the guitar when I was in college—Well, when I was in high school I was in chorus, and when I was in college I had a band with 4
two of the women that I knew from high school, and I wrote the songs and we would play them and sing them. We had a small amount of local fame. Nobody knew who we were outside of Sussex County, but it was still a lot of fun.
TS: That's neat. That is cool. Okay, so you're outside playing with your brother and sisters and all the neighborhood apparently.
RB: Yes.
TS: What kinds of things did you do, then, when you got kicked outside?
RB: We would—
TS: You're an eighties girl, then, really growing—
RB: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
TS: Okay.
RB: We lived on this long hill and so we would all—this was when I was really little—we would all get on our bikes and Big Wheels—I'm a Big Wheel [unclear]—
TS: Yeah. Sure.
RB: —and skateboards and roller—roller skates, and whatever you had that had wheels, and we'd all start at the top and we would ride down to the bottom, and whoever got there first would win. And then we'd all go back to the top—after we'd finished arguing about it—then we'd all go back to the top. We would go—It's a little development, but surrounding it is the Appalachian Trail and some protected wetlands, so we would wander through the swamp, we would just do anything; use our imagination and play whatever game we wanted to play.
TS: Now, you said you did Girl Scouts, too, and 4H?
RB: I was a Girl Scout—never did 4H. I was a Girl Scout from Brownies up to—we made it, I think, through, like, the first year of Cadets and then the troop I was in just sort of—
TS: Then everybody's in high school, right, and—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
RB: —faded away. Yeah. But my—All of my sisters were Girl Scouts and my mom was a Girl Scout leader, and one of the jobs she had was as a sports coordinator for—or programs coordinator—it's one of those things—for a couple of the local Girl Scout 5
camps. So it was—So it—Again, there's Girl Scouts and camping and all that stuff. It was a lot of fun.
TS: Yeah! It sounds like it was fun. Did you enjoy your childhood, then?
RB: Oh yeah.
TS: Yeah.
RB: I mean, when I was a kid, I'm like, "God, this sucks." And it was very funny because when I was just up this other time, my sister Mary and my sister Taya[?] and I were all at the house at the same time, which is really, really weird because we're never all there at the same time.
TS: This was just a couple of weeks ago?
RB: Yes. And we were sitting there—[chuckles]—It was—It was, like, Friday, and my sister Mary is like, "We should go out."
We're like, "Yeah, we should go out," and we're looking at each other like, "There's still no place to go out!" [both laugh] Unless you want to go to a bar, and we're just like, "Uhhh, no," because it may be New Jersey, but there's a lot of redneck bars.
TS: Did you end up playing cards or something?
RB: Yeah, I think we watched—my parents still don't have a TV but my—they have the Roku [digital media player first introduced in 2008], the—
TS: Yes, sure. I know what that is.
RB: So I think we watched an episode of something, and then it was—yeah, then it was time for bed. Oh my gosh.
TS: [chuckles] That's pretty funny. So now, you talked a little bit about being a nerdy kind of book girl. You had that interest in reading, I guess? What did you have an interest in?
RB: Yes. I read anything I could read, and I liked school [chuckles] and—which—and I still do, which I'm still a nerd. I still like to read. I actually—When I was cleaning up I took—I have a stack of books; it started out as a very small stack and then it ended up as several bags that I keep there, because I'm like, "Oh, I'll get around to reading them all." They're in the bedroom right now. [both chuckle] They haven't—They haven't grown any shorter, I should say.
TS: Yeah. But you did that as a young girl then—
RB: Oh yeah.
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TS: —you were talking about how, like, when your dad was working in the library you liked to go—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
RB: Oh yeah. I would go to work with him.
TS: Sure.
RB: And especially as I started getting older he would show me how to look stuff up in the library, and use the card catalog, use the microfiche machines, which I just thought were the most coolest thing ever. And when he was working—this was when I was in high school—during the summers or the weekends or whatever, if he was working on a project and he needed an unpaid research assistant, I would be [chuckles] that person.
TS: And you loved it, too, I'm sure.
RB: Oh yeah. Oh, it was great. When it came time to writing papers for school I had it down; I was like, "Alright, I got this." But yeah, I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy. I would go to the library as often as I could and—I just—it was a lot of fun. And then when I was in elementary sc—like middle school, my—this was—kids are so—they're such jerks. They're like, "Oh, Rachel, she reads a book a day!"
I'm like, "I do not. It's more like a book a week." [both chuckle]
And then, like, one thing that I remember from middle school—and I don't know why I remember this, but I just—it's always stuck in my brain—they had a—one of the English teachers in seventh grade—sixth or seventh grade—had this map on the wall and it was a "read your way around the world." So I—For every book you read you could advance, and every time you advanced you got, like, a ticket, so you could—at the end of the program there's a assembly or whatever and you get the tickets and the prizes and the stuff. And a coup—some people made it around once, or [unclear], and I was like, "I'm not interested." And then I was thinking, as a couple of weeks went by, I'm like, "You know what? I'd really like to get a prize." So I started reading and I ended up, I think, surpassing pretty much everybody because I was just reading, reading, reading, reading, reading. And my parents—your parents had to sign off on what you were reading, so I was reading the really easy books, like the science fiction, fantasy, whatever and tearing through them. And then my mom would be like, "Did you do your math homework?"
"No, I'm reading for this project at school!" [both chuckle] It's like, "Yes!"
So yeah, but—I was—I mean, even now it's—
TS: You just love to read.
RB: Yeah, I really do.
TS: What schools did you go to? 7
RB: You mean for, like, mi—elementary school, or high school or—
TS: Yeah. Like, who were your teachers, and how big were your schools, things like that?
RB: They were—They've changed so much, because as I was going through them they were even changing as the community was—as the community was growing. I went to a Ca—a very small Catholic school for kindergarten through second grade, and then I came over to the Vernon public schools, which were huge. And they were split up by K [kindergarten] through four, and then five through six, and then they were split up again so that there'd be two grades per school. And—But there was just hundreds and hundreds of kids. And when I went to high school I went back to a Catholic school, and I think my graduating class was a couple hundred. Not too many.
And then I went to—For college I started at a small liberal arts college out in Minnesota called St. Olaf [College]. I was there for a year and the weather was intense, and I was far away from home, and I didn't really want to go to college in Minnesota in the first place, so I applied to NYU [New York University] to the film program; I got in and I went there, and I graduated from there in May of 2000 and was immediately confronted by the reality that I had th—many thousands of dollars of student loans, and nobody wanted to hire you and pay you. Everybody in the film world wanted interns. So I tried to find a job that would even just pay me; just a little bit. I was like "You don't even have to pay me a living wage, just fifty bucks, so I don't have to lose money taking the train."
Yeah. So that—I got a job working in Park Avenue right around midtown, and that was where I was on 9/11. And my dad was actually working almost on the same cross-street, but on the ea— west side. So when 9/11 happened it was good because I could just—I was like, "That's it. I'm gone," and I went to his office and we basically rode it out. But that was one of the biggest factors in deciding to join the [United States Army] Reserves. Since then I've attended the [State] University [of New York] at Albany for my master's degree, and then Texas A&M [Agriculture and Mechanical], Central Texas College in Killeen for my Master of Criminal Justice.
[The September 11 attacks, also referred to as 9/11, we a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks by the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda on the United States on the morning of 11 September 2001. The attacks killed 2,996 people and injured over 6,000 others]
TS: Okay. Cool. So you do like school?
RB: I do. [chuckles] And I—When I got off active duty—The plan was to get off active duty—or to apply to PhD programs, get off active duty, go get my PhD. Then I was like, "Wait a second. I've got nine months before I get off active duty. This would be the perfect time to have that kid we've always been talking about!"
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TS: [chuckles]
RB: And "baby brain" just took over and I ended up not applying anywhere, and looking back, I'm glad that I didn't because I really—I'm enjoying this time, and having just taken command of the HHC [Headquarters and Headquarters Company] I'm thinking to myself, "You know what? I need that opportunity if I'm going to stay in, which at this point I think I'm going to, and there's no way that I could do all of these things at the same time. That's ju—"
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Right. You have a lot on your plate for sure.
RB: It just wouldn't work out. Yeah.
TS: Let me go back a little and talk about, then, when you're growing up and you're enjoying school, and playing in the—it's funny that you call it a swamp because I always think swamp is, like, alligators and stuff and I know there's no alligators up there.
RB: There are not. If there were I probably would still be in my room.
TS: Yeah?
RB: I would never have come out. [chuckles]
TS: So you had this great affinity for reading. What were you thinking about, like, for your future when you grew up? Like, what did you think were the possibilities in front of you?
RB: I don't think I've ever met a career field that I didn't at some point, even for however brief of a time, want to be in.
TS: Really? Okay.
RB: So growing up my two—my greatest ambition growing up was I wanted to fly the space shuttle. I wanted to be an astronaut, I wanted to go into outer space, I wanted to fly the space shuttle; I thought it would just be very awesome. And then it turned out that I didn't really have the affinity for studying as hard as I needed to in my science and math courses to make the sorts of grades that I would need to get into an engineering program, or something like that. Also, I had really bad vision so that whole—and also this was the late eighties or early nineties. I joined the Civil Air Patrol, thinking, "Oh, this will be great. Someday I'll be an astronaut," and I made it a few months, and then they have a little workbook that you go through, and I got to the chapter on space and I'm thinking, "This is great!" And I realized that not only was my eyesight too bad—this was, of course, before PRK [photorefractive keratectomy] and LASIK [laser-assisted in situ 9
keratomileusis; laser eye surgery] and all that—it's like, my eyes are too bad to fly a fighter jet and, "Oh, I didn't know women weren't allowed to fly fighter jets. What's that all about?"
TS: Oh, right.
RB: So—
TS: Oh, because it was the eighties, before '94.
[Pentagon policy changed in July 1993 to allow women to train as fighter pilots]
RB: Yeah. So I thought to myself, "Well, maybe I'll be a science fiction writer, because I love to read it." So that dream kind of fell by the wayside. But I also always wanted to be a reporter, and when I was in the fourth grade I started a school paper. And then when I was in high school I took a journalism/creative writing class, and then when I was in college most of my film classes especially centered on writing, like, screenplays, things like that. So—
TS: So that's the way you wanted to go when you were—
RB: I never realized how much I enjoyed writing. I always thought that I enjoyed it in relation to other things. So I enjoyed writing a news article but I thought it was the "news" part of it that I enjoyed. And then I enjoyed writing a screenplay but I thought it was the "film" part of it that I enjoyed. And then a few—about s—when I went to AIT [Advanced Individual Training], as a journalist, I realized that what I really enjoy is the "writing" part of it. And I wrote my first novel, finished it in 2005. It wasn't very good. [both chuckle] It's somewhere in my things.
TS: Right.
RB: But then I started—When I was at Fort Hood [Texas] I joined a writing group in Aus—in Round Rock, which is right next to Austin.
TS: Right.
RB: [dog barking in background] I'm going to—
TS: Okay, I'll pause it for a second here.
[Recording Paused]
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TS: Ready?
RB: Yes.
TS: Okay. We had to let the puppies go out to bark. All right. So you're—
RB: So I was in Round Rock and I joined a writing group while I was at Fort Hood. The group was in Round Rock and I was a member of them for several years. Even after I moved away I still Skyped in to participate. And through—By that time I was an MP [military police] so I was looking for an outlet for my creative work, and I started writing and eventually got better at it [chuckles], especially the fiction side of things. And since then I've had some stuff published.
[Skype is a computer application that allows voice and video calls to be made over the Internet]
TS: Neat.
RB: Short stories. I had a very small press, but another—it was a press, and they published one of my novels. So I'm—That's what I'm kind of doing right now, is some freelancing, and then I'm also working on some brook p—book proposals with the goal this year of getting one of those picked up and under contract so I could continue writing and getting paid for it, because again, for some reason people are like, "Oh, we'd love you to write this thing for us."
I'm like "Okay, well this is what I charge."
"Oh, well, it would be good exposure."
I'm like, "I don't need exposure! I'm not an amateur. This is what I do professionally." But—
TS: Well, that sounds really neat. That's neat.
RB: It's fun. [chuckles]
TS: Oh yeah. What year did you graduate from high school?
RB: Nineteen-ninety-six.
TS: Ninety-six. Okay, and then you went to Minnesota.
RB: Oh, geez, yes. [unclear] degree. St—
TS: St. Olaf, okay. It was too cold there.
RB: It was too—way too cold. 11
TS: So then you headed back to New York, and then—Now, when did you graduate from there?
RB: May of 2000.
TS: May of 2000. And then you're working, trying to find a job, and then you're working and two[?]—then 9/11 happens.
RB: Yes.
TS: You told me a little bit about that. Can you talk a little bit more about how you felt about it and what was going on?
RB: It was—It was—I'm still a little emotional, so that could come out. It was so weird, and I use that in the—like the literal sense of the term, because being in New York—when I was in high school there had been the attack on the garage of the World Trade Center, and so there was always a sense from that, and then from disaster films, that New York was a target for something.
[On 26 February 1993, a truck bomb was detonated below the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City]
But it's not something you think about when you're going to work every day. And especially not in September when it's so beautiful out and you're just like, "Doo dee doo, I'm going to work, and I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that." Like, it was just—
When my office manager called in—because I was—I was the receptionist; I was doing some other things but I was primarily the receptionist using my film degree to answer telephones. But she called in and said, "Hey, I'm going to be late because it looked like some sort of plane had crashed into the World Trade Center."
I was like, "Wow, that's weird." And I was thinking maybe a little Cessna [small aircraft] had clipped the wing or something like that. And I went online, because you couldn't really see it. So I went online and I saw CNN [Cable News Network] had a live feed, but that was the Pentagon. I was like, "What is going on!" The—This live feed of just smoke and smoke and smoke billowing out of the Pentagon, and I'm like trying to look at all the local Internet news and nothing had popped up yet. And then it was just like somebody turned a switch and all of a sudden it starts getting plastered everywhere. We turned all the TVs on. The switchboard kept lighting up because every—of course everybody is trying to call to find out where everybody is because the cell phones stopped working immediately. So I was on the phones for a while. We finally—You could see the towers—like this much of the towers, maybe an inch or so—through the window above the skyline—
TS: Where you were at? 12
RB: Yeah. And of course, very quickly everything was obscured with just that thick, thick smoke, and I mean it was just—it was very, very eerie. Finally, my dad called and Crystal, the office manager, picked up the phone, because by then we were both working the phones and she's like, "Hey Rachel, your dad called and he said get your ass over to his building." [chuckles] I was like, "Okay, Crystal, if you're sure." And she actually lived down in—near Battery Park City, so she and her husband were not able to even get back. They spent the next couple of weeks in Connecticut with her family.
So I went over to my dad's and just, like, walking through the streets it really did look like a disaster movie. There was no traffic except for emergency vehicles. People—Even just clusters of strangers would—were gathered around people's radios because the taxis, or if you had a vehicle, it was pulled to the side and people were just listening to the radios. See, I told you.
TS: Right.
RB: And I made it to my dad's. He was working at Bates Worldwide, which is an advertising firm, and so they had one of their big TVs tuned to CNBC [a business news channel] and there was—there wasn't—they had this constant need for news, but, I mean, what else were they going to show other than the same thing over and over again? So they were just try—pulling in these random stories all over, so I was just sitting there watching it. And the biggest problem that we faced was all of the bridges and tunnels were closed down. So you couldn't drive, you couldn't take a train, you couldn't walk. You couldn't get anywhere. Finally, we decided, "Alright, well let's just see if we can go grab a train from Penn Station, get to—take the train from Penn Station to Hoboken, and then from Hobok—Hoboken we could up to, I think, Tuxedo, New York, and then my parents—or my mom could come pick us up."
And so, that's what we did, was we walked over to Penn Station, and they had—or Grand Central Station—one of them, it's very fuzzy. Or we got to Grand Central and they said "No, you've got to go back to Penn Station," and then we caught the PATH train [Port Authority Trans-Hudson rapid transit system], and it was like—it was just a wave of people and they had opened up the gates—opened up the little thing where you swipe your card—
TS: Right.
RB: —and there's just cops just shoving—"Go through. Go though."
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: So you didn't have to pay—
RB: No.
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TS: Just letting people go.
RB: Yeah. And as soon as one train filled up it would just go to New Jersey and then come back to get the next. And there were—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: So they're just getting people out of the city.
RB: Yeah. There were people that we saw covered in ash from Ground Cen—from Ground Zero. There was one woman—I always remember—she was like—it was either a woman or a guy and they were saying that they had—they worked at the World Trade Center but they'd been late, so they were nowhere near it, but as they were coming—or coming out of the zone, someone was like, "Where do you work?" And without thinking they were like, "I work at the World Trade Center," and they hosed them down. [chuckles] And they're like, "Wait, I don't even—I wasn't even there!" So there was, like, elements of humor.
TS: Right.
RB: Then we got into Hoboken and they had set up this huge triage center, but there was nobody in it, because you were either in the towers or you weren't, so there just—there was very little triage.
TS: There weren't casualties like that.
RB: Yeah. So they—As we walked out they handed us a bottle of water, and one of the people was like, "Oh, where are you going?"
And we said, "Oh, we've got to go up to Tuxedo."
And they said, "Yeah, that train won't be here for about an hour or so."
And we were like, "Yeah, we know. We're going to go find some place to eat."
And the guy was like, "God bless you!" [chuckles] Because I guess—My dad and I were like, "Well, we're Italians so if there's something that—if there's a gigantic tragedy we're just going to have something to eat and that will make it better."
TS: [chuckles]
RB: And it did.
TS: Yeah.
RB: There's a lot of the—The restaurants in Hoboken were open and even our waiter told us, they were like, "Well, we don't know if we should open or not. But then we figured people will still need a place to eat." 14
And we said, "Well, we sure are glad you opened because otherwise we'd be sitting here eating peanuts out of the vending machine."
TS: Right.
RB: But we finally—the train came, we got on the train. I don't—I think that one was free too. I think if you were just coming out of New York they were just trying to get people out to where they needed to be.
TS: Right.
RB: And my brother and my mom came to pick us up, and then we finally made it back to New Jersey. But it was—it was a little bit of an ordeal, and I didn't lose anybody that I knew very well, but one of—one of my good friends, her boyfriend was in one of the floors above where the plane hit. And then there was just a bunch of other people. You can't help but know somebody who was involved, even if it's tangentially through a third party, because it's New York. Everybody knows everybody at least within two or three degrees of separation.
TS: Right, right.
RB: So it definitely made a huge impact. I tried—That was on a Tuesday. Wednesday I stayed home. I tried to come back in on Thursday. And then when I was back in on Thursday there was hardly anybody in the office. And there was a bomb scare at Grand Central, and I—it was like ten or eleven o'clock in the morning, and I threw in the towel. I'm like, "That's it. I'll be back next week."
So it was—it was—Like I said, it was definitely impactful and I can remember everything very vividly. And I also remember very vividly the—the media that came from it.
TS: Yes.
RB: The—What's the word I'm looking for? The after effects; like, what people did afterwards. And it was just very—it was—it was just weird, because again, how could you ever think that something like that would happen? You couldn't.
The—I think the biggest terrorist threat previous to that had been the Oklahoma City federal building, and that was that homegrown terrorism. So I think that back—sometimes I think we don't even—we can't even remember what our mindset was po—pre-9/11. And I think that's maybe not necessarily bad or good, but it should be acknowledged that it was a different mindset and that one event had the power to completely redirect the national mindset. So whenever—
[The Oklahoma City bombing was a domestic terrorist bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma on 19 April, 1995, carried out by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. One hundred and sixty-eight people were killed] 15
TS: That's a good way to put it.
RB: Yeah. [chuckles]
TS: It is, definitely. Well, did you feel like you had to do something?
RB: Yeah. I—If I see a sad picture on Facebook [social media website] I feel like I have to do something about it, so for that particular instance, yes, I—Especially because—Again, I was working as a receptionist and when I—on a good day I would get another project to help out one of the executives. But it was a great company with great people, but at the end of the day my job was to help rich people make more money, and I was like, "You know what? What if I die doing this? What if this is all I ever do?" And I was like, "I really need to get a job that is more than just making money." And every job, or lack of job, that I've had since that point has been about more than making money. Although money's nice. [both chuckle]
TS: Yeah.
RB: I like it, it makes life easy, but at the same time it can't be the only thing. And that's also how I knew when it was time to get off of active duty, was the only argument that people could make against my reasons for wanting to get out was, "Oh, but you're making so much money."
I was like, "I'm making so much money but I'm really bored and I want to do something different." So yeah. It definitely had an impact for the rest of my life, and probably will continue to do so for the rest of my life.
TS: Right. Definitely a very transformative moment for a lot of people.
RB: Absolutely.
TS: Well, when did you start thinking about the military?
RB: Probably two days after 9/11.
TS: Yeah?
RB: Two or three days. So. The—To back up a little bit. My dad was in the Air Force in Vietnam.
TS: Okay.
RN: And he was a flight mechanic or crew chief on an—on the O-2 spy planes.
16
TS: The [Lockheed] U2? [a ultra-high altitude reconnaissance plane flown by the US Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency]
RB: O-2. It was—It's an old plane. And basically it was a plane that the psychological operations guys use to distribute their leaflets, so—at least that's what my dad said. So they—He was actually stationed with the army, with the 101st Airborne, and he told me, he was like, "Yeah." He went to college the first time but it didn't work out, so he left college—or he was invited to leave college, and joined the air force, thinking—[unclear] —thinking he would be in the air force and not have to worry, and he ended up going to Vietnam and getting stationed with the air—with the 101st Airborne. [chuckles]
TS: Right. Not quite what he had planned.
RB: So yeah. But growing up, we got a bit of a—of a—I'm not—I can't really think of what the word is. A self-contradictory second-hand experience, because my dad would tell us, "You're not going to join the military. You're all going to college, and you're going to have a career, and you're going to do great things, and you're going to major in creative things."
And I was like, "Alright. That sounds good."
But at the same time he would tell us these stories of when he was in Vietnam and I always just thought that sounded great. Stories like, he was friends with one of the K-9 [military police dog] guys, and Louie and Brucie[?], and we were never sure which was the handler and which was the dog—
TS: [chuckles] Okay.
RB: But my aunt Gloria had sent my dad a five pound block of provolone cheese, and my dad had to go on maneuvers, and when he came back he's like, "Hey! Where's my cheese?"
They're like, "Oh, Louie and Brucie ate it."
So apparently they had gone in the fridge, gotten the cheese, and just eaten it; "Here's one for you, one for me, one for you."
TS: Just ate the whole thing.
RB: Yes. [chuckles] So my—He would tell stories like that and I'd be like "Oh, okay."
And then he'd be like, "But you're not—Don't join the military. Don't join the military. It's a bad experience."
And I'd be like, "Oh, okay."
TS: You're getting conflicting messages.
RB: Yeah, but I always—like, I'd always wanted to join. And even when I was going to college the first time I had said, "Oh, I really—I'm really thinking about joining the reserves because I can get money for college," and blah, blah, blah.
And my dad was like, "No! Take out student loans." 17
Which in hindsight probably wasn't the best way I could have gone about things, but what did I know? I was a kid. "Okay, Dad."
Even when I told my dad that I was going to go see the recruiter—because I was at work after I got back and I had decided that, yes, I am going to join the military, so I might have been a child of the eighties but this was 2001 and I pulled up Google and I started looking up all the different branches of service. And I knew that the Marines were way too hard-core for me, I'm like, "Nope." So I looked at the air force because my dad had been in the air force, and it was either about fixing planes or fixing the other planes. I was like, "Well, I'm not a plane mechanic. I don't really want to do that." I didn't want to join the navy because then you'd have to be on a boat, and those things go up and down and side to side and sometimes they sink. And so, I was like, "Well, the army it is." And I always looked good in green, so I went there and I was looking through all of the different MOS's [military occupational specialty] that you could pick. And they had the visual communications, so they had the combat camera, combat journalist, both broadcast, print, et cetera.
So when I went to see the recruiter—Well, yeah, when I went to see the recruiter and he asked, "Well, what do you want to do?"
I said, "Well, I'd really like to do some of this stuff," and I showed him the guy with the camera. I was like, "I'd really like to try that out."
And I got the, "Well, okay," because I guess a lot of people go in and they say, "Well, I want to do this cool thing!" and then they score fifty on the ASVAB [Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery]. And he didn't know me from Adam.
TS: Right.
RB: So he was like, "Okay." And then I went, I took the—took the ASVAB—or took the practice ASVAB, and then he seemed a lot more amenable to it [chuckles], and he was like, "Okay." And he's like, "Oh, have you been to college?"
I said, "Yeah, I graduated NYU."
He's like, "Oh.," He's like, "I know a unit and they are looking for journalists, and you could be a 46 Quebec [MOS: Public Affairs Specialist 46Q]," and blah blah blah.
And looking back at it I was think—I thought, "Maybe I should ask about being an officer." But—
TS: But you didn't.
RB: I didn't. I thought, "Oh, I'll be a journalist and this will be fun." And also, it was going to be the Reserves, so I was like I cou—I was thinking I could get deployed, but if I deployed then I would be doing this fun thing, and I wouldn't really worry about what rank I was. I didn't really know much about the military, [chuckles] as you can see. But I did. I went and I took the ASVAB and scored really high, and made my recruiter very happy. And signed up to go to that unit out in Fort Totten [Queens, New York City].
TS: Right.
18
RB: And this was the 361st Press Camp. I graduated the distinguished honor graduate from my AIT, and—which was funny because they—they call you up, they're like, "Distinguished honor grad, Specialist Brune."
I was like, "Oh, that's me!" But I was like—I had this very straight face. I was like, "Okay, don't look—don't look too excited, because you're in the army and you've got to play it cool." [both chuckle]
TS: Right.
RB: I went up and shook the commandant's hand and I—I almost dropped the challenge coin that he was giving me because I had no idea what a challenge coin was. I was like, "Oh, thanks? I wonder tha—what that is?"
And then I saw one of my instructors, and she had been the—our primary small group instructor, and she was a staff sergeant. I can't remember her last name, but she was an air force staff sergeant, and she said, "Specialist Brune, you were so serious!" She was like, "If I had been—if I had graduated I would have been, like, dancing and jumping around!"
And I'm thinking to myself, "You're allowed to do that in the military?" [both laugh]
So yeah. But that was, yeah—
TS: Why was it that you didn't want to go active right away?
RB: Because I thought my dad might still be right about how terrible the military was.
TS: Okay.
RB: So I thought to myself, "Well, you know what? If it's really that terrible then it will only be for a weekend. And then after—I can do anything once a month and then—" whatever.
Because again, growing up, even my mom had said, "Rachel, don't—" This was— forget—I was in high school and I played music at the church on Sundays, and they had been looking around for somebody to do the eight o'clock Mass on Easter and they couldn't find anybody.
So I said, "Yeah, sure. I'll do it."
And when I told my mom that I had to be at the church at, like, 6:30 on Easter Sunday morning, she told me, "Rachel, never join the military because they're going to ask for somebody to go out on this mission in the middle of nowhere and you're going to raise your hand and be like, 'I'll do it!'" [chuckles] That's pretty much what happened.
TS: [chuckles]
RB: So.
TS: Well, how did your dad feel about you joining the Guard. Was it the reserves?
19
RB: Reserves, yeah. Well, he was not happy that I went to see the recruiter, but I think that maybe he thought, "Well, she's just wrapped up in the post-9/11, and it won't really come to fruition." But as I went to the recruiter, and then I went up to MEPS [military entrance processing station] for the processing physical, et cetera, et cetera, and you—he—he actually stopped talking to me for two whole weeks. Like, no talking whatsoever. And we were still commuting together to the city, so this was quite a feat. It was just, we walked out, we got in the car, we went to the bus, we got on the bus, we went into the city and we went our separate ways. And then we met back up on the bus, and we drove back home in silence. And that was the way it was for—for two straight weeks. Until—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Is this before you joined or after you—
RB: This was when I started the process for joining.
TS: Okay.
RB: And then he gradually came around, and I started talking about, "Well, I'm going to be a journalist." And I think that he didn't realize that there were that—that there were that sort of—hang on, let me back up. I lost control of my grammar there. I don't think he realized that the army offered that sort of a job. He—Of course, he was in Vietnam in the seventies, and the air force in Vietnam was quite a different place than the all-volunteer army of 2001. So when he—I think when he realized that I would be able to do the sort of creative work that I enjoy doing, albeit in a military setting, he started to come around. When I told him that they had this student loan repayment program he started to come around some more. When I started talking about getting a bonus—it was the only time in any of my enlistments that I've ever actually gotten a bonus that had money attached to it—he started coming around even more. And when I started talking about, "I'd make this money, and would be doing this," he eventually—I don't know if he ever a hundred percent approved at that time, but he at least came around enough to be supportive of the fact that I wanted to do it.
And then, a couple of years later when my brother joined the air force, and my sister joined the navy, and my other sister joined the navy, he made a total one-eighty [degrees]. He was like, "Yes, great idea! This is perfect!" And so, they all got the benefits of my having gone through this, "Well, I can't believe you're doing this. Why? I can't believe—my own children going—" and he just went on a, like—
TS: So four out of the six ended up in the military?
RB: Yes. One—I was in the army. My brother did four years in the air force. He was a KC-10 crew chief. Those are the mid-air refuelers. My sister Mary was a Seabee, and she was stationed down in Gulfport. And my sister Taya—
20
TS: Is she not in anymore?
RB: No, they all did one and done. And then my sister Taya, she was a crypto technologist [cryptologic technician] or a cryptotechnician? I once asked her what she did, and she was like "Ha ha ha, it's classified!"
TS: Did she learn a language?
RB: She didn't. It was—It was some sort of technology that she worked with. And she applied to be a linguist, and got accepted, went out to Monterey [California] for a year to learn Arabic, and then got out of the navy. They were doing, like, a downsizing, and I think she had failed a PT [physical training] test, or something. And so, they were like, "Well, do you want to get out of the navy?"
And she said, "You know what? I think I will," and she got out. And then she was—she graduated from college, she was looking for jobs—she actually came down here and worked for about a year. And then, she's currently waiting—she got a job in UAE [United Arab Emirates], and so she's currently waiting for her work visa to finish being processed and for them to get her a plane ticket back so she can start. But, yeah, she went out there in—she went out there with a mutual family friend last year, and then got a job—or interviewed, interviewed, got the job offer. But there was going to be a long period of time where they apply for the background investigation, do the background, so she came back home, waited, and then finally she got word that her clearance was going through. So, any day now [chuckles] we're—we're hoping.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: She's going to be heading over there.
RB: Yeah.
TS: Wow. Very interesting. Well, let's go back. Why don't you tell me about when you went to Fort Jackson [South Carolina] and now you're in the army, basic. Tell me about that experience.
RB: Well, this [chuckles] —Okay, so this is pretty much indicative of the way my entire army career has gone. We get to the MEPS station and they ask us, "Has anybody ever flown on a plane before?" And a couple of us raised our hands. And so, they go to this guy, they're like, "Here's a stack of papers," and it was all of our files from MEPS. Okay, great.
So we get on the plane, we fly to South Carolina, we get on this bus, and we fly—and we're driving along, and all of us are thinking that as soon as we get off the bus they're going to start shouting at us, they're going to be running around, doing all this stuff. So we're all like, "Okay, okay, okay," trying to mentally prepare ourselves. 21
We get off the bus and they're like, "Welcome to in-processing and reception. Go and sit in this room."
We're looking at each other like, "We're just supposed to sit here?"
TS: Right.
RB: Okay. So we sat in that room. They're like, "Don't fall asleep!" Okay. [makes snoring sounds] Fell asleep, of course. This was the middle of the night. And they started calling us all in, bit by bit, with—they'd have the folder, and they'd—so finally they said, "Is there anybody we haven't called?"
And there's five of us, and we're like, "Yeah, I haven't been called yet." So they got all our names and start looking through the paperwork again, and they start looking through it again. It was gone. All of our papers were gone. Our—So we're sitting there; it was myself, this one other female, I can't remember her name, but she—I do recall she was going to go be a PSYOP [psychological operations] specialist, and these three other guys. And for the next couple of days we couldn't get—
TS: So you were just in limbo.
RB: Yeah. We were issued uniforms, so we got to dress—we got to wear the uniform like everybody else and—but we didn't have a—we didn't have an assigned number like everybody else got. We didn't have a ship date to go—to actually start like everybody else got. And we didn't even have—If you didn't have a number you didn't really have a bunk assigned to you, so we were like—in the middle of the night someone could come and kick us out of our bed and we'd have to find another one. I was like, "This is ridiculous! Is this—This is the army? Where am I now? Am I really in the army or is this like a big old Candid Camera [hidden camera/practical joke reality television show] thing that's gon—someone's going to jump out and be like, 'Surprise! Just kidding!'"
So we kept just going around and knocking on doors and saying, "Excuse me. Any word?"
And the drill sergeant's like, "No. Go away."
"Okay."
So we would probably still be there, but my buddy, the other female, apparently her dad knew a really famous congressperson or senator. And I don't think it was [South Carolina Senator James] Strom Thurmond but it was definitely one of those big Southern senators. And she was like, "You know what?" and it was so funny, she's like, "I hate to do this, but I'm going to call my dad." And she did. And literally the next day we—they had "found" our paperwork and we were off to the—they actually didn't find it, they were just like, "Here's a—Here's—No [speaking to dog].
TS: It's all right. The puppy's just joining me. It's okay.
RB: Okay. [chuckles]
TS: It's all right, Rachel, go ahead. [speaking to dog] Sit. Sit.
22
RB: Captain! No!
TS: Captain wants to lay on me. [speaking to dog] Okay.
RB: Okay. [unclear]
TS: It's okay. It's alright.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
RB: I told you they were very friendly.
TS: So you finally got to start your basic training.
RB: Finally got to start.
TS: All right.
RB: And it was—It both met my expectations and at the same time was not quite what I expected. The drill sergeants were definitely hard and mean and pushed you and everything.
TS: Now, was this co-ed [coeducational] or was it—
RB: It was co-ed, yes.
TS: Okay.
RB: It was men—or males and females—it was segre—segregated by floor.
TS; But you trained together.
RB: But we trained together. We did everything together. My battle buddy was a woman; she was—Lydia Christie[?], PFC Lydia Christie. And I—You know how in basic training they're trying to pair you up with the person who's most unlike you? So I'm this tall—this six foot white chick who wears these thick glasses and is a little dirty, which always comes through no matter what clothes I'm wearing, whether it be an army uniform or something else. And she was maybe five [feet] four [inches] [chuckles], this black woman with this very thick Jamaican accent and they paired us together, I guess thinking, "Well, who could be more different?"
And I was like, "Oh, where are you from?"
She said, "Oh, I'm from Brooklyn."
I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I went to school at NYU!" So the two of us got along great. 23
TS: Oh, cool.
RB: [chuckles]
TS: [speaking to dog] Hang on, I'm just going to move you.
RB: And it was—Looking back, the lack of sleep and the fact that after 9/11 and I went and called the recruiter, I didn't really process any emotions because I was just moving forward. And as soon as I—As long as I was moving forward and busy with making arrangements and things like that, I didn't really have to think about anything. Well, basic training, you're doing a lot of activity, but you also have a lot of time to think. Because you will be doing something, maybe cleaning your weapon, or polishing your boots, or ruck marching, or something like that, and you'll be thinking. And late at night you'll be laying in bed—because we went to bed earlier and woke up earlier than I was used to, so it took me a while to go to sleep—and I'd be sitting there, and I would just be thinking, and I would—would be—replaying things, and not necessarily like straight up flashbacks, but I would still have these leftover images and feelings, and so they would all come out, and it was just—it was kind of a horrible time because of that. And then also, because of all the pushups that we did. [chuckles]
TS: I was going to ask if anything was particularly hard physically.
RB: Yes, it was—it was—and it wasn't because I wasn't physically fit, it was just I didn't realize I could do the things that I could do. So I—I had no idea that I could do forty-something pushups, because I had never done that before. And then when I went to basic training I was like, "Oh my God, I have to do three pushups or I won't make it out of reception, and I was so nervous that I was like trembling, and I couldn't get up, and I'm thinking to myself, "Oh my God, how am I ever going to pass my PT test?" But when you see other people doing it, and you just have to do it, you do it. So I was—I was—Again, I was in chorus, and theater, and book nerd; I wasn't very much into sports. But it was—That was the most challenging part, I think.
TS: Was it?
RB: Yeah. It still is. It still is. I'm still working on getting back in shape after having a baby and I'm like, "Ahhh—"
TS: Well, I told you you'd get—you'd get a pass, as far as I'm concerned, for that. So that's [unclear]
RB: [chuckles]
TS: Well, so once you're out of basic though, then you had to go for your AIT for your MOS, right?
24
RB: Yes.
TS: And that was at Fort Meade [Maryland].
RB: That was at Fort Meade. That's actually where I met my husband.
TS: Oh, really? Okay.
RB: Yes, there's kind of a j—an in-joke about DINFOS [Defense Information School] romances. When I went there, there was a number of men and women who had just been in a very restrictive, highly physical, demanding environment, and all of a sudden now they are let loose on the world, and so there was some "pairing up" going on. And so, everybody was making a joke about DINFOS romance, DINFOS, romance. And there were a few couples that we knew who basically got married after knowing each other for a few months so that they could PCS together [permanent change of station]. And then there was a couple of couples that got together, like my husband and I, and actually my roommate started seeing this guy when they were there, and they are now also married, and they also just recently had a son, who is actually, I think, two months older than Laura Jean. [chuckles] I was like, "There must have been something in the water at that time."
TS: That's right. I guess so.
RB: But yeah, it was—it was a pro—it was broken up into sections and you learned basic journalism writing, basic photojournalism, editing, layout—layout and design, public—basic media law, not enough to come out as a lawyer, just enough to be dangerous.
TS: Right, sure. Now, what was it, a class? Was it about equal for men and women, or was it skewed some?
RB: It was skewed. I would say there's probably a quarter to a third women, and it was all the branches, so we were there with—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Oh, it was?
RB: Yeah, we were there with—
TS: Okay, so this is why you said that the air force staff sergeant was—Okay.
RB: Yes. We had Marines, [U.S] Air Force, Coast Guard, [U.S.] Navy, and then of course, [U.S.] Army. And we learned all those different aspects, as well as how to be a public 25
affairs specialist, or NCO [noncommissioned officer], or officer, which meant prepping commanders for media interviews; giving them rundowns on—Let me back up.
Say we had somebody who wanted to interview the commander, or interview a subject matter expert. We would facilitate that request, which would usually come from the higher headquarters, and if it didn't, we'd have to run it by the higher headquarters, get permission for whoever it was to do the interview. We would prep that person for the interview by reviewing what—some other stuff that this journalist had done. So we could say, "Hey, this person's got a hit list out for the military and will probably be very combative, so try to shape what you're saying." And then were—or we'd be like, "Oh, they're very friendly to the media so you can expect that they'll give you some "softball" questions."
TS: Right.
RB: And then we would be there during the interview to facilitate; make sure that the general or the colonel, or whoever it was, didn't come off looking foolish. Or something like that. [chuckles]
TS: What if they did?
RB: Then you'd probably have a very angry colonel or general. We actually—Skipping ahead—When we were in OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom] our general gave an interview, and I had gone home on leave, and the E-7 who was there—with whom I didn't really get along—he was facilitating the interview, and the questions started getting more and more specific. So they started out asking about the prisoners that we had, and basically got the general to swear up and down that we had total control of—we knew where all of the prisoners were, and we knew everything about it, and blah blah blah. And I'm thinking to myself, "Oh no. They're going to totally pull out the name of somebody that is having a har—their relatives are having a hard time getting in touch with." And that's exactly what they did.
So they're like, "Well, this person's family says that you don't know where they are. And have you ever heard of them?" And blah blah blah.
And I'm thinking to myself, "Go ahead and step in and say, 'We'll do some research.'" You can't—or—
TS: Right.
RB: You can't expect the general to just be like, "Oh, I know exactly who Mohammed is—" just as an example—because you've got five thousand—well, not five thousand—but fifty percent of the guys in there have some variation of those familiar names. It would be like, "Hey, where's John?"
"John? Yeah, I know that guy." And you've got fifty Johns on—on the list.
TS: Sure.
26
RB: So that was very—It embarrassed the general, it embarrassed the unit, it em—and it—it reflected badly, not just on the public affairs guy who was there, but on both of us, because you are your label. So there's one more senior officer who now has a bad taste in her mouth when it comes to public affairs.
TS: Gotcha. So that's why you try to do the diplomatic thing with the—Got it.
RB: Yes. Or just once the interview starts there's very little that you can do. It's the prep work that you want to do prior to it. So just sitting down, "Hey, they'll probably try to ask you about a specific EPW [enemy prisoner of war] and if they do that, then here's a good command message that—here are the—" just as an example—"here are the avenues that families can use to track down their loved ones." And publicize that, rather than sit there and try and look up a specific prisoner right then and there on the spot.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Right, kind of redirect the interview to what you want to say.
RB: Exactly. Exactly. Because that's—that's part of what your job as the public affairs is, to find that fine line of—give the reporter the information that he or she wants and needs, but at the same time provide them the information that we want them to share. And it's very interesting, in—last May—so I've been doing this for about a year now—I started working for—a freelance basis for Task & Purpose; it's a military interest website. And so, I've been on the other end of those sorts of interviews. Especially there was one—there's one series I did; it was a three part series on innovation in the military. And so, I interviewed a couple of higher level officers, and they—it was—it was along the same lines, they had clearly been prepared, so I would ask them my questions, which were legitimately "softball" questions, because it's a very military-friendly website; I'm not trying to do a hatchet job. But—So I would give them my questions, and some of them they were—most of them they were pre—prepared for, based on the topic that I had given, and some of them, they were a little less prepared for it. But they always had the PAO [public affairs officer] in the room with them, and I—if I was like, "Hey, can you send me a biography?"
They would say, "Oh, yes, we'll get that right to you."
I'm like, "Alright. Cool." So, it's—it's always, I think, a little bit easier working with the military as a journalist when you've worked in it as a public affairs.
TS: Oh, sure, of course. You know the inside story, right? What are you thinking about the army, then? I mean, you've gone through your basic, you've gone through your AIT, you were a distinguished graduate.
RB: I was ready—I was ready to join up active duty right away.
TS: Why didn't you? 27
RB: I contacted the recruiter, and it wasn't the same one, it was a different recruiter. And I said, "I want to go back on active duty," but by that time I had wised up and I said, "I think I want to be an officer." So I had—I was putting together my OCS [Officer Candidate School] packet and then one day [unclear]—
TS: This was in 2001?
RB: Two-thousand-two.
TS: Two-thousand-two. Okay.
RB: So there was a—Yeah, it was in 2002. I got back from AIT and most of my unit had gone to Cuba [Guantanamo Bay] as the press headquarters.
TS: They had gone to Cuba?
RB: Yes. And I was like, "Man, I really want to go."
And they said, "No, you have to stay here," because they were already there, and they didn't need any more people.
TS: Okay. Right.
RB: So the timing just worked out that at the same as I was putting in my OCS packet, the unit came back, and the camaraderie that I saw, and the stories that they were—"Oh remember that time?"
"Oh yeah!"
And they would—didn't even have to say what time it was—[sounds of dogs barking and scrambling out of room]
TS: [speaking to dog] Oh, gotta let you go. [more barking] Here, pause.
[Recording Paused]
TS: Okay, dog pause there. So you—
RB: So they came back from Cuba—
TS: Okay.
RB: —and they were—I could just see how they had come together as a unit, and I really, really, really wanted to deploy, and it didn't look like this unit was going to go anywhere, because they had just come back. So that second drill after they came back—there were 28
some people that were coming around saying, "So does anybody want to go transfer to do a deployment?"
And I was like, "Sure, I'll do it. And I didn't even ask where, which—so my mom was right about that." [sounds of dogs entering room]
TS: Right. Here, I'll pause it again.
[Recording Paused]
TS: Okay, so we took a short pause there and we're going to continue. So you volunteered to deploy somewhere, you didn't even know where.
RB: Yes. I mean, I could guess, but they were—said somewhere in Southwest Asia, so I volunteered to do that. And then during this time, the news had shifted from reporting on Afghanistan, which is where I really wanted to go, to reporting on Iraq, and all of the—all of the debates and negotiations that were going on as far as going to Iraq. And I remember thinking that I will volunteer for this deployment but I might not even go on it because it's not even sure if we're going to deploy.
Well, I think it was like a week later I got my orders, [chuckles] to say, "Go here because you're going to deploy." And then that's when I realized that—I mean, I can't—I wasn't behind the scenes so I can't really tell, but at the moment that they were looking for people, and I volunteered, which was in November or December, right around that time—
TS: Two-thousand-two?
RB: Yes. I'm pretty sure that it was pretty positive that we were going to Iraq, and they didn't even need to bother to have the debates, because we were already going to be there and what else were they going to do? Ship us all home? I don't think so.
So I got my orders. I went to Uniondale [New York] —or I reported to Uniondale, and we actually deployed out of Fort Dix [New Jersey]. So we spent a few days packing everything up. I had never met anybody at this unit in my entire life, and very quickly got to know a lot of the people. We went to Fort Dix and we deployed out of there, and actually this is the funny—I think I have this picture in here, I'm not sure, but it's one of the funniest pictures.
TS: Can you describe the book you're looking at?
RB: Sure. This is the volume—I can almost call it a yearbook—but it's basically a collection within a book of all of the issues of The MP Times, which was the newsletter—or the newspaper that I put together when we were downrange.
TS: Really neat.
29
RB: And I don't know if you can see this but—
TS: Oh, there's a picture of you?
RB: Well, it's not me—
TS: Okay.
RB: This was a—the picture is of Sergeant Nicole Latta[?] bundled up in all of her heavy gear—
TS: Oh, this is at Fort Dix.
RB: At Fort Dix. It was a snowstorm of epic proportions, and we were at the firing range, so we were qualifying—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Yeah, it's quite a picture.
RB: Yeah, and like I said, it's mostly snow. All that stuff in the background, that's all snowflakes.
TS: Getting ready to go to the desert.
RB: Getting ready to go to the desert. [both chuckle]
TS: Okay. I get the irony there.
RB: But—I mean, it was—it was—it was a very interesting time because, again, we were going overseas and it was very uncertain, and we didn't even really know where we—where we would end up, because the 800th Military Police Brigade, which was—the HHC was where I was with, because that's—I was the brigade photojournalist, they didn't even know where they would go, because by doctrine, your enemy prisoners of war are supposed to be removed from the active battlefield and housed and located and taken care of past the—past the line of advance—or past the front line—of where the active battlefield is.
TS: Right. Behind there.
RB: Right. That was not going to happen, because Kuwait said we could not set up the EPW camp in Kuwait. None of the other surrounding countries would allow us to do that either. In fact, Turkey said you can't use—you can't use our country to—because they were going to go in from Kuwait, and then down from the top from Turkey. And Turkey 30
was like, "No way. You're not going to do that." Okay. Later on they made a lot of money by allowing the supply convoys to come in from the top, but that's beyond—beside the point.
So we ended up at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait. Some of our battalions, the ones that were going to move forward, were located at Camp Virginia and a couple of the other forward locations. And what eventually ended up happening was, on my birthday, when the war started, the forward elements moved past the Kuwait/Iraq border and they went to find someplace to build an EPW camp. The first place they found, if I'm recalling correctly—which I think I am because this story—Sergeant Dandola[?], John Dandola, was telling us—when they moved forward and they found this area that they thought they would put the prison camp, he was walking to where the latrine area was, and the sand just kind of shifted, and he looked down and he was looking at a landmine. So they all basically picked up and left that location.
The Brits [British Army] had set up Holding Camp Freddy, and so eventually the battalion that our headquarter—part of headquarters detachment element went with, they ended up just settling on that camp, which was right over the Kuwaiti border. I mean, you could see Kuwait from the camp. And that eventually became Camp Bucca. And so, the way they got around the fact that the EPWs had to be moved to a relatively safe place was that they would collect them at these various points. And there was one in Baghdad—actually there were a number in Baghdad—then there was Trans-Shipment Point Whitford, which was right by Tallil Air Base, and then they brought them down to Camp Bucca. So wherever you had EPWs captured on the battlefield they would take them to one of those places and then they would transport them to Camp Bucca, which eventually became the—the big prison camp.
TS: Well, let's talk a little bit. So you got there in March of 2003—no February of 2003 to start, you said; deployed.
RB: Yeah, I believe it was like late February.
TS: Late February.
RB: Yes.
TS: So now you're in that kind of condition. What were your living conditions like? What did you eat? What was that environment?
RB: Well, where we were it was pretty nice. Camp Arifjan, I think, at that point was already a permanent party post, but it was quite small. And all of us coming in staging, had just expanded it exponentially. So there was a—these are still there actually—a line of about a dozen of these long buildings. And there were two that were offices and cubicles and things like that, and—that are actually still there—and then you had a couple of warehouses that had—they had built like, plywood walls to make a makeshift building. And then in the last couple of them were just these long, long, long open warehouses filled with cots. So everybody coming in, especially if they were there staging to move 31
onward, they would just cram into those—into those long warehouses and live there. And then work out of the two buil—out of those buildings.
When we first got there we didn't really know if we would be—as the Headquarters at Headquarters Company, if we would be moving forward, again because we didn't know where the EPW camp would eventually end up. So we were living—and the warehouses, they were drafty. And what we didn't expect when we got there was that Kuwait in February, at night, is still pretty cold. So all of us were, like, running to the PX [Post-Exchange retail store] that they had there to get the big fleece blankets. And I didn't buy one then, I used my sleeping bag, but I froze. It was so cold. I wasn't e—I was like, "Where am I? This is not the desert!"
TS: Right. [chuckles]
RB: And then, also, too, the—they had these drills for when the Scud missiles [a Soviet-built tactical ballistic missile used by Iraq] were going to be launched. And when you heard "lightning lightning lightning" and then there'd be like [makes sound of horn] "lightning lightning lightning" and you'd have to throw on your MOPP [Mission Oriented Protective Posture chemical warfare defense equipment] gear and your pro [protective] mask and go and get in the bunker. So we're like, "Okay," thinking, "this is weird." But—So every once in a while you'd have that sort of a—
TS: A drill.
RB: —drill, yeah.
TS: Why did you think it was weird?
RB: Because Kuwait was not—it didn't look like what I had imagined a combat zone would look like.
TS: What did it look like?
RB: It was just like a—like a normal army post. There was—Our living conditions were a little temporary, but at the same time we were driving around and there was a gym, and a DFAC [dining facility], and the PX, and there were people who were permanently stationed there. Like, this is where they went for their—to PCS there for a year. And they had barracks, and there was—the pool hadn't opened yet, but there was going to be a swimming pool. And they opened up this mall kind of area. So it had Sub—I think there was a Subway [restaurant], or—I might be misremembering it because when I went back—when I PCSed there in 2012—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Right. It had changed. 32
RB: It was all—No, it was all there.
TS: Oh, okay.
RB: All the—All the hardstand buildings that we had gone to because, oh this is great, they were there. So yeah, there was this feeling of everything is very temporary and at the same time everything is very permanent. And we—As the headquarters company, we kept watching people come and go, come and go, because all of these troops were flying in with—and all their stuff was being shipped in, and so they would come and they would stay in the warehouse for a week, or maybe a couple of days. And then they would jump out to one of the forward camps that were much more austere. And we went to a couple of them because we had soldiers there, and they were basically a GP [general purpose] medium or a GP large tent in the sand and there was—
TS: What's a GP?
RB: Government—or—I don't know.
TS: Okay. Just a big tent.
RB: Yeah, it's a big tent that smelled very distinctively of canvas. But there was sand everywhere. Sand blowing all the time. There was just wind blowing, blowing, blowing all the time. But, I mean, you get used to it eventually. And then especially after the war started and everybody jumped north, and things kind of calmed down, there were 5Ks [five kilometer race] to run, and there's just all like—normal stuff, that I thought, "My gosh, I'm deployed to this war zone and everybody's worried about me but here I am at Camp Arifjan." And I was trying so hard to go on the element of headquarters, because we had—our battalion was primarily going forward first, but there was a small headquarters element that was going to go with them, and I was like, "I've got to go on that!"
And I think it was primarily the command sergeant major who said, "No, you're not going on that."
I was like, "But I'm the journalist! I'm supposed to go on this stuff!"
[mimics sergeant major's voice] "You're not going anywhere!"
I'm like, "What?"
TS: Why not? Why didn't he want you to go?
RB: The reason that I got was, "It's too dangerous and you don't need to go." And I said, "But—"
TS: Was it a gender issue or—
RB: I think it was. I think there was gender issue.
33
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: But they didn't explicitly say?
RB: Yeah. I mean, again, I was still new at the army, and I had never, to my knowledge, had any issues with gender before. And then you go on a deployment and then all of a sudden it—you become very, very much aware of your gender, especially as a female. And I'm just like, "I—I'm—I need to do this!" I think also, to be fair though, they didn't really have a good understanding of what my job was, which is part of the reason why I left the field. Because a lot of people don't understand what your PAO is there for, and they think that you are there to shoot "grip and grin" photos of people getting [challenge] coins and awards. And I—I had to—I didn't really know anybody and I didn't really know how to talk pa—above my rank. So I was still very intimidated at times, and I just didn't know how to explain that this is the ent—if the entire brigade is moving forward, this is going to be newsworthy, and I need to be there to do it. And I can't just have someone relate it to me secondhand.
Very shortly after that, though, I did get a chance to go forward, but I still—I'm still a little mad about that. Especially since that command sergeant major, I don't know, he had some issues. He ended up getting sent back home to retire because he had a relationship with a specialist—not me, somebody else—and I learned years later that he divorced his wife and followed this woman to Florida and she broke up with him.
So yeah. Like I said, I don't if it—if it was primarily a gender issue, or if they saw me as just this specialist who is there to take pictures, and "Why do you need to go?" I think, knowing what I know now, I probably could have explained it better and said, "This is my job as public affairs, and I'm doing this for posterity," et cetera, et cetera, but—
TS: You did get to go forward you said. So you went—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
RB: Yes.
TS: So February through July and then—
RB: Well—
TS: So from February through July you were at—
RB: I was primarily at Ari—Arifjan.
TS: Okay.
34
RB: But I was hitching rides on any convoy that went over the border, because there were convoys that went over the border.
TS: Yeah?
RB: And then once you got over the border they would go back and forth. So especially the chaplains would trav—or the chaplain would travel, the command team would travel, and I got to the point where anytime someone was going somewhere I would ask, "Can I go with you?" And they never really could figure out a reason to tell me no, so I just went. [chuckles]
TS: So what was that like when you did that? What were you experiencing?
RB: Oh, it was fun. Finally I was getting off of Camp Arifjan, which was eventually kind of boring, because it's Groundhog Day, over and over again.
[Groundhog Day is a 1993 American fantasy-comedy starring Bill Murray, about a weatherman who finds himself in a time loop on Groundhog Day]
And my job was to go in and do photojournalism, and do interviews, and take notes and write stories, and market those stories. And I had to put together this newspaper every couple of weeks or so. I set my own deadline so sometimes it came out earlier or later, mostly later.
TS: So you're basically like a one-person shop?
RB: Yes. I had a lieutenant colonel, Colonel Scheer[?] who had, I think, originally been a finance officer, and he came to the unit the same time that I did. But he took the lead when it came to the media management part of it, so people—when people called and they wanted to—they sent us media queries and things like that, he primarily took over that, and then I was—I was running around doing stories, and putting the newspaper together, and sending stories. I got a little more savvy. I wasn't really savvy at the beginning, but I got a little bit more savvy about how to market the stories that we were doing, which were mostly human interest feature-type stories.
TS: Who were you marketing to?
RB: Hometown newspapers, other army publications, some websites, and pretty much everybody that I could think of.
TS: Yeah, just to get it out.
RB: Yeah.
35
TS: Okay, so you're going out, you're hitching rides, you're getting stories, you're figuring out what's going on, you're putting together these newsletters, for your unit?
RB: For the unit, primarily.
TS: Okay.
RB: So we start the first issue, which is in here. It was literally a—I used Microsoft Word to lay it out, which—don't ever do that, it's terrible. And it was—I printed it out on both sides and stapled it, and I did that a couple hundred times, and that was our first newspaper. And then I wised up and I went to the—the Coalition Press Information Center, which is where all of the public affairs people for the—for CFLCC [Coalition Forces Land Component Command] were located, and I said, "Can I please have a copy of—" Oh gosh—
TS: Software or something?
RB: Yes, it was [Adobe] Photoshop, and the publishing software Quark[Xpress], maybe?
TS: Okay.
RB: I can't remember exactly which one it was.
TS: That's okay. You might remember and you can edit that.
RB: Yeah. But—So they gave me the software and I downloaded it to the computer that—actually, it was a computer that Colonel Scheer[?] had bought, because the unit didn't have a laptop for me.
TS: Oh, okay. So you used that.
RB: Yeah, and then also they had—when I'd arrived at the unit I had asked them, "Do you guys have a camera for me to use?" Because I didn't have my own camera at the time. [chuckles] They handed me this—I had been using—at DINFOS I had been using this beautiful, completely manual digital SLR [single lens reflex] camera. It was about this big, it weighed a ton, it was very expensive, it had interchangeable lenses. Oh my gosh, it was beautiful and perfect. I didn't really know how to use it. But it took—I was able to take some higher quality photos because it was a higher quality camera.
So they handed me this camera that looked like it had been the first digital camera ever made. It took a floppy disk [type of computer disk storage used from 1970s through 2000s]
TS: Oh, wow.
RB: And I looked at it, and I looked at them, and I was like, "What am I supposed to do with this? Take a half a picture?" So we used that for about a—maybe a month. We used that 36
while we were at Fort Dix, and then Colonel Scheer went out right before we left and he bought a laptop and he bought a digital camera. And so, I was using those primarily until they actually were able to issue us an actual laptop, and they had digital cameras from the supply of cameras that they used in the prison to process the prisoners, and we got one of those. And then I also—when I was in—once we got up to Baghdad, I actually bought a Canon digital SLR, and then was able to—to do even more with the—with photography and photojournalism. So that camera came with me also on my second deployment, and I—
TS: Was this your personal camera, then?
RB: It was my personal camera, and I enj—I learned how to use it, and I enjoyed it. Unfortunately, it stopped working about a year or so ago, and I went to get it repaired and they have stopped—they have stopped repairing those.
TS: Oh, no. [chuckles]
RB: I had to buy the [Canon EOS] 50D instead of getting my 10D repaired. So.
TS: While you're deployed, and you're out getting these stories—I know that probably a lot of that is in this book that you have—What are some of the stories that you didn't report, that you wished that you could have, that you might be able to talk about?
RB: Okay, so we went to—let me see—Okay, so, I'm going to skip ahead to when we finally—oh, actually, no, I won't—I won't skip too much ahead. All of the people that I have gone with to—or that I had gone to DINFOS with, I think that at some point I met them out in the desert. [chuckles]
TS: Oh, really? Okay.
RB: My—One of my best friends, Nicky Trent[?]—now her last name is Goudelock[?]—but she was a broadcaster and we had become very good friends at DINFOS. And she and I got called up at the same time. And she ended up going with the coalition press information center, so it was great because then I had an in at our higher public affairs headquarters, and was able to get a lot of stories placed just because she vouched for me. And then as they—after they got the stories they saw that I was providing them with high quality stuff.
And so, we made also a couple of attempts, and actually succeeded pretty much, at just going to see each other. And there was one time in particular—this was after we had gotten up to Baghdad—they were in the Green Zone [area in central Baghdad where Coalition Provisional Authority was located], we were out at Camp Victory. And I couldn't mail a lot of my stories because the pictures were too big and the Internet line was too small. So I said, "Alright, well, when's the next convoy to the Green Zone?" Hopped on a convoy and we went up there. And the general actually had to go to do an interview so it just worked out really well. Well, we were sitting there with the general, 37
and I had asked, "Hey, is Specialist Goudelock[?]"—or Sergeant Trent, at this time—"is she here?"
And they told me, "Oh, she went to get the mail."
And I thought, "Oh, man. I missed her."
So she comes in and she sees me. She drops all of the mail and she comes over, she gives me this gigantic hug, and she's like, "Brune! I'm so happy to see you!" and she notices that there's a one star general sitting right behind me, and she's like, "Excuse me, ma'am. Welcome to the Press Information Center." [both chuckle]
So it was—But that was Sergeant Trent. She was very just open. And she ha—like I said, we're still friends. Whenever I travel down to Georgia, or I'm traveling through Georgia, I make it a point to stop and see her.
TS: That's cool.
RB: And she was actually—when I was coming back from mid-tour leave, that was when the [Hotel] al-Rashid got hit, and I was freaking out because that's where she was staying.
[Hotel al-Rashid, in Baghdad, Iraq was hit with eight rockets in October 2003. A U.S. colonel was killed, and 15 other people, including eleven Americans and one Briton, were wounded]
And she—she doesn't really talk about being there. But there was one time that she actually did write a little something on her blog—which I don't even think she maintains anymore—but she had been talking about feeling the building get hit, and then evacuating from the building, and seeing, like, people, and it's not something that we would talk about when we get together, but just knowing that I have a friend who's been through that sort of experience, I think, is—is a good thing.
TS: Yeah. Well, what did you think about being in a war zone?
RB: I'm—Sometimes I think that—again, this is going to sound weird—I enjoyed every minute of it. The only part that I didn't enjoy was my—after we got there, we'd been there for about four or five months, this new detachment came in that they had called up. And in that new detachment there was an E-7 who was a PAO NCOI[C] [Public Affairs Officer Noncommissioned Officer in Charge] and he became my boss; like, in between myself and Colonel Scheer. And this guy and I didn't get along. And it just—it was just—it made it difficult because he had a very difficult personality. So do I, but I mean, it was—it was trying at times, and unfortunately, nobody really liked him. So that made it even worse, because then people would say things about him to me, and I would—I would be like, "I so agree." And sometimes I would—I would not be a good person and I would say, "Yes, I know. He's terrible." And then sometimes I would just try to be a good person and say, "Well, he's—" I would try and play it off, make an excuse, or just try not to get involved in that. But there's this—Oh my gosh, there are so many stories about this guy. When I went on—There was one NCO in particular who did not like this guy. 38
TS: Did not?
RB: He did not.
TS: Okay.
RB: And he—This—Okay, so, Sergeant First Class Sutherland[?] was his name, and he had a very high opinion of himself, but he couldn't back up that opinion with actions. And he was with a group of reservists from New York and New Jersey who are very much, "what you see is what you get," and they don't really cut you a lot of slack. And they are going to—if you piss them off they're going to get on your case. So this guy, Sergeant Giuliani[?], I'll never forget, we were doing a formation run in Baghdad—which don't ask me why but we were doing it—and I'm running along, like a little sergeant—or specialist at the time—doo ti doo ti doo—and I look back and there's Staff Sergeant Louis Giuliani[?] at the back of the formation, running along, smoking a cigarette. [chuckles] I was like, my—it blew my mind. And I thought to myself, "Oh my God." But, I mean, this guy really was butting heads with the—with my boss.
So I leave to go on mid-tour leave, and I come back and I cannot find my thumb drive [computer date storage device] anywhere. I'm like, "What happened to my thumb drive?" because it had all these photos. It was 250 mill—or megabytes. Wooh! But it was what I used to basically bring my stories back and forth between here—between Camp Victory and the Green Zone, and I also used it when I was traveling in case I needed something. So come to find out, Sergeant Giuliani stole Sergeant Sutherland's thumb drive. So Sergeant Sutherland stole my thumb drive, and then pretended he didn't know—or, no, and then Sergeant Giuliani stole that one, so I'm like, "Where's my thumb drive?"
And Sergeant Bil—Sutherland's like, "I lost my thumb drive, too. Someone stole it."
And I'm thinking to myself, "Oh my gosh. Someone really hates the PAO section."
And Sergeant Giuliani gave me mine back and said, "Here you go. I'm sorry. I stole his and he stole yours. So I stole his."
I'm like, "Uh." Yeah, I mean, stuff like that doesn't make it into the big, epic movies, but it totally happens.
TS: Right. Happens—going on. Well, did you notice any other gender issues, like, when you would go out and you'd see women working with the guys, or was there anything like that?
RB: Not to my mind, no. I know that there was some harass—that there were some incidents, but—
TS: That happened to you personally?
39
RB: No. The—I think the closest that came was—they had built—I actually think Sergeant Giuliani built them—these wooden showers down by our TOC [tactical operations center]. And you could—
TS: By your TOC?
RB: Tactical operating center. So you—It was two stalls next to each other, and the water was from one of the giant bladders, but it was—it was better than waiting in line with a whole bunch of other people to take a five second shower and then smell really bad afterwards, because the water they used wasn't as good as ours.
But someone was like, "Oh, when you go to take a show—" or they were like, "When you take a shower, make sure it's with another female because some of the guys have been saying that they have been looking at some of the females."
And I was like, "What?"
And they said, "Oh yeah, So-and-so said he saw you in the shower," and blah blah blah. And it was actually Sergeant Giuliani who told me this story, which I took with a grain of salt because everybody knew that he would—he would basically sleep with anything if it had a pulse and was female.
So I was like, "What is—What reaction are you trying to get from me right now?" I was like, "Am I supposed to be outraged?" I just played it off. I'm like, "Yeah, whatever." And I was thinking to myself, "You know what? I'll just, from now on, not take a shower with anybody in the other stall."
So again, that was like the closest. But a friend of mine—At the time we had a number of different first sergeants, because the first first sergeant, First Sergeant Michalino[?], he was fine and then he had heart trouble and he had to go home. So they picked this other master sergeant to be the first sergeant. And he said some things to my friend that were really inappropriate. She was a specialist, just like me. Meanwhile, this guy, his wife keeps calling him home on emergency leave, so he kept going home on emergency leave, but then he would come back and he would make these ina—inappropriate comments. So I—I talk—I was talking to my friend and she's like, "Yeah, he was—wrote me this letter saying that he loved me and he thought I was sexy and this and that."
I was like, "Oh my God! What—" Me, always if I hear something I want to fix it. I was like, "Have you told the commander?" And—[extraneous comments about dog redacted]
So she said, yes, she had gone to see the comman—or she had talked to the commander, or someone had informed the commander, and the commander's reaction was, "Oh, well—" something along the lines of, "Specialist Erna[?] is always flirting," or "She's not completely innocent," or blah blah blah. [sound of dog barking] Exactly. [speaking to dog] That was exactly what I thought of that. [both chuckle] So that pissed me off. [sound of dog growling] Okay, Captain, thank you.
TS: Okay. So that's what she told you that he said?
RB: Yeah. And it just—it became—[sound of dog growling] If you don't mind I'm going to just pause—if we can—I'm going to put him outside because he— 40
[Recording Paused]
TS: Okay, so.
RB: Okay, so that was a—that was my introduction to sometimes in the military even if something is blatantly wrong, like—she had the letter that he wrote her. It was my introduction to the fact that even if something is blatantly wrong, unless your leadership doesn't want to do something about it, nothing will get done. I was—Again, I didn't know what I didn't know, so nowadays I'd be like, "Well, it's time to make a complaint to IG [Inspector General] or EO [equal opportunity] or try one of those alternate venues, but yes—
TS: Well now, were you married yet or—not yet?
RB: No.
TS: Okay.
RB: I—Rob and I had talked over email. We were sort of dating, sort of just—I mean, we were long distance. I saw him right before I deployed, and then he—he was heading to Afghanistan while I was heading to Iraq.
TS: Was he also in the army?
RB: Yes, he was in the army reserve as well, and he did six months in Afghanistan; he was a broadcaster for a PSYOP unit. He came back for six months and then he went to Iraq just as I was leaving Iraq. And it was actually very cool. Colonel Scheer[?] was very supportive when I told him that my boyfriend was coming into BIAP [Baghdad International Airport] and he was going to be there for a little while, and, "Would it be possible if we went out to see him?"
And we hopped into a humvee, and I drove, and at that time when you went from Camp Victory to BIAP even though you never really left the security of the perimeter you still had to go through the full convoy brief. So you had to have two vehicles, and you had to have all this stuff. Colonel Scheer's like, "Oh, don't worry about it. Get in the car, Brune, we're going to go."
So we drove up, and they were like, "Uh, you're not really—"
Colonel Scheer's like, "I got it. It's okay. You can let us through."
"Oh, okay." And they let us through.
I was like, "This is amazing. It's good to be a lieutenant colonel."
And we went to BIAP, and we went to the little area where all of the arrivals wait to get picked up by their units. And there was Rob, and we sat for about two hours, and I don't even remember what we talked about, but we were like, "Oh, hi."
"Hi, hi." 41
And "Don't forget to email me."
"Okay, I won't. Don't forget to email me."
"Okay." And then his unit came and picked them all up, and then we drove back to Camp Victory, going the other way. So, it was a—That was a very—That was when I realized that if your leadership does care about you, then they'll take care of you. So it was sometimes a very schizophrenic [unpredictable] experience with certain things happening like that, and then other things happening, like what happened with my friend.
TS: Well, were you still thinking about going the officer route at this time?
RB: No, I was having too much fun.
TS: Okay.
RB: I was having too much fun. And I really loved my job. So I was getting—on that deployment I had more of the fun than the frustration. Even after we were leaving, and all of the stuff about Abu Ghraib started coming to light, and we started realizing that our legacy was not going to be the stories that are in this book, which is all of the actual stories that I wrote while I was there, but all we were going to be remembered for was what this squad did at Abu Ghraib.
[In 2003 and 2004, several soldiers from the 372nd Military Police Company, 800th Military Police Brigade, were accused and convicted of allowing and inflicting sexual, physical, and psychological abuse of Iraqi prisoners of war in Abu Ghraib Prison in Baghdad, during the United States' occupation of Iraq.]
TS: And that squad was part of your—
RB: Yes. They were part of the 372nd Military Police Company.
TS: So they were part of the brigade or—
RB: Yes. The company was one of our battalions that was under the brigade.
TS: Okay. Well, how'd you feel then, when you came back out of there? So you came back March of 2004.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
RB: March of 2004, Yes.
TS: When you got back to Fort Totten [New York]? 42
RB: Well, we came back to Fort Dix and we went through reverse SRP [Soldier Readiness Processing] at Fort Dix. Then we went out to Uniondale [New York] and did our final out-processing, and then I went back to my unit at Fort Totten, which was a public affairs unit. And I didn't really know what to feel, except at that time they were very much demonizing [Brigadier] General [Janis] Karpinski, who was the [800th Military Police] brigade commander. And I felt—
TS: And you were under her at the time you were there?
RB: Yes.
TS: Okay.
RB: I felt that she had gotten the worst kind of rap for something that had—that was—that happened because of a systemic set of failures, both within the army and within our unit, but also within the world of politics.
[Extraneous comments about cat redacted]
TS: So you thought she was getting a raw deal.
RB: Absolutely. I absolutely do believe that.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Do you still feel that way?
RB: Absolutely. I absolutely do feel that. She—I actually wrote a book—Actually, let me go grab it real quick. This is the one thing that I know—Oh, here we go. This was my first attempt at self-publishing, and it's a very small book. The first section of it is poetry and photographs, and the second section of it is essays. And there's a lot of Iraq in here. In fact, I would say this is—this was probably my way of processing my first two tours in Iraq.
TS: Okay.
RB: I'll put that there. And one of the things that I make a note of in one of the essays was, General Karpinski came in to the unit about halfway through the tour. And so, she was—everything that would contribute to a situation like the one that happened, such as poor training, poor oversight, poor—poor quality of leadership; all of that was already in place when she got there. And she was doing her best to fix it. The woman traveled pretty 43
much a hundred percent of the time. She had this very beautiful office on—in—on Camp Victory. It was this very beautiful little island in the middle of a lake, and she had, like I said, this marble floored office. It was very beautiful.
And I don't even know if I ever saw her spend more than a half an hour there when she was coming through, because she was always on the road visiting the camps. And by that time we had also assumed the mission for the prisons, and to train the corrections officers, and to set up the Iraqi—or set back up the Iraqi corrections system. Somebody—I think it was [Paul] Wolfowitz [U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, 2001–2005]—had made the decision at one point to fire all of the people who worked for the government of Iraq; like all the armed forces, et cetera.
So there was, really—and there were, like, stringent rules against who you could rehire. Now, the qualities that would preclude you from service under the Coalition [Multi-National Forces – Iraq (MNF-I)] were mutually exclusive with what qualified you to work for Saddam Hussein [leader of Iraq before the invasion in March 2003]. So if you were a bureaucrat, you had to be a member of the Ba'ath Party. If you wanted to work for the Americans doing the same job you had done before, you couldn't if you were a member of the Ba'ath Party.
So it prevented the United States from using the skills of all of these people who knew how the government worked, and it also created—as I think we've— as has been seen by newspaper analysis, et cetera—this huge cohort of unemployed, mostly men, who are like, "Well, what am I going to do to feed my family? Oh, you want to give me $500 to plant this IED, improvised explosive device?" Or, "You want to give me $500 to spy on the Americans while I'm doing my menial labor job in their camp? Okay." I mean, who wouldn't take that deal? So.
TS: When you were there, did you have any sense that any of this was going on at the time—
RB: No.
TS: Or was this like a reflection back?
[Speaking Simultaneously]
RB: That—It was such a shock. It was such a shock. Like, you knew it wasn't perfect, but I don't—like, it was so well hidden that it was literally a shock—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Except for all the pictures that were taken.
RB: Well, after we found out about it, because when—when we were leaving was the first time that Colonel Scheer[?] was like, "Sergeant Brune, I've got to tell you about this." He 44
said, "There's some pictures, and it looks like somebody—some people might have done some—abusing some prisoners."
And I said, "Oh my—oh my God! What?" Like, even just that little bit. "What's going on? This doesn't—How did that happen?" My mind was racing. I'm thinking, "Oh my God, as PAO, how are we going to deal with this?" And it was—it was literally taken out of our hands and lifted up, and all of the—all of the media was taken away and held up at CPIC [Coalition Press Information Center], which is as it should be, because that was all way beyond any of our pay grades.
TS: Right.
RB: And it was—But like I said, it was shocking, and all of us were like—
TS: But it came out after you came back, right?
RB: As we were leaving, and then when we—by the time we came back it was—it was all out.
TS: Full blown up.
RB: When we were in—when we had come back to Kuwait—we were in Kuwait for a while longer than we thought we were going to be because they were doing interviews with a lot of the different officers. And again, I was faced with the situation where I was outraged, but what am I going to do about it?
Sergeant Sutherland[?], my boss—and this was something that he did that there may still be threats on his life if he ever returns to New York City—he went to work for CPIC because he had deployed late, and they said you could stay for the full three [hundred] sixty-five days if you can find a job. So he went up to CPIC and he started working for them. And as I found out later from my friend Nicky[?], he was kind of loud. Hang on a second. [side conversation with RB's husband]
[Recording Paused]
TS: All right, I started it again.
RB: So—
TS: So he went and got the job and then your friend Nicky[?] said—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
45
RB: Right, at the CPIC. "Oh, Sergeant—" she—she was so mad, she was like, "Sergeant Sutherland's been bad-mouthing you."
I was like, "Well, that's not—" I was like, "That's kind of usual, par for the course."
She said, "Yeah, but, I tell you what, he bad-mouthed you so much and once everybody got his number they were like 'Man, this Sergeant Brune must be really good if he hates her that much.'"
I said, "Listen, man, I've gotten used to it."
TS: Right.
RB: But what he did was, we both had pages up on SmugMug, which was a photography site—Well I had, I let it lapse. He posted this—this posting, and at the same time this newspaper article came out and said, "No Bronze Stars for EPW Brigade," and it basically talked about the fact that nobody was going to get a Bronze Star who had served with the 800th, as—because you get your deployment award. Nobody's going to get a Bronze Star. And then it quoted his—his SmugMug page, wherein he had said everything was messed up from the S2 [designation for Intelligence function on army staff] to whatever, and, like, he had basically said some things about the brigade that A: weren't true, and B: were very self-serving, and C: at the same time we were all under a—they had said nobody is to talk to the media about this, because they were—of course this was so horrific and terrible that they were—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Under control—
RB: —it was still under—Yes, it was still under investigation. Nobody really knew the whole story, and so they're like, "Don't talk to the media."
And we're like, "Okay, we won't talk to the media."
But this—and then here comes this guy just—and there was—in that article was quoted an anonymous source, but from the syntax I'm like, "That's him. That's him." So someone called up, he badmouthed the brigade anonymously, and then he sent them to his website so they could look at his stuff. I was so mad.
So I sat down and I emailed Nicky. I was like, "Listen, can you get me the email address for the CPIC OIC [Officer in Charge]," who I think was a lieutenant colonel, and I sat down and I let him have it. I was like, "Sir. I have a question. All of us are—" I was like, "I served with the 800th honor—They did honorable service. The vast majority of the brigade served with distinction, and they did—made the best of a bad time—" I just went on. I was like, "We've—" I said, "I really would love to tell the world all the good things that—that we did, but I haven't. I've been abiding by this media—by these rules for the media. So why is this guy getting to talk to the media and post stuff on his website," and blah blah blah. I was like, "He wasn't there the whole time. He's a terrible journalist." 46
I just—I went off on him. And I sent it, and I cc'ed [sent a duplicate copy]—I cc'ed a number of people from my unit. Or actually I forwarded it to them when I was done.
And I got an email back from the colonel and he said, "Oh, thank you for bringing this to my attention, Sergeant Brune." And he cc'ed me on his email to Sergeant Sutherland's boss, saying. "Will you tell this guy to quit talking to the media? We've already had to talk to him about it once." And he got—I never heard back from him until a coup—maybe like a year or two later I got an email from him.
TS: Which "him" are you talking about?
RB: Sergeant Sutherland, my old boss. And I got an email from him saying, "Oh, I'm going to sue you," and blah blah blah. So I called JAG [Judge Advocate General], I was like, "Can he sue me?"
And they were like, "Yeah, don't worry about it."
And so, that was the last time that I had heard of—heard from him until I got commissioned, and then shortly after I got commissioned I got a note on my blog saying, "Oh, I heard you'd been commissioned. Congratulations." That was the end. [chuckles]
TS: Did he ever have to write a performance eval for you?
RB: He did, and it was okay. It was—It was pretty good. It was my NCOER [Noncommissioned Officer Evaluation Report], but Colonel Scheer was the senior rater so he made sure that it looked excellent. I actually saw the eval that he wrote, and I was like, "Colonel Scheer, all the stuff that he put on his NCOER are the things that I actually did."
And he was like, "I got it. Don't worry."
So again, I was new to the army; I didn't realize that people put their subordinates' achievements on their own evaluations. But again, like I said, we—we just butted heads from day one, and he wasn't going to change, because he was an E-7, and he was eventually promoted to an E-8, master sergeant. And I wasn't going to magically become somebody that he thought was great. So. But Colonel Scheer was there as top cover, and I had already been with the unit for several months at that time, and when this guy started playing his little games I would have people stand up for me. Or just straight up steal his stuff [chuckles], like Sergeant Giuliani did.
TS: Right, there you go. Well, okay, so now you're back.
RB: Yes.
TS: Now, you went back to civilian life, too, right? Because you weren't—
RB: Yes. I started working for the local paper, which didn't really pay the bills.
TS: Okay.
47
RB: And my savings gradually shrank. And I—I really missed it. I missed being on deployment, I missed being in the army, and I just missed that camaraderie. So I went back to my original recruiter and said, "I want to go—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: The first one?
RB: Yes. I said, "I want to go on active duty." And I was thinking about asking to go officer, but I was thinking to myself, "Oh, I'll just stay. As long as I can keep my E-5, I'll just do it," which was—looking back, it was a mistake. At the time it seemed like a really good plan.
So I went on active duty in March of 2005, and they—they said, "Oh, good news. You can keep your sergeant rank."
I was like, "Yay!"
They're like, "Oh, also some good news: you're qualified for a bonus."
And I thought, "That's really great."
They're like, "Oh, but some bad news: you're—there's no money for bonuses so it's zero dollars."
I thought to myself, "Well, that's not a bonus; that's a tease."
TS: No kidding.
RB: Also it's kind of a jerk move to be like, "Here you go. Oh, no, sorry." And then I had wanted to—I said I would really like to go to 46 Romeo [public affairs broadcast specialist (46R)] school.
TS: What was that?
RB: That's the broadcaster stuff. And they're like, "Uh, we can't send you there," which, looking back, of course they could; it's called a reclass option. But then they're like, "Oh, and you have to go to Fort Campbell [Kentucky]."
And again, looking back, I didn't really know about the active duty army, so I'm thinking to myself, "Really? There's only one 46 Quebec [public affairs specialist (46Q)] E-5 position in the entire army and it's at Fort Campbell? That's weird." It was not true, as I found out later. But that's where I ended up.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Right, you just went. And so, then, how was that?
RB: Well, I ended up at a sustainment brigade. 48
TS: At a what brigade?
RB: Sustainment.
TS: Okay. What does that mean?
RB: And they were logistics, so anything that can sustain the warfighter. Medical, signal, transportation, supply, personnel detachment. Anything that supported the warfighter, we convoyed, packaged, moved, supplied, et cetera. And so, it was very interesting, because when I got there it was the 101st Airborne and everybody was very "hooah" [implying military enthusiasm], and it was quite a different experience than being in the reserves.
And also, they kept making us go through this air assault PT because everything was about air assault. And air assault PT was fine. The air assault obstacle course included something that I have never been good at. One was a rope climb, which, let me tell you, the one time I made it to the top—I'm also very scared of heights—so I let go and fell. It was not a happy experience. And then they also had the Jacob's Ladder, which is this very tall device, and it's basically two upright poles, taller than telephone poles, and in between you have these round logs that are huge. And you have to climb to the top of it, and then you have to climb back down.
Well, they're so big that it requires some maneuvering to do. And they get wider and narrower, depending on where you are. The first time I tried to go up the Jacob's Ladder, I made it maybe four of those logs and I went back down again. I'm like, "I'm not doing this." So for five months between March and—or six months between March and when we deployed in August, I kept trying, kept trying. Finally the last session I made it to the top of the Jacob's Ladder, and I was like "I made it!" And then I froze and I couldn't move, and I'm like, "I can't get down."
And they're like, "Come on, Sergeant Brune, let's go."
I'm like, "I can't get down."
And they're like, "Come on, let's go."
I was like, "Help!" [chuckles]
So one of the sergeants had to climb to the top and, like, talk me very specifically down from the top of this darn ladder. And I made it to the bottom and I said, "I'm going to never do that again." And it was true; I never did. Because we stopped doing air assault PT so we could start packing for the deployment. But it was definitely—I was like, "Man, I've got to stay away from high places." So.
TS: What did you think about deploying again? Because you'd only been back for a year[?].
[Speaking Simultaneously]
RB: Oh, I was excited. I wanted to go.
TS: [unclear] Okay. 49
RB: I was looking forward to it actually, because in the garrison it's okay, and there's stories to do and everything, but deployment is where it's at. Also you make more money, and it was going to be in an area in northern Iraq. So my first deployment I got to go all over, but primarily I was in southern Iraq. So now we were going to be in northern Iraq, and it was going to be—to get to see different things.
The only—The only note of apprehension that I had was, I had a sergeant first class coming in, and the unit still didn't really know what I did. They were—I showed up and they sent the civil affairs NCO to pick me up. And they were like, "Hey, you've got a new soldier."
And he said, "What?" I showed up and he's like, "Hey, I'm Sergeant First Class [unclear]"
I was like, "Oh, are you public affairs?"
He says, "No, I'm civil affairs. Ugh, they did it again. They don't know what they've got." Blah blah blah.
TS: [chuckles] So he knew the problems too.
RB: Oh yeah. I mean, spent, like, the first five months just working, showing people what I could do, doing stories, getting them in the post paper, doing a newsletter, getting all this stuff ready to go, and when my boss was getting there I saw that she was a Romeo, a broadcaster, so I set up all of the stuff that she needed so that I could do print and she could do video, and it would be really great. And I'm like, "Okay, this is going to be so cool." Well, she shows up and the first—the first apprehension that I had was, I had been trying to get in touch with her, trying to get in touch with her, and she wouldn't reply. And when she finally replied, it was to ask me about how she could find a house. I was like, "I'm an E-5 and I live in the barracks. I have no idea how you find a house." [chuckles]
And she showed up after—like, I had sent her an email specifically stating, "Hey, we are about to deploy. We're going to pack CONEXs [standardized shipping containers] in the next couple of weeks, so if you would like to put anything in them, like a personal box or something, now is the time to do so."
And she didn't really do that until after everything had been packed, and then she came in and was like, "Oh, I want to send a box. Is there room?"
I'm thinking to myself, "Wow." I was like—I didn't—I didn't realize it at the time, but I was about to have almost a déja vu experience, because she and I also didn't get along, and—but this time there was no Colonel Scheer to provide top cover. Nobody at the unit really knew what I did, and I did not make the sort of friendships that I had made on my first deployment.
TS: Okay.
RB: So I was—I was really missing Sergeant Giuliani coming along and stealing all her stuff. [chuckles]
TS: Right. 50
RB: And then, like I said, on the first deployment the brigade command sergeant major was sent home for having a relationship with a junior soldier. Well, on this deployment the brigade command sergeant major also was relieved and moved to another FOB [Forward Operating Base] for, again, having inappropriate relationships.
TS: Not the same one, but the same position.
RB: No, a different one. Yes, same position. And one of them was my friend, who he basically pressured and who—and it became an assault. And they—she was working for me on the paper, because I had—my boss was literally incompetent. She didn't know the things that she needed to do her job. She had never been deployed before, and she was scared to go off the FOB, and she spent most of her time sitting in her office Skyping with her husband. And it was just very, very frustrating.
So I had this sergeant who was working with me on the paper, and he was—she was one of his victims. So the new bri—the battalion command sergeant major came up to be the brigade command sergeant major, and I didn't like her either, because she was—she was just very—I don't know how to describe her. The first time we ever met—or the first time we had a big thing, we were walking back and I hear, "PAO! PAO!"
And I looked around and I'm like, "Is there an emergency?" [chuckles] And usually people call you by your name—or your rank and your name—
TS: Not by your position, right?
RB: Yeah. And she's like, "PAO, listen. You need to come and take some photos, because we need—we need photos—command photos."
I was like, "Well, Sergeant Major, I'm—I'm willing to help out but that's not what I'm here to do." I was like, "I don't really know how to do that. I don't take portraits." Well, I tried to phrase that as tactfully as possible and just got my butt ripped. So I was like, "Okay. Sure, I'll—I'll come by eventually."
So finally they tracked me down and they were like, "Well, you've got to come and do them right now." So I picked up my camera and I went over there and I took head shots, but again, I'm not a portraitist. I'm a journalist, and I don't do glamour shots.
So she did not like the way that hers came out. And I was—I had gone off to do a story and somebody tracked me down. They were like, "Sergeant Brune! Sergeant Brune!"
I'm like, "Geez, what happened?" Thinking that so—all hell's breaking lose and there's going to be a big story.
"Come on! Sergeant Major [unclear] needs to see you right now." So I'm like running back, running back, running back. [chuckles]
She didn't like her photo, and she wanted me to retake it, and so had, like, sent these people out looking—tracking me down to go and retake her photo. And I took it, and it looked the same as the other one, because she looked the same as the first time, and she didn't like that one either. I was like—and finally I was just like, "Hey Sergeant Major, I—this is not what I'm trained in." I was like, "I don't—I don't know what to do. I 51
don't know." And she—I guess she eventually gave up. It is entirely possible that I may not have used all the skills at my—
TS: Disposal?
RB: —disposal to make her look better than I did. But that's why you don't piss off the PAO. Yeah, she didn't like me. But anyway—to go back to prior—once this incident happened with the brigade command sergeant major, she came up and she sat in his chair. And she took my NCO and she moved her—
TS: This is the one that had been assaulted?
RB: —that had been assaulted—and her excuse was, "Well, that sergeant is a transportation sergeant and needs to be doing transportation things."
I was like, "Well, that's great but now I have nobody. And I'm still working on this." So that's probably why you don't piss off the sergeant major. [chuckles]
So one day, I had a chance to go on a convoy, and I tried to get out at least once a month, because I was publishing twice a month, and so the week that I was publishing I couldn't go anywhere. So I tried to get out every other week, depending on if the convoys were running right. And then I would do a loop. So I would take a convoy to one FOB, and then I would hitch another one to another one, and then I would hitch—and eventually I would make it back in time to put out the paper.
So I decided to go to—I think it was Diamondback, because it was near Mosul. And wherever it was, I stopped by the battalion headquarters to say hi, and I had "stringers," or unit public affairs representatives, that would—when I came down I'd say, "Hey, I'm coming down for this period of time. Let me know what's going on, whether it's an event or a human interest story, and we'll do all the stuff." And they—I said, "Hey, has anybody seen, Sergeant So-and-so?"
"Oh, she's over at the Movement Control Center," so I went down there. And so, we ended up just hanging out whenever I wasn't working. And the first night—
TS: This was the NCO that—
RB: This is the NCO that had been assaulted, yes.
TS: Gotcha.
RB: I said, "Hey, let's go to the DFAC and grab lunch."
And she said, "Oh, I don't—" She's like, "I don't go to the DFAC anymore."
I was like, "Well how are you eating?" Because that's where you go for the food.
And she says, "Oh, I have some microwaveable mac and cheese."
I just looked at her like, "What? Are you crazy? You sit here and eat macaroni and cheese when you can go to the DFAC and they make it for you and you don't even have to wash your dishes?" And she said—well, her—the CSM [command sergeant major], she—they moved her to the same base that they had moved the CSM when he was under investigation. 52
TS: The one who had assaulted her?
RB: Yes, and so she did not go to the DFAC because she was afraid that she would see him if she was there. And she wasn't up to seeing him. And I—I just—It blew my mind. It really blew my mind that that would be allowed to happen, especially by a female brigade—or by a female command sergeant major who should have known better. But that command sergeant major, I truly believe, was blinded by her own career and was getting very comfortable in that command sergeant major chair, and stopped thinking and caring about other people. So that's my own personal opinion.
TS: Did you try to do anything to help?
RB: I tried talking to a number of people, and nobody cared. Nobody wanted to do anything about it. Nobody cared. And I just—
TS: Was that other guy ever prosecuted? Hard to say?
[Speaking Simultaneously]
RB: I'm not really sure what happened to the—it just—it was—I think he just came home and retired. But I never heard of anything that came out of it.
TS: Well, in these ways you're describing how it was different from the first one, where you didn't have, like, the leadership that was protecting you and supporting you, not just that, but really—What other things were different?
RB: It was more of a—2005 was very different from 2003, in that by now the conflict had gone on for several years—for two years at that point—and we were—instead of packing up all of our equipment and bringing it with us, and then packing it all up and taking it home, we came in and we fell in on equipment. We fell in on an established location and an established mission. And so, it was basically learn what they had been doing and then continue to do it ourselves. It was also different because the—it was easier to get around. And it was easier to make it to different places to do the stories that I needed to do. There was a little pushback at the beginning because, again, people were like "Why do you want—it's too dangerous, you can't go out just for a story."
And I was like, "Okay, well, then what am I going to do, because that's my job."
And so, after—after a while I just did it. I stopped asking permission and I just did it. Like, I went down to the different units and I said, "Hey, I'm the PAO and I'd love to do a story on your soldiers. When's the next convoy?" And they eventually got used to it.
In fact, some of the battalion commanders—there was one battalion commander—this guy loved for his soldiers and his battalion to be in the newspaper. So whenever they were doing something they would call me up prior to doing it, which was 53
something that the other battalion commanders couldn't figure out. They were like, "We just did this really great thing. You want to come down and do a story?"
I was like, "You need to call me before the really great thing, especially if it's planned, so that I can come down and cover it rather than—" I was like, "Otherwise, just have somebody write me a story about it and send it to me."
TS: Right.
RB: So it finally clicked but it took them a while. But this guy, he was really great. He always had like—He always sent me really great stories so that—and he knew what would make a good story. So he never sent me a story—"Hey can you come down and cover this?"
And I'm thinking to myself, "How do I explain to this lieutenant colonel that's really boring and nobody's going to want to read it."
TS: Well, what would be a good story?
RB: Well, they—okay, so this is one of the stories I did. It was very, very cool. They had a HEAT [HMMWV Egress Assistance] trainer, which is a humvee egression assistance trainer, I think.
TS: It's just a vehicle?
RB: It's a vehicle body that's put on an axle.
TS: Okay.
RB: And you put the soldiers in it as if they were driving. And they turn the body of the vehicle and they simulate a rollover. So as they're simulating the rollover, you react to how a rollover would be. So you pull the gunner in and you hold on to something, and then once the vehicle comes to a stop, you open the doors, you release your safety belt, and then you exit the vehicle. And the—There was one in country at the time, which I think was in Kuwait, and so when people came in they were going through the HEAT trainer. But since it was a logistics unit and there was constantly supply convoys, the battalion commander asked one of his warrant officers, "Can you replicate this HEAT trainer?"
And the warrant officer was like, "Yeah, sure. No problem."
So he put together a little task force of people drawn from all the different units, and they actually built their own, and it was so cool. I don't know where it is now, but it was so cool. And the fact that they made it from—completely from parts available through the army supply system, and put it together themselves, and provided the blueprints to anybody who wanted them, meant that the army could make this piece of equipment and utilize it for much cheaper than the contractors were doing it. Which is probably why after we wrote our story nobody ever heard of it again. [both chuckle]
TS: Right.
54
RB: Naively I thought, "Won't everybody in the army want to do this?" And no, because contractors are getting paid a lot of money to do that, so we'll just move right on—move right along. But that was very cool. And so, the christening, so to speak, where they unveil it and everybody gets to try it out, he invited me for that. So I went there a few days early, and I interviewed the people who were involved in it, and I got to see it in action. And then when they did the inaugural event, I think the first two people to go into the trainer were the battalion commander and the command sergeant major. So I have all these photos of the event. It was very, very cool. And that was just, like, one of the things.
Now, the battalion that was with us on Q-West [Qayyarah Airfield West], that was, I think, in Diamondback. The one on Q-West, that guy wanted to be in the newspaper, especially when he saw the other battalion commander getting all this press. But he didn't quite have the skill or the knowledge, so he's like, "Oh, we built this education center."
I was like, "Oh, that's great. Is it still ongoing?"
"Oh no, we finished building it."
I was like, "Okay, well when's the grand opening?"
"Oh, we already had it."
I'm like, "Dude, help me out here."
TS: [chuckles] Well, what was it like to go on a convoy?
[Technical error—loss of part of interview. RB re-interviewed 18 June 2016. See part 2]
TS: Well, this is the second tape for Rachel Brune, and it's still April 3rd, 2015. This is Therese Strohmer. We're just continuing the interview. We had to change tapes here. I guess they're not called tapes anymore, but something.
So anyhow, Rachel, go ahead. You were talking about how you were switching what you were doing and you were going into PSYOPS and then you decided maybe that wasn't for you.
RB: That's correct.
TS: And so, what happened then? Did you drop out of the program or—
RB: Yes, it was called voluntary withdrawal.
TS: Okay.
RB: And so, they have, like, a little—they have a little company of all the people who didn't make it through training, whether they voluntarily withdrew or they didn't make it for whatever reason. And it's PSYOPS, civil affairs, and Special Forces; people who just didn't make it through. So it's kind of depressing being in that group. And you want to get out as soon as possible, which is probably why when my rates[?] manager told me, 55
"Well, you can come back and stay at Fort Bragg [North Carolina], but only if you do a year in Kuwait first," that I said, "Sure, I'll do it."
TS: To go back in the MPs?
RB: Yes. So I went out to Camp Arifjan, Kuwait; back to my old stomping grounds. And I was stationed there with the 595th Transportation Brigade, which is actually a strategic distribution brigade. They're under Surface Distribution and Deployment Command. And what they do is, they manage the deployment and redeployment of cargo from theater—from and to theater. So all of the units that were packing up their stuff and shipping it back, they were the strategic level brigade that oversaw the movement of that container from wherever they were back to the United States. Both military equipment, foreign military sales, sustainment, issue, and things like that.
TS: So this is now November 2012.
RB: Correct.
TS: Okay. What's your role as an MP?
RB: Well, interesting you should ask. I went over there, again, as the force protection officer, and when I got over there and I talked to the person I was replacing, who was also an MP, he said, "Well, you know what? They have a reservist working in that capacity so you'll be in the plans section in the operations section."
And I said, "Well, I'm an M—we're MPs. What do we know about planning strategic transportation?"
And he said, "Well, really what we do is RSOI [reception, staging, onward movement, and integration] for the incoming and outgoing reserve battalions."
The way that the brigade was set up was that you had—in your brigade headquarters and your downtrace [or subordinate] battalions, you had a certain number of personnel who were assigned active duty. But when the Operations Iraqi and Enduring Freedom began, they had to expand suddenly because they didn't have all of the personnel that they needed to run things.
So since, I guess, the early aughts—2001 or 2002—they've been filling, or augmenting, the headquarters—or the brigade and the battalions with reserve units. So they have what's called deployment and distribution battalions, and they are—they come in and they do a nine-month tour and they leave. So that was my job, was to basically make sure that they received the training that they needed to receive, that they came into country, that they were sent out to where they needed to be, and that the other units finished what they needed to do, came in to—came in, collapsed, and then left country. And I did that twice. The second time the—by the—I kept pounding on it and pounding on it, like, "I'm an MP. I should be in the S2 [Intelligence] doing the antiterrorism force protection. You have a reservist doing that, but I'm an active duty person. This is my career." 56
The first S3 [Operations] OIC who was there actually, like, said to my face, "Well, that—" because my friend Waltz[?], Captain Nansby[?] became the S—became the force protection officer after the first rotation.
And I kept hammering, I was like, "I should be there, I should be there."
And my boss was willing to go in and talk to her about it, and her response was, "Well, he's an MP. This is a career position for him, and he needs it for his career."
And I'm thinking to myself, "I'm active duty. This is what I do. I need that. How is that argument not being made for me?"
TS: Right. Why not?
RB: I'm pretty sure that she either didn't realize I was an MP, or didn't want to have me stop being in charge of the reservists coming in and going out. Because it was a—it was a big pain in the butt and nobody wanted to do it, not even the logistics people. And you would think that that would be something that a logistics person would do.
TS: Right. So you were filling a slot for the convenience really.
RB: I was filling a slot, yeah. It was—It was boring. I mean, it wasn't boring. It was interesting when I was actually doing it, but it went in spurts. We were either not enough hours in the day to get everything done, or I was sitting there going, "Is it time to go yet? Is it time to go yet?" And we worked six days a week—actually no—yeah, six days a week. We had Sundays off. And also we came into work on Fridays at 1300 [1:00 p.m.], so we had Friday mornings off. Because we fell under SDDC [Surface Deployment and Distribution Command] instead of under ARCENT [Army Central Command], which was the insta—the command that was—pretty much everybody on Arifjan fell under, they did things like have four day holidays.
Well, our command was like, "We have people downrange, and they're deployed, and we're going to have this deployment mindset all the time. And so, we're never going to take a four day weekend."
I'm thinking to myself, "Uh, we're not deployed. We're in Kuwait, and there's not much for us to do. So if we have the office covered 24—or the TOC covered 24/7, why don't we just rotate around?"
There was a policy letter that everyone who was there, every six months you were supposed to g