Oral history interview with Cathy Illman Sykes, 2006

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WOMEN VETERANS HISTORICAL PROJECT
ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Cathy Illman Sykes
INTERVIEWER: Hermann J. Trojanowski
DATE: January 25, 2006
[Begin Interview]
HT: Okay, today is Wednesday, January 25, 2006, and the time is 1:40 [p.m.]. My name is Hermann Trojanowski, and I’m at the home of Mrs. Cathy Illman Sykes in Greensboro, North Carolina, to conduct an oral history interview for the Women Veterans Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina Greensboro [UNCG]. Cathy, it’s wonderful to see you again after about twenty years. Thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview.
CS: You’re quite welcome.
HT: If you will give me your full name, we’ll use that as a test to see how we both sound on this machine.
CS: Okay. It’s Cathryn Illman Sykes.
[Tape turned off]
HT: Cathy, thanks so much. If you would, tell me a few biographical facts about yourself such as where you were born.
CS: Well, actually, I was born and grew up here in Greensboro, went to Page High School, and then from there—I graduated in 1975 from Page—and went to freshman year at Carolina, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. That’s where I met my husband, and we decided that we were going to get married rather than finish school at that point in time.
HT: And when were you born?
CS: Nineteen fifty-seven.2
HT: And can you tell me something about your family, your parents and any siblings you might have?
CS: Yeah, my dad worked for, I think it was about forty-one years, for Burlington Industries. He was a research chemist, and he worked various places around the Greensboro area. He actually—his dad was an architect for the federal government among other things and built a number of things here in Greensboro. The old post office was the main thing. My mom was a teacher. It seems like she’s taught half the kids my age in Greensboro, if not more. She taught many, many years as almost a full-time substitute at Kiser [Middle School], and then taught, gosh, twenty plus years at GTCC [Guilford Technical Community College] teaching both landscaping and also to gardening type classes as well as microwave cooking in the adult education program. I had one brother. He died in 1980. He had a lot of health problems, but he also graduated from UNCG summa cum laude with a double-major in math and economics, which was actually quite an accomplishment because he had already lost his sight at that point. So, he was doing that with readers and, you know, help taking his exams, but he was very, very smart.
HT: If we could back track to your high school days, you said you attended Page High School.
CS: Yes.
HT: Do you recall what your favorite subjects were?
CS: Probably math and science. That’s—I’ve always really enjoyed the sciences, you know, things like that. English and history were definitely not my forte.
HT: And, then, when did you start at UNCG?
CS: Let’s see. Nineteen eighty. My husband was in the air force at the time, and he—we left on—we were stationed at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. He was stationed there in Tucson, Arizona, and, then we moved back—he moved to Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Virginia, and I came back to UNCG to go to school. So, I had been going to school, you know, part-time, working full-time, going part-time, knowing I wanted to come back but—
HT: What was your major?
CS: Came back as a nursing major.
HT: And what made you decide to do that?
CS: Well, I had heard a radio interview—and this is going to sound like a wild story—I heard a radio interview, I don’t know, As a kid growing up on old WBIG with Dean Eloise Lewis.3
[Telephone ringing. Tape turned off]
CS: And Dr. Lewis at that time was talking about the new nursing program, and there’s something that just stuck with me from what—because what they were doing was they were starting a new baccalaureate program. For a number of years they had had an associate degree nursing program, and something had just stuck with me, and I knew—when I had gone to Carolina I thought that I wanted to be a doctor at that time.
HT: A medical doctor?
CS: A medical doctor. Well—and then I got married, and then I worked in a hospital as a nursing assistant for about three years, and I decided that I really didn’t want to be a doctor, I wanted to be a nurse. And that all sort of kicked off, and I knew—I wanted to come home to UNCG because something about Dr. Lewis, and she was still here as the dean, something about that just really stuck with me, so.
HT: So, do you recall anything specific about the administrators at the nursing school other than Dr. Lewis, any stories that you might be able to—
CS: Well—
HT: —share with us.
CS: It was very challenging for me to come back at that point because what I had done, was very consciously had selected courses that I knew would transfer for my first two years. So, I had all of my psychology and my basic humanities that I had to have, sociology and all those sort of things I took and then used them as transfer credits.
Well, that left all my science classes I had to just cram basically into one year. So, I ended up—it took me three years to get my degree, and I will never forget—I went to talk to Doris Armenaki who was in the School of Nursing then, and I had to get her help to get the biology department to let me take Biology 101 and 102 in the same semester, because otherwise there was no way I could get all my classes in. My second semester of what was then my sophomore year, I ended up with four lab courses, and it, you know the old saying of, if it doesn’t kill you, it make you stronger [laughing], and I’ll tell you I really, it really—I knew that I was earning my education. I was really getting a good education, but UNCG was —I couldn’t have done it, I don’t think, in a lot of schools. I was too young and too inexperienced I guess you could say for Carolina, but UNCG just my—
I will never forget and I’m just drawing a blank right now on the name of the professor—we had to take one semester of physics, and it was a conceptual physics class, and it was taught by the head of the department, which we were all non-physics majors in there was, you know, people majoring in nutrition and nursing and all those sort of things that had to take physics, and he was the most phenomenal teacher. I still remember his demonstrations and coming into class and, you know. The day he came in talking about different physical principles with one of these little roller things like you work on cars 4
and a fire extinguisher and shoots himself across the room, you know? Lying down on a bed of nails in class. I mean always doing all sorts of wild things but just really, really stuck with me, and it’s those sort of things that Carolina—the whole year I was there I was never taught by anything other than teaching assistants, and, you know, it’s just such a difference in philosophy that, you know, I’m real excited my son wants to go to UNCG. Now, he’s only a ninth-grader, you know, he’s a freshman in high school, but, you know, it would probably be a good fit for him, too.
HT: Well, you had mentioned Dr. Eloise [pausing]—
CS: Lewis.
HT: Lewis, a little bit earlier, do you have anything particular you want to tell us about her that you remember from that period of time?
CS: She always had the story about always asking people, you know, nursing—people going through the nursing program that, you know, when you go out and you talk to your friends—I don’t know how many other nurses you’ve talked to from UNCG—to always send more people back, little corpuscles, sending them back to, you know, send them to UNCG. You know, find the good people out there and send them, you know, her way, and she was just an absolutely phenomenal lady, just, hoo [laughing].
HT: I met Dr. Lewis one time. As a matter I interviewed her for the same program, and she was quite wonderful. Well, what about college life, what—I’m assuming you were probably a day student?
CS: Yes.
HT: As opposed to—so, did you get involved in any on-campus activities?
CS: Well, I was also across town ROTC [Reserve Officer Training Corps]
student—
HT: Oh.
CS: At [North Carolina] A&T [State University]. So, my plate was really full between, you know, doing the nursing curriculum and doing that, you know, going over there because I had to take—I had to take my ROTC classes every semester over there, and that was another one where I crammed in four years into three years because I did first two classes of the freshman year sort of a self-study, took the exams and they gave me credit for it during the summer, so, I did that. I was in Golden Chain. I was a member of Golden Chain. Oh, gosh, what else? I spent a lot of time in the biology building [laughing]. Uh, [pausing], just sort of general—you—I know I’m forgetting something, and maybe I’ll think of it a little bit later.
HT: Okay.5
CS: But those are probably the main thing.
HT: Let’s go back to ROTC. How did you get involved in the ROTC program? Evidently you must have known you were going to go into one of the branches of the service?
CS: Yeah, I had kind of this idea, I guess, when I was in high school that I wanted to do—I—oh, it wasn’t a calling or such, but I just, I felt really strongly that I wanted to do something in service to my country, and that’s actually where I met my husband was in ROTC at Carolina.
HT: Oh, Okay.
CS: So, I had been—I had one year there as a ROTC cadet, and then, you know, we got married and went off and all that, and then—and I just—I had seen other women who had—I had thought about enlisting while we were living in Arizona, and—because I had seen other wives who every time their husband got transferred they had to stop, you know, drop their job, quit their job, start all over again, and it was like, well, why should I do that, because I can do the same thing in the air force? And I like to travel. I love to travel, and I figured that that would be probably the best way to go, realizing we were going to be in two different places, but we already were just for me to get through school, so—
HT: Now, your mother, of course was in the air force during World War II. Did that have any influence on you?
CS: I’m not sure specifically, because I don’t know that really at that time I knew that much about what she had done. I wonder, though, if sort of the—I don’t know if it’s really desire to serve or just the example of, you know, doing community service, doing certain church work, doing, you know, things in the community sort of gave me that idea that these are the things you do in life, that sort of thing.
HT: Well, when did you graduate from UNCG?
CS: Nineteen eighty-three.
HT: And I’m assuming you were commissioned—
CS: Yes.
HT: —right after that?
CS: Yes.
HT: Did you do any post-graduate work after you left UNCG?6
CS: Yes, I did—when I was in the service the air force sent me to graduate school at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, where I got my master’s degree in trauma and critical care nursing which was—that was extremely fortunate that—and, you know, it was very, very competitive, but I saw the other folks going through, you know, people who were having to work full-time and had families and it’s, you know, I worked very, very hard. It is quite a difficult program, but at least that was my job, so.
HT: So, that’s all you did?
CS: That’s really all I did.
HT: And how long did the program last?
CS: It’s two years.
HT: Okay. And, so, you were basically stationed there?
CS: Right, exactly.
HT: Were you made to wear air force uniforms or civilian clothes?
CS: No, civilian clothes. There were twelve of us actually, twelve air force nurses in my year group. That was one of the main locations where they sent people.
HT: And did the program last all year, or did you have to go back to another base?
CS: No, I took classes during summer school.
HT: Oh. Okay.
HT: So. It was really a great program because it gave me an opportunity. Basically at that time—now, from what I hear they’ve gotten a little more restrictive—but at that time you could take as many classes as—you had to take the plan for you to get your degree, but if you wanted to take additional classes, as long as you kept your grades up, they didn’t care, and the air force would pay. So, I took—there were, oh, I guess, about four of us, four or five of us, who took extra classes. We’d go down to the University of Maryland in College Park, the main campus, and took extra classes to get an administration certificate, a general administration certificate down there. So, that was neat, because I got to take some of the nursing administration classes, and I took a class in education, you know, sort of a smorgasbord of things.
HT: And when were you at the University of Maryland, was that right after UNCG or—
CS: No, no. I graduated—let’s see. I went the fall of ’91, and I graduated in ’93, just exactly ten years later [laughing].7
HT: I guess I jumped ahead of the game here a little bit.
CS: Yes.
HT: So, after you became a second lieutenant, where was your first duty station?
CS: I went to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. [sound in the background] Yeah, there you go [sound in the background].
HT: And what type of work did you do there?
CS: Well, I was fortunate in that as most nurses at that point in time had to have a year experience coming in, a year of nursing experience before they come in the military, but they were doing particularly for ROTC graduates and some, and a few people who had done very well in their nursing program, the air force offered what they call a Nurse Internship Program, which they still do it, but it’s much shorter now. It was five and a half months, and it actually was considered as an assignment.
Now, I stayed at Wright-Pat afterwards, but some of the folks in our group—there were twelve in our group—we worked anywhere from two weeks to a month in different areas in the hospital. So, I got a chance to work in a number of different areas which was really nice. Wright-Pat was a big medical center, and it was very nice because afterwards, you know, I knew people—here I’m really brand new, but I knew people all over the hospital. So, it just made things much easier, you know, if you had to transfer a patient from your unit to an orthopedic unit and you picked up the phone and you knew the person on the other end, it just made things work much more smoothly. I worked—after that I was assigned on the surgical unit. It was a major surgery unit, thirty-six-bed unit, which—
HT: Which is still at Wright-Patterson?
CS: Yes, still at Wright-Pat. Some of—about half of our group went on to other bases, but—let’s see. I was the only one assigned to that unit. I was there—let’s see. That was January to—let’s see. That was 1983 till I think November, and then I went—I was still at Wright-Pat. Then I went to work in the intensive care unit.
HT: Did you ever go through anything that I would call basic training like six weeks of—
CS: Well, you do that during ROTC.
HT: Okay.
CS: Since I’d gotten my commission through ROTC, I did between my sophomore and my junior year I went through four weeks of what they call field training.
HT: Field training.8
CS: Yes, that was down at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida.
HT: Do you have any recollection of what that was like?
[Both laughing]
CS: About like basic training. According to my husband who was enlisted first before he became an officer, it was very, very strenuous. I mean everything from all your shirts had to be hung exactly right, your hangers spaces and your—all your socks had to smile. You know, they had to be put in the drawer a certain way, and your underwear had to be folded a certain way. You know, they checked your beds and the whole works. You went everywhere in formation, even PT [physical training] and the beach, so.
HT: So, that was at Tyndall?
CS: Yes, that was at Tyndall, [clearing throat] excuse me.
HT: And where is that again?
CS: In Florida.
HT: In Florida.
CS: It’s near—it’s actually just outside of Panama City, Florida.
HT: So, it’s on the panhandle?
CS: On the panhandle, yes. Beautiful white fine sandy beaches [laughing].
HT: So, did you ever get a chance to visit those beaches while you were in your field training?
CS: Well, we had—Tyndall is kind of nice because there’s—they have their own beaches and it’s sort of protected. There’s a spit of land that comes out so they’re protected from a lot of the rough weather that comes in, and, yes, we would run all the way to the beach. You know, because when you are in your PT stuff you run everywhere instead of marching, and, so, we would run all the way to the beach, and we would play our volleyball or all I mainly remember—I know it’s a couple of different things, but you would play your organized sports and generally have a little bit of free time, maybe a half an hour at most, and then you would run all the way back, but—
HT: You just had to do that one time?
CS: Yes.
HT: During your ROTC days?9
CS: Yes.
HT: And that was it? And then after you were commissioned, you didn’t have to do any kind of additional type of basic training?
CS: Well, I went to—no, not like that. They have—because I was medical and you go to—at that point in time, they’ve changed it quite a bit since then—but at that point in time you just went to two weeks, and it was really just classroom pretty much, and for those—now for those you go through ROTC, they don’t even go to that. For those who haven’t, who are direct commissions who come in, it’s a month-long, and they—it’s not as structured as like field training or basic training, but it’s more structured in that they even the doctors—even all the doctors who come in have to learn how to march and have to learn how to salute properly. You know, some of those real basic military things, and they’re there about a month now.
HT: Let me just backtrack just a second on ROTC. Did you have to take any kind of written or physical test to join ROTC?
CS: Well, no, not to join. Your first two years you’re—I can’t remember what they call it, but it’s basically anybody can participate in the first two years. Then normally you go to your field training, and then depending how you do at your field training, you’re recommended to continue, and then you actually sign paperwork and go in the inactive reserve for what they call the Professional Officer Course which is—or I think it’s course—which is your second two years, your junior and senior years, and you get a real small stipend. It’s like, I don’t know what it is now. Then it was like one hundred dollars a month for the months that you’re in school to help with. It’s not really a scholarship, but it’s like just a small stipend that you get, and that is somewhat competitive in that there are some restrictions on what areas, you know, because they’re really looking at recruiting, and what educational background, you know, they don’t want all journalism majors that sort of thing. You know, they need—there’s preference given to people coming in with hard science degrees. Nursing was no problem, and, then, it’s a little bit more competitive as far as slots are available for you to get in if you have sort of a softer degree, you know, English degrees, journalism degrees.
HT: History degrees.
CS: History, business, business administration. You know, they need those people because an air force base is basically like a big city or a small city, depending on its size, and you’ve got to have all those working parts to make it work.
HT: How many hours a month did you have to participate or a week in the ROTC?
CS: Well, you have a class. You really had two classes because you had what they call a leadership lab which was, you know, your marching and your whatever job you had. When you’re in your first two years you basically go out and you’re a body in the ranks, 10
you know? And then in the second, your junior and senior years, you have some kind of position, some kind of job, and what—
It was kind of interesting because I had a real eye-opening experience with—I really, really wanted to work in one of the position recruiting, and there are only four people who could work in recruiting, and what they tried to do, was they tried to have a black male and a white male and a black female and a white female. Now, realizing this is, you know, 1982. anyway, it didn’t , that didn’t seem odd to me at the time. I’m not sure that they could get away with it today, but I really, really wanted to be in recruiting and I kind of got to, “Well, we’ll see. We’ll see, whatever.” You know, it’s real competitive and only the best cadets are chosen to do that, and all that. I found out I’d been selected. I was going to be able to work in recruiting, which I was really thrilled about, and then I came to find out I got selected because I was the only white female in the corp.
HT: [Laughing]
CS: And it really, really opened my eyes on what quotas—how they feel, and I was, I was really—I mean I was glad because I still wanted to do it. I didn’t care why I got selected really, but it really opened my eyes on how other folks can feel when they get something or achieve something and find out it wasn’t because of merit. It wasn’t because they had the skills to do it. It was just because of the color of their skin. So, it was quite eye-opening for me.
HT: An interesting story. Well, how did your family, friends, and neighbors and co-workers feel when they learned that you were on this course to join the military because this was right after Vietnam?
CS: Yes.
HT: And you were going ROTC. I can’t remember exactly how most people felt, but do you recall?
CS: Well, my first throw in ROTC was in 1975.
HT: Okay.
CS: And that was much closer to Vietnam War.
HT: Oh, yes.
CS: And I don’t think either one of my parents were happy. I’m not sure that they quite could figure out what they had ever done that led me to think I wanted to be in the military, and I remember for years after going in the military, “Oh, mom, it won’t be for long. Just one more assignment.” [laughing] I think after probably about ten to fifteen years they figured out I was probably going to stay for awhile, but it—the first—I know my parents were not very thrilled. They never said a whole lot, but—and I’m not sure that, I don’t think 11
they were very happy with the fact that I was going over at A&T to—I think part of it was a safety issue more than anything, and I was never, ever felt that it was not, you know, I was not, this was something I shouldn’t be doing certainly. I mean it was a great experience, but, you know, I don’t really remember anybody else having real specific comments about it, but, you know, I think my friends, most of my friends by then were, it was more ROTC group. So, you know, we were all in together.
HT: Now, did your parents have to sign any sort of papers giving you permission to do anything?
CS: No, because I was old enough.
HT: You were old enough?
CS: Yes, I think some of the nursing students—I still, I do remember some of the nursing students asking me, you know, why? Why are you doing this? Because there was one other nursing student, and she was an A&T nursing student who was in ROTC. There was just the two of us. She was actually—I’m pretty sure she was a year ahead of me, but, no, it wasn’t. I didn’t have time, really, to [laughing]—
HT: Because you were quite busy then?
CS: Very, yes.
HT: Well, do you recall what people in general thought about women joining the military? Was it something that people looked on with favor or?
CS: I think it was more a little bit of surprise, of why? Because actually I was coming in just as they were phasing out rules like, you get pregnant, you’re out. You know, frowning on—I do remember a great deal of concern from some of the instructors, the ROTC instructors, of the fact that my husband was enlisted at the time, and they were really concerned that that was—and it really did have a potential to cause problems. Now, he ended up getting his commission about—let’s see, I got my commission in May, and he was commissioned the next February. So, I mean, it was only about eight months, and we knew he was going down that path, because he was going to school in Newport News, [Virginia], the same time I was going to school in Greensboro. So, it—but they were really concerned because that really more than being a woman in the military, that was more of a concern to them was the fact that he was enlisted, and I was going to be an officer, and that was really frowned on.
HT: Did you know any other couples that eventually, I mean, in your military career who were in that kind of situation where one of the spouses was a commissioned officer and the other was an enlisted person?12
CS: Yes, I’ve known several. Not very many, and in some places it depended on the commander. In some places it was very difficult. It was much more difficult if they were both in the medical career field. Again—
HT: Why?
CS: Well, it could be. The closer together they worked, you know, and it was a matter sort of their personalities, too. How much did they—how much of an issue did they make of it? I’m not sure that there was ever any difference between, were they, you know, which one was enlisted because, I think, most frequently you would see a medical officer married to a non-medical enlisted person. I’m not quite sure why that worked, but that seemed to be sort of the thing. It—and, again, I mean, because technically by the rules that’s fraternization, and the thing—the one thing that I saw, well, they say the military the only thing that’s constant is change, and everything seemed to be very cyclical. It was almost about every, you know, five or eight years, I’d say. When I first went in things tended to be fairly traditional, fairly restrictive. Conceivably really could have been a problem that my husband was enlisted. Then things got much more relaxed. It’s no big deal, and then all of a sudden things started getting very, very tight again, and fraternization was really frowned upon and could get you in trouble and all of that. So, that—I saw—it was very changing.
HT: But you said you only had eight months—
CS: Yes.
HT: —Bill [Sykes] wasn’t a—
CS: And the thing was I went—I actually went on active duty at the end of July in ’83. Then I went two—I went to Sheppard [Air Force Base] for two weeks for what they called MIMSO which—
HT: What is that?
CS: Which stands for—it’s the Medical Indoctrination—wait a minute. I got to stop and think. Military Indoctrination for Medical Service Officers [laughing].
HT: M-I-M-O?
CS: M-I-M-S-O [laughing].
HT: Okay.
CS: Military Indoctrination for Medical Service Officers [laughing], and that was the two weeks of basically explaining to the medical people how the military worked, and it was—it’s a very good thing that they’ve revamped it, because many of the doctors didn’t want to be there, and they would sit and read their medical journals or they would sit, you 13
know, because there was—in fact, I was in the largest class at that point that they’d ever had. It was almost 300 of us, 270-some of us, and they’d sit in this big, huge auditorium and listen to people lecture up on the stage. And, you know, you’d see people sleeping. It was just really, really bad. Since I had kind of—having gone through ROTC, having a military spouse, I was a little horrified at these folks, but, yeah, I did—that was two weeks, and then I went to Wright-Pat and five months of internship, which was very, very busy, and, so, it wasn’t really an issue because my husband wasn’t there. He was still at Langley. Well, no, actually he went to—let’s see, probably November—I’m trying to think how long OTS [Officer Training School] was. Can you stop just a second and let me ask—
HT: Sure.
[Tape turned off.]
CS: It was—he was one of the ninety-day wonders at OTS. So, that means, let’s see, he would have probably gone to OTS, I think November sometime. So, we were both in very separate places, very, very busy, and he was already sort of becoming an officer right after I had gone on active duty. So, we never really had a problem with it, thank goodness.
HT: So, after you finished your internship at Wright[-Patterson] Air Force Base, I guess that was in the fall or early ’84?
CS: I finished in January of ’84.
HT: Oh, okay, and where did you go next?
CS: I stayed at Wright-Pat. My husband was in OTS at the time. He was commissioned in February; and, you know, we were thinking, oh, Wright-Pat, it’s got lots of —because he had a degree—he had a bachelors of science in computer science, and we thought, you know, he was going to be a communications officer somewhere. Wright-Pat would be a great place because it’s got a lot of technology and Air Force Institute of Technology and all this stuff. Well, were we wrong [laughing]. So, he ended up getting an assignment to Scott Air Force Base.
HT: Your mother was at Scott.
CS: Yes, in Belleville, [Illinois], outside of Belleville, and, so, then my challenge was —well, what we found out—he was told at OTC, “Oh, no problems, just go. Stay there for a year and then ask to do your own move and join your wife at Wright-Pat.” Well, what the little piece he wasn’t told, was the fact that it was a headquarters assignment, and that’s a four-year controlled tour [laughing]. So, then I had to find my way to Wright-Pat, but what I did was—well, let’s see. This would have been ’84. I asked to stay at Wright—I mean, 14
I’m sorry, to Scott. I had to find my way to Scott. I asked to stay—I had gone to the ICU [Intensive Care Unit] in November of ’84. I asked to stay at Scott until—I mean, I’ll get it straight yet—at Wright-Pat until November of ’85, because once I’d been in the ICU for a year you get a special experience identifier, and because I wanted to stay in the ICU, that’s the sort of thing that when I then ask for an assignment it would red flag me to get that assignment. So, I stayed till November of ’85 and then moved to—I got an assignment to Scott to join him, so.
HT: But these two air force bases are not that far apart, I assume? They’re both sort of—
CS: Well, they’re right down I-70, but it’s—
HT: So, you got to go back and forth on weekends and that sort of thing?
CS: Well, not, it’s about, uh, it was about a six-hour drive.
HT: Oh.
CS: Yes, it’s quite a ways, because you’ve got to get all the way across Indiana, Illinois—and Illinois because it’s just outside of St. Louis. So, it’s all the way the other side of Illinois. Plus half of Ohio. So, it’s a straight shot, but it’s—it was quite a ways. So, yes, we were doing things—he would come some weekends, I would go other weekends, but, see, I was working shift work, so, it was—and he was working a lot, because as a second lieutenant in a headquarters he worked for Air Force Communications Command headquarters, which is no longer a command of its own anymore, when they did a lot of reorganization—but as a second lieutenant you’re lower than dirt [laughing], and a major is nothing in a headquarters, and, so, he worked a lot of hours and a lot of long hours.
Yes, we spent about five and a half years with two separate households, but which is fairly interesting because some of our good friends when we left Tucson, [Arizona], and they knew what we were going to do—well, they didn’t know it was going to be that long, but they knew, you know, I had at least three years of school they—it was, “Oh, you’ll never make it,” you know, “You guys are crazy to do this. You really don’t want to do this.” You know, “It’s not smart. It won’t be good for your marriage,” and on and on thinking they were being good friends. In a way they were, because our stubborn streaks really got active, and it’s like, “Dad gum it. We’re going to make this work,” and it was very difficult, but, you know, we were stubborn, and we’re going to make it work. Let’s see. The eighth of this month we celebrated our twenty-ninth anniversary. So, I’d say [laughing]—
HT: You proved them incorrect.
CS: We proved them wrong, you bet.
HT: So, where was your next assignment after—so you finally got to Scott?15
CS: I got to Scott November of ‘85. I worked in the ICU there, which was really very, very interesting. They had an eight-bed center. I think it was eight beds, yeah, five outside and three in the—and that was [pausing] shift work. I worked a lot of nights. I loved evenings and nights, and they loved—I was a captain by that point. Actually, I put on captain while I was there, and they loved having, you know, somebody with a little more seniority working nights so they didn’t have all the second lieutenants and airmen working nights. Hey, it’s makes me happy. I don’t have to worry about—there’s not so many, chiefs, just us Indians. So, you just did our business.
Then I went—I got an assignment—a flying assignment from there. I went to flight school. I’d just bugged the tar out of anybody who would listen. “I want to go to flight school. I want to go to flight school.” Did every additional duty, I did a lot of like staff education in a unit sort of based education. I developed a whole critical care orientation program. I did everything I could think of so that they would send me to flight school ‘cause it was very, very difficult to get slots, particularly—Scott was the smallest of the medical centers of the—they have five, six medical centers, I guess, and Scott’s the smallest, and at the time it was in, well MAC, Mobility Air Command—anyway, now it’s AMC, Air Mobility Command—which has the least number of nurses of any of the commands in the air force. So, they, of course, they get the least number of slots. And, so, it was very, very competitive, but I got a slot to flight school and went down to—that’s five weeks down at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, [Texas].
HT: And can you describe what flight school is?
CS: Well, you spend—I guess we spent probably the first two weeks in classes learning all about flight physiology and what putting a person in an airplane and taking it up to altitude does to your body, and you start out with, what does it do to healthy people, and then what does it do to sick people, and different types of illnesses, different types of people who have had different types of surgeries, people who have had different types of injuries, you know, all the problems with, you know, the stresses of flight.
And, then, we also had classes on equipment that we had to use. We got tested on things like they had—they have a little bitty—it looks like, almost like a kid’s toy, where you’d be given this plastic tub of parts, and you had a certain number of minutes—it was like two minutes—that you had to take all these plastic parts and get it together and make it work, and that was your ventilator that you might have to use on a patient [laughs]. It was a special kind of ventilator because you can’t use regular ventilators like you’d use in a hospital because their volume cycle, to help people breathe, and as you go up in the air, as you get to altitude air expands, so your volumes change. So, they had to use a pressure cycle ventilator, and it literally—the little ventilator, it’s almost like a little pump. It’s about this big, but it had all these parts, and you had to have it just exactly right.
So, we had tests like that, and then we had—because there are special equipment that you use on airplanes, and you had to learn. You had to learn days’ worth of things as far as aircraft safety. They actually have a hangar down at Brooks where they have the fuselage from a C-130, and you had to learn how to safely load litters, how to configure the inside of the aircraft because a lot of times you might have to fly an opportune mission, where they fly in maybe the cargo, and C-130s in particular, they carry, on the sides of the airplane, they carry the litter stations and up above—way up above where the 16
litter straps and the litter clamps, they just store them in these little buckets. So, you can have an airplane come in. You’d have to offload all of the cargo and then configure the aircraft to be able to take patients back out.
HT: And the nurses are responsible for those?
CS: Yes, the nurses have to do that. The nurses—and you fly. You don’t fly with doctors as a rule. It’s nurses and medical technicians. So, it was a course that was —we were together—
[End Tape 1, Side A—Begin Tape 1, Side B]
HT: Okay.
CS: Okay?
HT: Yes.
CS: We had to learn how to do basically all the things that you think about when you fly on a regular commercial airplane as flight attendants. We had to learn all those things. You have to learn your ditching procedures if you ditch in the water. So, we had this fuselage from this old airplane that’s over the swimming pool, and you have to learn how to get out, how to get your patients out, how to inflate the life rafts, how to get into the life rafts, and we’re doing all this in the pool, of course, with all your clothes on which is kind of a new experience, but it was a very, very good course. We had—I was trying to remember. I don’t think we did any live animal labs then. I taught later, when I was stationed at the, what they call battlefront nursing class, battlefront nursing course, but I think it was all—we used mannequins.
We learned—they had the C-131 fuselage. They had a C-9 actual part of a real plane, a mock up that we learned how to load patients on and off, how to set up the equipment, and, of course, you’re tested on everything. Lots and lots of performance, because it’s just, you know, everything from knowing how many liters of liquid oxygen you’re supposed to have in the different types of airplanes, and we had to learn basics through the C-141, the C-130, and the C-9. You had to know, you know, what, your evacuation procedures, what were the different kinds of life preservers you had. You know, see, there’s this lists and lists of things, where the fire extinguishers are in different kinds of aircraft, where the all the safety sort of things, and we had to learn all of that, and then you get tested on all of that.
HT: And all of this in five weeks?
CS: Yes. It was crammed, and then, you know, afterwards you—a lot of the people did a lot of partying [laughing], you know at night when you weren’t in class. We did a lot of sort of group study things before the test, but —and we were there because I was there right 17
from the beginning of January. We actually graduated on Friday, the thirteenth, February 13. I won’t forget that. You also do—it’s about three days of survival training that they do.
Now, it had been interesting—and I didn’t say this earlier when I was down at—because Tyndall Air Force Base is one of the places where they do, for the air crews, they do survival training. I was—they took all of the ROTC cadets through the water survival training. Now, of course, it wasn’t like the whole big course, but that’s something that simply because we happened to be at Tyndall we were able to do. You know, you go up in the tower and you have to pull the ejection things, and they yank you out and drag you down through the water, and you have to learn, like if you had to parachute how to find the airgen [?], some things like that which was—Tyndall did that, and then—but with flight school you get just sort of basic survival.
HT: And was flight school for nurses only, I think you said?
CS: And medical technicians.
HT: No doctors go through it. Both male and female?
CS: Yes.
HT: Now, I’m assuming most of the nurses were probably female, were the technicians male or female?
CS: Both.
HT: Both.
CS: Both, yes, and actually the air force has a much higher percentage of male nurses than all the branches of the military do than you would see in the civilian population. Guess when I got out it was—it was probably pushing about 15 percent of the nurses were men, and, you know, I don’t know why. I don’t know if it was, it wasn’t really that, it wasn’t that much of an issue.
HT: Because in civilian life you see so few male nurses.
CS: Yes.
HT: So, when the male nurses retired from the air force or any branch of service, do they stay in nursing or do they go into other fields or—
CS: Well—
HT: Do you know?18
CS: Nursing now is—there’s so many things that you can do, and I think one of the things I saw a lot of the – well, I can’t say it wasn’t any more than anything else. There’s—I think they tend to go more into some type of business related to nursing. I’m not sure that there’s that many people who retire from—or they go into education, you know, to teaching, or doctor’s offices. I think they’re not going back in the hospital. I think probably if you stay long enough to retire that you’re—you’ve probably done your time in the hospital [laughing]. Oh, the other thing in flight school that I did that was kind of—everybody thought I’d lost my marbles was I took my horse to flight school.
HT: Okay.
[Both laughing]
HT: How did that work out?
CS: I—my husband and I both had horses when we were at Scott, and like I was going to be down there for five weeks. What was I going to do? We were right across town from Fort Sam Houston which has, you know, I did a lot of calling around to see what was available in the way of stables, if there were any military stables in the area. And I found out, okay, I have to have my horse in quarantine for two weeks, taking him to Fort Sam, but then they had space, and they had—it turned out it was great. It was sort of a self-care big barn. You know, I paid somebody and they would feed for me just simply because I wasn’t sure whether I would be able to get out morning or evening, and it was wonderful. One nice thing it probably kept me from partying and drinking quite as much as a lot of the others did instead. But it was—it was really neat because I would be up early in the morning over. I’d take care of my horse, you know, turn him out or whatever and make sure his stall was picked up, because they were pretty picky about that particularly when they had—
Fort Sam was where they had the first military pentathlon competitors, and the big, old barn are beautiful, old, huge stone building, which is where the veterinary clinic was then, because it had been a big cavalry post. They had just these stalls attached to the side of the building, and that’s where if they had new horses that were coming on post they would have to stay there in quarantine for two weeks so that the vets could check them out. And I could go over and it was right across the street. There was a big, you know, pasture area. I could turn him out in the mornings and come back afterwards, and they still had some of the rings and stuff where they had done the army officers where they had practiced before the Olympics and done competitions and stuff, and, so, I could find places to ride. So, it was kind of neat. It gave me a chance to learn a lot more about Fort Sam Houston, that was for sure. And, then, the last three weeks when I moved over to the other side of the post there were a lot of people over there. I’d go out in the evening and it gave me a little different flavor to socialize with, and, then, I think it gave me a little bit healthier past-time than what some of the other students were doing [laughing].
HT: So, after you finished flight school you went back to Scott?19
CS: Yes.
HT: And the horse went back with you?
CS: And the horse went back with me. Yes, I trailered him all the way down there and trailered him all the way back, but yes and then it was funny because I got—never have I had so much lead time. I actually found out in October ’87 that I had orders to fly, a flying assignment, in October of ’88, and they didn’t quite know how to handle it because I actually got order of notification a year before. And, of course everything—it really bothered them, and I was coming for my assignment briefing and I had a year to go, because lots of things are going to change in the meantime. So, we went on through it, but, you know, that—
HT: As to what are doing during that year of between October of ’87 and ’88?
CS: I was worked in the ICU.
HT: ICU, okay. And then you got your first flight assignment in ’88?
CS: Yes.
HT: What was that like?
CS: Oh, it was wonderful. I went to—we went to Germany. My husband got, of course, thank goodness that gave him a year to work his orders to try to get over there.
HT: So, this was a permanent assignment?
CS: Yes. It was a permanent assignment, yes. He actually ended up going, I guess about, let’s see, June of that year, he left for Germany which, of course, left me to do the storage shipment of household goods and my whole baggage and his whole baggage, and our household goods we were shipping overseas, you know, all the moving stuff. He left and left me with, but that—it was worth it.
HT: And where in Germany were you stationed?
CS: At Rhein Mein [Air Force Base]. I’ll give you the spelling later, but it’s right outside of Frankfurt. It’s actually—they share the Flughafen, which is the airport. They share the runways, and the Rhein Mein—in fact I just saw an article in one of the military magazines, I guess, we get—that they finally turned Rhein-Mein back over to the German government since that was, I guess, well, that’s where they flew the Berlin Airlift out of, was Rhein Mein Air Base. There’s a monument there that there’s the mirror image of it in Berlin at Tempelhof [Airport] that it’s almost like—almost like a wing, I guess, coming up out of the ground, and then the same one that faces it in Berlin. 20
It was—it was a really—it was a very, very interesting assignment. We flew all over Europe, and then we also flew missions back and forth to the United States bringing people back. I think that was probably one of my best assignments. They only generally let you have one flying assignment because there’s so many people who want to fly. They send way more people than they ever need to flight school than they ever need for active duty foreign assignments because there’s only three active-duty flying squadrons. Well, actually there’s four. Three that are what they call strategic flying squadrons. There’s one at Yokota [Air Force Base], Japan; used to be in the Philippines, but then they moved it to Yokota. There’s one at Scott Air Force Base, and then there’s one—there was one at Rhein Mein and then they moved them to Ramstein [Air Base, Germany], I guess about a year after I left.
HT: And how large was the squadron?
CS: It was about a hundred people.
HT: Okay. With doctors—
CS: There were no doctors.
HT: No doctors at all.
CS: No doctors, no. You would fly—occasionally if you had a patient that was very, very sick, a critical-care patient, either adult or a child—because we flew not only military but we also flew dependents. And, occasionally, at the request of the Department of State, we would fly civilians back to the United States. Sometimes we would pick them up. You know, if somebody got sick over there and they didn’t have any other way to get out, or they were, you know, State Department personnel whatever, we would pick them up and then , you know, connect the flights to get them back to the United States.
HT: And what type of aircraft did you use at this point?
CS: We flew—mainly we flew the C-9s which are—they were actually built for air medical evacuation. It is the only aircraft that has been—the inside was actually designed, and they were built in the early ‘70s, most of the airframes were early ‘70s, and they are pretty much—I don’t know if they’ve phased all of them out, but they have pretty much have phased out the C-9s. We also flew C-141s, then, and we flew C-130s, and you just—you really had lost the draw if the C-9 that was supposed to do your mission was broken. There wasn’t one to replace it, and you had to fly a C-130 [laughing]. That was just like torture because they are so much slower. They are so much louder. It’s just—you could do about half as many stops in a 130 as you could in a C-9.
HT: And I’m assuming these planes were all full of sick military people?
CS: Well, we flew—of the three squadrons, the ones in the Pacific flew the longest missions. They flew very long legs. I mean two, three hours between stops. The ones at Scott 21
generally would fly very short legs because they were going to lots of places. They actually probably had the hardest, and they flew the sickest people. We flew something in between. We would occasionally get sick people but a lot of what we had were people who were going from—a lot of times dependents who were getting, having to go for doctor’s appointments that were referrals, because if they were at a small base they would then have to go to a larger base because, to get specialty care. There were people who had been injured who needed to get—we flew—we always had two people who stood alert who had to be available if we ever got a call to pick up somebody who was an urgent patient, and we launched—I’d say we probably launched about once a week, maybe—I’d say three to four times a month we would launch an aircraft to pick up an urgent patient. The area in the squadron, again, everybody had a job that they did in addition to whatever, just flying.
HT: Oh, so, you are not flying—
CS: You didn’t fly all the time.
HT: —eight hours?
CS: No.
HT: Okay.
CS: No, you only flew a few days a month, but you had a job. The job—the area where I worked was called in the FCC which was the Flight Clinical Coordinators. And, basically, every single person who got on an aircraft within Europe—who moved on an air evac mission—we had to review their record the day before. And, then, once we—as we reviewed patients’ records in the computer, they were then released to the administrative people who would manifest them on different flights, because we had a standard schedule of flights. We knew where they were going. So, you know, they would look at where were they coming from, where did they have to get to, and they would assign them to flights, but we had to make sure that based on looking at what was in the computer, you know, were they safe to fly? Did we need to get—did they need any special equipment? Because anybody—if you’re sending out a crew the next day, all the special equipment they will need for any patient during the day has to be sent with them, because there’s no way to get it once they were out in the system.
So, we had to plan for any special equipment, and a lot of times I—you almost had to develop sort of a sixth sense because you would read some of these, and you’ve got to figure they were—a lot of the patients that were getting put in were getting put in by some poor, Ernie admin person who didn’t know medical stuff at all, but was just trying to type whatever the doctor said, and didn’t know what was wrong with the patients. So, you would sort of learn that, to really question. Well, if you are trying to call somebody in Brindisi, Italy, to find out what’s really going on with this patient, you know, the telephone systems in Europe are awful.
So, we had many times we had to call patients, and I found—I had one patient who was entered in the system as back pain. No special equipment, no nothing, and it 22
was just like, “Well, this is odd,” and, so, I finally got through, after several hours of trying I finally got through to find out this guy had a spinal fracture. He needed traction. He needed oxygen. He needed all sorts of equipment, and the poor, little kid who had been told to put this in the computer didn’t know what he was doing, and didn’t understand why we needed to know what we needed to know. So, we did a lot of those calls.
We were also on call. If they got a call into the—they called it the AECC. It was the Air Medical Evacuation Control Center. It was manned twenty-four hours a day. If they got a call, then they would have to call a flight clinical coordinator or one of the nurses. We would come in and look at the patient information and then they would figure out, you know, what do we need to launch? Do we not? Do we need to—because if it was an urgent—an urgent meant that you had to launch an aircraft now to safe life, limb or eyesight. A priority means they needed to be moved within twenty-four hours. Either one of those had to be validated by a flight surgeon. So, that meant that if we looked at it, you know, maybe we would call them back first to find out, you know, did this really need to be an urgent or a priority, or could we just add it to the next day’s mission? And, you know, depending on, you know, you’d get talking to people and you learned who had what resources. It didn’t make sense for us to launch an aircraft for an urgent patient who was sitting on an aircraft carrier in the Med[itteranean] when they had more medical resources on that boat than the hospital that we would evacuate them to. So, you had to learn a lot about what were the resources in the area.
We—and, then, we would look at, do we need to launch? And, you know, sometimes we did. To this day I will remember getting called in for an urgent—we had gotten a call from a doctor. He was in—down in Sicily. No, it wasn’t Sicily. It was—oh, shoot, what’s the other—there’s a little island off of Italy. Anyway, two young folks had been out, and we had a horrible problem with young people getting out on the little motorbikes or in cars and getting in accidents. They had accidents all the time, particularly navy personnel, and this was two young folks had been in an accident, and we had gotten this frantic call from this doctor saying we had to come get these people right now, and I came in, finally got the guy on the phone, or he called—he called back to the squadron because we couldn’t reach him at any of the numbers he’d left, and he said he was in the battalion hospital. They had taken one of the people to surgery. He couldn’t find out anything about him. Nobody there spoke English, and you could tell it was a young American doctor who was probably trained with state-of-the-art stuff in the hospital he was trained in, and he could not communicate. The other patient he was really worried about, and he said, “I don’t even have a blood pressure cuff.” He couldn’t do anything for this person. He didn’t know why they had taken one to surgery. Couldn’t find out, and he was frantic on the phone, and, you know, we ended up figuring out how to get them transported, how to get more information. And a lot of times what we had to do was help them just calm down and think straight long enough to figure out what were their resources right there, because we were hours away, even best case scenario. I mean just travel time going from Germany to Italy. It was probably going to be three hours, plus you had to launch your crew. They had to do their pre-flight stuff. So, you add another hour to that. So, it was—you learned—I learned that the life is dealt with—life and death issues are dealt with very differently in Europe than they are in the United States, and we were sending a lot of very idealistic, young doctors and nurses over there, 23
and they really got smacked in the face with the fact that it’s a very different world, and they don’t have everything at their fingertips. They have to rely much more on, you know, the gifts God gave them basically.
HT: Sometimes it’s improvising as well.
CS: Exactly.
HT: Now, would you pick up just one person if he needed a—
CS: Yes. In fact shortly before I left—because I worked in the FCC I didn’t—I wasn’t on alert nearly as much as some of the people in the squadron. Some of the other areas like—the people in scheduling especially who did air crew scheduling, they flew a lot because, okay, so they weren’t there that day, it wasn’t that a big of a deal if they got alerted to go somewhere. You had people who worked in training, who did all the air crew training and all the new air crew personnel, made sure that they were new, all those things that you learned at flight school you had to go over for real now, actually in the airplanes and make sure you could do it. Then they had stand eval, which is standardization and evaluation. Those were like your inspectors basically. Those are the people who came out and did all of the—all your check rides with you to evaluate—they stood over your shoulder and didn’t say a word but took a lot of notes [laughing] to find out, you know, were you doing everything you were supposed to be doing. Then they would start with the quizzing. Okay, how much locks? And, how do you find the data on this? And, how many of this type of life preserver should you need? Well, you’ve got, you know, so many litter patients, and on and on. How much? Okay, who was supposed to be doing this? And what if this happened? And that sort of thing.
HT: And you did this flying for what, about an year?
CS: No, I was there for three years.
HT: Oh, three years’ time, okay.
CS: Yeah. And in that three years we had a few little momentous things, like the wall went down and Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and [laughing], you know, and we went to war, so.
HT: So, that three years were from ’80—
CS: Eighty-eight to ’91, yes, yeah I went to graduate school from there.
HT: Now, you mentioned the wall coming down and Saddam Hussein invading Kuwait. So, what differences did you see or experience prior to the wall coming down, prior to Saddam Hussein invading Kuwait and then the wall coming down and us going to Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Was there any difference in the procedures or the administration of the flights and that sort of thing?24
CS: Well, we got much, much, much busier. As far as the Berlin Wall coming down, it was a challenging time for the military there because military doctrine does not—it moves about the pace of syrup in snow. It’s very, very slow to change for the most part, and, you know, we were there—still the doctrine is important because the people are assigned, and the mission that they’re given that they’re expected to train to be able to do is based on whatever that doctrine says they think will happen, and they still were preparing for the Fulda Gap scenario of, you know, the bad guys coming through this massive land war and what were we going to do with that? And that’s how people were deployed and manned and expected to train. When that really was, you know, totally, totally different than we were expected to respond to with an air war that was building up in the Gulf. And I wish I could lay my hands on those numbers. I know I’ve got them somewhere. I’ll see if I can’t dig them up for you.
Rhein Mein was a really pivotal location because so much of the cargo that was going to the Gulf came through Rhein Mein. They moved my husband, actually, he’s a communication’s officer but you’re talking about transportation. He worked in—he could tell you the right names for it better—but he was in charge of all the systems that managed all the computer systems that managed all the cargo and passengers that went through Rhein Mein. And he had to learn—he even got trained on how to go out and push pallets on the aircraft because we had so many—they moved more cargo through Rhein Mein in the first thirty days of Desert Shield than they had did in the entire Berlin Airlift, and, you know, which is absolutely mind boggling. The morning we woke up and we found that the whole ramp was full of C-5s, it was like, “we’ve been invaded.”
HT: Because those C-5s are big—
CS: They’re huge, huge, big aircraft. So, that was interesting. I—our squadron actually had a crew on the ground in Saudi Arabia, actually two crews. One in Dhahran, [Saudi Arabia], and one in Riyadh, [Saudi Arabia], forty-eight hours after Kuwait was invaded. Now, did they know what to do with them? No. Thank goodness our commander was a colonel had had the sense to send as the—a crew is made up of two nurses and three medical technicians, a standard crew. She had had sense to send two majors down there which we—mostly it was a squadron of captains for the most part. We had a few majors, but she sent two nurses who had a backbone and a little bit of rank, and they went down and started knocking on doors. And it was such a—they were coming in so fast.
Things were moving so fast, and we were trying to get so many things set up so quickly that the commanders who were on the ground were not thinking medical, but they needed to be, because if you look statistically, 80-90 percent of your casualties in any war are due to non-battle injuries. They call them DNBI, Disease Non-Battle Injuries. So, it’s not people getting shot. It’s the first thing what do you see when you move in a lot of people, a lot of cargo, you see people get falls. You see people get hurt backs. You see chronic problems flare up. We had amazing number of people with respiratory problems because of all the dust and all the sand, because the sand down there you think desert. Well, you think, you know, the sand like you have on the beach. The sand down there is as fine as powder. I mean it’s just like flour, and it would blow. I mean sometimes just violently blow, and that caused a lot of people problems. 25
So, there was early on I—the first crew that went down there—we sent one crew to each location. They basically were knocking on doors, and they procured places for them to set up, and then we could start sending them supplies and getting stuff shipped down to them. After that they got—they actually got air medical evacuation. You know, all it took was a few people getting hurt or a few people getting sick, and then they realized, “Oh, my, I think we do need medical,” and then it got fixed. Those people stayed down there a month.
I was deployed with the second group of crews, and we actually sent four full crews from our squadron, and I went down with the second group, and then there was squadrons—I mentioned earlier there’s strategic squadrons and there’s one tactical squadron, and those are the people who do the short haul runs primarily with 130s, and they’re stationed out of Pope Air Force Base, of course, here in North Carolina, good, old Fayetteville. And the commander down there, the overall air medical evacuation commander for the theater was Colonel Bob Brannon, who was the commander at Pope. He went over as the commander, and he decided that he wanted another, one more of his crew down there and one less of the strategic crew simply because they were flying a lot more tactical missions because there were a lot of small bases where they set up throughout, you know, Saudi Arabia and the other countries down there. So, I was only down there a little over a month in Desert Storm, but—
HT: During the month you were there, were you flying back and forth to Germany?
CS: I actually never flew a mission.
HT: Oh.
CS: We had—I did a lot of training, and I did scheduling because we were getting a huge influx of reserve and guard crews.
HT: Oh.
CS: It’s no longer classified, but at the time it was classified, but the force numbers we were being told was we were expecting to have to move three thousand patients a day, and that we—and I only knew that because when our commander came down right before I left to talk to Colonel Brannon, I was in on the briefing that she got, which was basically the latest at that point. You know, just the thought of having to move that many patients, because we didn’t know what was going to happen. Now, it ended up primarily being an air war rather than the ground war, but, again, what were we working on? We were working on the old doctrine, the old plans, and trying—trying to—from a medical perspective I think we were extremely fortunate because the air evac commander who was there was very experienced, and very, very, very smart. Our commander, Colonel Jane Bigelow was very savvy. In fact she ended up going down to Ramstein, actually, because that was where the theater, the European theater headquarters was. So, you know, we were preparing for really, really ugly numbers.26
HT: So, you must have had a pretty good size medical facility there if you were—had that many patients?
CS: No—well, but they did was—what you do is you put them in a hangar. You put them—when they come in, ideally what you do when they come in, is you transfer them from off of the airplane they are. You have the other aircraft there, and you do plane-to-plane. You go off of one plane, you put them on another plane. In the meantime, you take them off of one plane and you stage them in a hangar on the flight line, and then you put them on another one. At Rhein Mein, the clinic—and all they had was a very small clinic, two nurses, I think two or three doctors, a couple of , they had about three or four flight surgeons, and then they had, you know, some other support people, some occupational health, environmental health, that sort of thing.
Their job was to set up the air medical staging facility at Rhein Mein. Well, the boxes had never been opened. They knew their commander was very smart. He went to the base commander who they belonged to and said, “Look, you know, you are going to be asking us to do this. If they are talking about casualties coming through, we have no place to put them.” They didn’t have authorization at that point to open those boxes to get into them. They said, “Please, let us start getting into them.” So, they did. They took a portion of it and they basically took a big hangar, and, you know, there are whole sets that are put in storage of, you know, foldable beds. Now, a lot of the stuff looked like it was probably World War II and Korean War vintage stuff, and some of it was not useable. You know, after the gloves had deteriorated, and you couldn’t use them. Plus, you had to order in your medications because, of course, they’re not storing those in there because they’re going to expire, and they change, and all that. So, they went on and started setting up.
They ended up having a 250-bed air medical staging facility set up between one big hangar and a sort of an annex hangar, and they used that for—now we never got anywhere near three thousand. I think probably the biggest we ever got in any one day through there was more like three hundred. But, still, moving that many patients in, checking them all, making sure they’re getting fed, making sure they’re getting their medicines and all that, and getting them back out on to the right airplanes was quite a logistics challenge.
HT: Did you have to do any kind of triage during this time?
CS: Well, yes. You do. You triage everybody because, you know, it was—I can’t remember. I want to say about a six-hour flight from Saudi Arabia. So, lots of things can change between there and, you know, getting to Germany.
HT: And once the patients got to Germany, where do they go next?
CS: Well, it depended on how soon could you return them to duty basically. Were they patients who could be sent to hospitals in Germany, or in Europe, that could receive short-term treatment and be returned to duty, or were they going to need longer-term treatment? If they needed longer-term treatment they were evacuated to the U.S., simply 27
because, you know, you didn’t want to fill up your in-theater beds. You needed to move them on. Somebody with a broken leg is probably not —to use an example.
HT: So, I guess this lasted during the time—Desert Storm was what, about a year’s time?
CS: Let’s see. Desert—
HT: Ninety to ‘91?
CS: Desert Shield went from August, I think it was August 4, until January.
HT: January 17.
CS: When air war started. And, then, that was ’90-’91. I left there in the fall of ’91, and they were still—the ASF was still up and operational. They were still getting patients back in, not in the numbers, but we were having to run—the other thing that was really challenging is that we were having to almost run parallel operations because you still had all your peace-time operations that had to go on, as well as, you know, basically war-time operations. So, we had guardsmen who were on like extended tours of duty who came and who worked out of our squadron. We set aside some rooms in our squadron, and they ran all the war-time numbers while most of our squa—you know, with some help from our active-duty people; and, then, sometimes you had both patients on the same plane which made it a real challenge. It’s quite a logistical challenge, because if nothing else you have to keep all the numbers straight, and they had to keep the numbers of who was coming peace-time versus war-time.
HT: What kind of hours did you have to keep during this time, was it extended hours?
CS: Long hours. Long, long hours.
HT: What did that do for morale?
CS: You know, it really—I never saw that it was a problem because I, again, another one of those little moments that you never forget. I had gone home, oh, it must have been probably close to midnight, the night that Kuwait was invaded, or the day that Kuwait was invaded. It would have been at night. I had gone home, and I had no more gotten in the apartment than the phone rang. “Oh, what now?” You know, of course, I pick up the phone and all that I get told was this poor airman who was manning the control center, “Ma’am, I think you need to come back now.” It was like, “Okay, I’ll be right there” [laughter and sound like swish, indicating hurrying]. And I found, you know, my old Ford pick up truck can go pretty fast on that Autobahn [laughing]. It really can go faster than the little speedometer says it can. So, that’s when I went back. We were working, routinely working, sixteen-hour days because we were having—many times we were having to work in the clinical coordinators, flight clinical coordinator’s area, you know, the computers and things, but, then, for all the patients that were going back to the U.S.28
we actually would have to go down to the ASF to see them and to get their records and to go over with the staff down there who was traveling because—
[End Tape 1, Side B—Begin Tape 2, Side A]
CS: And actually talking about doing what you got to do. I think that’s one of the biggest surprises going in the civilian world, is the fact that the mentality is so different. People are much more protective of, you know, they want to get credit for what they’re doing or you don’t have the teamwork. You know? In the military what you find that people aren’t so much worried about, you know, I did this and I did that. I mean there’s some of that. You always have some of those people, but it’s like, “Okay, what’s the job that has to be done, and how are we going to get it done?” And you do what you have to do. “Okay, what do we have?” You never have all the stuff you need to do it with. You never have enough of whatever, but how can we do whatever we need to do with what’s available? And it’s a very, very different mentality.
There was some—when I was deployed it was kind of interesting because they put—when I first went down to—I was in Riyadh. When I first went down they put us up in a five-star hotel which was, that was okay [laughing] I liked that just fine! It was just fine and, then, basically we were given—we signed in and we ate our meals in the restaurant with everybody else. This is just fine, and then about, I don’t know, three or four days after we got there we got told we were moving, and we got moved to what’s called Eskon Village, [Saudi Arabia], which actually still exists down there, and it’s still used for military people. It was this huge apartment complex, if you will, that had been built by the king for the Bedouins, and they would not use it because he wouldn’t allow them to bring their animals into the compound, and so it had never been used.
And, of course, they bussed us all in there, and they assign us to—they were like old buildings; and, of course, in their culture the men and the women are separated. So, you would have a common area in the middle, and then you would have bedrooms on one side and bedrooms on the other; and we could go up to the top roof, and the roofs were all tiled. So, of course, we had places then to string our clotheslines and do our laundry. We were doing laundry in the bathtub and hauling it up the stairs to the roof, but everything had been sitting for probably about ten years, and it was German toilets, porcelain toilets, and German fixtures. It was very, very well-made, beautiful tile floors, but everything was full of sand, and things wouldn’t work. All the plumbing was full of sand. And, so, you had a little kitchen area in there. Our kitchen wouldn’t—our water wouldn’t run because sand had collected in everything. I’ll never forget. This guy came in, a workman, of course they had poor nationals who were in there doing a lot of the repairs and stuff. This plumber came in and he took parts of the—I don’t know if he took the knob or what he took off because I wasn’t in there watching him, but all I know is he took something off and all of a sudden we had water spewing everywhere, and he put it back on, and he basically said, “Okay, all fine,” and walked out. It wasn’t his job to clean up, the women would clean up [laughing]. So, we had sandy, gritty water, and, of course, we had no mops. We had no rags, no nothing, but, you know, soon we figured out whatever we had and we made it work. But, you know, it was—there was a lot of, you know, didn’t take a 29
day before they had the signs up that said, “Air Evac Way this way,” and people were —I came within about two hours of getting a ride on one of the AWACs airplanes because—I can’t remember what we traded with them—
But where our offices were what ended up being almost a little clinic because we had so many people that were getting heat exhaustion because this was in October—September-October time frame—and it was hotter than blue blazes. You know, these young guys who would go out and go running for five miles at noon were not real smart, and then they also came down with—we found out they had a carrier of some kind of gastrointestinal problems who was serving food in the chow hall. So, we had a lot of people who came down with a whole wave of GI [gastrointestinal] problems, and we were starting a lot of IVs on those.
But where one of the little villas we had taken over for an office was right near where the AWAC's guys were, the airborne control people, and we traded something with them. I don’t know what it was, and they had made arrangements. Two of us were going to get up and go fly with them because we could get off work, but that got nixed just at the last minute. But, you know, one of the guys had taken—within about forty-eight hours you had people who had set up barbeque places. You had people who set up barber shops. You had people who had set up all sorts of stuff. All you had to do was ask around to figure out who was doing what. It was just absolutely amazing. You could tell somebody had transportation and when they were out there was actually a little—there was a very, very small BX [base exchange], a little exchange in Riyadh because there was some permanent people who were stationed down there. They had a very, very small detachment down there, and they had something that had been set up, and you could tell these guys were probably going through and cleaning out all the hotdogs and ground beef that was there. But, you know, they would come by the public health guys would come by and check them out just like they’d check out their chow hall food where you got wonderful things for lunch like an MRE [meals ready to eat] or you’d get—if you decided you’d get—you could have their prepared meal or you could get an MRE for lunch. Breakfast and dinner were hot meals. Their prepared meals would be things like a bologna sandwich on white meat with butter on it. You know, I was thinking MRE was better than that, but there was some interesting combinations of food.
HT: And you were there a month, is that correct?
CS: Actually, you know, I’m stopping and thinking back because they were there the month of August—I’d actually have to go back and look at my records. I was probably there almost two months because I didn’t go home until right before Halloween. So, I went the beginning of September and went home the end of October, so it was about two months.
HT: Did you have any kind of contact with the local population?
CS: Some. We actually—nurses are always into education, you know, feeding people and education, I think that kind of goes with nursing. And we made connections because one of the things if we had somebody who was really acutely ill or who had been badly injured, there’s some state-of-the-art hospitals in Riyadh, and it’s the capital of a country, and there’s a lot of—their doctors and nurses are British-trained or they’re European-30
trained. I mean they’ve got top-notch equipment, and a lot of the nurses who worked there are Americans and Filipinos who come over and will work a couple of years because it’s tax-free income. There are a lot of Filipinos over there and all sorts of service industry. That’s kind of another story because they’re—the nurses were treated very well. The service like the housekeepers and the bellhops and the kitchen workers were treated—many places were not treated well.
HT: I was going to ask you if you were ever treated ill because you were a woman, because I know in that culture women are not considered equal to men and that sort of thing.
CS: When we went downtown—if you wanted to go down and shop, there would times when you could. You always went with a man. Generally, we would go in groups. You wore—we were culture conscious. You wore long sleeves. You wore either long pants or long skirts. None of us, I think, had long skirts. Many of us bought Hijab which we didn’t have—because it’s fairly—I’m going to sneeze.
HT: I’ll turn it off.
[Tape paused]
CS: Yes, but they came—you could get the headdress. In fact I have the headdress and the little mask, but it’s almost like a—it’s sort of like a robe. It’s like a length of material with, just sewn up the side, And, you know, you would wear it over your regular clothes, and we would wear that. Now, we were actually told at that time that we were supposed to carry our gas masks with us wherever we were.
HT: Oh.
CS: And we’d carry one set of chem gear. Whenever you went from your room to work, you carried that with you, and you carried it back, because we didn’t know what was going to go on at that point. We had—but what they found was they sort of suggested to begin with. Nobody wanted to do it because, one, you don’t want to stand out any more than you absolutely have to. At that point it was early enough on that I think they saw us more as potential customers, you know, people to make money off of than those nasty foreigners. I know some of my friends who were there later it got to be—there were restrictions on even going downtown at all. It got to be where you could not go down—you could not go shopping. So, I never had any problems with it.
I know it did get much touchier later, and I know some people who did take gas masks downtown with them were approached. Some tried to have them—I never talked to anybody in particular, but we heard stories about people would try to steal them because they’re not in the country to go around, you know, and if these Americans are carrying them, maybe there’s really a threat. They would try to steal them. They would try to buy them, you know, so it was almost better just not to go downtown.31
But the other thing with air evac is there’s something about in your, I think, they do a blood test somewhere along the line and to be able to get an assignment to be an Air Medical Evacuation person you have to believe in the philosophy of shop till you drop, because I swear sometimes when we would take—we did overnights from our squadron from Rhein Mein we did overnights to Turkey, and we did overnights to Rhoda, Spain, which is right down on the Med, and sometimes I think we would leave from those places with more personal purchases than we did with [laughing] patient baggage or equipment. I got a couple of —a few really nice carpets and brass and stuff like that I’d be glad to show you [laughing] from shopping expeditions down there, but I did. I did a little shopping when I was in Saudi. I got some nice gold jewelry.
HT: So, it sound like you had—enjoyed your time in Saudi Arabia.
CS: I did. You know, it was just another challenge. From being a second lieutenant at Wright-Pat, I knew—you know, I hadn’t been on the floor probably a month, and I knew this was going to be an exciting career to have when one night I’m on the phone. I’m working nights—night shift—and we’re supposed to be getting a patient from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, that they’re bringing in by helicopter. He was a prisoner patient, and supposedly he fell in his cell. Okay. So, I get patched through from the operator to the helicopter pilot to find out the status of this patient that is going to be arriving, and I’m thinking, this is going to be a pretty exiting job. I don’t know anybody who’s done this. So, and that was, you know, I hadn’t been in the air force probably six or seven months at that point. So, I’ve enjoyed that. The military is not for everybody, and people—often I’ve been asked to talk to so-and-so. Hey, so-and-so is interested in the military. And, you know, I’ll tell them, because it’s not worth trying a recruiter spiel and telling people, “Oh, it’s the most wonderful thing. You’ll just love it,” because it’s not for everybody.
HT: Now, by the time you were in Saudi were you a captain or a major by this time?
CS: I was a captain.
HT: Captain.
CS: Actually fairly junior captain. I put on captain—uh, I’d been a captain, I guess, about a year and a half maybe. I put on let’s see, June ’83, ’84, ’85, ’86, ’87 —June of ’87. So, yeah, I’d probably been a captain about two years.
HT: And after you left Saudi Arabia, what did you do next?
CS: Well, I went back to a squadron and worked a lot of hours and after I got back I found out another little bit news that I was pregnant. I had my son when I was in Germany. But, you know, there were—our commander was just—there were a lot of Desert Storm babies out there.
HT: Oh.
[Continues in Part Two]