Oral history interview with Kimberly Dawn Mozingo, 2013

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WOMEN VETERANS HISTORICAL PROJECT
ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Kimberly Dawn Mozingo
INTERVIEWER: Therese Strohmer
DATE: March 19, 2013
[Note: This transcript has been edited and portions will be restricted until January 1, 2038.]
[Begin Interview]
TS: Today is March nineteenth. This is Therese Strohmer and I’m at, actually, Jackson Library with Kim Mozingo? Is that how you say your name, Kimberly Mozingo?
KM: Yes.
TS: And we’re—to conduct an oral history interview for the Women Veterans Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Kimberly, could you say your name the way you’d like it to be on your collection?
KM: Kimberly Dawn Mozingo.
TS: Okay. Well, Kim, why don’t you start off by telling me where you’re from; when you were born?
KM: Okay. I was born in High Point, North Carolina, June 10, 1968.
TS: Okay, High Point, and do you have any brothers or sisters?
KM: No, I’m actually an only child.
TS: Are you?
KM: I had a—I do have a half-brother and two half-sisters, but I wasn’t raised with them.
TS: You weren’t?
KM: No.
TS: So, you grew up by yourself?2
KM: Yes.
TS: What did your folks do for a living?
KM: Well, my mother’s worked in the textile industry, or you know, manufacturing, her entire life pretty much. My grandmother worked in the hosiery mills when they were here in the ‘40s and ‘50s, and then my mother went to work in the hosiery, and then eventually now she works for the furniture industry making swatches for the—
TS: Swatches?
KM: Swatches for the furniture when you—
TS: Oh, right, okay.
KM: So, when you go, like, to a department store and they’ve got little pieces of fabric that the couches come in; that’s what she does; she sews those.
TS: Oh, all right.
KM: And—
TS: So, you live with your mom and your grandmother?
KM: No, no.
TS: Oh, okay.
KM: I live with my mother.
TS: Okay.
KM: I still live with my mother. I had a house fire several years ago and I moved back in with my mother. A long complicated story there. But my father is—my biological father is still alive but I’ve not seen him in years, and my stepfather passed away a couple of years ago.
TS: Oh, I’m sorry.
KM: Yes; heart attack.
TS: Yeah, that’s sad. How’s your mom doing?
KM: She’s doing well. At the same time that my dad died, my husband left me, so we were both, kind of, going through a really hard time, and this was back in 2004.3
TS: Oh, okay.
KM: So, yeah.
TS: So, you, kind of, had to nurture each other.
KM: Right. Well, I was living in Florida. So, my husband left, my dad had just died, so I decided to move back up here to North Carolina, because I’m an—
TS: So, that’s how you ended up back here?
KM: Right.
TS: Okay. Had you lived here since you had left?
KM: No.
TS: Oh, really? Okay.
KM: No. I left in 1987 and didn’t come back until 2004.
TS: All right, came back home.
KM: Yes.
TS: There you go. So, tell me a little bit about growing up in High Point, North Carolina, as a young girl and, you know, the, I guess, seventies and eighties would have been your formative years.
KM: Right, yeah, I have pictures of me wearing, you know, bell bottoms and those ugly clothes from back then. [chuckles] You know, my family was very, very poor, but I didn’t know that when I was really young. We lived in rental houses. We moved from High Point into Archdale when I was, probably, five, which is the next town over and it was more rural. Instead of being a town it was like a bedroom community for High Point.
TS: Okay.
KM: My mother did not want me going to the city schools. She felt that they were too dangerous. And so, we moved to Randolph County and moved to Archdale, and we lived in these, like, really small rental houses. And I started elementary school at Archdale Elementary, and my first week there they tested us in first grade, and I was put in an advanced class. And so, I was in an advanced class my first three years of school with the same kids. It was, I guess, an experimental thing; this would have been 1974.
TS: Okay.4
KM: And then I went through, you know, elementary school, and then I went to another school which used to be called Trinity College; the buildings there, and later it was moved and now it’s called Duke [University]. But Duke got its start in Trinity, North Carolina. And so, I went to middle—kind of, middle school there, and then I went to Archdale-Trinity Middle School, which was a brand new school, and I really got into band.
TS: Oh really? What’d you play?
KM: Flute.
TS: Yeah?
KM: Yes, I played flute, and I was always, like, the A student. I was really, really good at education. Sports, no; I was not very good at that all.
TS: Did you participate in sports at all?
KM: No.
TS: No?
KM: No. I could barely walk up a flight of stairs.
TS: [chuckles]
KM: I was terrible at sports; absolutely horrible. So, I was like the—the smart, geeky kid; I was the band geek. So, that was kind of my thing, and once I hit middle school I started realizing, you know, that I wasn’t wearing the same kind of clothes that everybody else was wearing.
TS: What were you wearing?
KM: Well, hand-me-downs; that kind of thing. Because my parents were so poor—
TS: Oh, I see what you mean. Okay.
KM: —and it was, you know, a little bit of a reaction from me, and I started noticing that my family wasn’t like other families in the way that they—the way that we lived; the way that they behaved. I always think about it—you know, that my family could be on COPS, or one of those—you know, those, like, swamp people kind of shows. [chuckling]
TS: Why? What do you mean by “behaved”?
KM: They just are very—you know, I hate to use the term southern redneck, but that is exactly what they are. You know, there was my biological father; his brother went to prison for murder. The other brother went to prison for drug dealing. And my father, kind of, was 5
also dealing drugs. The time my mother was married to him, he used to beat her; knock her down flights of stairs. The cops were always getting called out and—
TS: This is your biological father?
KM: This is my biological father, and my mom left him before I was even, like, six months old. And then she married my step-father when I was about three. My step-father was part Cherokee Indian. He had—They had moved—Him and his parents had moved to High Point for some reason; I’m not really sure why. But he basically—barely had a ninth grade education, and he also worked in the factories as well.
And so, we just lived in these really tiny, little places. I remember growing up in one house that we lived in, there was no insulation. It was a clapboard house and there was spacing between the boards and you could see outside through the boards. There was no heat. There was no air. It did have running water, which was nice, but that’s kind of how I grew up. And so, then I’m going over—and I’m going over to my friends’ houses and I’m like, “This doesn’t look like the way that I’m living,” and I started noticing that there was this difference.
TS: So, what did you think about that at the time? Do you remember? I mean, reflecting back on it, do you realize as a young girl that you had an awareness about it; even at the time?
KM: In middle school I did. I don’t think I did before then, because you’re too young to understand economics and social status, but as I grew up I definitely did. I started really noticing, like I said, other kids were wearing—their parents would pick them up in these nicer cars. My parents had this, you know—a car that had rust all over it, you know, and—that they paid, like, five hundred dollars for, because that’s all they could afford. And my mother was more aware of trying to help me fit in. My father—because my step-father I called my father—he was, you know, just so stuck in—my mother said he died in the 1950s; he was just walking around dead; because he was so stuck in that era. He didn’t understand about trying to help me fit into, you know, high school, and you want to try to fit in. But—so, maybe, I’ve just—that’s why I got into band; so I could be a part of something when I was in middle school.
TS: Right.
KM: But, I mean, I loved school. It was something that I was very good at.
TS: Did you have any teachers that were, you know, mentors to you in any way?
KM: Our band director when I was in high school. His name was Charles Cronham; C-R-O-N-H-A-M. He was, and is—he’s still alive; he’s like in his late eighties now, but he was really more of my mentor. I had teachers that I loved, but off the top of my head, you know—I had a teacher that was really sweet in fifth grade; her name was Ms. Moring. She was my math teacher and she used to—we would have—once a week you would have to take this test and it was a hundred multiplication—you know, multi—one hundred multiplication problems, and if you could do them in under so many minutes 6
then she would—and you got them all right, she would then take you out for McDonald’s, and you would get picked up, like, Saturday morning and—and she would take every—those people that did it out to McDonald’s. So, I got to go out—she used to take us out to do that. So, that was really fun. I mean, it sounded like she cared.
TS: Sure.
KM: Yeah, so.
TS: That’s really nice.
KM: Yeah, I thought so too.
TS: So, you’re growing up. You’re in an advanced class—
KM: Yes.
TS: —in your early ages. And then you’re in band. Did you—was it marching band at all?
KM: Well, when I was in middle school it was just concert band.
TS: Okay.
KM: Once I went to Trinity High School—which I think I got to Trinity in ’82—I was in marching band and concert band, but I played what’s called a flugelhorn, which is kind of like a big trumpet, in marching band. And then my sophomore year I played flute. I played a different instrument every year.
TS: Oh, really?
KM: Yes. [both chuckle] And then my junior—
TS: That’s not normal, is it?
KM: No, no. In my junior year I played piccolo, and believe it or not, in my senior year I played tuba. We had five people on our tuba line; four girls and one boy. And you don’t normally see girls and I’m only, like, five foot three. The tuba was as tall as I was.
TS: [chuckles] Why’d you play so many different instruments?
KM: I don’t remember. I think when I first—my freshman year they had too many flute players, so they were having flute players play other instruments, and then my second year he was just like, “Go ahead and go back to flute.” And then my junior year he needed piccolo players. So, I had already been in band three years and he wouldn’t let the freshmans play piccolo. You had to be an upper classman to do that.7
And then my senior year it was me and all my friends and we all said, “Let’s play tuba.”
He was like, “Sure.” Because he—my band director would go around saying girls had the higher lung capacity than boys so they made better tuba players. [both chuckle]
TS: Okay, so he supported that; that’s good.
KM: Yes, he did; yeah. So, we had this, like, you know, big guy, and like I said, these four little girls carrying these tubas.
TS: Well, now—so you’re in—so when you get in high school and—how was—how were things for you there, like, socially?
KM: Our high school was very different. You see all these movies where, you know, the high school—the band people are considered the geeks. That wasn’t the case in my high school. Our football team lost every game; every game. We had the worst football team. We had a pretty good basketball team, but the worst football team. And so, people came to the football games to see the band because we were, like, state champions—it was called the Trinity Blue Crew. We were the best band in the area. Like, people loved the Trinity band. And so, people would come—we won every competition. Every competition we ever went to we won best drum major; best drum line; best wind line; best band of the day. I mean, you should see the trophies that we won. It was insane.
So, our band—our high school wasn’t set up like a lot of high schools that you think about. You did have the—the really popular, snotty kids. And then you had the jocks. But pretty much everybody else hung out with everybody. I had friends that were cheerleaders. I had friends that were more of, like, what you would consider the potheads. You know, I had friends all across the board. As a matter of fact, my three friends today are my three friends from high school. We are still friends.
TS: Was it an integrated school?
KM: You’re talking about African-Americans? Yes. Yeah. Oh yeah. I never realized it—in a class that I took last semester we read a book called Blood Done Sign My Name [Authored by Timothy B. Tyson], where there was some violence, and it was in 1972, I believe. I started my—you know, my first grade in ’74 and I did not realize that schools were not integrated up until that point; until I read that book and I started thinking, “This is only two years before I started school,” and I was in kindergarten with—you know, that would have been probably ’73 —with blacks and Hispanics and everybody. It was a kindergarten for the workers in the factory, so all the children were children of people that worked in the factory and I was the—when we graduated kindergarten I was the kid that had to get up and give the speech to introduce the speaker. So, I’ve always been very academic. Not a very physical person.
TS: Now—So, you’re in—you’re in high school, you’re in band, and it sounds like you’re enjoying high school?8
KM: It was a—you know, you have those high school moments where you don’t fit in and you’re socially awkward, but you know, looking back on it—you know, there were moments, but I did have fond memories of high school, yes.
TS: Did you have a sense of, like, what you wanted to do with your life when you, you know, got out of high school?
KM: I did. I absolutely did. I think it hit me when I was a freshman that if I did not do something with my life I would end up working in the factories like the rest of my family. No one in my family had ever graduated high school; they had all dropped out between the time they were fifteen and sixteen years old and went straight to work in the factories. And I knew that’s not the life I wanted; I absolutely knew it.
And so, it might have hit me in eighth grade. When I was in eighth grade my uncle was murdered; my mom’s brother. He was ex-army. He had been in Vietnam, and it really changed our family. That might have been, kind of, when I began to see that I needed to do something else with my life.
TS: What happened?
KM: He was a furniture peddler. He would take—he would go around—well, not—
TS: Was he local? I mean, did he live in your—
KM: Yeah, yeah; he was local. He would go to this one furniture factory and he would get furniture, and then he would drive it around and sell it out of the back of the truck and the company would get part of the profits and he’d get part of the profits. Well, he normally went up North and he had decided that winter—it was February of ’82, I believe—he decided to go to Texas because it was warmer, and he took a friend of the family with him. And they get down there and they sold some furniture to these guys and they asked him to drop the furniture off at a house. So, my uncle and this guy go to the house to drop the furniture off. Well, these people that had bought the furniture were actually going to rob them, and they kidnapped them. They put them in the back of a van and took all their money, which was something like three thousand dollars at that point, and drove out to this dirt road and told them to get out of the van and start walking; they had their hands tied behind their backs. And then they opened fire on them. They killed—they shot Kenny, the guy that was with my uncle, like, twice in the back of the head once they got him down. And then my uncle they shot something like eight times in the back and then once in the back of the head once he was down on the ground.
My uncle had an eight year old daughter and a three year old son. But I was—I was—for some reason I felt very close to him, and maybe—you know, thinking back on that maybe is what led me to realize that I needed to do something with my life. That maybe life is precious in a way, and I needed to go out and live it to the—the most and not to stay here. And knowing that he was army and he was Vietnam, and we would see all these pictures of him, that by the time I was a freshman, I knew that’s what I was wanting to do.9
TS: What? Go in the military?
KM: Go in the military. I absolutely knew.
TS: Why did you have that—why did you have that feeling?
KM: Because I knew that there was no other option for me.
TS: What about college?
KM: I even mentioned college once to my mother and her reaction was, “People like us don’t go to college.” I don’t know what that means today.
I still question, like, “What does that mean?” but college was not an option because my parents, my family, would not support college. To them—that was completely foreign to them. I was the first person in my family to ever graduate high school, and I knew that that was not something that was an option. They would not have supported it, because you go—you go to work. You know, you go work in the factories and that’s what you do.
TS: So, they didn’t have any kind of concept of what a college—
KM: Absolutely not.
TS: —would do for you or—
KM: Absolutely not.
TS: Did any of your teachers encourage you to try to apply to college or anything?
KM: I’m sure that they did; like the counselors and stuff. But I was so set on going in the military because I knew that I needed to get away. I needed to get away. Being an only child, my mother tends to, kind of, baby me; even now. So, I knew that if I didn’t get away I would live under my mother’s thumb probably the rest of my life. So, I was like, “No, I need—I need to go live my own life and have my own—” My plan was to get in the military and take college courses while I was in. That did not work out. But yes, I knew I couldn’t stay. There was no future for me if I stayed here.
TS: How did you plan—make your plans to go in the military?
KM: Well, I graduated high school in ’86 and I had taken—what’s it called? The ASVAB [Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery]?
TS: Yes.
KM: And I kind of knew at that point air force was where I wanted to go. Pop culture had a lot to do with it [chuckles] as well. You know, you see all the movies, and like, M*A*S*H10
was really big at the time. So, you know, it was a lot of influx of all this military stuff, and I was, like, really into that. Like, any military movie, I’d watch. I mean, it just seemed like it was a great life even though—like, M*A*S*H [television series that ran from 1972-1983 about a mobile army surgical hospital during the Korean War] was always—you know, wasn’t necessarily happy, but it seemed like a great life to me.
So, I decided—I started talking to a recruiter when I was in my senior year of high school, down in Asheboro, I remember. And I also remember going down there and there was a group of people that they had come—they were people that were in the military from the local area that were home on leave. It must have been around Christmas, is the only thing I can think of. And they—it was in Asheboro Mall and you could go down there and they would have, like—allow us to talk to them; like, the people that were in the air force to, kind of, under—learn about what was it like being in the air force.
So, I graduated and I, kind of, goofed off a little bit after graduation, I must say. It was probably, I would say, mid to late summer of ’86 and I finally went in and said, “Okay, this is what—” you know, you’ve got to work yourself up to it a little bit, because it was frightful; it was scary. I didn’t know what to expect, you know; leaving home and all that.
TS: Besides your uncle, did you know anybody else that had been in the military?
KM: Well, my great uncle had been in World War II. I didn’t really know him. We would exchange letters because he lived in Arizona. And then my dad’s—my stepfather’s father was in World War I. My—my mom’s grandfather had also been in World War I. So, our family had a lot of people that had been in the military. No females though. I was the first female to go in, and my—and then my—we found out later, of course, that’s my mom’s uncle had also been in Vietnam; my grandmother’s youngest brother, but we—I never met him. So yes, there had been a history—family history of military service.
TS: And how did you pick the air force?
KM: That was the only branch I really thought of. Navy was possibly another option. Never marines. Not the army. Like I said, I’m not a physical kind of person.
TS: Okay.
KM: So, I think the navy’s basic training was really, really long; like sixteen weeks or something. And air force’s was, like, eight, so I was like, “Let’s go to the air force.” But I think that was the route I was going to go in anyway.
TS: Yeah?
KM: And so, I went to see the recruiter. I actually enlisted for six years. So, I had a—you know, I kind of knew that’s what I wanted to do, and I had to keep going to the MEPS [Military Entrance Processing Station] station in Charlotte, and getting all your testing.11
TS: Did you get a bonus?
KM: I actually did not get a bonus.
TS: For signing up for six years, you didn’t?
KM: No.
TS: Really?
KM: No. I got to go in as an airman first class.
TS: So, you got some rank.
KM: Yeah, I got some rank but no bonus. None of my enlistments did I ever get a bonus.
TS: That’s okay?
KM: Yeah.
TS: Because a lot of times on six years you get that.
KM: Yeah. I don’t—I don’t remember if I did.
TS: So, you picked—so, tell me about how—did you figure out what you were going to do; the particular job in the military that you were going to do?
KM: I just remember going to the recruiter and filling out all the information and then getting the paperwork that said, “You’re going to be an information systems radio operator.” I had no—
TS: They assigned it to you?
KM: Yeah, they assigned it to me, and I’m like, “Okay, what’s that?” You know, because you get—you got the letters and stuff in the mail or something like that from what I remember. And so I’m like, “Oh boy, I get to talk on radios.” [sound of rubbing hands together] And so, you know, you see all these movies with the guys on the—you know, the headphones, and all this pop culture and stuff that—they’re talking on radios; “Alpha, Bravo, Charlie.” I’m like, “Ooh, that sounds like fun!” So, that’s what I did. Well, part of the time.
TS: Yeah. Well, tell me about when you first—when you left and you—was it the first time you were ever away from home, that you went to basic training?12
KM: Oh yes. Yes. We had went—my family, like I said, wouldn’t have a lot of money so we didn’t travel; we didn’t go places. We would go to the beach—down to Carolina Beach, and I was really always attracted to, like, military sites too. Like, I loved Fort Fisher
down at Carolina Beach. So, it was something about that life, or the military, really, really stuck with me. But yes, I—it was—it was just something that I thought I had to do.
TS: Well—So, you get to Lackland [Air Force Base].
KM: Right.
TS: And, you know, you get off the bus, probably, right?
KM: I can’t remember if we flew or we were bused.
TS: Yeah.
KM: I don’t remember.
TS: But, I mean, when you—when you pull up to the barracks and stuff, you’re usually on a bus.
KM: Okay.
TS: And then you have the—the TI [Training Instructor] there, right?
KM: Right.
TS: Do you remember getting yelled at, or all that? What was that like?
KM: Terrifying.
TS: Was it?
KM: Absolutely terrifying. I got there in February, and ironically I’d—my first day of active duty military was February 3, 1987. My uncle was murdered February 3, 1982. So, it was the anniversary of his death that I actually went into the military.
I remember getting off the bus, and they’re asking us to line up, and of course everybody’s standing around looking like, “Do—Do what? Do what?” And you—they want you to line up and they’re yelling and it’s nighttime. It’s—I don’t remember what time of night but it was late.
And so, you’re lining up, and then you’re having to march to your dorm, or where you’re going to be living. And all of a sudden you’re in this big open dorm with, like, forty different women that you don’t know. You don’t know anything about them, and you’re told to store your stuff and go to bed. And then at, like, six o’clock the next morning, here comes them banging on the doors and coming in to wake you up. And that 13
was the day that they actually gave us, like, our uniforms. You had to go down and get them issued to you. And I didn’t have any kind of tennis shoes or anything like that, so they kind of yelled at me for that. Like, “You don’t have any better—” because all I had was little boots, and they’re like, “You don’t have any better walking shoes or shoes?”
And I’m like, “Absolutely not,” so they let us go down the PX [Post Exchange], or BX [Base Exchange], to buy essentials. And so, you got to go there, and I had to buy shoes because I didn’t have any.
TS: So, you weren’t running in your boots at that point?
KM: No, they’re not combat boots. These are just, like, civilian, kind of, little boots that laced up the front; eighties, kind of almost like—probably thinking Chuck Taylors; those kind of things. So, they were not—not appropriate, but it was all I had, so—
TS: But, I mean, why did they want you to buy tennis shoes? Did they have you run in those?
KM: Yeah.
TS: So, they didn’t issue you any tennis—
KM: Well, we had—
TS: —tennis shoes?
KM: Yeah, they—no, they didn’t; you had to go buy them.
TS: Oh, okay. So, it was on your checklist of stuff you were supposed to bring?
KM: Probably, and I didn’t; yeah, exactly. [chuckles]
TS: Okay.
KM: But yes, we had to go get our uniforms down at the—the thing, and they gave you all that. Then you had to set up your locker, where everything had to be organized.
TS: How’d you do with all that?
KM: I was fine with it. I have a touch of OCD [Obsessive Compulsive Disorder], so I was fine with keeping my—everything, like, perfectly folded and perfectly in line.
TS: How was it being in a bay with, you know, forty other women, being an only child?
KM: It was different. You had to be guard one night. You did it—I think it was two hours, and you would have to walk around with your little flashlight, making sure everybody’s in bed, and not let anybody in the dorm. And, you know, basically, I would just have a book up at the little podium thing at the front of the—where the door was, and just be reading. 14
And every ten minutes you’re supposed to walk around. You did that for two hours and you wake—woke up the next person, who did it for two hours.
While we were in basic—it wasn’t on my watch but another girl’s watch, a girl had went in the bathroom and tried to slit her wrist.
TS: From your squadron?
KM: Yeah, from our squadron. And she tried to slit the wrists with—her wrist with the—the little scissors that they gave us, which are not really sharp. They’re basically, like, school scissors, and she had went in the bathroom and tried to slit her wrists. So, that was a big thing when we were there.
I just remember, you know, having to get up in the morning and go downstairs and eat chow. You had to line up and you got two glasses of water and your food, and you had to go—and you went to a table and you couldn’t sit down until the table was full. Then you sat down. Then you had to drink one glass of water before you could even touch your food, and then you could eat with the other glass of water, and you had, like, fifteen minutes; it was very quick.
Then you went out and you lined up outside, and then you basically spent the majority of your day in class, you know, reading. You had to learn all about military life and that kind of thing. And then you would spend that part of the afternoon, like, marching and learning all those maneuvers.
Then at the end of the day, for, like, an hour or so around five o’clock, you could go down to where they had the soda machines and snack machines and the phones. And then you could call your family and talk to them, and you got to do that for about an hour and it was like a relaxation zone. The T.I.s weren’t allowed to go in there; it was just the people in basic training, and you could just veg out for a little bit down in this little part of where the dorm where. And then at the end you had to march back up, but it gave you a little bit of a reprieve.
TS: When did you do any running?
KM: Oh boy. [chuckles] We ran—pretty much, like, after the marching maneuvering you would start running and exercising and that kind of thing. I was terrible at it. I’d never—I could do any other kind of exercise, but I was a terrible runner. I have large breasts and I didn’t know anything about, like, a sports bra at the time, so it would kill me—absolutely kill me to run. As a matter of fact, I failed the running in basic training. Failed it.
TS: Completely?
KM: Completely failed it. But what they did to try to help you pass was at the end of the day they would take out the people that didn’t pass around five o’clock, and you would start running on the track, and then all of a sudden they would start playing the national anthem at whatever time they took the flags down. So then you had to stop for however long that took to catch your breath, and then you could continue running at the end. So, it kind of helps you make your time, so that—15
TS: It broke it up for you.
KM: It broke it up for us, and they did that deliberately, so I have to thank them for doing that or I’d never gotten out of basic training. [chuckling]
TS: How was the obstacle course?
KM: I actually loved the obstacle course. I was very good at it. So, I can do stuff like that, I am just not a runner.
TS: Right.
KM: And there was one thing where you had to climb—there was a—like, a pool-type thing and you had to climb upside down on a rope across this thing. So, I get across it and they’re like, “You stand there in case somebody, you know, falls; you dive in and catch them.”
And I’m like, “Okay, but I don’t swim. [laughs] We’re both going to drown if I have to catch somebody.” But nobody fell in, thank goodness, while I was standing there. But I was really good at it. Once we were finished with it I’m like, “Can we do that again, because that was fun?” That was amazing, yeah.
TS: How about for the shooting; the marksmanship?
KM: I was very good at that too.
TS: Yeah? Had you shot a weapon before?
KM: Never. Never had shot a weapon. I actually was a marksman. I did get my marksman medal in M-16 and 9-mil[limeter] while I was in.
TS: Oh, you shot both of them?
KM: I did. Yeah, I did. That was—I didn’t shoot 9-mil until much later in my career—
TS: Oh, you didn’t. Okay.
KM: —but yeah, yeah, I really enjoyed shooting the guns. It’s very cathartic. [laughs]
TS: Well, good. So, how about academics, that was—
KM: Not a problem. Not a problem. I’ve always been very academically inclined. So, yeah, I didn’t have a problem, shoot, studying and learning; that came really easily to me. It was just the running that I had a problem with.
TS: No one helped you get a sports bra or anything?16
KM: I’m probably—I probably had one at some point.
TS: Yeah?
KM: But yeah, it was just never my thing. Once I ended up at Hurlburt Field [Florida]—
TS: Yes?
KM: —we did a lot of exercising, and so yeah, by then I did have a sports bra.
TS: That was, like, later in your career.
KM: That was much—that was my last assignment.
TS: Okay. But then—So after basic you went to Biloxi [Mississippi]?
KM: Right, for tech[nical] school.
TS: Tech school. And how long were you there?
KM: Six to eight weeks.
TS: Okay, I see.
KM: I think it was March that I got there. I’m pretty sure we were just bused over from basic training, from what I can remember, and—
TS: How was that experience?
KM: It wasn’t the best, actually.
TS: Why not?
KM: While—The first two weeks that you’re there you can only wear your uniform; you’re not allowed to be in civilian clothes, but after you’ve been at the base and tech school for two weeks, then you can where civilian clothes off duty when you’re not in class. Well, after the first week that I was there, I lost my ID. I don’t know where it went. I still, to this day, don’t know what happened to it. But I came back with it to my room and my roommate was packing up and leaving because she was graduating, and I still think somehow she—it got—
TS: She packed it up?
KM: She packed it up. Somehow it got gone. So, I had to go to the first sergeant and I had to tell him, you know, “My ID’s gone.”17
Well, he said, “Well, for your negligence, you have to do another two weeks of uniform. You cannot wear civilians for four—” so I was there for four weeks without being able to wear my civilian clothes. So, that was a little stressful.
There, again, the academic side of it was fine. We would get up in the morning and everyone would meet in, like, the courtyard, and you would march from there to where your school was. So, you would march to one building and the people that went to school in that building would peel off, and then you would reform and you would march to the next building. Our building was way out so we were, like, the last group. And we went to school to learn how to operate radios; that’s what we did; how to tune them; how to talk on them. You had to learn that military alphabet; Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta; that kind of thing. How to encode them; how to do—you know, tune—turn them on and power them on and power them off; how to set up antenna if you were doing, like, a portable unit. So, that’s what I did while I was in tech school.
TS: Did you enjoy it?
KM: The radio operating part was fine. I really did not enjoy setting up antenna or any of that. I was like, “Let somebody else go do that. I’ll go and just talk on the radio; that’s good; I’ll do that part.”
TS: [chuckles]
KM: I was just never very good at trying to figure out how to point the thing, you know, because most of these were line of sight.
TS: For that azimuth and all that?
KM: Yes. Yeah, we didn’t have—we did have, like, satellite radios, but that was a little later in my career, too, so a lot of these were point of sight radios. So, you had to, like, set the antenna up and point it in a certain direction and I was just never very good at it. [both chuckle]
TS: So, when you got done with—there, did you have a dream sheet or anything that you filled out for where you wanted to go for your assignment?
KM: Yes, I did, and—
TS: Where’d you want to go?
KM: England was my very first choice.
TS: Yeah? Why did you want to go there?
KM: I wanted to travel, and I was a big fan of, like, English rock bands at the time; Duran Duran, Depeche Mode; The Cure, which I’m still a big fan of.18
TS: I’m sure with, like, late eighties.
KM: Yes. I’m a product of the eighties.
TS: Okay.
KM: And so I was like, “Oh, I want to go to England.” That was my first assignment and I remember I was talking to my mother, and I’m in the lobby of the dorm talking to my mom and they came in and said, “Assignments are here,” and they handed mine to me. And I remember just squealing in delight because I got England as my first assignment. Yes.
TS: What’d your mother think about that?
KM: She was happy. She was really happy for me.
TS: Yeah.
KM: She was, you know, terrified for me and missed me, being an only child and all that, but she was happy for me.
TS: I forgot to ask you what your parents thought about you joining the air force.
KM: My parents were for it. I think my mom realized that—that I needed something more than what I could get in High Point. My biological father was not happy. He called my mom after he found—I don‘t remember how he found out, but I remember him calling my mom and saying, “No daughter of mine is going to go hang out with a bunch of niggers,” because that, to him, was what military was.
And my mom’s like, “Just shut up,” and hung up the phone. I mean, I never talked to him, but she was livid at him. Because I’d only seen him, like, four or five times in my life, and he’s calling up being the usual redneck that he was.
TS: Wanting to control your life when he hadn’t been part of it?
KM: Exactly, exactly. And I just—you know, my mother—I only went—I only saw him a couple times in my life. He would call up occasionally and be like, “Oh, I want to see her.”
So, my mom’s like, “Okay.” And she would drop me off at his house [Comments regarding KM’s relationship with his wife restricted until 1 January 2038]. I get on the phone and call my mother and say, “Come get me, please.” So, yeah, I didn’t have much to do with him at all; at all.
TS: [pause] So, you’re in England.
KM: Yes!19
TS: [chuckles]
KM: I went home for a couple weeks.
TS: I wish I could videotape you because your facial expression just totally lights up the whole room when you—when you’re talking about England. Okay.
KM: Yeah, it was fun. It was—I—I went home for a couple weeks—
TS: Okay.
KM: —before I went to England, and then I think—I think I went to Atlanta, and flew from Atlanta to England, because from what I can remember we didn’t have, like, an international airport here at that time, or whatever. And it was a civilian flight; it wasn’t a military flight.
But I did have a problem when I landed in England; didn’t have any English money. And I’m, like, standing in the—this one area they told us to stand in, and there would be a bus to come pick up the military people that were there. And so, just ,”Wait here,” and this bus would come and it would—it would drive around to all the bases there in the south of England and drop you off where you needed to be, like—
TS: Like a duty[?] bus?
KM: Right. It was, like, [Royal Air Force] Mildenhall, [RAF] Lakenheath, [RAF] Greenham Common; I can’t remember the others.
TS: And that’s where you were at, right?
KM: I was at Greenham Common. And so, I walked off. I go to the bathroom and I had started my period, and I’m wearing, like, tan pants. And apparently I had started a while back, and I’m like, “Oh—” and I’m eighteen, nineteen. I didn’t have any money. And they had the machines in the bathroom to get, like, pads and stuff, but I didn’t have any money. So, I had to tie a little thing around my waist, had to go up to the money exchange thing, get money, go back to my suitcase, get clothes. That was my initiation to England. [chuckles] But that was pretty—I remember that today, like, “Oh, that was the worst experience.”
TS: Well, it can only get better after that, right?
KM: [laughs] Yes, it does in a way; it does in a way. So, I get to Greenham and I meet the guys that I’m working with; there’s five of us; four guys and me. I was the first girl to ever sh—be there.
TS: Oh, really?
KM: Yes.20
TS: At this late—like, ’87, right?
KM: Yeah, in this particular office I was the only girl to ever come in. It was two sergeants and then two airmen. So, there was actually two sergeants and three airmen, counting me. And it was—Greenham Common was a ground-launched cruise missile base. I got there in June of ’87. Never been away from home, and remember, like, I get into the dorm and, you know, I started working and I had to take my testing to get up the next level of—I think I was a one when I got there and I had to take—
TS: For qualifying levels. Did you have, like, four categories?
KM: Yeah, it’s like one, three, five, seven, and nine, was what I—what I had. So, I had to—I think once you get out of tech school you’re a one, and then you have to study and take all these tests to come up to a three, and all that. So, I was studying for that and I unfortunately started dating one of the guys that I worked with. His name was Dale. We ended up getting married but that’s—that’s a little later.
Greenham was an interesting base. It was very tiny. If you really wanted to go shopping you went up to either Lakenheath or—
TS: So, it didn’t have, like, a commissary or—
KM: It did, but it was tiny.
TS: Tiny?
KM: It was—I mean, we had a BX [store on the base] , but it was tiny.
TS: So, you didn’t have a lot of—
KM: No.
TS: —things to choose from?
KM: Yeah, we just had a little—tiny, little clinic.
TS: What was housing like?
KM: I lived in the dorms. The dorms were okay. The dorms were all right. That was my first year there. Once I got married, of course—there were dorms off the base; right off the base there were some dorms. I lived in the dorms on base.
TS: Was it a mixed gender dorm, or just was all women, or what? How was it set up?
KM: The one I was in was all women; it was all girls. And it was—it was interesting. I had a roommate.21
TS: Were they like quads or how—
KM: No, no, they had—the rooms were—
TS: Like a—a real barracks style?
KM: Yeah, the rooms were different.
TS: Okay.
KM: Like, at each end—there was two stories and at each end you had one big room, and there was a shared bathroom. And depending on your rank you could have that room by yourself. So, like, a lot of the sergeants that were living there—single females—had those rooms. And in the middle there were—I think there were four rooms on opposite side. The ones on this side were tiny, and you could have that room by yourself, and then the ones opposite were—you shared with somebody. And I had a roommate for part of the time I was there, and then they—I got the room opposite. I mean, it was like a closet; it was so tiny. But I had that room by myself.
TS: Right; which we always want.
KM: Yeah, it was really—I think you had to, like—you couldn’t be—from where the bed was the door would open; there was no room to walk between. I mean, it was itty-bitty. But I had my own sink in there. I didn’t have my bathroom but I had a sink, so I could, you know, brush my teeth in there and didn’t have to worry about—
TS: Fighting everybody else for a space.
KM: Yeah, yeah, so—and that was after I’d been there probably about six, seven months. But Greenham was interesting. Because it was a nuclear missile base, we had protestors outside the gates. They were British citizens, they were women, and they would camp—that’s where they lived. They had these little pup tents, and they lived right outside the gate, and if you went out the gate in a military vehicle they would throw piss at you; rotten eggs.
TS: They would?
KM: Yes! Paint. If you were in a military vehicle. Now, they didn’t touch you if you were in your personal vehicle leaving the—leaving the base, but military vehicles, yes, they did; absolutely. Because they were peace demonstrators against nuclear weapons, so—and they would break—somehow they would get into the base, and I never figured out how they were able to do this, because the base was surrounded by a fence with barbed wire on the top. Then there was another—several rows of barbed wire on the ground with another fence with barbed wire around the top. So, I don’t know how they got in, but they would break into the base and paint ‘baby killer’ on your buildings. And you would hear 22
them singing all these peace songs as they were running around the base, and the MOD—the Ministry of Defense Police—would have to come and chase them down because the American police couldn’t touch them because they—
TS: They couldn’t?
KM: Yeah, because they were British citizens.
TS: Oh, and they were off—they weren’t on the base, they were off; outside the perimeter?
KM: No, this—they were on the base.
TS: Oh.
KM: They would break in.
TS: So, the Ministry of Defense came to chase them, even on the base?
KM: Yeah.
TS: Oh, that’s interesting.
KM: Because they’re British citizens. The American police—or Military Police could not touch them because they were British citizens. The only ones that could actually tackle them and arrest them were the MOD Police, even if they were on the base.
TS: Did that make you nervous?
KM: Yeah, because they would have announcements; “Everybody stay where you are. Don’t go outside.” I mean, they would never physically harm you. They were—They would not come up and start beating up American soldiers, but, you know, you would hear announcements like, “Everybody stay,” and you’d hear them. I remember one time they woke me up. It was probably one, two o’clock in the morning, and I hear singing, and you see all the—the flashing lights and you know, “Oh, here they go again,” you know. You could see—you could hear the cops chasing them around the dorms and stuff. And you would go to work and there’d be paint all over the buildings, and it would say “baby killer”. It was just—it was—I thought that’s how military life was. This is my first base, I thought, “Okay, well, this is what I have to put up with. All right.”
But I did get to travel while I was over there, which was a lot of fun.
TS: Yeah, I was just going to ask you. What kind of stuff did you do on your off time, then?
KM: Hung out with Dale, who was my boyfriend, and we went to England—oh, England, excuse me, we went to London a lot. It was a forty minute train ride to London. So, you would get these passes, and you would pay for them, and it would be a—like, there and back, one ticket.23
TS: Round trip, kind of, on the train.
KM: Exactly, yeah. Yeah, and people would actually—that lived there, would park there, and they worked in London. So, you know, they would park their cars at the train station every day and then, you know, take the trains back and forth to London. And so, you’d go there and you could eat at McDonald’s and Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.
TS: You go to London to eat at McDonald’s?
KM: [laughing] McDonald’s.
TS: Okay. Did you go in the pubs or—
KM: Yes, of course; of course.
TS: Okay. Well, the first thing you mentioned is McDonald’s.
KM: But, you know, that’s what I’m saying. I mean, there was a McDonald’s and a Pizza Hut downtown where we were living. You know, we would go in the McDonald’s downtown to get, you know, a burger and there would be the peace demonstrators that were camped out in front of the gates over here at this table, you know, eating their lunch. It was very strange.
It was a beautiful country. Oh my gosh, it’s so green. It’s so lush. But it is cloudy a lot, so you don’t see a lot of sunny days. But we did get to—we did go to London, and we did go down to, like, Salisbury Plain and see Stonehenge, but Dale really didn’t like to travel—excuse me—did not like to travel, and so I didn’t get to do as much traveling as I wanted because, you know, I’m with him and I’m going to please him, and so I always did what he wanted to do. The same with my second husband, too. I never really got to do what I wanted when I was in.
TS: So, what kind of things did he like to do?
[Comments regarding KM’s relationship with her husband restricted until 1 January 2038].
TS: And he was in the military?
KM: Yeah, he was in the military; we worked together, yeah.
TS: So what did you do?
KM: Nothing at the time. It was later that I did stuff, once we left England.
TS: Did you ever tell anybody?
KM: Later.24
TS: Yeah?
[Comments regarding KM’s relationship with her husband restricted until 1 January 2038].
KM: I didn’t have any friends.
TS: No?
KM: No.
TS: Just Dale?
KM: Just Dale; that was it. Everything he wanted to do I did, so yeah, I didn’t have any friends. After—
TS: And you were working—you were the only female at that unit.
KM: At that time; at that time.
TS: Okay.
KM: Another girl named Rebecca came in the—I think I had a year left, or less than a year left, and she came in, so there was another girl there. I think Todd left. I can’t remember. Somebody left and then she came in. So yeah, there was—there was—me and Dale and Todd, by this time, were senior airmen because we’d be in for three years at that—at that point. Or not three years, but I was able to move up to senior airman by the—by the time I left.
TS: And what rank did you say Dale was?
KM: We were—he was an airman.
TS: Okay, So, you’re—he was actually lower rank than you?
KM: Right, because I came in as an airman first class.
TS: That’s right.
KM: But, you know, we basically just—he wanted to hang out and just drink and party and that’s—I mean, I was twenty years old; I was very young; very naïve, but yeah—
TS: How long did you stay married to him?
KM: A year.25
TS: A year?
KM: Yeah, just a year.
TS: And how did that go when you weren’t married anymore? I mean, did you initiate it or did he?
KM: It was, kind of, a joint—a joint thing.
TS: Yeah?
KM: When I left—we left England, he had kept telling me he was going to leave me, and I’m so stupid I’m going, “No, we need to stay together.”
And we came—once we left Greenham, we came back and we stayed with my parents, and [comments regarding KM’s relationship with her husband restricted until 1 January 2038]. We had a joint assignment to—what was it? North Dakota. I can’t remember the name of the base.
TS: Minot?
KM: No, it wasn’t Minot.
TS: That’s South Dakota, isn’t it?
KM: I don’t remember.
TS: I’m forgetting the name. [Probably Grand Forks Air Force Base, Minot and Grand Forks are both in North Dakota. Ellsworth AFB is in South Dakota.]
KM: I don’t remember, but either way, we had a joint assignment.
TS: Like a temporary duty assignment?
KM: No, permanent assignment to North Dakota.
TS: Okay.
KM: And he was from South Dakota, so when he left he went home. I’m in North Carolina.
TS: Okay.
KM: And my mom’s best friend was going through a nasty divorce and she had one of those answering machines that recorded two way conversations. [Comments regarding KM’s relationship with her husband restricted until 1 January 2038]…and eventually that’s when I went up to Pease Air Force Base [New Hampshire]. They cancelled my assignment to North Dakota and send me to Pease.26
TS: What happened to him?
KM: He went—He reported to North Dakota thinking I’m still coming, because he doesn’t know, and they—once he got there they revoked his security clearance and he basically—the rest of his military career, which was like a year, or however long he had left, he was the base operator and he had to—because even while I went to Pease, he was still calling me at Pease because we’re trying to get the divorce settled, [comments regarding KM’s relationship with her husband restricted until 1 January 2038]
TS: What—So he got restrictions and reduced in—did he get reduced in rank or anything like that?
KM: I don’t remember.
TS: Yeah? But he didn’t have to serve any time?
KM: No.
TS: Like, he wasn’t charged with anything?
KM: No. No.
TS: What do you think about that? I mean—
KM: I think how stupid and foolish I was to marry him. [chuckles]
TS: Well, I don’t mean—I don’t mean that at all. I just mean that—how the military handled that when you did tell them; when you showed them the evidence.
KM: I—yeah, I think that—you know, looking back on it, I think that they probably could have done more, but this was in ’89 and I think that at the time it was still, kind of, the good ol’ boy network. I appreciated that they—what they did do. [Comments regarding KM’s relationship with her husband restricted until 1 January 2038]. So, I was—I think I was fine with it. Just keep—just keep him away from me.
TS: That was enough resolution?
KM: I think so, yeah; at the time, yeah.
TS: Well, did you—when you were in England and you’re—so you immediately started dating Dale, but did you ever have any, like, sexual harassment up to this point? Not at all?27
KM: Not while I was there, no. That assignment was really interesting. You know, the two sergeants that were in charge of us were both, like, staff sergeants, and then we had a master sergeant that was above—he was above several offices. They were both married, they were really nice guys, and they never, you know, treated me any differently than anybody else. We worked in an office that dealt with a lot of classified—lots of classified information. When I got to England I was actually in a—when I got there they told me—they said, “Okay, you’re going to get a specialty code once you leave here,” because I wasn’t working radios as much there.
TS: And this is in England?
KM: England, yeah.
TS: Okay.
KM: When I first get there they said, “You’re going to become a combat crew communications specialist,” which was a subfield of the radio operator. We operated radios only during exercises; that was it. The other ninety percent of the time that I was there we dealt with classified documents; communication classified documents. The encode/decode, authentication documents, that would—that were given to the nuke [nuclear]—the missile crews when they went out.
So, they would come to us and we would issue them all of their classified documents in this big old trunk thing, and then they would take that with them and they would go out in the field. And so, our job was to make sure all that classified stuff is maintained, controlled, documented, and you cannot make a mistake on it; absolutely not, because you could go to prison if you did not do your job there very effectively.
So, we had something like, I don’t know, ten safes. You would open the safe and you had an inventory sheet for every drawer, and you had to inventory it every time you opened it. Even if it was just to open it to grab one thing, you could not just do that. So, you had to dial the combo, you opened the safe—and we were in secure buildings, too, so you had to go through security things to get into where we worked. And you would open the safes and then do all the inventory.
And then the things expired. Sometimes it was weekly, sometimes it was monthly. So then you would have to open up—pull out the old stuff, fill out the form, shred it, you know, put the new—then do a inventory, put the new stuff in. It was—it was a lot of stuff, and you didn’t want to misplace anything because—
TS: Is this where OCD came in handy? [chuckles]
KM: Probably, yes, yes. Because I had a top-secret clearance, and I also had a NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] top secret—a COSMIC—it was called COSMIC TOP SECRET ATOMAL [Classified information restricted to NATO-Atomal]. Wow. [laughs] Which was a NATO top secret clearance, as well.
TS: I’ve not heard of that one.28
KM: Yeah, COSMIC TOP SECRET ATOMAL. I know; whatever. But—So, I had, like, a really high security clearance because I had to deal with all of this communication stuff, and it was basically documents that they could encode/decode messages through clear radios. And of course, if they got a message back they could authenticate it to make sure it was real, and that kind of stuff. So, that’s what I dealt with ninety percent of the time that I was at Greenham Common. And because I did that, you get a specialty code that’s on your transcripts, or your record, to say you’re qualified to do that job.
TS: Right.
KM: So, I loved it. That was, like, the most amazing, and I did it—three out of my four assignments I did that, because I had that specialty code, so when it came up to say, “Okay, you need to leave. You’ve done however many years. We’ve got to send you somewhere. Okay, she’s got this specialty code. Guess what? She has to go here.” So—But it was fun.
TS: Did it limit your assignments, then, because there’s only so many places you could go where they had that?
KM: Well, I don’t think so, because, I mean, when I went to Ramstein [Air Base, Germany] it was radio operator completely. There was no—
TS: Oh, so you didn’t use that specialty code?
KM: No, I didn’t use that specialty code when I went to Ramstein, but I did use it there. And then the exercises. Oh my gosh.
TS: In England?
KM: [chuckling] Yes.
TS: How were they?
KM: Oh my gosh. Oh man. Being a nuclear missile base, we would exercise, probably, every other month for, like, sometimes a week long; three or four days to a week; just depended. And we always had to wear our chem[ical] suits when we did our exercises. Yes! Because we were, of course, at a nuclear base, so we were pretending that we were getting shot with nuclear weapons, so you always had to wear your chem suit.
So, by the time, you know—well, part of the time I was there, and then when I married Dale I’m living off base. So, there was a big parking lot next to one of the hangars that you parked in, and anything on, like, the family side of the base, was non-play [not part of the exercise—KM clarified later]. You could go to the BX. You didn’t have to do all—you know, be in your chem suit there, but once you got to this parking lot buses would come pick you up, and there would be a sign that would tell you what level you were in; yellow, green, or red. And so, you could look up and go, “Okay, we’re—we’re in condition green, so I just need to have my chem suit with me.” But if you got 29
there and you were in condition yellow, you had to put your chem suit on to get on the bus. You could have everything on but your gloves and your hat—your thing.
TS: Was it those rubbery gloves?
KM: Yes, and they smelled.
TS: I was wondering how you could open the safe with them—
KM: Yeah.
TS: —and get the stuff out.
KM: Well, we didn’t do that during the exercises.
TS: Oh, you didn’t?
KM: No, we had already—by the time—the beginning of the exercise we would have issued all of our encode/decode, the missile cruise would head out. They went out to Salisbury Plains, which is actually where Stonehenge is, but it’s actually a huge military complex for the British military. And so, our guys would go out there and play games with the British military, and it was these big trailers, and they would have fake—they didn’t take the real nuclear missiles out; they would have fake ones that they would have in these trailers that lifted up, and it would hold four nuclear missiles. The idea was it was ground launched cruise missiles, and they could drive all over Salisbury Plain and the—the “Russians” couldn’t find them because they’re—
TS: Because it’s mobile?
KM: Because they’re mobile; exactly. And so, it was one of those you probably see on TV where it would raise up and then the missiles would shoot out. Then you would have another truck that would go out with them that’s, like, the communications truck. Then you had these Humvees that went out that stationed on top of the mountains, or the hills out there because it’s line of sight, so that the base could talk to those guys—
TS: So, it was, like, signal intelligence?
KM: Exactly. And then those guys could signal down into where Salisbury Plain is. So you had all these things going on. So, they would all be gone, so we’d already issued that. But what we did during these exercises were we were the radio support on base to talk to the—the guys sitting on top of the hills; the mobile radio operators who were then talking to the missile crews. So, because it was line of sight you had to have all this—these people. This is before digital technology.
So, you would get on the bus and then the bus would drive you around and drop you off where you—where you worked. Well, where our radios were, were inside the missile bunker. So, our office was on one side of the—the base, and then the radio site 30
was down in this missile bunker, so you had to go through all the blast doors and you had to get in there.
And if you got caught out in the open and they went into condition red, you would then have to throw your helmet on, throw your gloves on, and dive into the nearest ditch. The whole time you’re in condition red, which could be two hours—so you’re laying in this ditch for however long, it could be July and you could be burning up, and it could be December and you’re freezing. So—And then as soon as they went back to condition yellow, then you could get up, walk around, and—yeah.
The worst experience I ever had in this was, I’m in the bunker, right? We go to condition yellow, so we had to put our chem suits on. So, we put them on. So, I’m talking to radios, talking to all the guys and everything. Well, then we go to condition red, and my relief had just got there; we worked twelve hours shifts. My relief had just got there; we go to condition red, which means I can’t leave, okay. They’re not going to open the bunker door to let me go. And I’m like, “Man, I’ve already been here twelve hours. I’m stinking.” You know, I’ve had this chem suit on—so I’m in this chem suit.
So, I decided to go and crawl in the back and just lay down because I’m, like, sleeping. Well, nobody comes and wakes me up, and, like, eight hours later they find me and they’re like, “Hey, you can get up now.” And it’s been condition green for hours. So, I’ve had this chem suit on, with the helmet, the whole thing, just passed out in the back for, like, eight hours.
I’m like, “Thanks.” And I had to come back to work in, like, three hours, so I’m like—you know? Like, “That was great guys, thank you very much.” [laughs]
TS: Well, you would have been in England, like, as the—Eastern Europe is, kind of, crumbling.
KM: A little bit, yeah.
TS: Right, when they were doing—a lot of people were coming across the border at that time, and things were breaking down. Because in ’89, right, you were there?
KM: I left in June of ’89.
TS: So, right, in that summer, I think, is when things were starting to—do you remember anything about that at all?
KM: I just remember them being really cautious. You know, the base officials trying to be really cautious about what was going on. But other than that, I don’t remember much else about, like, what was going on. I really got more of an impact of that when I went to Ramstein in Germany—
TS: Okay.
KM: —which was like two years later.
TS: Oh, right, because then you got the end of—31
KM: Or a year and a half later.
TS: —the Soviet Union during that—
KM: Right. Well, the [Berlin] Wall fell a couple months before I got to Germany.
TS: Okay.
KM: Yeah.
TS: Well, what—is there anything else you wanted to talk about, about England?
KM: My mom used to send me bags of Cool Ranch Doritos. [both laugh]
TS: There’s always something that, you know, we miss.
KM: Yeah, they didn’t have them over there, so my mom would, like, send care packages of Cool Ranch Doritos and Sir Pizza. Pizza boxes that were empty, but at least I could smell them.
TS: [laughs]
KM: I mean, really, it was great.
TS: Seriously?
KM: Yes! Yes! She did. And so, I would get these bags of Cool Ranch Doritos, and they were crumbled. I mean, they were just little tiny pieces, but I didn’t care. But yeah, I couldn’t get that. But one of the interesting things about it is that you could drink at sixteen over there. So, I turned twenty-one a week before I came back, and I’d been drinking the whole time; you know, you go out to the pubs and stuff. So, I came back and my mom’s like, “How great does it feel to be twenty-one?”
I’m like, “Eh,” you know. I’ve been drinking over there.
TS: Been there, done that.
KM: Been there, done that.
TS: How was the food?
KM: Oh, it was great.
TS: Yeah? Did you really like it?32
KM: I really liked the food. I—The people, not so much actually. The British were very, you know—they would look at the Americans and say, “Oh, those colonists,” you know. They still thought we were a colony.
And you’re like, “No, we’ve been a country for a couple of years now.” But they would call the Americans “colonists” and stuff, so.
TS: Where—Where—When you say “the British”, was that everywhere or just in certain areas you went to or—
KM: Pretty much, yeah.
TS: Really?
KM: Yeah. Yeah. You know, you had some really nice British. Some of the guys, of course, of base, were dating some of the British girls and stuff like that, which has its own reputation. You know, anywhere there’s a military base you always have the girls that want to marry the military American to get back to the United States, and so you had a lot of that going on. You know, Ramstein was also bad for that; England.
TS: Well, do you want to talk about Pease Air Force Base and how that was when you were in New Hampshire?
KM: Sure. I left Greenham and, like I said, I went home, and that was, kind of, a—they assigned me there to get away from Dale. And it was a bomber—bomber and something else base. The problem with that was it’s right on the coast of New Hampshire, so they’re not even going to be able to get the bombers off the ground before the Russians can destroy the base, so it was closing. Greenham Common closed right after I left.
TS: Oh, it did?
KM: Yes, it did. So, I get to Pease and they’re like, “Yeah, it’s closing.”
And I’m like, “Oh!” You know, I’m thinking I had the worst luck. I was only there for about a year and half. I was one of the last people to come into the base, because they were already going to close it, so there was nobody coming in after me. There might have been a few people after me, but not very many.
TS: Yeah? So, what was your experience like at this base?
KM: It was different. I was going through the divorce at that base when I first got there. It was—everything was—they didn’t even have a room for me. They were trying to find places to put me, and so I was doing—I was housed not in the—with my squadron. I was housed in, like, the logistics squadron building because they didn’t have a room where I needed to be. And the—the contract with Pease Air Force Base was something like sixty—sixty percent of the base had to be from New England.
TS: You mean the workers?33
KM: No, the military. It was some kind of contract with the base that over two-thirds of the base had to be people from New England.
TS: Really?
KM: Yes. So, like, on weekends nobody was around, because everybody lived—my—my second husband, he lived five minutes from the base; he grew up there, and you know—or ten minutes. He lived in Maine, but it was, like, between Maine and right on the border.
Yeah, so it was, like, on the weekends it was like—there was only, like, twenty people around because those were the only people that didn’t live within a couple of hours. Almost everybody else was from Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine; yeah.
TS: So, you met your second husband here?
KM: Yes, I know. When I first got there I worked in an office. There again, there was a master sergeant, a couple sergeants. I was a sergeant E-4 by this point, and—so, I started hanging out with one of the airmen that worked with me. I think she was a senior airman; I can’t remember. And she had a big clique of people that she hung out with, so I just started kind of hanging out with them.
And Dale—excuse me—Shawn was my second husband, and he had a girlfriend at the time, and we would all just, kind of, hang out together. But he and his girlfriend broke up, and we were just hanging out, and then we started dating, which was in March of 1990. We got married in April of 1990; six weeks later we got married. So, yeah, we didn’t date very long, but I had known him for—like, since June, up to that point. I had went through a really—I had a horrible first—pretty much, I don’t have very fond memories of Pease Air Force Base. The job was still the combat crew communications.
TS: And you liked that?
KM: Of course, I loved that.
TS: Yeah.
KM: That was—That was my favorite. I loved doing that job, dealing with the bombers crews and—I want to say tankers. I want to say it was bombers and tankers there. So, you know, the crews would come in a get their stuff, and we would issue it to them. Yeah, that was great. But personally, I had a really tough time there.
TS: What happened?
KM: Well, I was going through the divorce, and you know, Dale was calling me up at work and—you know, and everything, and it was just going through all of that. While I was living in the logistics dorm I was raped. I had been studying. There again, you got to take 34
your next level, and I was studying something; I don’t remember. And the guy across the hall from me, because it was a mixed—mixed dorm, guy across the hall from me had knocked on the door, and I had been drinking. Not a lot; I’d probably had two beers or something. And he comes in—
TS: Was it, like, a dayroom that you were in?
KM: No, it was my room.
TS: It was your room.
KM: It was my room.
TS: Okay.
KM: You had—You had a room, and then there was a bathroom, and then you had, like, a suite. So, you had two rooms and a bathroom in between. Your suitemate had to be female, so there was another female on the other side of me.
TS: I see.
KM: But across the hall there were males, so you had—and that was how my dorms were at Pease; it was male and female like that. But the bathrooms had to be shared by the same sex. And the guy comes in—and, you know, I opened the door because I’ve known him; he lived right across the hall from me and hadn’t been there but a couple months, and he attacked me while I was in my room, and raped me. I never reported it; never did anything, because I felt like I had been drinking—I mean, I wasn’t drunk. Like I said, I had, like—I was sitting in my room, studying, having a beer. But I just, kind of, let it go.
And then a few months later I was having a divorce party, and I had started dating Shawn’s roommate; my second husband’s roommate. He had been gone on TDY [temporary duty], and I had a big divorce party because my divorce from Dale was final, and I got drunk. I mean, I got really, really hammered. And—I can’t think of what the guy’s name was now. Can’t—It doesn’t—I can’t even think of what his name was. Greg; that was his name. And he had come back from TDY and he was like, “Yeah, I don’t want to date you anymore. You’re not pretty enough for me;” that same night. And I just went and got drunk.
I was like, “Oh my gosh.”
So I went back to my dorm room. Now, by this time I’m living in the dorm that I should have been living in. They had—after—shortly after that incident happened, which had nothing to do with it, they moved me into the dorm that I was supposed to have been in but they didn’t have room. So, they got room and said, “Okay, you can move in.”
So, I moved back—and I had a roommate at the time—and I went into my room to, kind of, just pass out. And of course, the door wasn’t locked and my roommate—one of her friends—came in. I don’t remember this because I was passed out, but he came in and tried to rape me while I was passed out. My suitemate had come down to check on me and walked in and caught him, and he grabbed up all of his clothes and ran out the 35
door and took off. But she reported it to the first sergeant, who then moved my roommate out because it was her friend, apparently, and moved her to a different so I would have a private room so I didn’t have to deal with that.
TS: Well, what did they do to the guy that ran off?
KM: I don’t think they ever found him. I don’t know—
TS: But they knew who it was, right?
KM: I don’t know that they knew who it was. I don’t—I don’t know, because I was passed out. So, to this day I refuse to drink. I might have a beer occasionally, but I’m like, “No, I—no, no”; will not—will not put myself in that position—or that I had. I mean, you have to realize I was twenty-one.
TS: Right.
KM: I was very young—or twenty. I was very—whatever; however old. Or however old I was at the time; I was twenty-one. So, you know, my personal life—and after that I just got really angry. You know, I had a lot of personal problems.
And then Shawn started showing an interest in me, and he was very sweet and very kind, and you know, I just fell for him hook, line, and sinker, and we got married.
TS: Did you see him, kind of, as a protector, too, maybe, in some ways, you think?
KM: Probably; probably. I think I saw him as someone that—he was very kind. He didn’t—He wasn’t like Dale. He was just very caring at the time. Now I look back on it and realize he was also very manipulative, but, you know, he was very controlling in a different way, which I didn’t see at the time. So, you know, my—we did travel a lot when we were up in Pease. He and I would go and he—we never got to go to Boston, which was really irritating, but you know, I got to go visit with his parents who lived, like, ten minutes from the base, and, you know, it was just—it was different. Yeah.
TS: Well, do you mind if I ask you about the one—the—so at this—at this place, this person that you knew raped you, and then this other man that you—they weren’t aware of attempted to. The one that did, did—and you said you didn’t say anything; you didn’t tell anyone.
KM: Yes.
TS: But did you continue to live in close proximity to him?
KM: Yeah.
TS: Did you work with him at all?36
KM: No, no, because I was living in the dorm that was for logistics people.
TS: Right.
KM: So, I didn’t work with him. He lived across the hall. And it was probably, only like, maybe a week or two after that when I got moved to my dorm because an opening came up.
TS: So, you didn’t really see him again?
KM: I probably did. I probably just didn’t think about it, you know; I don’t remember.
TS: Did you—Did you ever, like, seek any kind of counseling or—
KM: No.
TS: No?
KM: No, not at that time, no.
TS: Was that anything that was encouraged in the air force at that time?
KM: No.
TS: This was still a period where you say it was not really—
KM: No, not really.
TS: —sexual abuse—
KM: Yeah.
TS: —and violence.
KM: Yeah, not really, absolutely not. I was just—I mean, I just remember I got angry. Like, I wouldn’t even talk to people. I was so angry and so just destroyed about it. And I became very promiscuous during that period, too, I think just trying to let loose; I don’t know. And then, of course, when I met Shawn it was like, “Okay, now that’s the person I’m going to marry and he’s going to take care of me.” And he was military; he was air force at the time as well. So, I totally thought I had found that one person that was—you know, we had a lot in common, we were both military. I thought, “This is going to be great.”
He was a—He was a comm—He was information systems computer specialist, so he did the computer side of it and I did the radio side of it.
TS: And that was, kind of—a new kind of field opening up at that time too.37
KM: Yeah, right.
TS: Well, it would have been open for a little while, but changing quickly, I’m sure.
KM: Yeah, because by the time I got to—when I left there and I got to Ramstein I’m dealing with satellite radios, where my first base I’m dealing with HF [high frequency] radios. And here it is, only two or three years later, and I’m like, “Satellite? Well, this is cool.”
TS: [chuckles] Yeah. So, you—you talk—you talk here—is that what you’re talking about here?
KM: Yes.
TS: Yeah? Where you felt, like, not sure of your own safety, I guess, in some ways?
KM: Yeah.
TS: And your mental—
KM: Yeah. Yeah. I went through a lot—a lot of stuff at Pease Air Force Base.
TS: Yeah?
KM: I mean, I don’t look back on it and—like I hated the base, or anything like that.
TS: Right, on.
KM: Because it was—
TS: You don’t come across that way.
KM: No, no, it was—I mean, the only problem I had with Pease was it was in New Hampshire. It snowed a lot. [chuckles] So, it would be—it was so cold. I mean, it was so cold, and there would be, like, three or four foot little snow drifts outside the dorm, and I’m like, “You know, I’m from North Carolina, man. This is not good,” you know. It was—It was an interesting—you know, interesting place. The best steak sandwiches they had off base. There was a place called D’Angelo’s that you’d get the best steak sandwiches in the world. I miss D’Angelo’s to this day.
TS: I think the best sandwich place, actually, is in Monterrey, California. A place called Compagno’s.
KM: Okay.
TS: I haven’t been there since, like, 1980, so—[laughs]38
KM: I know, you miss it. I’m like, “Man, I miss it.” And there was a place downtown that—that was called the Oar House—O-A-R House—and it was a restaurant, and it was a—like a four star restaurant, and Shawn’s parents were friends with the people that owned it, so we could go eat there any time we wanted and didn’t have to pay, and the desserts were just to die for. And I had my first Monte Cristo sandwich there, and I love Monte Cristo sandwiches now [chuckling]; like, it was the best. And the downtown area outside of Pease was very quaint; very New England. So, you know, it was really kind of nice.
TS: How are you feeling at this point? So now you’ve been in, like, three years?
KM: Yes.
TS: And you’re a sergeant?
KM: Yes.
TS: So, you’ve been promoted well.
KM: Yeah.
TS: And do you feel like you—how were you treated professionally, you know, at this point?
KM: I think I was treated professionally fine, because there was already, like, two females in my office when I got there. One was, like, a staff sergeant, and the other one was, like, a senior airman, and I was an E-4 sergeant; not a staff sergeant yet.
TS: Yes.
KM: So, yeah, I think professionally I never had an incident where it was—until I got to Ramstein, where I felt that, you know, I was sexually harassed for being a woman.
TS: Oh, okay.
KM: Right.
TS: What happened there?
KM: I had a master sergeant that was there that was, I think, really anti women. He was—He just—He didn’t like women very much, and then of course—
TS: In what way; how did he show that?
KM: I remember when I—my first evaluation that I got with him was really low, and the senior master sergeant—or the chief master sergeant was like, “No, you can’t give her this low of a grade,” and I was the only one he gave that low of a grade to.39
TS: Were there other women in—
KM: No, not at that point.
TS: Okay.
KM: There—like I said, after I came in, a couple other females in came shortly after me, but at that point it was all—it was still all male; there was, like, five of us, I think.
TS: And this is the base that you’re at after Pease, right?
KM: Right, I went to Hurlburt Field [Florida].
TS: Okay.
KM: When I got married to Shawn, Shawn had an assignment—I think I had an assignment to Ramstein, he had an assignment to some crazy place on the other side of Germany, and we were able to get a joint—they changed his assignment to joint, so he joined me at Ramstein. And we flew over—we flew over into Reykjavik, which was interesting.
TS: In Iceland?
KM: And it was a military flight.
TS: Is that Iceland, right?
KM: Yeah, I think so. It was pitch dark, I don’t know. I just remembering landing; like, “Where are we?” And it was a military flight so you had to wear your uniform. And we landed, I want to say, in Frankfurt, and then we went from Frankfurt and then we drove down the—one of the guys that he worked with—was going to be working with, picked us up, him and his wife, and then drove us down into Ramstein. And we lived off base for about a year and a half; we didn’t live on base. Had a big old house in the middle of this town, and then we moved into a smaller place, and then eventually got base housing, which was on the fourth floor with no elevator. [both laugh] I had to walk up and down stairs every day.
TS: So, how was that—you—well, go back to what you were talking about; this first sergeant—who—wasn’t the first sergeant. Who was it that rated you poorly? This senior master sergeant?
KM: The master sergeant.
TS: The master sergeant. Okay.
KM: Right. He was my direct supervisor, and my job at Ramstein—I worked in the United States Air Force European Command Center; USAFE Command Center, which is four 40
stories underground. In the middle—you walk up and there’s this little tiny itty bitty, like, building, like a shack. And you walk in, there’s a guard there, and you have you show him his—your ID. And then there’s a gate, and you buzz in and you walk down, like, four flights of stairs. And then you walk down a long hallway and walk through these blast doors. Yeah, I worked in some really crazy places.
And this Master Sergeant [name restricted until 1 January 2038], and then there was a chief master sergeant, and the rest of us were all, like, sergeant, maybe a few airmen. And he just was very condescending to me. I remember one time I had talked about some kind of movie I had at home. He grabs me by the front of my shirt and yanks me to him and said, “I want that movie. You need to bring it to me,” in front of, like, all these other people in the office.
And then I remember another time I came into work and I had by BDUs [Battle Dress Uniform] on, and he was like, “Your BDUs are wrinkled.” And he called me into an office and had the captain—one of the captains there come in and say, “Rate her uniform; how wrinkled it is.” I was just crying hysterically; like, this guy was just—he was just really antagonistic toward me.
But the chief was more like, “Yeah, you can’t—” He ended up getting in trouble for it; I mean—of his attitude totally. They did away with the radio operators there and we went to another spot on base, and he was sent somewhere else. Like, he—They were like, “Yeah, we don’t want him in our radio shop. We want him—” and so, he worked for the squadron, just as, kind of, like a—actually, I don’t know what he did.
TS: Yeah? But it—It seems like there’s this habit of just moving them away, not necessarily—
KM: Oh no.
TS: —giving them any punitive—
KM: No, no, definitely not. It still was, kind of, the good old boy network.
TS: Yeah?
KM: Yes.
TS: Well, did you have anybody that you would consider a mentor?
KM: No.
TS: Not really?
KM: Not really, no.
TS: Not at any point in your career?End of Part One.
Interview continues in Part Two.