Oral history interview with Janice A. Farringer, 2014

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WOMEN VETERANS HISTORICAL PROJECT
ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Janice A. Farringer
INTERVIEWER: Therese Strohmer
DATE: November 1, 2014
[Begin Interview]
TS: Today is November 1 [2014]. This is Therese Strohmer. I'm actually at—We're at the
Chapel Hill Public Library in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to conduct an oral history
interview for the Women Veterans Historical Collection at the University of North
Carolina of Greensboro. I'm here with Janice Farringer. Janice, would you like to state
your name the way you'd like it to read on your collection?
JF: Janice—Janice A. Farringer oral history.
TS: Okay. Alright, well, that picked up good. Why don't we go ahead and have you start by
telling me when and where you were born?
JF: I was born on April 26 [1949] in Memphis, Tennessee.
TS: April 26. And did you have any brothers or sisters?
JF: I have a brother sixteen months older than I am who's—was born in Columbia,
Tennessee, and I have a sister who's six years younger than I am, and she was born in
Nashville, Tennessee.
TS: Okay. So you're in the middle.
JF: I'm the middle child.
TS: Very nice. Now, what did your folks do for a living?
JF: At the time I was born my father was a resident at the UT [University of Tennessee]
medical units in Memphis, and later on he was a surgeon.
TS: Oh, he became a surgeon.
JF: Yeah, and I grew up in Nashville.
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TS: Oh, nice. So you were born in Memphis and grew up in Nashville? How long did you
stay in Memphis?
JF: Just five years.
TS: Five years? Do you remember anything about that at all?
JF: Very little.
TS: Yeah?
JF: Very little.
TS: What do—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
JF: I've seen the pictures so often you don't know if you—
TS: Sure, that kind of influences your memory sometimes. What do you remember?
Anything?
JF: Well, I was born with crossed eyes so I had an operation, and at that time they wrapped
up your head for, like, two weeks.
TS: Oh.
JF: So you couldn't see. And I remember just being taught how to eat at twelve o'clock, three
o'clock, six o'clock.
TS: Oh, you couldn't see your plate? It was just, kind of, guiding you to—
JF: Right. So it was an operation, and I think today they probably do it outpatient, but it was
a big deal.
TS: Sure.
JF: So.
TS: Yeah. Now, did your mother work outside the home?
JF: Well, before she was married she was doing cancer research as a lab tech [technician],
but after she married, no, she never worked.
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TS: I'm sure she worked, right?
JF: Well, she worked in the home—
TS: That's right.
JF: —with three kids.
TS: Now, what are your memories of Nashville?
JF: Oh my gosh, Nashville was my home. I just grew up far out in the suburbs, and there
were woods all around, and I went to Catholic grade school. I went to a private girls'
school in high school that was not Catholic, and then I went on to Vanderbilt
[University].
TS: So you grew up in the suburbs. Were there a lot of kids in your neighborhood?
JF: Oh, yes. [chuckles] And back then, parents didn't restrict the children to the yard.
TS: What kinds of things did you do for fun?
JF: We'd wander everywhere in the woods and, I mean, basically, especially in the warm
months, it's like, "Go outside and don't come back until you hear the dinner bell." So we
waited to hear the bell and then we went home. [chuckles]
TS: So you played. Did you do any kind of things we'd call tomboy?
JF: Oh yeah.
TS: Climbing trees or playing ball or—
JF: Yeah. My brother hit me in the ear with the softball. I should have ducked, right?
TS: [chuckles]
JF: No, we—A lot of this area was wooded and in some parts of it they were building a few
houses, so we would—basically, our fun was to go into the houses that weren't finished
yet. They were, I suppose, dangerous. And we just had a blast.
TS: Just to explore them and play inside?
JF: And then there was an apple orchard about a mile away and we'd go down there and
liberate some apples.
TS: Yeah. [chuckles] Now, did you have any kind of music that you listened to?
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JF: Well, country music [chuckles] is pretty pervasive in Nashville.
TS: Did you have a favorite singer?
JF: No, not really. I knew of Johnny Cash, and my father knew people behind—that were in
the cloakroom , or the backstage, of the Grand Ole Opry, so we could get in there, and it's
just pretty fascinating. You just—But in Nashville, really, if you're a star or a singer or
somebody like that, the populace leaves you alone because you're at home, and we didn't
bother anybody.
TS: Yeah.
JF: But the funny thing is, I used to run with a friend of mine and we would threaten to put
on sandwich boards that said: Have your picture taken with a real Nashville runner. [both
chuckle] Ten dollars.
TS: Did you get it taken?
JF: No.
TS: Oh, you threatened.
JF: But the tour buses—
TS: As they went around—
JF: Yeah.
TS: —to look at the houses of the celebrities.
JF: Yeah. But anybody that lived in town, if you saw them in a restaurant or something you'd
just leave them alone.
TS: Yeah. Everyone should just have a life and—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
JF: It was [unclear] place to grow up.
TS: —not intrude.
JF: Oh yeah, I mean, that was their home, and they were raising their kids there; just leave
them alone.
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TS: Now, how about for TV or movies or anything like that? Were you a movie goer at all?
JF: Not really. We didn't have a TV until I was, like, in fifth grade, at all. And then—I
remember the very first movie I saw Elephant Walk with Elizabeth Taylor [American
actress]. And then I don't remember any other movies being particularly—I didn't—they
didn't impress me.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: That resonated with you?
JF: But there were Saturday matinees that were very cheap; I think they were a dime or a
quarter or something for the kids, so we would go to those. But I can't remember any
other—
TS: Just somewhere to spend the afternoon.
JF: Yeah.
TS: Yeah.
JF: So—No, I—No, I was just a school, book person.
TS: Well, tell me about school, then. How was grade school and elementary school? You said
your first eight grades were in Catholic school?
JF: Well, actually through the ninth grade but—
TS: Okay.
JF: —five through nine—No, kindergarten through nine. Well, we had Catholic nuns and it
was a very controlled environment. [chuckles] And so, you just did what they said, and
you studied and went home, and my parents were of the opinion that, "If the nuns said do
it, you do it, and don't come home and say, 'The nuns did this to me.'"
TS: Were you a pretty obedient child?
JF: Oh, absolutely.
TS: Yeah?
JF: Yeah.
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TS: You weren't rebellious and—
JF: Not—Well, my brother was considered—he was two years older—two grades ahead of
me, and the nuns thought he hung the moon, so when I came along it was like, "Unh-Uh."
[both chuckle] And I didn't think I was rebellious but apparently I didn't hang the moon.
TS: Not quite like your brother, right?
JF: No.
TS: I see. Well, now, did you have a favorite teacher or nun that resonated with you at that
time?
JF: Well, most of the teachers that I liked got out of the—of being nuns.
TS: Oh, did they?
JF: So there was a teacher called Sister Virginia and she left. And there was a teacher—I
can't remember her name. I was, like, in the third—I think I was in the fourth grade. We
had—Actually, this is interesting. We had split grades, so there were two grades in each
room. So it's first and second, second and—third and fourth, fifth and sixth, seventh and
eighth.
TS: Okay.
JF: So you really got a lot by osmosis from the other side of the room when you weren't
being taught something.
TS: Was this because they were small class sizes?
JF: Yeah, they were. There were thirteen people in my eighth grade class, so maybe there had
been, maybe, sixteen at some time, or something like that.
TS: Right.
JF: Just very small. So putting the two grades together wasn't a big deal, but—to us. But
anyway, the teacher that was in the fifth grade classroom—and I was in the fourth grade
classroom, which would have been separate—she used to read my stories, because I used
to write stories, and I would take them in to her so hopefully, and she actually paid
attention; I thought it was cool. And I can't remember her name.
TS: She got you interested in writing, then?
JF: Oh, yeah. And then—
TS: Or supported you in that.
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JF: Right, that there was some value in that, yeah.
TS: Yeah. Well, that's nice.
JF: So that was good.
TS: Now, in Nashville, then, in this time, was it segregated at all?
JF: Oh yeah.
TS: Do you have any memories of that?
JF: Well, yeah, Nashville had marches and desegregation stuff, but my family was very
conservative, so you can imagine what point of view I got, which I thought was tiring
so—
TS: Yeah.
JF: I mean, it didn't make any sense to me.
TS: So they wanted to stay segregated? I see. So you were tired of hearing it.
JF: Yeah. It was like, "This is dumb."
TS: Yeah. Was it the same way in the school? So was it completely segregated?
JF: Oh yeah. The Catholic school's completely segregated, and I'll tell you on the record, the
reason I went to secular for tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grade is because they started
admitting blacks to the Catholic girls' high school. And my father said, "No." So I went to
a different school. Actually, in fact, a much better school, much more academically
challenging school, but it was still segregated.
TS: What was the name of that school?
JF: Harpeth Hall [School].
TS: Harpeth Hall. Okay. So what kind of classes did you like? I mean, what, kind of,
interested you? You said you were a studious child.
JF: Yeah. I—Well, I didn't really care about school except I wanted to write. And I was
terrible in math; math made no sense to me. And our teacher in the fifth grade was a very
elderly nun who had finally gotten her lifelong trip to Rome, and she spent our fifth grade
year talking about her trip to Rome.
TS: Not math. [chuckles]
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JF: Not math. So, I mean, I had no idea. Come to the sixth grade, I'm going, "Really?" [both
chuckle] And that carried over.
TS: Yeah.
JF: So I'm not a mathematician.
TS: But did you like things like English and Social Studies and—
JF: Oh yeah. English. We actually had Art History in the school. I liked that because they
would pass out these little cards of, what were then, Modernist paintings, and I'd go,
"Wow, look at that." So yeah, I was just a regular student.
TS: What year would it have been that you graduated from high school, then?
JF: Sixty-seven.
TS: Okay, so that's a pretty interesting cultural time.
JF: Yeah.
TS: Were you aware of things that were going on, like, with the Vietnam War and the—
JF: Oh, absolutely.
TS: Yeah?
JF: Absolutely. It was on the TV screen. And I'll tell you, I lived through the—in the eighth
grade, I think it was—I'll have to check the year—the Cuban Missile Crisis [1962
confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union concerning Soviet ballistic
missile deployment in Cuba] and that—of all the things in my childhood that scared me,
that scared me the most. Because we were—we were talking at school about how—not
only getting under the desk [as a protective measure for an atomic bomb blast], but that
we were relatively close to the Florida—or the Gulf Coast.
TS: Yes.
JF: How we were going to evacuate the school and get back to your family, and to me it was
like, "This isn't going to work." [chuckles]
TS: But it did terrify you, then?
JF: Oh, it was terrifying, and they—they put the Kennedy—You've seen the newsreel where
the ships are going, "[makes noise]," and—
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TS: The blockade?
JF: For the blockade, and they tracked the Russia ship, and you'd see the little maps of where
everybody is every day, and you're going, "We're going to die." [chuckles]
TS: Really? Is that what you thought?
JF: Oh, yeah.
TS: Okay.
JF: Oh, Absolutely; this was it, and it—that scared me to death.
TS: Well, what did you feel, then, when John F. [Fitzgerald] Kennedy was assassinated?
JF: Well, I'll tell you, because of my conservative background I didn't really feel much.
TS: No?
JF: No.
TS: There wasn't a liking for him very much?
JF: No.
TS: Dislike.
JF: No.
TS: So did you watch it on TV, the funeral or anything?
JF: Oh, yeah, we watched it on TV.
TS: That's interesting, to have you been in a Catholic school, that you didn't have an affinity
for that; that's interesting.
JF: It's a—Well, that's probably why I got tired of the whole thing, including religion. [both
chuckle] Catholic[ism] says do this, Father says do that, it's like, wow, this is—
TS: So you were in conflict a little bit.
JF: Yeah; oh, yeah.
TS: I see. So in high school, did you do any other extracurricular activities?
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JF: Oh, I loved my second high school. I loved it. They embraced me, and I joined—it was
much more challenging academically and I basically studied every day, all day long,
but—
TS: Where was this at?
JF: It's in Nashville too.
TS: What was it called?
JF: Harpeth Hall.
TS: Oh.
JF: They—I came from “Church Latin”—back then we had to take Latin—so my freshman
year at the Catholic school I took Latin. I went to Harpeth Hall, so I was supposed to be
in second year Latin. Well, they were teaching secular pronunciation of Latin, which
differed at the time from Ecclesiastical Latin, and I was just totally lost. [chuckles] I was
going, "Oh, really?" So they had, what they call, help sessions at, like, 7:00 in the
morning, so I would go over there for the help session in an effort to pass Latin.
But I loved Harpeth Hall. I love Harpeth Hall to this day. My sister went there,
my niece went there, my niece's daughter is going to go there. They're very supportive of
individual talent and interests, and though we had a very tight regulated curriculum—we
had to take this, this, this, this—and there were very few electives, which is not true
today, but—
TS: Were you on a college path?
JF: Oh, yeah.
TS: You were. Now, did—
JF: The whole school was.
TS: The whole school was? So was this something that you knew that you were aspiring to,
then? That you were going to go—
JF: Oh, there was no question.
TS: Yeah.
JF: I mean, there—from the time I was little there was no question we were going to go to
college. I had educated parents and they expected it.
TS: Yeah.
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JF: Of all the kids.
TS: Now, did you have a particular teacher in high school that you recall as being very
supportive, in particular?
JF: Ms. Malefort[?]; Penelope Malefort. She was—She was actually a chemistry teacher, but
she was the overall “cry-on-your-shoulder” person, that you could go to her office and
go, "Wah, wah, wah." And she was also the sponsor of the yearbook, and I was editor of
the yearbook my senior year, so—and I was also on the staff before that and she was in
our—she was our sponsor. And she was also the college counselor—this was a small
school—so she would be on the lookout, like, "Where do you want to go, and what
grades do you have to make to get in there?" And things like that.
TS: Did you talk about that with her early, then? Did you figure out where you wanted to
apply to college?
JF: [chuckles] Here we go again. My father went to Vanderbilt [University].
TS: Okay.
JF: And he said, "Unless you don't get in, you're going to Vanderbilt." So I had—
TS: You didn't have a choice?
JF: No, I had to apply, and I applied early decision thinking I wouldn't get in, but I got in. So
my failsafe school was Salem College in Winston-Salem [North Carolina].
TS: Oh, it was?
JF: Yeah, I got in there, too, but I didn't go there. [both chuckle]
TS: So mostly you were just targeting what classes you needed to take—
JF: Yeah, it was—
TS: —to prepare you for college.
JF: This was way before the student protests and you had—you just had to take this college
track.
TS: Yeah.
JF: So I did.
TS: How far away was Vanderbilt?
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JF: Down the street.
TS: [chuckling] I'm sorry, I wasn't sure it was [unclear]. So it's in Nashville? Did you stay at
home, then, or did you get to go in the dorms?
JF: I stayed at home my first semester, and I told my parents—I said, "This is like going to
high school. I'm not doing this," so I was in the dorm from then on.
TS: Yeah. How was that experience, then, in college?
JF: Oh, Vanderbilt?
TS: Yeah.
JF: I loved Vanderbilt. Really, I studied more in high school than I did in college.
TS: Did you really?
JF: Yes, I played bridge, basically, and got a political science degree with a philosophy
minor, and I loved it.
TS: Yeah. Now, the counter-culture was really kicking up while you were in.
JF: Yeah, I wasn't in it.
TS: But were you aware of it?
JF: Oh, yeah, they—I took a lot of studio art, so we would do things outside like sketch if it
was a nice day, and there was this big field—I've forgotten the name of it—but it was
normally where the ROTC [Reserve Officers' Training Corps] did their little drills on the
day that we were sketching—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Sketching?
JF: —and—or sculpting or whatever we were doing outside. And so, there was—the counter-culture
people, or the Vietnam people [protestors against the Vietnam War], would, like,
carry caskets through the—in front of or around where the ROTC was.
TS: The protesters?
JF: The protesters, and dress in ghost's masks and death stuff, and march back and forth, and
I just—I thought it was fascinating. I didn't—Even though I was a political science major
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it just—I didn't think the Vietnam War was right, but I wasn't going to go out of my way
to go to Washington [D.C.] and march.
TS: You didn't think it was right though?
JF: No, no. There was—I mean, if you watch that stuff on TV every night, every night, every
night, it was like, "We're just killing these people."
TS: So what were your plans, then, from Vanderbilt? Did you have, like, a planned career
path or anything?
JF: Now, this was 1971.
TS: Okay.
JF: There were no jobs for women that had—amounted to anything. Every—Most people
asked you if you could type. There was a bank management program in our town for one
of the big banks, and they saved one slot a year in those management training things for
women; a friend of mine got it, so that was out.
TS: [chuckles]
JF: But basically my plan on graduation day was I was going to Europe with a friend of mine
and we were just going to backpack around until we ran out of money. So I really was not
a far thinking person.
TS: But did you do that? Did you get to backpack?
JF: Oh yes. So we went and traveled around—all around Europe and, basically, the five
dollars a day. Actually, we had that book, Europe on 5 Dollars a Day [by Arthur B.
Frommer].
TS: Did you?
JF: And we'd tear out the pages once we'd seen the town; lighten the load. And stayed in
hostels and YWCAs [Young Women's Christian Association] and stuff like that, so.
TS: Did you have a favorite place that you went to?
JF: Edinburgh [Scotland]
TS: Edinburgh?
JF: That trip—Yeah, Edinburgh was just fantastic, I thought that was great. And Florence,
Italy.
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So I went away and did my stuff, and I came back and I got a job at the Better
Business Bureau answering the complaint line. That was something. [chuckles]
TS: Yeah.
JF: There's this woman that called up—this is why I went to law school, or one of the reasons
I went to law school. This woman called up—We weren't—We had scripts when
somebody was complaining about AAA Plumbing or wherever they were complaining
about, so we couldn't tell people, "That's illegal. You need to call the police;" we could
not tell then that. All we could tell them was, "AAA Plumbing has no complaints," or,
"fifty complaints, none of which have been settled." That's supposed to give them a clue.
TS: Right.
JF: But we couldn't tell them what was really—
TS: "Don’t do business with these people," right? Which you wanted to probably say.
JF: Absolutely, I wanted to scream at these people. So this woman called up and said, "Well,
I went to the Holiday Inn and I bought this typewriter and I got it home and it had the
serial number melted off."
I said, "Oh." [laughs] I wanted to say so bad, "You think it's stolen?"
TS: Right.
JF: So I thought, "These people need help. These people need help." So anyway.
TS: And so, that's why you applied for law school, then, because of your—
JF: Well, it was a few years later, but that story just stuck in my mind, that—"This is
ridiculous. I should be able to tell her—"
TS: Right.
JF: "—it's stolen property. You might want to take it back if you can. If they're not in the
Holiday Inn you're kind of stuck."
TS: Right.
JF: "And, by the way, you're not very smart."
TS: [chuckles]
JF: But—
TS: Yeah.
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JF: No, then I went on to get a job with the Tennessee Arts Commission, and I was the
director of information for them and I put out the news—statewide newsletter, and did all
the publicity for every state museum, and the art collection, and any of our—like, there
were state schools that had collections and stuff. So I got to travel the state for that, which
was kind of scary if you went up in the mountains at that time. They gave me a marked
car that was the emblem of the state of Tennessee, and I really didn't like driving up in
the mountains, in those little towns, with that on it. I thought they would think I was a tax
collector or something.
TS: Oh, okay.
JF: Anyway, that was an interesting thing, traveling as a woman by yourself, in Tennessee at
that time, so.
TS: What kind of things happened?
JF: Well, we [chuckles]—There was a meeting, and the other people in my level of
management or whatever, were all men, and we were putting on a meeting at a—one of
the smaller Tennessee Universities, or extension of UT or something. And I had been
traveling, doing all the little cities and visiting the newspaper in these little, tiny towns,
encouraging them to put a notice in their paper about this arts festival or whatever it was;
I really can't remember. And the plan was, I would go up first and do the advance, and
then we—I would meet my colleagues at the place where the festival was going on.
And so, I did my thing and I showed up at the—I think it was a Holiday Inn, and I
went up to the desk and I told her who I was and I said, "Are John, Joe, Tom, [unclear],
are they here yet?" And she turned her back on me and she went back and started doing
something at the credenza, and I said, "Well, excuse me, are they here?"
And she twirled around on me and she said, "They're in a room on the second
floor next to yours but they do not connect."
TS: [chuckles] So she thought you were going to have some sexual relations or something
and not a business—Yeah.
JF: I said, "Well, that's nice. [both chuckle] I just—I never got over that. I thought, "Wow,
that's really weird." But it was a very small town; I'm sure she suspected any woman that
was traveling alone.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Traveling alone, yeah.
JF: Anyway, that was that. So then I worked at the [Tennessee] State Library and Archives
for a while doing archival cataloging and stuff. And then that's when I was waiting to see
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if I got into law school. Then I went to—back to Memphis to the Uni—it's called the
University of Memphis now—at the time it was called Memphis State University—for
law school.
TS: Now, at this time the women's movement is also pretty—
JF: Yes.
TS: —heating up and—What year did you enter law school?
JF: So I was out for three years and then I entered law school at, like, twenty-five.
TS: At twenty-five.
JF: Or twenty-four.
TS: What year would that have been?
JF: Seventy-four.
TS: Okay, so a couple years after the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment] passed, then.
JF: Well, it didn't pass.
TS: Well, it passed in the [United States] House [of Representatives] and Congress, it just
wasn't ratified.
[The Equal Rights Amendment was a proposed amendment to the United States
Constitution designed to guarantee equal rights to women. In 1972, it passed both houses
of Congress and was submitted to state legislatures for ratification. It seemed headed for
quick approval until Phyllis Schlafly mobilized conservative women in opposition,
arguing that the ERA would disadvantage housewives.]
JF: And I was standing in—That was when I was with the Arts Commission, so we were
right there by the Tennessee State Capitol, and I was standing in the gallery when they
voted it down.
TS: Oh, you mean in Tennessee, yeah, when they didn't ratify it.
JF: Yeah.
TS: What what did you think about all that ruckus about that.
JF: Thought it was—They should have ratified it. [chuckles]
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TS: Yeah.
JF: Because by now I've had the experience of not being able to get a job and, "Can you type,
honey?" and don't travel as a woman by yourself. And I'm thinking, "This—I've got a
college degree, folks. I need to work here."
TS: Right.
JF: So—And I thought, "Well, you're never going to get anything with an undergraduate
degree," and so I went back to law school to—in an effort to be overqualified to work,
because seriously, you couldn't get anything that was—
TS: Beyond typing or—
JF: Yeah. I mean, the Arts Commission job was great but it had no future. I mean, it was the
same thing I had been doing.
TS: So there wasn't really, like, a career path that women could choose, except for, like you
said, that one at the bank that they set aside for women.
JF: And the—[coughs] Excuse me, I've got something in my throat. I was really lucky to get
that one—the information director at the Arts Commission, but I had a lot of art in
college and I'd been editor of this and that and the other, and it kind of just fit.
TS: Well, tell me, then, about law school. How was that at Memphis State?
JF: It was great. I studied—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Did you have any other—
JF: Then I studied twenty-five hours a day. [both chuckle]
TS: So your undergraduate, you got off a little easy. Okay.
JF: This was graduate school.
TS: Okay. Now, were there other women in your class with you?
JF: We had—
TS: You said seventy-four [unclear] started.
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JF: When we graduated there were nineteen.
TS: But you started with more?
JF: Yeah, and a lot of them fell out the first year, which is understandable, there's attrition.
There were four of us who kind of got each other through, and unfortunately three of
them are dead—no, two of them are dead.
But anyway, I really just kept my head down for the first two years. And then I
was the vice president of the Student Bar Association. God forbid that I should run for
president, because women were the vice president. And—
TS: Well, at least you weren't the secretary.
JF: [chuckles] True. So, I mean, I was active. We petitioned for this and that, and I got to go
on trips for the placement office. So, I mean, it was fine. But the dean said—The dean
was very conservative, and these women were coming in taking the slots of his men, so
seriously—this is serious—he said, "Those women will never take our jobs." Our jobs?
TS: They said this is front of you or—
JF: It was reported that he said it—
TS: Yeah.
JF: —publicly but not in front of me.
TS: Yeah.
JF: It was like, "No, we're here. We're here to work, we're here to do things." So then I
studied for the bar with these four women that—we all got each other through, passed the
bar. But in my senior year there was this—I guess it was my—no, there are three years of
law school, so my second year, I met this guy who had transferred from another school—
in order to be with his fiancé he was transferring from another school, so they would
meet at Memphis State and get married and all that. And he had been a tank guy in the
army and gotten out and was going to law school.
So he was talking about the army, and this and that, and he said he and his wife—
now wife—were going to rejoin as a couple, in the JAG [Judge Advocate General], and I
said, "Well, that's interesting."
He said, "Oh, it'll be great." And he just kept talking about that; his wife thought it
was a good idea. Unfor—And so, he just, kind of—
TS: He planted a seed.
19
JF: —planted a seed. And so, I filled out the paperwork. I thought, "Well, it's a job." And I
really, really wanted to go back to Europe, and I thought I can roll the dice, because they
didn't promise you anything.
TS: Right.
JF: I thought, "Well, I'll just roll the dice." And unfortunately they were at the very end
where you go take the physical and his wife had—was diagnosed with Myasthenia
Gravis, so they didn't go.
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: What's that?
JF: Is a—It's was [Aristotle] Onassis died of; the [unclear] guy. It's a neurological thing, and
one of the first symptoms is a—sort of a—
TS: Droopy eye.
JF: A droopy eye, and she had that her third year and didn't really think anything about it, but
they wouldn't accept her so they went back to Ashland, Kentucky. So here I was now
going by myself, and I thought, "Well, that's fine. I can do this. It's no big deal." So.
TS: Did you, like, just walk into a recruiter and say, "I’d like to join JAG as a—"
JF: No, it was all paper stuff.
TS: Okay.
JF: You applied to the JAG separately, this and that. You really had no contact with a live
person until—
TS: No?
JF: —until—No—until they told you to go get your physical and raise your hand.
TS: Okay.
JF: So, no, you got a letter—official letter that said "Welcome to the JAG Corps" or
something like that, and then you reported—they told you where to report for training to
Fort Lee, Virginia. And so, I drove up there and that's where I went—
TS: Well—
20
JF: I went in and said, "Wow, this is different." [chuckles]
TS: Well, now, how did your family react? Your dad and your mother and your siblings.
JF: [chuckles] Well, I had been, kind of, bullheaded for a long time, but my father said—
TS: You don't sound that bullheaded from—
JF: Compared to the rest of my family.
TS: Okay, compared to—how do you describe your brother?—the—as a—the one—
JF: That he hung the moon. My father said, "You really don't like people telling you want to
do. Are you sure you want to be in the army?" [chuckles]
TS: Had anybody in your family been in the military?
JF: My father had been in in medical school during World War II, so he was deferred, but he
was in the Reserve. And I think all of his life he thought that he was in the real military.
Of course, he was in the Reserve, but I didn't discuss that—
TS: Right.
JF: —difference with him.
TS: Right.
JF: But he was trying to teach me the ranks, because I didn't—I had no idea who was above
whom or—
TS: Right.
JF: —what the insignia looked like, so. Yeah, I just went off and joined the army. [both
chuckle]
TS: Well, how was it then? How was your experience when you were at Fort Lee? What did
you learn there? Did you, like, just learn being an officer, sort of thing?
JF: Well, the very—All I remember is the very first film we saw was "How to Train
Leaders," and through all of my educational experience, it was my experience that you
didn't train leaders, trainers were born—I mean leaders were born, and not trained. And I
just—From that minute on I thought, "They've got this all wrong." [chuckles] And,
unfortunately or fortunately, because I had to go back, physically, to Tennessee to swear
into the bar, they actually gave me a week off of charm school to go do that. So I missed
a week of the training at Fort Lee.
21
But I was there for when they throw you out of the truck in the woods at night and
say, "Shoot the [unclear] and go from A to B and we'll see you later." And that was a
highlight. My little team, they said, "No flashlights, no this, no that, no the other," and it
was dark in the woods. I never realized how black—you could not even see your hand in
front of your face. So somebody fell and instantly five flashlights went off. [both laugh]
TS: You were being watched? Or was that the people in—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
JF: No, it was our—
TS: I see.
JF: They were—We disobeyed the order. Anyway, we got him up and we made it to the hill,
and then they fed us my first experience with C-Rations; those horrible little Beanee
Weenees [beans and sliced hotdogs in a sauce] that they put the tin thing in the boiling
water. Oh, if I hadn't have been so hungry I wouldn't have eaten it, but you're hungry.
TS: They rely on it.
JF: I know, they do. I mean, they starve you into it. So I ate those and I thought, "This isn't
good." [both chuckle] So that's what I remember about Fort Lee.
TS: Now, what did your mother think about you joining the army?
JF: She just looked at me perplexed. She didn't really say no, she didn't say yes, she just said,
"Well, if that's what you want to do," so.
TS: She let your dad fight that battle.
JF: Well, he wasn't fighting it, he was just questioning whether I would be ready for
somebody to tell me what to do.
TS: Right.
JF: And then he was kind of proud that he could teach me the ranks and all that.
TS: That's right.
JF: And—Which I forgot immediately, so I spent my time at Fort Lee running from building
to building so I didn't have to know who to salute.
22
TS: [chuckles] Now, did you go in as a second lieutenant, then, or did they give you some
rank?
JF: I think on paper for the first three months we were lieutenants and—but we always wore
the rank of captain.
TS: Oh, you went in as a captain?
JF: Yeah.
TS: Okay.
JF: I think the pay for the first couple of months was—
TS: During training?
JF: —during training—was not a captain's level but we always wore captain's bars.
TS: I see. So then after Fort Lee where did you go?
JF: Then we went to Charlottesville, Virginia, where the JAG school is. It's a two or three
story building on the University of Virginia campus, adjacent to their law school, but
completely separate. And we had classes there, and [unclear] stuff, and how the military
runs their business, their contracts, their trials, their whatever, for three months, and that
was pretty in—that was pretty intense.
TS: Now, were both of those trainings at Fort Lee, and then this—I'm sorry, where did you
say—
JF: Charlottesville, Virginia; University of Virginia.
TS: Were they coed trainings?
JF: Oh yeah.
TS: And how was that? Were the men cooperative and—
JF: They had been in law school with women there. They didn't really—I found—I found the
lawyers in the army very laid back, and as long as you could do the work you were okay.
TS: Okay.
JF: So, yeah, we even had—we had beautiful rooms, you wouldn't believe these rooms.
TS: What were they like?
23
JF: They were gorgeous. They had—They were in the same building so they weren't
technically a dorm. They had just taken, like, offices and made these—
TS: Like suites?
JF: They were beautiful. They weren't exactly a suite, but you had your own bathroom, and it
was huge, and there was a—like, a queen size bed, and décor, pictures on the wall, a huge
desk, with wonderful lighting. And so, I was under the impression that that's what the
army was going to provide me, and that was wrong. [chuckles]
TS: Just like Private Benjamin learned, right?
[Private Benjamin is a 1980 comedy film starring Goldie Hawn]
JF: Well, it was kind of tantalizing because that's what you saw first; you didn't see the bad—
TS: Right. I'm surprised that you got that at all.
JF: Oh, it was beautiful.
TS: Yeah.
JF: I think they just, kind of, lull you into it at the JAG school. I enjoyed the work at the JAG
school. There—It was very professionally fulfilling. I really liked it. And then everybody
got their orders and went wherever they were going, and I had asked for Germany on my
dream sheet and I got it.
TS: Now, was there anything up to this point that was particularly challenging to you, being
in the army?
JF: Finding uniforms.
TS: Oh really, why is that?
JF: Well, I was smaller than I am now and they just didn't have—they didn't have uniforms
for people my size. I was, like, one—one pound over the minimum weight. So I weighed
one hundred and one pounds.
TS: I was going to say, you're pretty small.
JF: Yeah, one and a half.
TS: I mean—
24
JF: And I weighed a hundred and one pounds.
TS: Okay.
JF: And so, I went up to—While I was still at home I went up to Fort Campbell, which is not
far from Nashville, it's north, and I went to the quartermaster there and they actually had
to alter the fatigues for me, and when we got to the JAG school they brought—they bring
in these tailor people, and they had to tailor a dress uniform for me because I just
couldn't—nothing fit.
TS: Everything was too big.
JF: And then they were sending me to Germany so I had—I needed a green double-breasted
overcoat, to stay warm and not freeze to death, that goes over the dress uniform, and they
didn't have one. I said, "You cannot send me to a cold climate without a coat. You just
can't do it." And so, they called all over the country and finally found a coat for me and
shipped it. Because I was just—"You can't do this," and being a lawyer I could cite a
regulation somewhere; appropriate garb or something.
TS: Sure.
JF: So they finally found me a coat. But the uniforms were—That was a big issue. They just
didn't have the right size.
TS: What about for footwear? Were you okay with that?
JF: I bought my own heels, and they allowed that.
TS: Did they?
JF: And they were com—they were good heels. We got women's boots that were shipped to
us, and they made my feet bleed, they were horrible. They were very narrow. They were
lace up things that—They were just too narrow for my foot. So as soon as I got to
Germany I bought men's boots and then [unclear].
TS: Those fit better?
JF: Yeah.
TS: Yeah. I heard there was a lot of problems with the boots.
JF: Oh, there were terrible problems. That runs through the interviews that I did, the boots
and the uniforms.
TS: Yeah.
25
JF: And it's also in here in the [Symposium Issues?].
TS: Right.
JF: They just weren't prepared; they really weren't.
TS: Tell me about, then, Germany. How was that? Did you go to Stuttgart right away or did
you go to—
JF: I did not even take the leave that people take after training. I went from—
TS: You're like, "Let me get there."
JF: I did. I wanted to go to Europe. I thought, "Well, why waste time in the United States?"
So I went before Christmas and I spent Christmas in Germany, and I was—you go in
uniform and you land in Frankfurt, and it's night and it's freezing and the winds blowing,
and you're going, "What have I done?" And my sponsor, it turns out—at that time
incoming officers had a sponsor from their office where they were going—my sponsor
was in the United States so—
TS: Oh, really? That's not very helpful. Were they on leave at that time?
JF: Yeah, they were visiting or something. I thought, "Well, that's poor planning." But I had a
friend of my brothers who was a physician in Stuttgart and he and his wife came up and
took me in for Christmas, so that worked out. I got to Stuttgart and they put me in the
BOQ [bachelor officer quarters] at Kelley Barracks, and it was so bad that they didn't
even charge us the—whatever the BOQ rate is, because they couldn't, it was substandard.
TS: Describe what it was like.
JF: It was a little wooden building with—I don't know when they built them. It was—All of
Kelley Barracks was taken over from a German—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Probably during the war.
JF: —from a German concern, so I don't know when this was built but it was just—it was a
shack.
TS: It could have been from World War I perhaps.
JF: Maybe. Wooden floors, wooden walls. The bed was rock hard and was like—it looked
like it was built like a platform bed with one mattress on the top. And you got an army
26
blanket and I didn't—there was no hot plate, no anything, and there was a kitchen down
the hall, which I'm not a big cook anyway. Fortunately, the BOQ was right next to the O
Club [Officers' Club] so I usually ate over there. But it was really, really substandard,
really, and all painted institutional green, as I recall.
TS: Was this a coed building, too, or just—
JF: Yes.
TS: It was.
JF: It was a coed building. At that time, it didn't matter your rank or your station in life, if
you were a bachelor you were in a BOQ. And there was a lieutenant colonel from my
office, I finally found out, and he lived down the hall and he'd been there for years. So it
really was not appropriate but—
TS: You couldn't get any off base housing?
JF: Well, it was difficult at the time because there were so many people looking for off base
housing. So I did finally and I got it from a guy that was leaving. I got an apartment very
close to Kelley Barracks called the [unclear], and I lived on the twentieth floor of this
high-rise, and I could see Kelley from my window. I walked back and forth every day. So
that worked out. I did finally get a car but I wouldn't have had to really, except for work I
had to go from place to place.
TS: How long were you in the Kelley Barracks?
JF: I think I was in that BOQ three or four months before I finally found somebody who
would introduce me to the—I had to go downtown and interview with the apartment
owner and his wife, and he lived downtown in a very old-fashioned German apartment,
and I had to have tea with them. And so, fortunately, I passed the test and they leased me
the apartment.
TS: They let you have it. So what year did you get to Germany, then? Was that '78, '79?
JF: No, because I went straight—it was like December of '77.
TS: Oh, okay. So just before—
JF: I went in in September and I finished all the training and went straight to Germany.
TS: Okay, so at the end of '77.
JF: Yeah.
27
TS: Okay. Now, did you know what kind of job you were going to be have—I mean, you
knew you'd be working with JAG, you didn't know exactly—no?
JF: No, so I got there and started in what most people started in which was legal systems,
which was basically anything that anybody wanted, I mean, from buying a car and doing
the right paperwork to—they had to have wills in order to be there, so we did a lot of
wills.
TS: Why did they have to have wills to be there?
JF: Because it was a war zone and you can't—they wanted them to have a will in case they
got killed.
TS: All soldiers?
JF: Oh yeah, all soldiers.
TS: Okay.
JF: So we did a lot of that. And in fact, when I came back and was in civilian practice
somebody brought a will in that had my name on it. It was like, "Wow! That's cool."
Anyway. So I was in legal assistance a very short time. I—It was work but it wasn't the
work that I wanted to do.
But in that time, after I got off the airplane, going there they handed me a file and
they said, "You're prosecuting this woman in ten days."
TS: Oh.
JF: And I don't know—
TS: Had you ever prosecuted anybody before?
JF: No. [chuckles]
TS: Okay.
JF: We did have moot court at the JAG school. But the point for me in the army was, there
wasn't anybody else to do it. If they told you to do it it's because you had to do it.
There—You couldn't say, "I don't want to do this," and there basically weren't other
bodies to do it so I said, "Yes, sir," and prosecuted this young woman who I know her
boyfriend talked her into it, I know that in my heart. She tried to get hash[ish] in her boot
through German customs at the airport and they caught her. And her—At that time, the
Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Red Army [Faction] were very active in Germany, so
you—if people think our security is stringent now, it was stringent like that. I mean, you
got patted down by a female, there were people walking around with Uzis. They really,
really—They had security before we had security. So that's how she got caught.
28
[The Red Army Faction, or Baader-Meinhof Gang, was a West German far-left militant
group active from 1970-1988.]
TS: Hash was a pretty big problem at that time too.
JF: Oh, drugs were a big problem; a big problem. [chuckles] And I don't know, I guess it all
came from Afghanistan; I don't know where it came from. But there was hash, there was
leaf marijuana. We didn't have a big cocaine problem that I remember.
TS: Maybe later that came.
JF: Maybe later, but it was a big—it was right after Vietnam [War]. Many Vietnam people
were still in, although they'd gotten rid of a lot of them. Nobody wanted to be in the
army, because the draft had ended, so what you got—you got some Cat [Category] threes
and Cat fours and—
TS: As far as the mental or intelligence skills go, right?
JF: Yeah.
TS: Category three?
JF: Yeah. And they really—I don't know why they were there. They weren't really there to be
soldiers, they were kind of there in this transition period, and so a lot of women were
taking the empty jobs. That's why—Okay, my research has revealed to me that the reason
that so many women—They, like, went from twelve thousand women in the army to
fifty-nine thousand in, like, four years, so they were really filling the places that they
could not fill because they were not a volunteer army. So that's why they opened up these
MOSes [military occupational specialty] to women, and I guess Vietnam scarred a lot of
people; they just didn't want to go in. The women had not been there as combatants,
although some of them got caught up in it, but—so they really didn't know any better I
guess. There were a lot of drug problems.
A friend of mine who was a lieutenant, she was in the company dorm—or she
lived in family housing—but she was in charge of the sweeps where they would go
through the barracks and look for drugs, and she said you could stand outside the
barracks and watch the stuff fly out the window as the sweep went up the stairs.
[chuckles] So there were a lot of drugs.
TS: Yeah. When you prosecuted this woman did you win the case?
JF: Yeah.
TS: Yeah. But it was kind of disheartening maybe?
29
JF: Well, yeah, because I'm sure that her hus—that her boyfriend set her up, but she would
not say that and so you just had to go—
TS: So nothing happened to him then?
JF: No.
TS: I see. Did you have a lot of cases you had to prosecute?
JF: I think I only prosecuted, like, four or five cases, and that's because I was then taken out
of—Most people had two jobs. You did your job and then you—because there were these
prosecutions to do so you did those too. But I then went and became head of
Administrative Law for VII Corps, so I had a lot of administrative junk to do, and I
would very occasionally do a trial but not all the time. So I was never a fulltime
prosecutor, no.
TS: No. Were you familiar with any of the issues with sexual harassment or sexual assault
that were happening at that time?
JF: I'll tell you, there was this—This was in Legal Assistance, because many of the young
wives that came over with their enlisted husbands, because they were en—married they
could get separate rats [rations] and stuff so they could live off-post, and they would be
living in these little German villages and they basically—the women didn't know where
they were.
TS: They were pretty isolated.
JF: Yeah. And they didn't know how to get around; they didn't know how to do the bus. And
some of them had no money because hubby didn't give them any. So I remember this one
woman who was pregnant and she finally made her way to the Legal Assistance Office,
and her husband had beat the poop out of her, and I was trying to get her—There was a
provision to get dependents back home, and so we got her on the—I forget what we—I
think it was the Freedom Plane or something. We just had a little nickname for it. And
she was out of there in, like, two days. But they had no place to put her to keep her
separate from her husband, and she was scared to death. I really thought at one point in
that day, when I was trying to find her a safe haven because there was no shelter or
anything, that I was going to have to take her home with me. But her company
commander found one of his couples in his group that would take her in, and then we got
her on the plane. But—So yes.
And there was another woman who was a young soldier, enlisted, and she told
this wild story, and she was very—I don't know, I don't want to be sexist, but she was
very attractive. Very attractive, kind of blond idealized female person, and she was telling
these stories about being harassed and called a name—a certain name—every single
minute of the day, and it was not a bad name, it was something like they would call her
Duck Feet or something. I don't know what it was, I can't remember. But it was wearing
30
her down and she couldn't make it stop. So unfortunately, in that case, they put her in the
psychiatric unit, and I really think that was the wrong thing to do.
TS: Did they think she was not telling the truth or something? Or just that she wasn't able to
handle whatever stress she was facing?
JF: I think they thought she was not telling the truth, and that she was nuts, basically. And
she was, by that time she was pretty nuts, but she didn't deserve to be in the psychiatric
unit, she deserved some respect from her—
TS: Coworkers?
JF: —coworkers. And I think she got an administrative discharge, I don't know, but that
brought home to me that the army really wasn't going to defend these people, and I
couldn't make it stop.
TS: So the environment you were in, you said the men that you worked with, pretty—
JF: Oh yeah, pretty collegial. Yeah. And we had a great SJA [Staff Judge Advocate]. He was
very collegial. I mean, it was like in a law office, our group was. Some of the guys, like,
wanted in the Defense Council over in [unclear] Barracks, which I had to go talk to the
Defense Council sometimes. One of the guys had a girlie calendar posted over his desk,
so if you were visiting him you were looking at this Playboy calendar. So I finally had to
ask somebody to get him to take that down; I thought, "I'm not sitting her looking at
that." So he took it down, but he had to be ordered to take it down and—
TS: Did you ever ask him yourself or—
JF: Yeah, I think I did.
TS: And he just ignored—
JF: He just laughed it off, "Oh yeah, ha ha." And it wasn't—We didn't get in conflict about it,
but he came down.
TS: Yeah. So [unclear] that's just not the place for it.
JF: Right, yeah.
TS: So he actually had to be ordered to have it removed?
JF: Well, I don't know "ordered," but he was told to take it down—
TS: [chuckles] Right.
JF: —so he took it down and—
31
TS: Well, those kinds of things are happening a lot at that time, in this transition period,
because of—as you say, the numbers went up—
JF: Yeah.
TS: —eightfold, in such a short period of time.
JF: And for maybe a year and a half, two years, I was the only one in my office; I was the
only female JAG in my office. Now, there were female JAGs in the outlying kasernes
[German, meaning "barracks"]. I mean, basically Stuttgart was ringed by kasernes—
kasernes from the olden days. But—So I was—If they wanted to pick on somebody it
was me. [chuckles]
TS: Did they pick on you?
JF: No, really, I just—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Not much?
JF: Oh, well, I have my other story. I think this is picking on me, but I didn't really react. So I
come into Stuttgart and I'm—I'm now there and I'm—another case comes up and they
said, "Well, you've got to prosecute this case."
So I said, "Okay."
Well, one of the main witnesses, because it was a robbery of a bar downtown—
soldier was alleged to have robbed the cashbox of a bar downtown Stuttgart, so we had
to—I had to interview the bar owner to get his side of the story, and I didn't speak
German so I took one of the other—or he took me—one of the other JAGs that spoke
German to translate. Well, this bar was indescribable. It was like a hole-in-the-wall, and
you went in through this, like, heavy curtain—they didn't even have a door—and you
kind of—I don't think it was wider maybe than—
TS: Ten feet wide?
JF: —ten feet, and the first thing you saw at the far end of this long room was a ten or twelve
foot screen of pornography. And every human anatomy, fold, and hair and whatever, was
up on that screen. [chuckles] It was like—
TS: So you're pretty uncomfortable.
JF: I was just like, "Really?"
32
TS: "Could you turn that off?"
JF: Yeah. And so, the bar owner came and we—and my translator was on my right and I was
seated at this bench thing that was up in the back of the bar and str—facing straight to the
screen. And I don't really care but it was distracting to try to question the bar owner who
would be sitting in front of me, in front of this—
TS: Right, the screen.
JF: —depiction, and [chuckles] I did it but that really rubbed the guys—or they ribbed me
about it when they came back. So I think they knew what I was getting into, because I
didn't react and we got back in the car, and he—and when we got back to the office
everybody said, "Well, how'd you like it? How'd you like that bar?"
TS: So they did know. Yeah.
JF: I just tried not to react to that. I mean, really? [chuckles]
TS: Well, do you think at times, even if you didn't have any kind of overt sexual harassment,
that in some ways men were just trying to see how far they could push things?
JF: Oh, absolutely.
TS: Yeah.
JF: Or push me or any other woman.
TS: Right.
JF: One this—One time this guy came up to me, and this was late in my tour—We had alerts
where the—in Germany because it was the Cold War and the East Germans could come
across the Fulda Gap at any moment, and you had to be prepared; I mean, they were
prepared. So you would get a phone call at one o'clock at night, they'd say,
"Alert! Alert," and you had to go to your office, even if you were JAG, in your field stuff
and—
TS: In your chem [chemical] gear and—
JF: Yeah.
TS: —mask and everything.
JF: Well, whatever the TA-50 was. [TA-50 stands for Table of Allowances 50, and refers to
army-issued individual equipment] And sit up all night, basically, because we weren't
going. And then they call off the alert. Then you had to work all day long; you didn't get
to go home and take a nap. I forgot where I was going with that. Oh, my boss saw me in
33
the field gear, which was a wool shirt and a lot of wool stuff, and these huge—maybe
they were waterproof pants, and he said, "Please go take that off. You look like a clown."
I mean, really, I was, like, rolled up and waddling down the—So there was really no
[chuckles] proper gear. Had we had to go, I—it just wouldn't have worked really.
TS: Right. Did you have the kind of pants that had the charcoal on the lining, and things like
that for the—No? Because [unclear]—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
JF: We did have chem gear but I don't—[unclear]—
TS: But not [unclear]. You didn't have to put it on?
JF: No, we just had to put on the wool, heavy, if you had to tromp around in the snow, gear.
TS: I see.
JF: It was there.
TS: So it's for that season really?
JF: Yes. I actually wore that chem gear to a Halloween party. [chuckles]
TS: Oh yeah?
JF: It was an internal Halloween party. Anyway, that—I forgot where I was going with that,
but I—
TS: You were saying before how men were kind of goading women to—
JF: Oh yeah, this guy came up to me and said, "Well, I hear you said—I hear you said that
you would never shoot a German—or never shoot the enemy."
I said, "What do you mean? I've been shooting since I was, like, five years old.
I—My father taught me how to shoot everything there is to shoot and you're saying that
to me?" I said, "They're coming at me they're going to be dead." So it was like this test,
and I had to answer for that one, but maybe somebody else would not have had that
answer.
TS: Well, I was going to ask you if you had weapons training and if you carried a weapon
when you were in Germany at all for your—
34
JF: No, we—As an officer I would have been issued a handgun, and there's the whole issue
of women in combat that was never directly addressed, because they didn't really have an
answer for it. There was a—And yes, we had gun training at Fort Lee. Yeah.
But there was a plan to get dependents out. See, there were a lot of families
there—a lot of families—and they had an exit plan for if the people came over the border
then we were going to have to get all these families out, and they were—there was a plan.
And it was never clear to me what was going to happen to the women, because we were
going to be there in combat; there was no place for us to go. And it never—it never has
made sense to me that they would get those families out either, because the roads in
Germany, had something happened, would have been clogged with Germans and
Americans and everybody fleeing somewhere. I just thought, "This is—This is nice to
have a plan but I don't think this is going to work."
And so, then it never occurred to me that they would ever, ever take female
soldiers out; they would just never do it. They were essential personnel not JAG officers
non-essential. We had people in the motor pool, there were mechanics, and they would be
there.
TS: Like, combat support type units.
JF: Yeah, but Germany's not a big place, so if they—if the hordes of whoever came over the
border, you're just going to be there. [chuckles] So, I mean, nobody talked about that.
TS: Right.
JF: But it was pretty accepted that that's—
TS: That's what was going to happen.
JF: Yeah, because where would you go?
TS: Were you comfortable with that?
JF: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I hoped it didn't happen, and you were made aware of it all the time by
these alerts. But it was just physically impossible that we were going to be taken out or
protected or anything else. There were women up on the border. It was just not going to
happen, and I think everybody accepted that.
TS: So in '77 it would have been the second class of women that went to West Point [The
United States Military Academy] and the other academies.
JF: Yes.
TS: Did you ever hear any comments about that?
JF: I didn't know any female—Well, the first class graduated in '80.
35
TS: Right, I just mean, like, men talking about it or women talking about it, because that was
a big thing about they shouldn't be there because they're not going to be able to be combat
officers.
JF: I didn't hear anything about that in Germany, no. We were pretty isolated over there. It
was not like being in America where you got the New York Times [newspaper] in
addition to the Army Times or—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: The Armed Forces Network [radio and television broadcast network] or Star and Stripes
[newspaper].
JF: Right, that's all we got, yeah.
TS: Yeah.
JF: So no, I—I mean, I was all for it but I didn't—we were too busy, we didn't really—I feel
like I missed '77 through '80 in the United States basically.
TS: Yes. I can relate to that. [chuckles] So Jimmy [James Earl, Jr.] Carter's president. Did you
have any feelings about his presidency or—
JF: No, we could vote absentee. I think I voted for him, but it didn't really—Because when
you—This is the way I felt. You're in the army, you're going to do what they say. He's the
commander in chief. You raised your hand, you follow orders, and you do it, so I didn't
really have a problem with that.
TS: Well, when did you get involved with this symposium that you brought a copy of? Were
you there participating with that or—
JF: So I'm in the JAG office and I'm chief of administrative law, and we had a lot of
interaction with the commanding general and the headquarters, which was maybe thirty
yards up the street there, so I was very near the flag pole, so to speak. And when
[Lieutenant] General [Julius] Becton—There was a—There was a program called the
Federal Woman's Program, or the Federal Women's Advisory Program, which was really
for civilian GS-12s, 13s, that type of civilian employee that were actually equivalent in
rank to maybe[?] high ranking officers.
So there was a woman named Mary Ann Sibuleski[?], who was the Federal
Women's coordinator, and she—so I didn't know that. But I went to this meeting and
they—I was told to go to this meeting, which was not unusual, I went to a lot of
meetings. And it was supposedly about this—and I don't think it was called a symposium
at that time, but finding out the issues, and it was run by the EEOC [Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission] male head director, and I think Mary Ann was there as the
36
Federal Women's Program coordinator, and I was just there, I don't know why I was
invited, but—
TS: Did they have any DACOWITS members there for the military; The Defense Advisory
Committee on Women in the Military [Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the
Services]?
JF: No, that was totally in Washington as far as I know. It was just local people, and it was a
meeting, so. They were telling what the general had said, to find the issues, and it was a
women's thing, and blah blah blah, and unfortunately my bigmouth said, "If it's going to
be a women's symposium why aren't women running it?" to this male.
TS: Who did you say that to?
JF: The EEOC director who was ostensibly in charge of this thing. And next thing I know I
get a letter that I'm—[chuckles] Never volunteer in the army.
TS: [chuckles]
JF: Never. So Mary Ann and I ran it, and I was the military half of the chair and she was the
civilian half of the chair.
TS: Okay.
JF: And I really didn't have any portfolio to do that. I was still doing my other job. It was—It
was like I didn't have a set of orders that said you will, but I did, and my boss was told I
would. But I was really without paper portfolio, which sometimes is very important in the
army. And—
TS: What kind of portfolio did you—
JF: Well, orders.
TS: Oh, I see, you were just assigned without orders.
JF: Yeah, I was just assigned.
TS: Okay.
JF: And this was a big deal. It took a long time. And Mary Ann and I would meet in her
apartment after work and try to work it out, and it was—there was a lot of stonewalling
among the senior staff, and I did not go to the senior staff meetings but Mary Ann did
because she was stationed in headquarters; she was a GS-13 and she went to these
meetings. And the general said—she told me this—"You will make this happen. You
will," to his staff. "No more of this. You will make this happen." So we got more
cooperation then but there was a lot of, "No, you can't do that. No, you can't do that."
37
TS: What was it that you were trying to do that they were trying to stonewall?
JF: Well, they didn't want to have local things and they certainly didn't want to have to bring
people on orders into Munich for four days, and feed them and house them. And there
was a lot of logistics in this that we had no way to handle, and—
TS: Right. So was it because it was all about women that they were, like, resistant, or was—
JF: I thought they—Well, my impression was, "This is unnecessary and it's a lot of trouble,
and this is a big meeting in Munich, and we don't want to deal with it." There was a lot of
back and forth about why we couldn't have this meeting—Munich had a lot of military
buildings and places to meet. We were not allowed to have some of the meetings near
where these people lived—or were housed; the hotel. So then we had to get busing, and
this is, like, in the middle of the day, bus all these people to the new venue, and then bus
them back for dinner, and it was all so unnecessary, because other meetings were held in
Munich and—
TS: They weren't a problem for those.
JF: No. It was our understanding anyway. There was a lot of logistics stuff that really was
irritating, but it finally got done, because much of it was out of our hands, we just had to
let the logisticians do it, and the bus people.
TS: What was the goal of the symposium?
JF: To find out the issues that women were having in his command, and we broke people
down into many groups. There were sole [single] parents, which was an issue at the time.
Probably still is an issue. There were NCO enlisted officer facilitation groups.
TS: Like fraternization issues?
JF: I could read them to you. They're the same issues you would hear today.
TS: Yeah. You don't have to read them, it's okay. Just—
JF: It's interesting to read them because they're almost the same; harassment issues.
TS: Yeah.
JF: No uniform issues.
TS: I think at that point a lot of times they saw these kind of issues as women's problems.
JF: Oh, yeah.
38
TS: Like when you talk about single parents, and yet there were more men that were single
parents than women—
JF: Yes.
TS: —but that's still a woman's problem.
JF: Oh, yeah.
TS: Those kind of things. Is that kind of the attitude?
JF: Well, the sole parents did have issues—the women sole parents did have issues. My—
There was no childcare. So my friend, the lieutenant down at the headquarters company,
had to roll out of her bed at seven o'clock in the morning and go do PT while her son was
still asleep, and when she got an alert she did have to go out to the field. She had to find
her our heal[th]—childcare within the stairwells of the apartments where she lived. She
did have a family housing on post, but she found somebody in her unit whose wife would
take her son in when they had to go out at one o'clock in the morning. So her little boy,
she said he'd—she'd wake him up and say, "It's an alert," and he'd get his little bag and he
would trudge down the stairwell to Mrs. so-and-so's house, and he knew the routine, so.
But there was no childcare.
TS: Yes.
JF: So that's an issue.
TS: Right.
JF: And—
TS: Was that something, then, that was addressed later to put that in place?
JF: I—It wasn't my issue so I don't know, but she—according to Doreen who had to do this,
it was the whole time she was in Stuttgart.
TS: Yeah.
JF: I don't know if they addressed it later. I'm sure they did—I know they did on American
posts. But there was just things like that, and if they did have childcare that opened—it
opened only during office hours, so that's seven o'clock to 8:30 [p.m.].
TS: If you worked a different shift you're kind of in trouble.
JF: Right. Yeah.
39
TS: Well, was there anything that really surprised you as you're going through these meetings
and these reports and things are coming in?
JF: No, I was not surprised really. There were some—I facilitated the officers where—This
was another thing. We arranged to have facilitator training, which the army offered. They
brought somebody in—I don't know if they brought him in from Washington or
someplace—for the all the women that were going to be facilitating these particular
groups, who were members of that group. So we had a sole parent doing the sole parent
and all that. And we got facilitator training, which I thought was really good; we were
prepared. But Mary Ann and I had to do the facilitation—she was doing senior civilian
employees and I was doing officers, and so we were not available to run the company.
[chuckles]
I mean, and there was an issue with the press—the press being the Army Times or
Stars and Stripes or whatever—wanting to interview people about the symposium, but
military people are not supposed to talk to the press, and these women certainly didn't
want to talk to the press, and it was—it was kind of a mess to deal with that. When I was
in the facilitation group and we'd be called down and Mary Ann and I would go, "What
are we going to do about this?"
TS: Right.
JF: And go back and do our jobs. So we just had no idea that—the amount of work it would
be.
TS: How long did it take for the whole process?
JF: Probably nine or ten months.
TS: Yeah.
JF: The symposium, I think, was three days.
TS: And then you get more information? Did you do surveys or anything like that or was it all
in-person interviews?
JF: It—Well, they were facilitation groups who broke it down to their ten top issues. Those
ten top issues were compiled, and they were compiled at the symposium, and we had a
meeting to address the top ten issues at the end of the symposium. And then we had—
Another thing that was interesting is Mary Ann and I insisted that all military personnel
would be in civilian clothes, and that didn't sit well with the guys. [chuckles]
TS: Why did you want them in civilian clothes?
JF: So there wouldn't be any of this "I outrank you, don't talk back to me."
TS: I see.
40
JF: And you might know he outranked you and don't talk back to him, but we—I think the
guys seriously felt naked without their rank. [chuckles]
TS: Maybe so.
JF: So we had community commanders who were colonels and they didn't have their colonel
stuff on so—but we insisted on that and that, I think, helped a lot, especially in the final
community meeting where it was discussed male/female, whoever, community
commanders, whatever, about how these could be addressed. And then General Becton
got the after action report and dealt out to the communities that were having one of these
ten problems, or all of these ten problems, to address it on the community level, and then
those that could not be addressed at the local level, or the Corps level, were then sent
back to Washington, and I took the report back to General Becton in the Pentagon. And
those were the issues that only the army could—like, people didn't like being called
dependents, they wanted to be called family members.
TS: I see.
JF: And that couldn't be addressed at the local level.
TS: Did anything larger come out of it; from this symposium?
JF: In VII Corps a lot came out from it because there were a lot of issues that were able to
be—For instance, nobody knew this until this symposium, or at least the higher ups didn't
know this: women who wanted to go to sick call had to go to their unit's medic before
they could go for an appointment. So basically you had to tell the medic you were
pregnant or you were having a yeast infection or you were—you found a lump in your
breast. I mean, you had to tell him that before you could even get an appointment. That is
such an invasion of privacy.
TS: Did they do that for men, too, though? I mean, were—
JF: They might have but that's a different issue. [chuckles] So that was cleared up
completely; that women could go straight to—
TS: Just go right to the medical?
JF: Yeah. Because these medics weren't—they were medics, they weren't—
TS: They weren't doctors.
JF: Right.
TS: Interesting.
41
JF: So a lot of that was cleared up, and—really I—whatever went to Washington, my
meeting with General [unclear], it was very strange. [chuckles] But I couldn't trace it. I
tried for ten years to trace what happened to the issues that went to Washington and
there's been nothing at the National Archives, they're not anywhere I've—
TS: Oh, really?
JF: The Histories of VII Corps, they're not there. So I may have one of the two copies in
exis—
TS: Oh. Of the symposium.
JF: Yeah.
TS: The conclusions from that. That's very interesting. That's what I was wondering what—
when I say what came of it. If there was some—
JF: A lot came of it in VII Corps, a lot.
TS: But you don't know army-wide if General—
JF: Well, dependents are now called family members, I don’t know.
TS: Oh, okay, maybe it did come from there. That's great. Now, had any other Corps been
doing anything like this, that you were aware of.
JF: V Corps did one but I didn't have any contact with them and I don't know how they did it.
I think ours was different because of how we did it.
TS: Doing the little groups and then coming together?
JF: Yeah. So I don't know how the V Corps did it. I do know that V Corps did it because I
interviewed General [H. Norman, Jr.] Schwarzkopf who was in the Pentagon doing all
volunteer army organization work, which worked with getting them integrated, et cetera,
at that time, and he said, "Oh, yeah, V Corps did one too," so. I don't know, that's all I
know.
TS: Very interesting. When you were talking about how the EEOC were all guys, kind of,
running it—there is some talk about the way that those in charge of the Equal
Opportunity programs, it was like a career ending sort of place, or that it wasn't like a
place anyone wanted to go to. Was that how it was treated in that day, do you remember?
JF: I just didn't like the—[both chuckle] and as far as I could see—but I was military so it
didn't do anything, they really didn't do anything, and that was just my opinion of the
office.
42
TS: It wasn't really—
JF: It was run by a civilian employee so he was probably a GS-12 or something.
TS: But they had an EEOC within the army too; within the military. They had a program for
EEOC.
JF: Not where I was.
TS: No? Not in '74?
JF: No. No. But you could talk to the IG [Inspector General].
TS: That was it?
JF: In fact, after this symposium the IG department wanted me to transfer and do stuff in VII
Corps and my boss wouldn't let me go.
TS: No? Why not?
JF: Because he needed lawyers. [chuckles] I mean, he needed bodies.
TS: Yeah.
JF: No, they wouldn't let me go. I was kind of disappointed in that, but.
TS: Well, what was the best part of your job, that you enjoyed the most?
JF: I liked admin law. I came to know and love the regulations. [chuckles] I—But basically I
traveled every weekend. I just got out of there and I was young and I was in love with
another lawyer, and so we traveled a lot, and it was basically three years of just seeing
Europe, and went down to Africa, and it was just great.
TS: You were fulfilling your wishes, then, right?
JF: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. But I worked my tail off during the week.
TS: Yeah.
JF: But I really—There were people that just would stay in their dorm. I mean, I thought that
was really bizarre.
TS: Did you go to any of the volksmarches or anything like that?
[Volksmarching is a form of non-competitive fitness walking that developed in Europe]
43
JF: Yes, I did volksmarches; yes. I did the scavenger hunts with your car where you go and
find the sign from some castle[?]. Yeah, I just—I loved it. I did. I was dating somebody
who was a civilian lawyer in Holland so I went up to Holland a lot, and went to [unclear],
and the parties, and it was just—There were a lot of us young, single people and it was
fun.
Now, here's a dilemma. I just remembered this picture. We had a JAG dinner that
was for all the JAGs in VII Corps, and so everybody put on their dress blues. And we
went to the dinner and we sat down and every female officer was—beside her plate was a
corsage. You can't wear a corsage on your dress blues. I mean, really.
TS: Right.
JF: I thought, "What were they thinking? They're trying to be so nice but this is so wrong."
TS: So what happened with them? Did they—
JF: We didn't wear them.
TS: They just stayed on the—on the plates? [chuckles]
JF: Yeah.
TS: So to speak. Well, was there anything particularly challenging about in the army that you
didn't expect?
JF: Only that you had to learn very early on that what needed to be done had to be done and
it had to be done by you, and even if you didn't feel qualified you had to figure it out,
because there was no one else to do it, and I thought that was very interesting, too,
because that would not happen in a civilian law firm. You would spend five or six years
in the library writing briefs and you would—and I found that to be a problem and I got
out because civilian law firms wouldn't believe that I did what I did, and it's like, "Yeah, I
did." [chuckles]
TS: Well, that's almost true for a lot of different career fields, too, in the military, because
from the people that have talked to me they'll say, "They gave me such responsibility and
I was twenty-two, and then I get out and I can't flip burgers." [chuckles]
JF: Exactly. Exactly. I think that it's probably still a problem today. People are highly trained
in a certain field and they have huge responsibilities, and they get home and maybe their
career field doesn't exist in the civilian population. But even if it does, you're twenty-five,
you're not going to get that job.
TS: Yes.
44
JF: So I—It builds expectations, but it also makes you grow up real fast.
TS: Well, that's the other thing, I think, is that—other women have said that they were given
challenges—work challenges—that they really didn't think that they were capable of
doing, but it turns out that their supervisor had believed in them and gave them the
support they needed to be successful. And also, sometimes they failed, but then they
learned and they moved on. Did you have those kind of experiences too?
JF: Yes. My first trial, being completely green and six months out of law school, I was
petrified. [chuckles]
TS: I bet.
JF: And so, I had all the—my little pieces of paper in line and everything but I had never
done a trial. So God bless this guy, God bless him. He was chief prosecutor and the night
before the trial he said, "We're going to Nellingen [Kaserne]." So we went to Nellingen,
went in the courtroom, and he played every part. And he said, "This is what you're going
to do; this is where they're going to stand; this is what he's going to say;" blah blah blah
blah, and he played every part, and if he had not done that for me I would have just—I
don't know what I would have done.
TS: So he role-played, kind of, what was going on?
JF: Oh, yeah. He role-played the judge; he role-played the witnesses; he role-played the
defense council. It was just amazing. If he hadn’t done that I don't know what I would
have done. I'd bless his name if I can ever remember it, [chuckles] every day, because he
did that.
TS: Well, that's something that I guess a lot of other women have talked about, too, is that
they had mentors that helped them—
JF: Yes.
TS: —through the way. And so, that would have been one example. Did you have any others
that kind of took you by the arm and helped you through?
JF: Well, my boss, Colonel Hollaway[?], was—he actually became SJA later, and now is a
judge—civilian judge. No, actually he's on—he's on a military court of appeals, but
anyway. Very nice man, very—completely neutral on sex, rank. What he was looking for
was somebody to do the job, and he was really, really good. And I know that because I
think four or five months before I was to rotate we got a new SJA; these change all the
time.
TS: Yes.
45
JF: And he was not collegial, he was not friendly, he was—I don't know if he was a sexist
but he really didn't like me. [chuckles] So I realized at that point that I had been very,
very, very lucky, and I had done the right thing by telling them I wasn't going to
continue.
TS: Yeah.
JF: Because you really can't choose your boss and—
TS: No. I think the only thing you can do in the army is wait it out and go to the next station.
JF: Right, but—
TS: In a lot of cases.
JF: I had been filling a major slot. That slot in administrative law was really for a major, and
I'd been doing that for two years, and the people at the Pentagon call you up and say,
"What do you want to do?"
And I said, "The only way you can keep me in the army is to make me a
lieutenant colonel and send me to Japan," and I knew—I knew they couldn't do that; I
absolutely knew they couldn't do that. But I'd already been the major stuff. I wanted the
material not the rank. I really didn't care about the rank but I didn't wanted to go back to
being a captain slot.
TS: Right.
JF: So—
TS: How long would it have been before you're up for major?
JF: I was above the—I don't know, what do they say, [promote above peers?], or something?
TS: Right.
JF: I have no idea but—
TS: But you hadn't—probably had the time and service yet, right?
JF: No, but I had two medals. [chuckles]
TS: What medals did you get?
JF: I got a medal for the—Army Commendation Medal for the Women's Symposium from
the general, not from the JAG Corps. And when I got out they mailed me first [unclear]
cluster[?] for the Army Commendation Medal. So for a three year tour that's not bad.
46
TS: That's not bad at all.
JF: They did eventually offer me Japan but I said, "Sorry." [chuckles]
TS: Why did you decide to get out then?
JF: Because I didn't want to go back to being captain's work[?], and it was just too much
trouble really. The only way I made a difference in VII Corps was not caring if I got
promoted, and that—I did a lot of good that way. When the new SJA came in I realized
that not everybody was going to let me do that, so.
TS: Right.
JF: And I've talked to a lot of people—officers—who said as long as I wasn't looking for that
next rank, or attached to doing that, and compromising what I would do to get that, then I
was effective, and I was happy to be there. But when you start hunting rank I don't think
you can do as much.
TS: No. Was there anything that you really wanted to do besides have a lieutenant colonel job
as a captain? [chuckles]
JF: I know it's—
TS: No, it's very interesting that you say that actually. You didn't really want the rank, you
just wanted the responsibility. But was there anything else that you felt that you weren't
able to do, maybe just because of your gender?
JF: No.
TS: No?
JF: I was requested for a general court martial that was either a murder or a rape, and you can
be requested by name and that's a known—that was a known thing, and I got requested
when I was doing admin law, and I kind of thought that would be neat to do, but with my
level of experience I was kind of like, "I don't know," and they would not let me do that.
TS: Oh, they wouldn't.
JF: Which is great. [unclear] because I probably wouldn't have done as well as somebody
else.
TS: That was more of an experience—
JF: That was an experience thing.
TS: Yeah.
47
JF: But no, I don't think there was much I didn't do.
TS: Did you have anybody that you had held in high regard? I mean, not necessarily a hero
but along that line.
JF: General Becton.
TS: Yeah. What was it about him that you respected?
JF: He was so effective. He was real—I mean, I—General—Colonel [Holloway?] was great
to work for, but General Becton as a leader was so effective. He would just—He had a
line that I still use. He would come up to anybody—And he always had these little cards
in his pockets so he could pull out statistics and stuff and talk about. But he would come
up and somebody would say something to him about what they did and he would say—
perfect line—he would say, "How'd you do that?" And that would open the door and he
would listen to whatever the enlisted NCO officer had to say. I still use that in interviews;
like, "How'd you do that?"
TS: That's right.
JF: It's a perfect question.
TS: It is.
JF: And he was just so open, and I will tell you in case you do the history, that General
Becton was basically non-promoted because, when he got back to Washington, which
was later—to four stars because he made a comment about—that it was—as a
commander he thought women should either get out of the army or—and I believe this is
true, I believe he said—or have an abortion if they're pregnant, because I could not fill
those slots while they were in a combat—the Cold War situation. And I'm sure that was
true, because if you have a mechanic who's pregnant and can't lift the wheel, she's on
admin duty. Now you're out a mechanic. If you had to go to the field, you're out a
mechanic. I understand what he was saying, but that was so against army policy that he
didn't get promoted and he got out.
[On 29 June 1981, Army Times published an article in which General Julius Wesley
Becton, Jr. was quoted as saying that female soldiers who get pregnant should "abort or
get out."]
TS: Interesting. But he was very supportive of women.
JF: He was very supportive and I've talked to women who say it's such a shame because he
was one of the good guys. But he was stating the obvious, really.
48
TS: Well, of course, anybody who had maybe a disability, for a short time, they were losing a
man, injury—
JF: Right. I think at that time women—and I've been told this—were—and I don't know if it's
true or not—were using pregnancy to get out, because they didn't like Germany or they
didn't like what, or this or that or the other, so I don't know that that's true. And I know it
was a problem for filling slots because that wasn't an empty slot, it was a disability slot,
and so you couldn't fill it.
TS: Right.
JF: Male or female you couldn't fill it.
TS: Now, you would have been in during the Iran hostage crisis, which was '79.
[The Iran hostage crisis occurred 4 November 1979 to 20 January 1981, and involved a
diplomatic crisis between Iran and the United States, where fifty-two American diplomats
and citizens were held hostage by a group of Iranian students who supported the Iranian
Revolution]
JF: Was it? We didn't get a lot of news on that. I did—
TS: No?
JF: There was—No. There was a JAG—There was—must have been a JAG officer in
Tehran—office in Tehran of some kind, or JAGs were advisors there, because we did
have this guy who we had all met at a—one of these big conferences, but he was shipped
home fa—shipped home—he was shipped to Stuttgart really fast. And he said they just
sent—came in and said, "You're going." And he picked up a few of his rugs and he left.
TS: Yeah.
JF: And he brought us pistachios. [both chuckle]
TS: Well, that's nice.
JF: That's about the only thing I remember about that.
TS: Yeah, because that's probably one of the major things that happened during that period.
And then you were out before [Ronald Wilson] Reagan took office, and those kind of
things.
49
Well, let me ask you what you feel about some of the issues that have come up.
We talked a little bit about the Equal Rights Amendment already. When you were in
there was nothing called "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."
JF: No.
TS: But still, homosexuals weren't allowed in the military. What were your thoughts about
that? Did you—
JF: We all knew that so-and-so was a homosexual, or so-and-so. I didn't care. I don't care. It
did not make a difference to me as long as whoever it was did their job, and basically,
from what I saw, if you did your job nothing happened. But there was a major perception
that if you were in the military you were either gay or you were promiscuous, and—
TS: As a woman.
JF: As a woman, oh yeah. And so, I just thought that was stupid.
TS: Did you ever get that yourself? Like, did you ever have that—
JF: No, because I was dating somebody and I would be gone every weekend and I didn't
hang around. So no, I didn't. If they were talking about me I don't know.
TS: Okay.
JF: I really don't. But—
TS: But having some sort of boyfriend was a protection against those kind of things.
JF: Oh yeah, it was, it was; it definitely was. I know a doctor that I completely believe was
gay, and he ate dinner with us at the O [Officers'] Club. There were a bunch of under
thirty types that we would meet for dinner and nobody cared. I mean, it was just stupid.
But there were some people that were of the appearance of being lesbian. Whether they
were or not I don't know. And as long as they did their job nobody ever said anything that
I know of.
TS: But if—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
JF: Although, some of the interviews that I've done, there was a lot of harassment for the
people who were homosexual.
TS: Is that right?
50
JF: Yeah.
TS: Well, I suppose, like you were talking about the one JAG commander that you had, and
then a new one came in, so if you had that happen and you had somebody who was really
against you for that particular reason, things would change just the way they did for you,
right?
JF: Absolutely.
TS: Even though it was a totally different issue.
JF: Absolutely. And that—I talked to General Becton in an interview twenty years later and
he said that that Colonel was a born again Christian and that he was very—that he had—
in fact, he had known him for many years and he said he was wild, wild, wild until he got
born again. And then he got really born again, so I think he was—
TS: Moralistic about a lot of things?
JF: Yeah, and I would not have—I really—I wouldn't have crossed that man for the world.
There's no telling what he would have done. [both chuckle]
TS: Well, you got out so you didn't have to worry.
JF: Yeah, exactly.
TS: How about the idea of women in combat positions? We kind of talked about it, but what
are your feelings about it?
JF: We were there to do a job.
TS: Yes.
JF: I don't—didn't have any feelings about it one way or the other.
TS: But now that they're opening up jobs to women.
JF: If you raise your hand and you want to be in infantry, then go for it.
TS: Yeah. Do you think there's any restrictions that they should put on what women can do?
JF: No.
TS: No?
51
JF: No. No, I really don't. In fact, the women in Iraq and Afghanistan were caught in combat
and they were not trained for that, so I think that was a very bad thing to put them in that
situation. The women have been exposed to combat for years. It's a 360 [degree]
battlefield. It's just ridiculous to even talk in that way.
TS: Well, I mean, there's the issues where they say women don't have the strength that men
do, how can they carry a pack? Those kind of strength issues I think are the most
dominate right now in the opposition.
JF: Funny you should say that.
TS: Okay.
JF: I interviewed the guy who was the PT or the master of the sword for—Are we running
out of tape?—
TS: No, we're good.
JF: —at West Point, and he had to come up with the PT [physical training] requirements for
women who are entering West Point, and he fell into that category; he said, "Well, I was
in the infantry in Vietnam and we had hundred pound packs, and it wasn't good for the
guys, and I just don't think—" and it was all that. And he did a lot of testing and whatever
to get the PT program at West Point in order. We've all seen the littlest guy in the unit
carrying a bazooka. It's not—You don't have to be six foot four [inches] to do some of
this stuff. I just don't understand. If it's too heavy for the shrimp who's carrying the
bazooka, then why don't we make the equipment lighter? I just don't understand that
that's a problem.
TS: Well, they have done things like that. In the air force they've changed the size of the
cockpit—
JF: Good.
TS: —to make it more suitable not just for women of a smaller stature but also men of Asian
heritage or [unclear]. So it was actually a benefit in a lot of different ways for that.
Interesting.
JF: I interviewed an air force pilot who was in the fourth unit—fourth class of air force pilots
for women and I said, "Well, what about—how did you reach pedals?"
And she said, "Full extension, full up." So she had the full extension on the pedals
and she was as close as she could get to the steering wheel, or whatever that stuff is.
Anyway.
TS: Yeah, they learned that it wasn't that they couldn't fly, because women flew in World
War II with all those planes. Yeah, interesting.
52
JF: So if it's too heavy for a five foot eight woman it's probably too heavy for a five foot six
man. I mean, I just don't see the problem. How effective can you be with a hundred
pounds on your back? Seriously. And the armor—the body armor—hasn't even to this
day been form fitted for women, so they are vulnerable under their arms where there's a
blank spot, and that's—Come on, guys.
TS: Right.
JF: I think because they're still a minority. They're 14% of the army now, they're still a
minority, and it's just, like, easier to kind of put on the blinders and go, "Well, we're
serving 80%."
TS: Right. Same as like when you couldn't get the uniform to fit you, right?
JF: Yeah. [chuckles]
TS: Same sort of issues. What about issues of PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]? Did you
ever see any of that with, like, the Vietnam era veterans that you served with?
JF: The Vietnam veterans that were in as administrative people in the JAG Corps really just
didn't talk about it. They were senior NCOs and they just didn't talk about it.
TS: But some of the people that you've interviewed since then, have you seen that at all?
JF: Not in Vietnam, but from sexual assault, PTSD, yes, definitely.
TS: A lot more cases of that? Or maybe more people are talking about it.
JF: Well, there is one woman, I have her on tape. She—I was talking to her for forty-five
minutes and she finally said—I said, "Well, was there anything—" at end of the
interview—"Is there anything else you want to tell me?"
She said, "Well, I was raped in AIT [Advanced Individual Training]." And I was
stunned.
I said, "Oh, I'm so sorry that happened."
And she said, "And I didn't tell anybody for twenty years."
But she's been in counseling with the VA [Veteran's Administration] for the last
twelve years, so she's doing the right thing, but what happened to those twenty years
when she was quiet. I mean, how much did she suffer?
TS: Right.
JF: So I think eventually they make their way to counseling, but I don't think it's—at least in
that era it wasn't as available. And there's no confidentiality in the psychiatric—whatever
the army says, whatever you say can be sent back to your—
TS: To your commander.
53
JF: Which I thought was really weird.
TS: Well, now, you decided to get out of the army while you were in Germany. Besides the
fact that you couldn't have that dream job [both chuckle], what—
JF: I'm going to sound like a narcissist.
TS: No, no, it doesn't. I think it's actually very interesting, because you wanted to be
challenged.
JF: Right, I was—I mean, I—It was—For me it was about the work not the collar, and—
TS: But were you worried that when you got out you weren't going to have that kind of—
JF: No, I was totally naïve—totally naïve—and it really happened that it was a bad thing that
I got out. [chuckles]
TS: What did happen then?
JF: Well, I got a European Out [separating from the military while stationed at a European
base and remaining in country] and I traveled around for a while, and then I came home
and I started applying for jobs in Nashville [Tennessee], which is not the most liberal
town in the world, and nobody would hire me. Now, I must say, this was 1980 and there
was a huge de—recession.
TS: That's right.
JF: There were no jobs for anybody basically, but I didn't know that in Germany. I didn't—
TS: How old were you? You weren't like—
JF: Thirty.
TS: So you weren't really planning for—
JF: No, I was planning on coming home and getting a law job, and it was very difficult. It
was very, very difficult, and I finally joined—I finally set up my own practice in
Nashville and then was hired by a firm in Chattanooga. But it was difficult. And when
you would interview they would go, "Yes. Yes. You did that? Yes. Yes." It was like they
totally couldn't get it. And—
TS: Why do you think they couldn't get it? Was it because of your age or gender, or your time
as a lawyer? What? What do you think it was?
54
JF: I don't think they understood the level of responsibility that you were given, and that you
did it [chuckles] without spending years in the library, and becoming an associate, and
maybe getting thrown a trial and whatever; that you just went in and did it.
TS: So like we were talking about earlier, the on the job training that you get, or on the job
work [chuckles] that you get, is different than in the civilian world.
JF: Oh, absolutely, and particularly in the law world. You're just basically a rookie for years
and—
TS: Was that frustrating for you?
JF: Oh, it was very frustrating. I—It was totally frustrating. I thought—I thought, "I've got
my ticket punched. I've passed the bar. I've been in—I've served my country." Assume I
was male and I said all those things.
TS: Right.
JF: "And I'll go home and I'll get a firm and I'll live happily ever after and I'll make partner."
And it just didn't happen, it did not happen, and it—I thought that having all those ticket
punches would be a career booster, and it just didn't seem to be that way.
TS: Did you think about getting back in; going back in?
JF: Yeah, I did. I did actually. And I talked to General Holloway and he said, "Well, just let
me know what you think."
And then I applied to the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] and—that's a-whole
'nother story, honey. I applied to the FBI, took the test, I passed the test—the
written test. Went downtown to the FBI office, which is very strange, down a hallway,
and big metal door. And I went in to interview with the guy and he said, "Well, can you
hold a pistol?"
I said, "Well, yes, sir, I can hold a pistol."
He said, "Okay," and he handed me a pistol; I think it was unloaded.
TS: [chuckles]
JF: And he said, "Okay, hold this—hold this pistol for as long as you can." So I stood there
and held the pistol, held the pistol, held the pistol, held the pistol [chuckles], and he
just—like, he didn't say anything.
TS: He was just sitting there watching you?
JF: Yeah. He wanted to—It was really a—basically weed out the weak-armed whatever;
whoever that is. So I—
TS: And how long are you going to be holding a pistol like that anyhow in any situation?
55
JF: And now they hold them like this, with two hands, but that was the test. And so, I passed
that test and I went back home and I got a letter that said contact so-and-so in Memphis.
And so, for some reason that I really cannot explain to you, I really cannot explain it to
myself, I had this premonition, which sounds so dull, that if I went in the FBI I would be
killed, and I just could not do it. The opportunity was standing there with an open door
and I thought, "I can't do it."
TS: Well, if you have that kind of fear put into you that's very difficult to then go into a job
and then have that in the back of your mind. I can see why—
JF: [unclear] dangerous.
TS: Sure.
JF: So I didn't do that. And I finally opened my own office and then went to Chattanooga.
And then [chuckles], irony of ironies, I started dating a guy that I knew in Germany and
married back into the military.
TS: Oh, did you really?
JF: Yeah. That was a mistake. [chuckles]
TS: Was it?
JF: I'd rather be in than a family member who got no respect at all.
TS: On the outside.
JF: Yeah.
TS: Yeah. Was that a lot harder then. Obviously.
JF: Oh, yeah. It was—Because I knew what they were doing; I knew the jobs, I knew—and
my ex-husband was a dentist, and so he was in a clinic and doing his professional thing
and—
TS: Was it tough to get a job or were you—
JF: You couldn't—There was no way you could get a job in any—Well, we were at Fort
Campbell, Kentucky, and I had a small child by that time and there was just no way; you
weren't going to get a job. And I was not licensed in Kentucky; I was only licensed in
Tennessee.
TS: Oh, Tennessee, right.
56
JF: And so, then we were at Fort Bragg for many years, and I wasn't licensed in North
Carolina and—
TS: You were or was not?
JF: I was not.
TS: Was not.
JF: So I did get a job because Vanderbilt was doing a program—public policy program there.
I did work for them for a while doing their site management stuff, but that was only
because I had that connection. So I felt very sorry—I still feel sorry—for any army
spouse, or navy spouse, or whatever spouse, who are stuck in these towns where they
know you're going to leave. Why would they hire you? There's no incentive for—and if
they do hire you they're not going to pay you very much because you're going to leave. I
really think that's—needs to be addressed. Maybe it has been addressed but it wasn't
addressed when I was a family member.
TS: Well, do you think that your life is different because you joined the army?
JF: Oh, absolutely. Oh yeah.
TS: Explain how.
JF: I didn't ever understand, even with all my background, that—the chain of command, what
that meant and how that worked. I think that's the most amazing thing that I learned, is
when to jump the chain of command and when not to [chuckles], and what the
consequences might be.
TS: Well, give someone a tip. When can you and when can't you?
JF: You can't if you're looking for that next rank; you cannot do it. You can if you don't care.
[chuckles] But it's the right thing to do, and I did, and I have no qualms about—I didn't
care about the consequences, I didn't care about if I didn't get major, it's just you had to
do the right thing in my mind. I didn't do it often and—
TS: Well, give me an example of when you did.
JF: Oh, let's see. There was a—There were just times when I would—somebody would ask
me if you could do this administratively, and I would say, "No," and then somebody else
would ask me the same question and I would say, "Just don't ask me." [chuckles] Or call
their boss and say, "Tell so-and-so not to ask me." But it—You just had to know how to
play that, and I didn't do it often. And I did—Like, we had a child abuser who was a
horrific child abuser and he was—his family was going home and he was going home
with them, and perhaps I'll be prosecuted for this, but I called the Social Services in the
57
town where he was going and I said, "You need to watch this family." And that was
completely outside of my pay grade to do that.
TS: But you were concerned morally for the family.
JF: Oh, absolutely. How could you send this monster to the States? Anyway.
TS: Well, it's interesting that you say that, because what's coming out now about issues of
rape, is that commanders, they make the woman go to a different unit and the man stays,
and then there's no record. And then maybe they get out of the service and then there's no
record of it but the rape continues, and things like that.
JF: Yeah, it's a—some people consider it a job. I thought that they were communities and
that we were more like a community, and that you had to do the right thing for your
people, and I thought the best leaders were the ones that took care of the people. And the
ones that didn't I thought, "Well, you're—you may be doing your job but you're not
taking care of your people." [unclear]
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Go ahead.
JF: I don't know if you've seen the news but there's something going on at Fort Bragg about
bigamists and—
TS: No, I didn't know.
JF: —the wives at Fort Bragg are discovering that their husbands have several wives.
TS: Oh, I hadn't heard.
JF: I actually interviewed a woman who was enlisted, and she was very naïve, she was from
far away wherever—from a little town—and she married a guy who she liked, and she
was very young, and they applied for separate [unclear] and—whatever the money is you
get for housing—and the army came back, like, four months later and said, "Oh, no, you
can't have it because he's got a wife in Fort Bragg."
And she was—she said, "I didn't know any of that could go on. I didn't—I was
from Podunk, U.S.A. [slang for a small town] I didn't really—" she was shocked. I mean,
this was a young woman who probably was in love, or she thought she was in love, and
this guy had taken advantage of her. And so, she had to go home, get it annulled, come
back, get reassigned. And she got reassigned to Fort Jackson, South Carolina and he got
reassigned to Fort Jackson. It's just—[chuckles] There's something wrong with this. I
don't know what, but. I think the women at Fort Bragg at the moment are trying to get the
army to do something about these multiple marriages.
58
TS: Wow, that's very interesting. Now, did you ever consider yourself as a trailblazer in the
army?
JF: Not really.
TS: No?
JF: I did in law school—
TS: Did you?
JF: —because there were so few of us.
TS: Yeah.
JF: But, see, that was kind of like, "Okay, I fought the battle in law school, now it's won, I'm
in the army. I can do it." I really didn't, no. I do think that you have to be really good at
your job. There was no room for being medium at your job if you were a woman.
TS: Did you feel like you had to be even better than the men—
JF: Oh, yeah, I did.
TS: —to be, like—Yeah?
JF: Yeah, I did. I think the respect level was earned by being better than you had to be.
TS: But if you were just good at your job that wasn't enough.
JF: No, I didn't feel it was.
TS: Yeah.
JF: I did want to tell you one—Toward the end of my tour—and not when the born again guy
came—but I came into my office one day and there was a—you know the shotgun
envelopes?
TS: Yeah.
JF: There was a shotgun envelope on my desk and I opened it up, and there was a lot of stuff
on my desk, but it was a poison pen letter [a letter, typically anonymous, that is libelous,
abusive, or malicious] that said I had only gotten where I was gotten—I had gotten
because I was doing such and thus with so-and-so, and I thought—
TS: Sleeping around or something?
59
JF: Yeah. I thought, "This is insane. This is so insane." It really hurt my feelings.
TS: Was this at Stuttgart?
JF: Yeah. And it could only have been a—sent by somebody in the military and probably
only in my office. I thought, "This is just not what I've been getting from these guys." So
I showed it to my boss and he had a staff meeting, and he said, "This will not happen
again."
He asked me if I wanted to say anything. I looked around the room at every
person, I said, "If you have something to say to me at least have the courtesy and the
courage to come say it to my face." And I kept that letter for a long time. I finally threw it
away; it was bad karma. But I just—that was totally out of left field for me. I thought,
"That is bizarre."
TS: Even though you say that you were treated with respect—
JF: I was.
TS: —that this incident happened, so behind the scenes you don't really know how people—
you don't know their hearts, right?
JF: No, and I had no—I don't know who it was from. It could have—It could have been
anybody, but I didn't get that vibe off of anybody.
TS: Yes.
JF: So I thought that was [unclear].
TS: Did any of the guys come to you later and say anything about it? Not that they were
responsible, but maybe in support of you.
JF: No.
TS: No? It just was kind of let go?
JF: Let go.
TS: Interesting. That's very interesting.
JF: After the staff meeting, no, there was nothing. That really hurt my feelings more than
anything else; that it was somebody probably in my office. I perceived that that could
have only come from my office.
TS: I'm sure.
60
JF: And that hurt my feelings.
TS: Well, because that kind of violates the trust that you felt you'd [unclear]
JF: Yeah, I thought I had. I really thought I had, so I just—I had to blow it off and do my job,
which I think a lot of women did. It's like blow it off and do your job.
TS: What part of the tour were you in when you got that? Were you at—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
JF: That was at the end.
TS: Oh, you were at the end.
JF: Yeah, but not with the born again guy, I was still with the regular fellas.
TS: Yeah.
JF: And [unclear]—
[Speaking Simultaneously]
TS: Yeah, I can see that would have been worse to [unclear].
JF: Yeah, I was just like, "What? Why would somebody send this to me?" I just thought that
was really bizarre. I wish I still had it. [both chuckle]
TS: Now, would you recommend the service to any young men or women today?
JF: In the current hostilities in the world, no. If I did recommend it, it would be the air force.
TS: Why the air force?
JF: To—It was my perception the air force had much better facilities, much looser
regulations, and they were just nicer to their people. I know they had better housing. So—
In fact, I did—When I came back there was a fellow who had been in my law school
class and he married a friend of mine, so he said, "If I went in the JAG Corps, what
would you say?"
And I said, "Join the air force, no question." And he did, he—and he just retired a
couple years ago.
61
TS: Is that right?
JF: Yeah.
TS: So you have a daughter, right? Would she ever have an inkling to do anything like that?
She's older now, right?
JF: No, she wouldn't, she's an artist. She's a designer, she would have no interest.
TS: No?
JF: Even with two parents who were veterans she would have no interest in it at all.
TS: [chuckles] That's good. What does patriotism mean to you?
JF: I think you have to give back. If you're—If you're alive and breathing in America you can
give back in various ways; charity or volunteer work or whatever. But I think the military
service is sort of on a higher plane; that if you do that you really mean it. So to me it was
very—I became very patriotic in the military, just because we were asked to do so much
and we worked so hard and it had a point. Especially in the Cold War you were—you
were just on pins and needles all the time. Although we didn't live like that, it really was.
"Are they going to come over? What are we going to do?" I saw the Berlin Wall. I knew
that they were serious about this stuff.
TS: Right, it was still up.
JF: Yeah. Oh yeah. I was fortunate to go right after it fell, and my daughter was, like, three,
and there was a big hole in the Berlin Wall and there was a—I know he wasn't over
eighteen, a Russian soldier on the other side—East German soldier—and he was just
sitting there. I mean, everybody was letting everybody pass, but there was a big window
in the wall, and so I passed my daughter over to him and he put her on his lap and smiled,
and I took his picture and then I took her back. So—But that's not what it felt like.
TS: No, how different the world was then.
JF: Oh my God, it was serious, and you—I took a train to Berlin—we had troops in Berlin—I
took a train to Berlin, it was called the Berlin Train, and you—once you got on that train
in Germany you didn't—there was no possibility of getting off or stopping or anything
else; you went straight from this point, and there was a corridor that was safe on that
train, and you got off in Berlin. And they took your passport at the beginning and they
didn't give it back to you until you were in Berlin, and I—that scared me, I thought,
"Geez, this is not good." [chuckles]
TS: And it was a night train too. [unclear] train.
62
JF: Yes, it was; yes, it was. Did you take the train? And you had to wear your uniform, and I
went over to the East. I thought the East was just so pitiful. I looked—[unclear] in the
department store and I looked at the fashions and I thought, "Oh my God, no wonder
they're depressed." [chuckles] It was terrible.
TS: A much different world.
JF: Oh, a totally different world.
TS: Well, do think there's anything that a civilian might not know or understand about what
it's like to be in the military that you'd like to explain to them today? Like, a
misperception.
JF: So many things. I think people in the military recognize each other once they—they
recognize that you know. [chuckles] You know what I'm saying? That you know the
hardships, and the sucking it up and doing your job, and I think a lot of people haven't
had in their world a demand like that where you just really just have to do it.
TS: Is there, like, a sense of teamwork that you think is different in the military than in the
civilian world?
JF: I think what's different is you can't quit.
TS: [chuckles] Okay.
JF: It occurred to me early on that you can't quit this job. I'd always pretty been loose with, "I
can quit and do this or I can do that," but it was like you had to deal with this, and I think
that's a great—a wake-up call.
TS: Motivator too.
JF: Yeah, it's a motivator. And while you can quit in the civilian world and you might be
unemployed for a while, you can—it's the most horrible boss you've ever had, you have
that option. In the military you deal; you have to deal with it. I think that's a great eye-opener,
and I think people that were in the military understand that, and understand that
they were given a lot of responsibility.
TS: Yeah, we talked about that, where it's not as well respected in the civilian world, or it
wasn't at the time you got out too.
JF: No. It's like they didn't believe. [chuckles] And maybe it's just me, I don't know but I just
felt like they didn't believe the stuff that I'd done, and to me it was very vivid[?]. Yeah,
that's what I did. I made contracts for sheep grazing on [unclear] fields. It's like, really?
TS: They put you to work. They're paying your salary, they put you to work.
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JF: That's right, and even if you don't know how to do it you find out how to do it.
TS: Sink or swim.
JF: No, I really appreciated my military service. It taught me so much, and professionally it
was exceedingly wonderful, really; it was great. It was so immediate and so right there
and you had to do it. It just makes you be able to make decisions that you have to make.
There's no waffling about it.
TS: You have to own that decision too.
JF: Yeah, you do, so. I know people a lot—I know people in the civilian world who cannot
make a decision; "I can't—I don't know. I have to get more information."
TS: "What do you want for lunch?" [chuckles]
JF: "I don't know. Should we go to—No, I—Where do you want to go?" It's like, "Come on
guys. Just make the decision."
TS: Right. So that's one thing you think [unclear]. It sounds like you were a pretty good
decision maker before you went in too.
JF: Yeah, yeah, but I meet many people in the military who couldn't make a decision; there
was just no room for that.
TS: What about this issue of, like, what your dad said initially, about taking orders?
JF: Well, as I said before, if I wasn't looking for that next rank, which I wasn't, then I could
pretty much fly my own ship. They—I followed orders. But for instance, the new fellow
who came in, that was very uptight, at the end, I had been administratively prosecuting a
golf club manager for, basically, embezzlement of stuff, not money, for three year—well,
for two years I had been working that administrative case, and there were so many
appeals and so many hearings, dah dah dah dah dah, and he came in and he said—he'd
been there, like two weeks, and he called me and he said, "What about this case?"
I said, "Yes, sir."
He said, "I don't think we ought to do this case."
I said, "Well, sir, I have been prosecuting that guy for—administratively for two
solid years, and if you want to dismiss that case I really don't think I'm the one that
should do it."
"Are you disobeying a direct order?"
I said, "No, sir, I just don't think that I am the one to dismiss the case after all this
time."
"Well—" I thought he was going to throw me in the brig or something, but I stood
there and I took it, and I really didn't believe that I was the proper person to dismiss it. If
you were going to dismiss it, it should be somebody above me, so—and seriously, so they
could take the blame. I really, really understood what was going on here, if it went—if it
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backfired I didn't want to be the one because I had been doing my job and I believed he
was—he should be fired and—
TS: Did they dismiss it?
JF: I don't know, he didn't—I didn't dismiss it.
TS: Okay, so it was still ongoing by the time you left?
JF: Yeah.
TS: Interesting.
JF: I just wasn't going to do it. And maybe that was an order that he delivered, or maybe it
wasn't, but.
TS: Do you think there's a level of independence that people in the military have that isn't
also credited to them? This issue of always following orders, and yet you're pretty much
thrown into jobs and you have to—
JF: Yeah.
TS: —sink or swim, as we said.
JF: Oh, a level of independence on every single level; every single level. I didn't
understand—I was sheltered. I went in the dental clinic, for instance, when I got to
Kelley, and apparently at that time you had to get your teeth examined so they would
have a basic level for when you came in on your record and when you went out. I went
into the office and there was a desk and I said, "I'm here for my dental appointment."
And they said, "Well, go to the back bay."
I said, "Excuse me?"
"Well, go to the back bay."
I said, "Well, where is the back bay?" [chuckles] I mean, it was assumed that I
knew where that was, but I had no idea where that was. That really irritated me. Don't tell
me to go someplace if I don't know where it is. It was a building.
TS: Someplace different from where you were at.
JF: Well, it just—In a dental office today it would say room A, room B.
TS: Right.
JF: There was no—
TS: Right.
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JF: —direction. So I didn't—I just started walking [chuckles] until I stopped, and then I said,
"Is this the back bay?"
And they said, "Yeah." So I sat down. But it's like that. If they say, "Report here,"
or, "Report there," you better get your—
TS: Figure out where it's at.
JF: Yeah, and do it. So there's really a—It's a much more grown-up expectation than I think a
lot of people get.
TS: That's a good way to put it; grown-up expectation.
JF: Yeah.
TS: Instead of having every moment controlled, it's not that there isn't control but—
JF: Yeah.
TS: —you have a lot of responsibility that you have to take on yourself.
JF: Right. And they would say, "Go to this kaserne over there to get your housing
straightened out."
"Well, how do you get to that place?" I didn't have a car.
"Well, you just go down to the bus stop and wait till the bus comes."
I must have sat at that bus stop for an hour and a half. It was like, "Geez Louise,
guys, if there's supposed to be a bus—" But you just did the necessary.
TS: Yeah.
JF: You just did the necessary.
TS: Would you do it again?
JF: Oh yeah, I would. It was an adventure.
TS: Yeah.
JF: It was. And it was lifelong, obviously, I'm still talking about.
TS: That's right.
JF: It was a lifelong adventure.
TS: Well, we're at that point where I can say, is there anything we haven't talked about that
you want to add?
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JF: [chuckles]
TS: Because I finished up all my formal questions. Was there something that we haven't—
JF: No, I—Basically, I want people to remember the symposium, I want them to read the
issues, and to know that they're the same issues today. And the people that I interviewed,
I want somebody in two hundred years to be able to go, "God bless America, they had to
do that?" I think it'll be shocking in two hundred years; I really do.
TS: Do you think these issues will be resolved?
JF: In two hundred years. [laughs]
TS: Oh, really?
JF: I'm not sure they'll resolve, no. I really am not sure they'll resolve.
TS: Why do you think that it's so hard to get them resolved?
JF: Because they're a minority—women are a minority and they're not enough of them in
command positions to address this, although there are some women in command
positions who don't address it either, but.
TS: Because they're protecting their position, right?
JF: Oh, absolutely, they're CYA [cover your ass]. I think—Suppose—Let's just suppose in a
universe that the army was 50/50. It would be entirely different; entirely different
organization; 50% women, 50% men. I just think it would be entirely different. It might
not be better, but I think it would be entirely different in terms of who thinks you can do
this job, and what you would be assigned, and what you would not be assigned. There
wouldn't be any question that you were going into combat. And they'd lighten the loads
on the packs and whatever. I just think it would be—But I think in any organization when
a minority gets to a certain percentage they should take—
TS: [A certain?] tipping point?
JF: Yeah, it's a tipping point, and I don't think 14% is a tipping point. I do believe that I'm
right to say that the military is keeping it there for whatever reason, I don't know. I'm sure
they're keeping it there. They know what they're recruiting and they know all the
numbers. So I don't know, I can't speak to that.
TS: That's very interesting. Well, I want to thank you so much for coming today, Janice. It's
been great to talk with you.
JF: It's been fun, fun. I never get to interview myself so this is great, people asking me
questions.
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TS: Good. Okay, I'll go ahead and turn it off then.
JF: Okay.
TS: Unless there's something you want to add.
JF: No.
TS: Okay. Alright.
[End of Interview]