Oral History Program Julie Newland Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 9-23 February 2023 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Julie Newland Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 9-23 February 2023 Copyright © 2024 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Weber and Davis County Community Oral History Collection includes interviews conducted by Weber State University faculty, staff and students, and other members of the community. The interviews cover various topics including city government, diversity, personal everyday life experiences and other recollections regarding the history of the Weber and Davis County areas. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Newland, Julie, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 9-23 February 2023, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections & University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Julie Newland conducted in three installments between February 9-23, 2023 by Lorrie Rands at the Weber State University Stewart Library. Julie discusses her military service, her subsequent physical and mental health struggles, and her work as a public servant through the years. Kyle Jackson is present for the first interview and Marina Kenner is present for the last interview. At the end of the interview is an appendix of photographs provided by Julie. Trigger warning: Sexual harassment in the military. LR: My name is Lorrie Rands, and I am interviewing Julie Newland for the Veterans’ History Project in partnership with the office of Congressman Blake Moore and Weber State University. Today is February 9, 2023, and we are holding this interview in Studio 76 at the Stewart Library on Weber State University campus. I just want to thank you for your willingness to sit and share your story. Let's start at the beginning. When and where were you born? JN: Thanks. My name is Julie Newland, and I was born in Mesa, Arizona, in December 1966. LR: Did you grow up in Mesa? JN: Yes. LR: I know this might seem strange, wanting to focus on the beginning. I just find it's easier for me as well. Growing up in Mesa, what was your family dynamic like? JN: My dad was a family physician, the doctor in Apache Junction, Arizona. My mom was Mom and had two kids and ran the office. My dad died when I was four, so in 1971, he died of brain cancer, and my mom had time to liquidate all of her assets and all of his assets and move into East Mesa a few miles away. One of his dying wishes was to move us to a different school district [laughs]. He was an outspoken man. He was 61 when he died, so a lot older than my mom, and so my mom 1 became a widow in her late twenties. It was our mom and me and my older sister, and we were pretty much the original latchkey kids; we had the string with the key around our necks. School let me start early as a kindergartner. I started school when I was four because my mom had to learn new skills and get to work. We were fortunate to have survivor benefits for Social Security, so we had some income coming in. LR: That's really cool. You mentioned a couple of kids, so it's you and how many siblings? JN: : Me and my sister. She's two and a half years older. LR: Okay. You mentioned you started kindergarten early. What school did you attend? JN: Taft Elementary. My mom found a house that was within walking distance of the school. She set it up for us to walk ourselves to school and back every day. LR: Okay. You mentioned it was his dying wish that you be in a different school district. What was wrong with the...? JN: My dad was in charge of the Chamber of Commerce at the time in Apache Junction. Like I said, he was a very outspoken, opinionated leader in the community, and I guess he knew a little too much and didn't want us to be educated [there]—sorry, Apache Junction friends. He just didn't want us to be in that school district. My mom would never tell this story [laughs]. LR: The memories that you have of your dad, are they memories that are yours, or do they come from stories that you've heard? JN: Mostly stories that I've heard, but I do have some memories from when I was little, running around. We were always ‘Doc Newland's kids’, you know; everybody in town knew us when we were little. My job when I was little, running around in diapers, was to say hello to people in the waiting room and to make sure the magazines were put in the racks. We were kept busy, and we had chickens in the 2 backyard. It was a small-town doctor's office, and we did not have money. I think he wrote off a lot of things. Later when I grew up, we still maintained his records for a long time—his patient records—so when we had to destroy them, I saw how he just wrote off a lot of stuff. LR: How long did you stay in East Mesa? JN: I grew up in East Mesa, and we were bussed into junior high and high school from there. I lived there pretty much until I joined the military. LR: Okay. I was just curious. Let's go back a little bit. What are some of your fondest memories of elementary school? JN: Mrs. Harrington—there were a lot of us that just went through as a group; we're a pretty stable bedroom community of people, like construction workers, that type of thing, where people went home to eat and sleep. Mrs. Harrington was a constant in our lives. In fourth grade, she told us all we needed a male teacher, so she told us all to go get taught by somebody else for fourth grade, and then we went back to her for fifth grade [laughs]. She was a really positive influence. LR: So was she the teacher? I'm a little confused by this. She just taught every grade? JN: Yeah, she would follow us through the grades. I don't know if that's normal, but I had her for most of my elementary school. LR: That's interesting. Moving into junior high, where were you bussed to? JN: To Fremont Junior High out on Power Road—Bush Highway, Power Road. It was pretty cool. They had a pool, so we got to have swimming for P.E.. That was nice. LR: Kinda the same question. I know junior high is not the best time of any kid's life, but what are some of your more fond memories of junior high? JN: It was the seventies, so I think people my age, looking back on the seventies, kind of romanticize it. We were pretty much on our own to take care of things. I remember I had my first kiss from a boyfriend at a dance in junior high. But mainly it 3 was people that I knew from my childhood—the same group went to join the bigger group. It was still kind of nice. We weren't segregated into cliques yet. LR: Was East Mesa a small town? JN: It's just a big metropolitan—it's a suburb of Phoenix. Mesa’s a really pretty big town, but when I say East Mesa, it's a lot different than Mesa. Like I said, we're the bedroom community. People go home to go to sleep, to get ready for work the next day. LR: Okay, that makes sense. This might not be a fair question, but I'm going to ask anyway. As you were growing up, did you ever feel the loss of not having your dad? JN: Yeah, that's a good question. Divorce wasn't very common, I think, even then in the seventies. When Father's Day card-making came around in elementary school, there was me and another boy in the class that didn't have dads. Mrs. Harrington, she would say, “Well, make a card for your mom.” She just would make it okay. It was just what we knew; that's just how it was. I will say, my mom didn't talk about my dad very much, but we had remnants of him in the house. You know, we had his gavel from the chamber. We had all of his records, all of his diplomas from getting his medical licenses and doctorates, his degrees. I did bring something to read from my dad's side of the family, if I may? LR: Yes, please. JN: It has to do with—there's very few remnants of him. But when he died, we didn't have any contact with his side of the family. He had traveled west from Kansas City for good reasons and kind of started over and married a young lady: my mom. But my cousin brought my mother a family history, and it was really pivotal, I think, for me and my sister. It's called The Newland Family. I found out later in life that it was made by my first cousin, and I'm the youngest of many, many, many cousins. They're much older than me. This first cousin had served during World War II, and 4 so this is dated about, I think, 1944, right at that time. He wrote this up, and my sister and I, it's about all we had really of my dad. I'll just read two paragraphs: The Newland family, going back to revolutionary days in old Virginia: we find one John Newland, born in 1738; he entered the Revolutionary War as a private at the age of 38 and served seven long years and never lost a day from the service. He was in many decisive battles and engagements: the Battle of Brandywine, Germantown and Monmouth. He was one of Washington's 2400 picked men who crossed the Delaware on Christmas night, 1777, and in the Battle of Trenton, which followed, he was one of the rugged Continentals who spent the winter of 1777-78 in Valley Forge, the gloomiest period in American history, when the soldiers with no blankets slept on the bare ground and barefooted left their footprints in the snow. In 1818, he was granted a pension of $8 a month and was given five years back pension, the payment being made in gold. John Newland died in 1843 at the age of 105 years. So we have some pride in our family history. I found out later in life very recently, actually, that Carl Newland, my cousin that wrote that, was also in the Air Force like me. He made it to the highest rank of enlisted. He was a Chief, and so he was like one of the top people in the Air Force. I found this out much, much later, but when I was younger, that's what I had, so there's a lot of pride. LR: Thank you for sharing that. JN: I'm getting all shook up. LR: No, it's interesting. The question that I was thinking of was, first of all, when did you receive that? How old were you? JN: My mom received it from my first cousin who was much older, like in the ‘70s, and it just kind of sat around: “Oh, yeah, that's about your dad.” You know, you get 5 curious, and so you start reading things. I know my sister and I were both very interested in tracking down details. We lived in Mesa, where there were the family history records of the LDS Church. Back then, things were on microfiche. We would go and dig in and request films from who-knows-where. My sister actually did a lot more genealogy work than I did. We're not confirmed with the Daughters of the American Revolution; our line is like a placeholder with the D.A.R., where the documents haven't been filed, but it's all right there, so maybe one of us will do it one day. LR: That’s really interesting. The reason I asked is the question I was thinking of: did that story have any influence on you joining the military? JN: Yes, I think so. It was one piece of the puzzle. LR: Okay. I am very linear, so I'm going to continue with where we were. We talked about junior high a little bit. Going into high school, had you already kind of decided that you wanted to be in the military? JN: No, not at all. LR: Okay, so you just joined. Going to high school, you're just doing your [thing]. JN: Yes. In high school, my freshman year was awesome. I had a great freshman year. A lot of the kids that I grew up with, I still knew them. Then a weird thing happened. All my Hispanic friends went with the Hispanic group. All my friends that thought they were cowboys went with the cowboy group. Some people went with the druggies. Some people were sports-oriented; went with the sports people. I was like, “What happened to everybody? They all split.” So there were about 10 of us that would hang around each other. I went to Mountain View High School in Mesa, which is predominantly LDS, and I'm Methodist, so there were a lot of kids that wouldn't speak to us. It was really weird; weird dynamics. LR: I don't really want to go too much into that culture… 6 JN: It was weird. LR: …but was it just that school, or did you notice that throughout your entire childhood? JN: High school. LR: It was just high school? JN: Yeah, it was at that school, and it was very, very sports-oriented. We were the top football team in the state, so everything's geared around sports. I mean, I was active in things, but a lot of my friends just went other places. I'm a little sister, so when I was in high school, I hung out with my sister and her friends a little more until they graduated. I think my freshman year, I discovered dating and had a lot of different boyfriends, and it was just fun. Then my senior year, I had finished all my credits and only needed a couple of classes in the mornings. My junior year, I started working through a cooperative office education program. My junior and senior year, I worked after school at Valley National Bank. They started me as a bookkeeper my junior year, and then I became a teller my senior year, and that was a really great job. I loved it. Senior year, I was half at high school, and then I worked, and then I started college classes. So I had a completely full day as a senior and so I didn't participate in much my senior year. I was just done, you know, so I went to Mesa Community College and started knocking out my general education. LR: Okay. I'm curious, the cooperative education program—was that credit for high school, or was it just a program that they had? JN: I don't think it was credit. It was just matching us with employers. I was really into business courses, and I graduated in 1984, so the classes I took were things like typing and shorthand. This is so dorky—I competed in typing and shorthand and was very, very good at it, and so I got matched up with a business job. 7 My junior year, I was on the archery team, so I did do some sports. I actually lettered. I have a varsity letter in archery. That was amazing. I was second on the varsity team and I loved it. We travel around and play with other schools. I really liked that. LR: That's really cool. You talked about taking typing and shorthand classes. Were those the only classes available to you? JN: Well, I took accounting and shorthand, typing. There really weren't any, like, HRtype, you know, ‘How to manage’ type. It was really just functional stuff. But I was always upset that in the typing class, there was one boy, and he got to be the person dictating the letters. I was like, “Why can't I dictate some letters, you know?” He always got to be the dictator, and I didn't think that was very fair, but I was happy that I could type really fast. LR: When you say typed really fast, what is your type speed? JN: Like 85, used to be. LR: Okay. When you graduated from high school, how many college credits did you have? JN: I can't remember. It would have been two semesters, so part-time for two semesters and one full-time semester, maybe. LR: That's still pretty good. JN: Yeah, I was a really hard worker. LR: Did you have any goals or plans when you graduated from high school, other than college? JN: Yeah. I loved working with the bank. When I was on the teller line—it was when people still walked into a bank to do their business, and I loved it. I love talking with people. I would have little old ladies come in once a month and I'd balance their checkbook for them. Or I would have construction workers all come in on a Friday. 8 All they wanted to do was cash their check and go spend it somewhere, and so they'd come in all sweaty and dirty, and it was just a good time. Everybody'd make a line around the lobby and wait to cash their check. I was actually in a robbery once; it was the teller a couple windows down. I got to experience what that was like. It was interesting. I saw people at their best and at their worst. You know, when you mess with somebody's money, they're not very happy, if something happens. The manager was Rosey, and he used to smoke a pipe. I used to love that smell. People don't do that kind of thing anymore. I loved balancing my drawer to the penny every day. I was really precise with everything I did and friendly and fast and people like that. Since I was trained for secretarial work, a job came up in commercial loans as a secretary. I got so excited. This is probably really sad for people listening, that I was so, so excited about a secretary job, but I applied for it, and I interviewed for it because I had my typing speed. I had my letters of reference and everything. I was probably 17 with a year and a half at the bank already. So I interviewed for it and they called me back and they said, you know, we're not going to hire you for this job, but we have another job that we'd like to offer you. It was in commercial loans, downtown Mesa in the big Valley National Bank building. They hired me to learn how to use a computer and to do all their word processing on the computer. It had a whole separate room for the printer with a sound cover because it was so loud. They hired me, and they sat me down with a stack of books to learn how to use the computer because nobody knew what to do with it. Everything was hotkey to get somewhere else. You had to learn all the hot keys, and everything was on floppy disks. I started doing word processing for their commercial loans, and the loan officers were handwriting everything on legal pads. There was one man who 9 used a manual typewriter, so he actually knew how to type his own, but it was a [imitates typewriter keys] clunk clunk clunk clunk clunk. So I started word processing these handwritten ledger pads of loans for businesses. Then one day, there was one of the loan officers that was really into technology. He's like, “Can you do an amortization chart on that? So we figured out how to write up an amortization chart, on the computer, and everything was new. I loved it. I would do my work so fast and I'd get it back to them all printed up. They were just in shock. It was all so new, and so I loved it. We had a dress code there. I had to wear heels and nylons and blouses, just like at the bank. It was professional attire, so I got to buy nice clothes. I got to work in a nice office. I bought a new car. I bought a 1985 Ford Mustang, brand new. It was pretty and blue and had a luggage rack on the back, just for those trips that you might take. I was working really, really hard. LR: And you were 17? JN: And still going to school. LR: When you got this job? JN: Yeah. LR: Wow. JN: I was there for about a year. I was two and a half years with the bank before I went into the military. LR: Okay. I have this strange question, but when you were going through—especially elementary school—did you ever do any of those duck-and-cover-under-your-desk drills? JN: We had fire drills. We didn't do the atomic bomb duck-and-cover drills. I think our teachers were probably too tired to do stuff like that, but we had fire drills. Probably not so often… 10 LR: Okay. The reason I ask: growing up during the Cold War like you did, I know that that was something that was common throughout school. I was wondering if you ever remember any of those, and if it happened. I don't recall it ever happening in junior high or high school. Did you experience that? JN: It was mostly fire drills, but in elementary school, or maybe junior high, we did have Arizona-specific topics that were covered, things like desert survival. I remember there were some lessons on what to do. It may have been a day, I can't remember, but I remember talking about stuff like that. We were right on the edge of the desert. LR: Okay. That makes sense. JN: We were required to learn our numbers and colors in Spanish, but beyond that, that was the end. We did have an introduction to metrics, which everyone promptly forgot. LR: Metrics as in…? JN: As in the metric system. At least, we were introduced: “There's this other system out there. It's called metrics, which the rest of the world uses.” That was about it. LR: All right. So after you graduate from high school, you have a really good job that you're obviously really enjoying. What prompted joining the military? JN: I grew up with my dad's family history, and it was the Cold War. It was the arms race, and there was WarGames, a movie probably a lot of people have seen. That was very real. It wasn't make-believe; this could happen. Growing up, we watched M*A*S*H almost every night: M*A*S*H and Lawrence Welk, and had the TV dinner for a time. My mom discovered TV dinners—and she was a really good cook, by the way, but she worked all the time and was tired. But it was the eighties, the arms race; global thermonuclear war was a real thing that could still happen. 11 I was working full-time. I was going to school and I was just tired. I didn't see where things were going. I was valued at my job. I had spending money. I think I was just bored. I knew there was another big world out there. I will want to mention: my mom was really a great mom. She was a widow. She took us to Washington, D.C. to visit the White House and visit the National Mall, and she took us to Mount Rushmore. We traveled and went to Disneyland. She educated us, and I think I just knew there was more out there. When I started working, my mom never sat down with me and told me, but I just knew that I needed to contribute. So when I started making money, I paid half the rent at 16. We had moved into a condo, and my sister and her husband had taken the house for a short time. So I was actually in Mesa, still in a condo with my mom, and I paid half the rent, and I bought groceries, and I was adulting, even though I lived with my mom. I just wasn't happy. So when I was working full-time at the bank, it was a full-time job with benefits and all that. I was really young: 17, 18. On my lunch break, there was a recruiting station with all the branches of the military that were there. I decided, “Well, I'm just going to start talking to each branch and see what you have.” I made it a goal to talk to each one of them seriously. So I went on my lunch break; I had a half an hour, so I beelined over to the recruiter's office. I knew I wasn't going to be a Marine. I knew I wasn't going to be in the Army. I wasn't sure about the Navy, but I sat and talked with each one of them. Actually my sister's friends, a lot of people I knew had already gone into the military. She had two very close friends that went in right away. One was a Marine; a female friend of my sister's went into the Navy. So I had sat down with each one of them, and the Air Force was the best interview that I had. 12 I finally asked them, I said, “So what type of jobs do you have?” I remember telling them, “I don't want to be cold. I don't want to be too hot. I don't want to be outside.” I said, “Do you have something that's inside where I can sit down and not be exposed to the elements all day?” I just wanted a job, but I don't want to suffer. Basically, I'm like, “I have a job already. What do you have that you can offer me?” They did offer, “Well, you could be a cook.” “No, no. What else do you have?” So I talked to them for a while. On the TV there is “Aim High, Air Force,” and there are lots of commercials all the time. It just was natural to think about joining. I actually joined without even telling my mom what I was thinking of, because she just raised us really independent. I just went home one day, I said, “Mom, I'm joining the Air Force.” They actually had a quota of women at the time, so they maxed out at 10% each year. I joined when I was 18, and then I went in in 1985. Then I had to wait until the next February in 1986, when they could start over again, because they were full of women right now. It was called the Delayed Enlistment Program. I signed up and then I waited. LR: That didn't deter you, having to wait? JN: No, I was excited about it. LR: Okay. That seems strange—only 10%? JN: 10% at a time, and jobs were limited then. They weren't as open as they are now. It was 1985 when I joined. LR: What was… I can't remember what it's called in the Air Force. It's MOS [Military Occupational Specialty] in the Army. JN: Yeah, AFSC [Air Force Specialty Code]. LR: Thank you. What was your AFSC? 13 JN: I can't remember when I found out what I was going to be exactly. When I signed up, they said, “Yeah, you can be a radio operator.” It was when I signed. So I was a radio operator, and 49251 was my AFSC. That was a ground radio operator in a little building. I went to Basic at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, and I believe it was a month—which the other branches will probably laugh at if they're listening to this because they had to stay longer. Air Force, I believe it was 30 days. I was in an allfemale flight, is what they're called. I believe there were 25 of us. It was all female and people from all backgrounds from all over the United States. It was really, really educating to meet people. I had never met someone from the hills, way backward from what I was raised as. Some people already had false teeth from whatever they had gone through. Being so young, people who are first-generation Americans were so excited to be there and worked so hard. There was one lady that joined just to have the jacket because back home, you weren't somebody unless you had your jacket that showed you were a veteran. There were people that were in Basic that shouldn't have been there, that didn't fully disclose their medical history. People who had had broken legs before and they found out and they said, “You're previously injured; you need to go back home.” They weeded out some people because of things like that. I almost got weeded out because I was a horrible runner. I didn't even think to practice running. I was just like, “I'm just going to do it,” and it was difficult. In Basic Training, you wear boots, and then you switch into tennis shoes to run. I sprained my ankle one day when I stood up in my tennis shoes because the support of your boots isn't there. I was heartbroken. I had to go to the clinic and they mentioned that I might have to be put on something called ‘casual,’ and that's where they just keep you until you're better. I didn't want to stay in Basic Training 14 any longer than I needed to, so I ran on a sprained ankle. I couldn't feel my feet when I did my test; I just ran and hoped that my feet were landing under me each time. It was really hard. It was kind of a different psychology. We were educated that we were a government property, and we got all of our shots. I have a yearbook that I brought that has pictures from it, and we all look miserable. You just get yelled at for a month. LR: You've already talked about this sense of culture shock, going from this little sleeper-town bedroom community, [and] all of a sudden you're in this all-walks-oflife, very structured, the time you wake up to the time you go to bed. Was there a sense of culture shock? JN: I think looking back on it, our home was very quiet; even though I didn't have a dad, I didn't have parents yelling at each other like other families, or a loud family. It was a very quiet household, so I had a very quiet life. When you go from that into everybody being yelled at, that was different. I was smart enough to know that there was an end to it. I just knew, “We're going to do it and it'll be done and move on.” I did have some bad experiences. One time I was going to eat; we'd line up to go eat and one of the—we called them technical instructors, TIs—he yelled at me and told me I didn't need to eat. What do you do with that? You sit down, you don't eat. There was weird, weird stuff that was over the line, looking back. I knew it at the time because it shocked me. Things like that. When most of us finished Basic, they kept some girls back. There was some investigation of something. Some things were strange. You just get through it. We did get mail from home, and I had mail from when I went to the San Diego Zoo with a girlfriend. They had gone through all my pictures looking for 15 something to yell at me about, and [it was] just zoo animals. What can you do with that? I think I got lucky. LR: Were your mom and your sister able to come out for that graduation from basic, or was it just, “No, you’re done.” JN: No, just done and go. LR: “Move on to your next.” JN: I'm glad you mentioned that. We were out at the flight line. You line up and you all graduate, and they kept us standing for so long. I'm a person who would always black out because I was really skinny, really thin, and it was hard standing for hours and not moving. It was really hard to stand on the parade grounds waiting. We had done a lot of physical stuff prior to that. They would load us up and make us carry things, and we had done the confidence course, where you run through the obstacle course and get yelled at. [Recording stops for a break] [Recording begins again] LR: All right, here's the question. I just thought of going through Basic, the all-female flight. Did you ever have any interaction with other flights? JN: Kind of. It was an all-women flight, and there was a door that was locked that men were on the other side of. Boys were on the other side of. I think there was some note-passing and maybe some people that got caught with notes, but they couldn't do anything else. What was discouraging—looking at the guys, because we'd see each other marching around, was when somebody has their head shaved, they don't necessarily look very good. Not everybody has a nice head. I was kind of surprised at how they didn't look so good. Everybody was tired and in Basic and getting yelled at. I did do something that was different for me. The smokers got to take a smoke break. Whenever the smokers said, “We need a break,” I'd be like, “Who 16 wants a break?” and so I'd go and stand with the smokers, even though I didn't smoke, because we got to get away for a couple of minutes. Even the bathroom was in and out. You couldn't even have any time in there. We had church, so everyone went to church, of course, because it was the only time you could sit and kind of close your eyes. LR: Did they have different denominations or was it just one? JN: I think it was just one, nondenominational. But I was Methodist, so I enjoyed it; I wanted to go to church. Everybody did a lot of praying, I think, so I enjoyed that. But my mom was a smoker, so I kind of grew up as a secondhand smoker. There's no way that I was going to start smoking, but I knew that they needed their breaks. That was kind of nice. I thought I was pretty smart figuring that out. The little things. LR: So from Lackland Air Force Base, where did you go for your next training? JN: Then I went to radio operations school. They call it technical school. Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi. It was very regimented because you're right out of Basic, and so we still had to march to class. We still could get in trouble and have extra duties assigned if we got in big trouble. I learned how to march and sleep at the same time. You get very good at sleeping while you're marching because you just kind of bump against each other as you march to school, so I could extend my sleeping time very well. Since I had been a competitive business person in high school, the first two weeks were too boring for me because for radio operators, you had to learn how to type, and there was no skipping. So I had to start at the beginning to learn how to type on a manual typewriter, which was fine. It was, “Pinky, pinky,” you know, “one-two-one-two.” I actually would sleep while we learned how to type and hopefully I didn't snore, but I was doing it, and I had my eyes shut, and I was sleeping. 17 The first two weeks were beyond boring. I couldn't hardly sit up in my chair and I asked to be advanced. “Who are you to be advanced, Airman?” So I did what I was supposed to do. Then we learned more interesting things about how radio frequencies work and how to use them and how to talk, how to write. It got really interesting after that. LR: Okay. How long were you at Keesler? JN: You know, I can't remember. It was probably at least a month or longer. It was a while. We had to learn our jobs, but I can't remember exactly... It was still in a very controlled environment. I can't remember if we had passes to go to the beach or anything like that. It was all just a continuation of Basic, pretty much. LR: Not being able to get out into the community very much, how was Mississippi a different type of culture from where you had been? JN: I can talk about it later because I went back. But as far as the culture, talking with guys and girls, it was all mixed now. You got to make new friends, just hear different stories. It was learning a job. I have a deep hatred for cigarette butts. We had to pick up a lot of cigarette butts from all those smokers or whoever was throwing them. I can't stand seeing a cigarette butt in the dirt. We had to maintain the grounds and do our chores and keep things perfect. Not a lot of fun at that time, but we didn't get yelled at so much because we were learning our job, you know? LR: Did it feel like a welcoming environment in the sense that it's only 10% of the work[force] of the military that is female? Did it feel like it was welcoming, or did it feel a little… I don't know. What was the feeling? JN: It just was what it was. I just remember being tired all the time and just learning new skills or sleeping while doing things. Always tired. LR: Is there a memory that stands out from Biloxi, from Keesler? 18 JN: Not at that time, but later. I have some really good memories from when I was more in the community. LR: All right. So, from Keesler—you had gone active duty, correct? JN: Yeah, I enlisted for four years with a defined job. At that time, I can't remember when we did it, but we did do a “dream sheet.” I don't know if those are still done or not, but it was a sheet of paper where they said, “If you can go anywhere that you want to go, where would you go?” You write down all of the places that you'd love to go. I wrote Germany, Italy; I wrote Panama, but I'm thankful I didn't go to Panama because it got really dicey. After that, I wrote all the foreign countries, lots of European countries, and then Panama. So I thought that was a wonderful opportunity that they gave us to choose if we wanted to leave the country or just stay in the country. That was a good thing that they did. LR: Okay. So typical for that type of ground radio school, like six to 10 months of recall. It's a long time. JN: No, it wasn't that long. LR: It wasn't that long? JN: No, because I was an operator, so the big thing was to learn how the frequencies worked and how to do basic troubleshooting to make them work. What different types of antennas were used and why? It was kind of like a ham radio. You have your radio and then a big old antenna out outside. That's what we were taught how to use. LR: From Keesler, did you have any more training after that, or were you sent to your first duty station? JN: I went to my first duty station and then later had more training for my second duty station. I went to… it was West Germany at the time, because it was still in the Cold War, and I was stationed at Zweibrücken, and I believe I had leave after tech. 19 school, so I did go home. I went to Arizona and visited my mom and my sister and my niece. Then I went to West Germany, Zweibrücken. Zweibrücken [Air Base] is not there anymore. It closed down in ‘91, I think, but it was on the French border. Kind of central Germany. It was a key base in World War II. It was on the Maginot Line, so lots of history. Used to be a Canadian base, so we had an ice rink. Canadians know how to build bases. So I was sent there as my first duty station. Of course, they train you on what you're doing and check you out, so I was trained. I don't know how long it took, but I know they showed me how to do everything and then signed me off on my education plan for my job. We had a radio station there that the purpose was to be a backup for headquarters in emergency action messages. Then we were a MARS station, Military Affiliate Radio System. I looked it up last night, and it's the Military Auxiliary Radio System now, so it still exists. There's ham operators that do the emergency communications; well, they interact with the military. We at Zweibrücken were the Gateway to Europe radio site, where the ham radio operators would connect to. If people needed to pass messages, we had a connection to a civilian ham system, and that was the MARS system. And we did teletype. After I was checked off on my education plan, we had all sorts of, “Welcome to Europe, you American kids,” and they told us what to do, what not to do, and gave us a clue about where we were living. We went through those training sessions. But once I was checked off on my job, I went to night shift. I was at Zweibrücken for two years and I had the night shift by myself, so I just did my job by myself. LR: So from 1987… JN: Whenever I got there in ‘86… LR: Oh, ‘86, okay. 20 JN: …through ‘87. It was two years total. LR: Okay, so you left there in ‘87? JN: No, I left there in ‘88, so ‘86, ‘87, ‘88—somehow that works out. I was there for two years. I had Basic, tech school, home on leave, first duty, stationed in Germany, and then was there for two years. LR: The reason I'm asking is we're getting really close to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. So I’m wondering how… JN: Well, I kind of have a better way to gauge it. Chernobyl happened— LR: While you were there? JN: Yeah. In April 86, Chernobyl happened. I had either just gotten there or I was there, because I made a decision to just eat canned food for a little while. Everybody kind of knew what was going on, just kind of packaged food. It was right when that happened because nobody knew where the winds were taking the radiation and things like that. LR: Did you notice a difference? I realize it's not exactly close to Ukraine, but… What am I trying to ask here? When I'm thinking of the atmosphere, I'm thinking of the mood of the base. Was there tension? JN: No. People didn't know. We didn't have social media like there is today. We would watch the news; people just didn't know what the literal fallout was. So I just, myself, without talking to friends or anything, decided I was going to be careful of the food I ate. We didn't change our habits other than my personal decision. It was an amazing place to be, aside from wondering if radiation was floating our way. I think people were happy to be there and excited. I was with an amazing group of people that I worked with that just took me under their wing. One of my coworkers who later became my NCIOC—Noncommissioned Officer In Charge, he was enlisted—when he was my peer, when I first got there, he took me to a concert 21 with his son and made sure I got out and did things. We went to Rod Stewart and Joe Cocker. We would go as groups on our days off with people I worked with or other people on base. We would do road trips to see amazing places that none of us ever thought we would have a chance to see in our lives. Every time we stopped by a World War II memorial, we'd stop and read about it, and learn about it. I have pictures standing next to all these World War II memorials. Do you mind if I keep talking about what life was like? LR: Oh, please. JN: So I lived in female housing. When I first got there, I did all my training, got signed off, then switched to night shift and just did my job, you know; didn't get yelled at anymore. I kept my fitness up. I'd go running because I wasn't going to go through that again, having a hard time. I knew I personally had to work on my fitness and be a better runner. I started going to school right away. I took a German class to make sure I could talk at the market. I took cultural anthropology. I'd view a cassette tape from the University of Maryland, and I did some other classes through City Colleges of Chicago. I think back on it, I did so many things. I don't know how I fit everything in. A friend of mine, we were talking and she's like, “You know, some people just waste all their money or save all their money. Let's do both. Let's save our money and see what's around here.” So there was four of us that would travel together, and it was me and a girlfriend, and then two guys, and I worked with one of the guys, and then she worked with the other guy. We were just friends, super innocent. We would coordinate our days off, and so I would finish a 12-hour night shift, like 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., and we would meet at the train station and just pick somewhere to go. I’d just sleep on the train and then arrive somewhere: “Where are 22 we?” and walked to whatever the castle was there. I have some really good memories of hanging out with that group. It was really, really cool. The guy that I worked with, his name's Alex; he is Greek, so we always went to the Greek restaurant, and the owner always spoiled him and spoiled us too. I don't recall ever having access to, like, military food. I always just cooked my own, or we would go out to eat. When we went out to eat, it would be for like 5 hours. So I just wouldn't eat that day or part of the day before that, so that I would have a good appetite. We ate some really good food. We always had schnapps or ouzo, finishing. We learned to really enjoy good meals, and thank goodness I exercised still [laughing]. We had a thing called Volksmarching. It was really popular. I always went Volksmarching, which was either a 10-kilometer walk or a 20-kilometer walk. A group of us, we would just go Volksmarching and talk for the hour-and-a-half, or two hours, I guess, when we did a 10K and get our little prize at the end and then a brat [bratwurst] and be happy. If I was sleeping in on a day that I had off—I would kind of switch to days—I had friends that would come bang on my door and say, “Come on, let's go Volksmarching,” and tell me to get out of bed and come on. So it was a really good, supportive, friendly group that you just did stuff with. I learned how to drink beer. I appreciate really good beer. Belgian beer’s the best, and I drank a lot of German beer. I was super skinny because I exercised all the time. If I wasn't Volksmarching, I'd get off work and go to aerobics, which was so fun. It started at seven, so I would run from getting off work and just kind of change and join the class really quick. It was ‘80s aerobics with the ankle warmers and the Jane Fonda outfits. It was really fun. It was me and a lot of spouses, I think, because I was on the night shift. 23 Just to back up—personally, as far as dating or things like that, when I told my mom that I joined the Air Force, she said something that kind of stuck in my brain. First she said, “Oh, they have nice uniforms,” so she approved of that. Then she said, "That's something I could never do.” There were women in the military in my mom's era, but it wasn't common. If you were a ‘good girl’, there was that stereotype. That implication kind of stuck in my head, to be a ‘good girl’, even though she didn't even have to say anything. When I first got to my first duty station in Germany, I chose not to be alone with any guys ever because I didn't want to get a reputation. I didn't know what to expect. It was all new. When I lived on base, it was in female housing. I do remember being struck by a lot of ladies that had morning sickness. There was pregnancy going on and people puking in their rooms each morning. That stuck in my head as, “I'm not going to be that person.” For the first six months, I just learned my job, did my job, got a good group of people, and then later I had a boyfriend. I was like, “Okay, I've been here long enough. I know these guys.” After my friends left, they went on to their next duty station, then it was like me and 10 guys. That was just the norm; I was just one of the guys, until I started dating one of them. LR: How long were you there before you started dating? JN: At least six months. My friends PCS'd to other places. But then I started dating. His name's John. Before I moved off base, they had run out of places to put people and offered housing. By that time, I had bought a salvaged car and sold my beautiful new Mustang back home. So I had a car and they offered housing, and I thought, “Oh, what a wonderful opportunity to live in a town off base and get paid to pay the rent.” So I immediately applied for that. I was like, “Get me into a little town!” I moved to a place called Kleinsteinhausen, which was about six miles away. It was the upstairs of a family's home that they had for military people coming and 24 going. It's a nice little—it had one bedroom and a little living room and was upstairs from a German military family. LR: I'm just curious, when you were living on base, were they all-female housing? Was it dormitories, like Basic? JN: Yeah, it was. It had single rooms that were about a twin bed length, so about six or seven feet wide and maybe 10 feet. Then we each had a sink, so we had running water, and then it was a shared bathroom for everybody. It was kind of like college dorms, I think, where it had the resident advisor who had a room where if you had something wrong, you'd go to the housing person to be like, “This needs attention.” We had inspections. We had to keep everything perfectly clean and neat. Some people would sneak boys in, and so the SPs, they would bring dogs through and scare all the guys out the window. “Flee!” I worked nights; I slept all day. There was one day when—anytime they did construction on base, they would find unexploded bombs—and they found a bomb outside my window and had evacuated everybody but me. So I slept through, and thank goodness it didn't explode. We exercised a lot. Did I tell you about that? It was the Cold War and arms race, and so we did what we call ‘exercises’ at least once a month while I was there. That involved playing war games. We were trained in chemical warfare. We would have to have our chem suits, which were pants and a big jacket, camouflage things and a gas mask, and everything was covered. We got used to running around in gas masks and sleeping in gas masks. We could do it, no problem. We could jump in and out of those things really fast, and we would have our main radio shop that was a closed building, you know, with security. We would have an alternate site that we would have a van—they call them a track van—that can be 25 transported. We'd have to practice setting up alternate radio sites for communications. It was routine to be playing these war games. One time I was making my way across base in the dark, because you don't want to get caught and killed, because they would ‘kill you’ and make you lay there all night with a sign saying, “I'm dead.” I was making my way across base, and somebody did a fake bomb next to me, which was like a huge firecracker boom right there on the ground. They didn't know I was there. From that experience, I learned I can fly. That went off right next to me. I was trying to sneak by a bunker where there were people, and I flew into the bunker, and they didn't know I was there. “The heck are you guys doing here?” and they were just as surprised as I was. I'm just like, “Oh,” and put my hat back on and kept going. Things like that, you just don't tell Mom back at home. But yeah, we just learned how to play war games. My boyfriend at the time was a master at getting around inspectors that were trying to test us. He knew how to skirt rules, of all things. But we played war games a lot. I actually lived off-base for a time when we were playing war games, and they tried to blow me up leaving base because they would let us go home. It was that common, so they blew me up driving off base. I'm like, “Bye, I'm not staying, you guys. That's really mean of you to blow me up.” They would throw a colored smoke bomb right at me and say, “You're blown up.” It just got to be where, you know, “No, I'm going home, and I'm going to go to sleep.” But I did get wounded. I was looking through a diary that I kept from that time, and I did get wounded at the radio shop on the job. They're like, “You have a 26 broken arm and a punctured lung, and you fix it.” So I was the injured person; stuff like that was interesting. Our first aid kit didn't have anything in it. I looked in my diary, we had like a stick, you know, for a splint. So I remember thinking, “Oh, how funny that is.” But really, when you look back on it, no, it wasn't very funny to have a first aid kit not stocked. Even though I guess we kind of all assumed that we would just die—as much as we [did] not like to, but it was just every month, and we just did it. LR: It becomes routine. JN: Yeah. LR: Living in the community, you mentioned how exciting that was. Did you feel more part of that community in the sense that you're living there, but you have to go on base—so you're living in a foreign country, but you’re going to an American base every day? JN: Yeah. I was adulting. Even though I was helping with the household bills with my mom, I had never lived on my own before. It was my first apartment; my first time buying oil for the oil heater for winter. The landlord, he would come to me: “Julie, you need to pay me this much money because I'm buying oil for the heat for your apartment.” You light the oil on fire and that was the heat. He had a big thing in the basement he showed me. So I was learning things like that. I learned he had a little son that lived on the same floor as me, you know; his bedroom door was on the same floor. He would do little kid jokes for holidays that I didn't know about. There was Witching Night, kind of like Halloween, so little kids do jokes on people, and he froze my car door shut with water. Like, “What?” and he's laughing. So you learn about the little kid pranks. I think Grandma was living there, and so it was the grandma and then the couple and then their son. Somebody was 27 a taxidermist at some point, so there were all these scary stuffed animals in the hallway. It was a really old house. It was a new experience. I'd go downtown a lot. I did all my shopping in the community and went to the markets and socialized with Germans. I was part of a club called the Kontact Club, which was the German-American Friendship Club. I learned about their families. I'd go to their homes with friends, and they’d talk about Uncle So-and-So, who was in the German military during World War II. This is what we think now. It was the older people. If an older person would meet me and I would say I was an American, they would want to make sure and tell me their story from World War II and how happy they were that I was there. There was so much respect for Americans, and they just wanted to say how thankful they were. Even though I was the next generation, they wanted to pass that on. LR: So you became part of the community? JN: Yes. LR: From what you're describing, it sounds like you immersed yourself in the culture that you were living in… JN: Totally. LR: …and you went to places that you might not ever get another chance to go to. Will you talk about that a little bit? JN: A lot of it has to do how I was onboarded with my shop. The people I worked with were all about getting out and seeing places and going places and doing things. But to my credit, the first week I was there—I didn't have a car yet—I decided I wanted to see the town, and Zweibrücken Air Base was on top of the hill from the town of Zweibrücken. So I decided, “Well, I'm just going to walk down to town and walk around.” While I was doing that, some tourist asked me for directions, and I didn't even know what to say. I must have just looked like an idiot because I was like, 28 “Well, I must be doing it right, because I look like I know where I'm going,” because I didn't want to stand out. So I just walked and I thought, “Well, I'll just walk until I get lost. I know if I go uphill, that's where the base is.” So I just walked around, got to know where things were. That was my first week there, because I was in Germany—whoever would have thought I would be there. As a base, one of the first things there was an organized activity called a ‘Castle Rally.’ One of the higher-up enlisted people was paired with me as a navigator, because we had a driver and a navigator. I think it was like a 100kilometer castle rally where we had to do a scavenger hunt. It was the culture to get out. So I went with this person who I had never met before because he had a car, and he drove, and he knew where he was going. I was supposed to help interpret the clues we'd get. It was a Castle Rally, so it was from castle to castle, because there's so many. Then you'd get to the castle, and then you had to find a certain place in the castle to get your next clue. We just ran around all day until whoever got to the end first won. I don't even know if there was a prize or anything. That was just the culture, just to get out. I did side trips. I signed up on my own to go on bus trips that were through the military. The MWR [Morale, Welfare & Recreation] office would organize recreation activities. There was a trip to Paris, and I took a trip to Paris and went to the Moulin Rouge, went all around Paris with the tour. I almost missed the bus at one point and thought I was going to get stranded, but I found it. I got lost in the Louvre. That's why I almost missed the bus, because I was looking at all the art. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. At that time, it was under construction. They were adding the pyramid feature that's there now, and so everything was kind of turned around and signs and things. 29 I met families that were on vacation, and I went to London with a tour group and went to a play to see “Cats,” and went around all the tourist destinations and came back and jumped into work the night that I got back. So I used all my time very well, but we worked really, really hard. Do you want to hear some work stories? LR: I want whatever you're willing to share. I would love to hear it. JN: It was a good experience. So back to radio operations and the MARS network. I loved it. If I was there on a Saturday morning finishing my shift and opening the network to the US, I would get the weather reports and log in all the ham operators dialing in. I think our military callsign with the MARS network was Alfa Foxtrot Alfa Seven Zulu Whiskey. So I'd be like this: “This is Alfa Foxtrot Alfa Seven Zulu Whiskey. Go ahead,” you know, and they would introduce themselves, where they're from, and I'd say, “How's the weather?” “This is the weather report,” just pretty brief. Then the next person would do a contact, and we had to log using Q and Z signals. It's an international communication code. We had to do our radio logs in Q and Z signals; our emergency action messages were only military. Those were all encoded, and we had a couple of different ways of doing encoding. We used a lot of different antennas. We had huge antennas. If you're driving along the freeway and you see really, really big antennas, that's one of them that I was using. It was called a monopole. Then we had a log-periodic antenna, which was really big also. That's what would bounce the radio waves across the ocean and back so we could communicate long-distance. We had a single sideband radio. I was required to have two frequencies up at a time. We had to have a primary and a secondary because we were backup for the command post. I think I had at least four radios, and they were always breaking. 30 There was always something wrong. These were World War II equipment we used KWM-2As, which are commonly called K-2s, which is what people used World War II in Vietnam. We used those, and they had the tubes in them, like the old TV tubes. Crystals, kind of like fuse breakers for your car, are what a crystal looks like. That was part of our onboarding; we had to learn how to make these things work. I have a really funny story—well, I think it's funny. I worked night shift; one night, there were two radios broken, then my secondary backup radio broke. So when that was gone, you had to call in and say, “Hey, I don't have a secondary.” “Yeah, yeah, we're fixing something else somewhere else. We'll write it down. Good luck.” Then my primary went, and I thought I was going to get court-martialed or whatever they do to people that don't do their jobs. So I called up maintenance or job controls, what they called it. I say, “I just lost my primary radio. I don't have any radios and I'm a radio operator. Can somebody come help?” They're like, “Yeah, we have higher priority than you right now. We'll get to you when we can.” I had terror in my bones. My adrenaline was going. All I remember was, “I am going to make this work.” So I opened up the K-2 case and started switching things around, scavenging from one and putting it in the other one, trying, swapping parts out, turning it off, turning it on—which is what maintenance always says to do. So off and on, nope, off and on, nope, still didn't work. So I unplugged it. I just remembered growing up, we had a tube TV that we always had to hit to make it work again. I had tried everything. I had swapped antennas. So I got into our toolbox, which had one thing: it had a hammer. I'm like, “This better work.” So here I am, destroying government property. I whacked that sucker as hard as I could, the whole thing. Like, “This is it,” and it started working. So I called him back. 31 I'm like, “I fixed it, guys, now I have one.” I was so proud of myself. I got through that night. Some nights it would be really quiet, and I have a couple of things I'd like to share that are really fun. There was another radio operator somewhere else—I never found out who he was—that could do voices, he could do impressions. One time he came on as the president, President Reagan. He'd just get everybody cracking up. He did Reagan one time, you know: [imitates the operator imitating Reagan] “Loud and clear,” however he does Reagan. Just got everybody cracking up. So every time somebody would come on to do their radio check, they'd be laughing still. One time it was so quiet, there was no noise to even tell you had a frequency up. If you switch your radio dial, you hear static or something. There was no noise one night, so I had to keep checking to see if I was on frequency. He did Elmer Fudd, and he did a, “Be wery, wery quiet. I’m hunting wabbits,” and it happened to be at a time when all the radio checks were late. I think it was so quiet, somebody went to sleep or something. He came on and he woke everybody up doing Elmer Fudd. It was so funny. I would listen to… what is it called? Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, which is a government program broadcasting to other countries. So I would dial into that, and it was very interesting. I tried to get news from that. If I had my other radios working, I would see how far I could receive from. One time I got Argentina, and I was like, “Wow, I got Argentina,” and we had single sidebands. I tried to dial in stuff from eastern countries and see if I could hear anything. It was not part of my job; I just was curious and it was awesome. How often do you get these huge radio antennas to listen all over the world? I would listen to a French radio station all the time. I would dial into that. I had some music that I would play. I loved my job. 32 LR: It sounds like it. JN: The teletype that we did, it was kind of like in the old movies where you see the switchboard operators where they're plugging in the big wall. We had a big wall of connectors that we had to do, and it was all teletype. It was really good at processing teletype messages. LR: One more question before we move on. I know you left in ‘88—probably the early part of ‘88 when you left—but were there any signs at all that things were starting to change, that the political environment was shifting? JN: Well, there's a famous thing on the news with Reagan, you know: “Gorbachev, tear down that wall.” I can't remember if that had [happened]. That was probably later after I left. I wanted to go see the Berlin Wall, but I was told that I wasn't allowed because of my security clearance. They just weren't going to allow me to go there, but we would go everywhere else. There were places that you just didn't go without permission. You didn't go near that. It was really a lot of history from what had happened. I learned what the communities were like when they had concentration camps in the communities. They're like, “We just didn't know.” So I heard what happened. Once they knew, everybody had to march through the camps. I was being educated on stuff like that. I learned the signs above the gates: “Arbeit macht frei,” is because people were worked to death. You know, “Work makes you free.” I learned that the autobahns were made by prisoners who worked to death to build them. We learned a lot about the history. The global thermonuclear war, it was just an arms race. That's just how it was. Everybody was just ‘exercising’ all the time. LR: That's just interesting. JN: Wild. It's strange what you get accustomed to. 33 LR: It is true. Looking at the time, it's almost 6:00 PM. Do you want to keep going for about a half an hour, or do you want to call it for tonight? JN: I'd like to share—I went back to Biloxi. LR: Okay. Did you go back after…? JN: Zweibrücken? Yeah. LR: Okay. That was for your next gig station, right? JN: We could finish that real quick. LR: Were you PCSing, or did you actually decide to change your... JN: I loved my job so much that I wanted to be an officer. I wanted to stay in the military. I wanted to make a career out of it. I was told that if you're going to be a career person, you need to have a short tour at least once in your career. So I thought, “I'm not married. I don't have any kids. I'm gonna do my short tour now.” At that time, there were ways where you could request where to go. LR: What's a short tour? JN: A remote tour, like a one-year tour. LR: Right. JN: So if you were married, it was unaccompanied. It was remote. So I thought, “Well, I've got my long overseas tour done.” Two years was long. I said, “I want to do a short tour because I'm going to make this career. I'm not married. It won't impact much. I’ll just go.” There was some kind of a board where things were posted, and I saw that there was an opening in Sicily. I volunteered to do a short tour to Sicily, and to go to Sicily, I had to have a higher security clearance. So I had to have a top secret, which took about a year to get. I had to be sidearm-qualified, and I had to learn Morse code, so I had to go back to technical school and learn Morse code in Biloxi, Mississippi. I'm saying it that way for a reason—Mississippi. That's how people said it. 34 LR: So that's what sent you back to Biloxi, and this was in 1988? JN: This was ‘88. It was awesome. I loved learning Morse code. I was so excited about my job. I was going to go to Sicily. Holy cow! Whoever would have thought that I could go someplace? It seems so far away and so wild that I would have an opportunity to go there on the Mediterranean. Greece is over there. All these things [were] going through my head. So I went back to tech school to learn Morse code. I was so excited. I was either the first or one of the first to finish Morse code school. LR: First females? JN: No, sorry, in my group, because you just had to stay there till you got it. You had to learn it. LR: Okay. You could not leave until you had. JN: Right. You had to pass a certain speed. I finished in record time: six weeks, I think, something like that. It was really great. I loved it. We would do Morse code all day. One of the guys that was in school with me, right off the bat, he goes, “Hey, do you like to dance?” “Oh, sure, sure.” He's like, “I love to dance; I need a dancing partner.” This guy, there was never anything between us. Totally platonic. We would go to dance lessons every Thursday night at Johnny Joe's in Pascagoula. We didn't have any money, so we bought one beer, and that was it. We danced all night, and then before the next lesson, we'd go down to the beach in Biloxi and dance. It was so fun. He said that he was going to be a pastor, so he had dropped out of theology school or something. He said, “Do you want to try different churches out with me? I just want to see what everybody's talking about.” So every Sunday we'd go to a 35 different church and just see what they were talking about. It was incredible. I loved it. Learned how to shoot a .45, and so I qualified right away. No problem. I actually got a marksmanship ribbon. Because I was an archer I knew how to aim. I had already had a marksmanship ribbon, but now I had this. This old teacher was always drunk. He was a civilian that taught Morse code, probably from World War II. He'd prop himself up on his stool like he was drunk, and he'd teach us more Morse code. It was great. He'd talk about shrimping, and he’s like, “I got to go shrimping.” We'd be done on time. The next day he'd tell us about the shrimp that he caught and have his little drink. LR: So you were actually able to go out? JN: Yeah, so it was a lot different than the first time I was at Biloxi. This guy that liked to dance, we would go to the Zydeco festivals where they would play the accordions, do Zydeco music, and have gumbo. Once the older men saw that I could follow them, they just kept me dancing the whole time I was there. So I danced, and then some other old man would say, “Come dance with me.” He’d spin me around, and I just had so much fun. It was incredible. Good people; tried food I never thought I'd try, never could imagine. Beautiful. It was still Hurricane Andrew—I think it was Andrew. The stories from the cleanup from Hurricane Andrew were still on the minds of people, in like ‘81, maybe. LR: In the ‘80s. Not Camille? JN: No, it was Andrew. They were still talking about, “Well, disasters happen, and it happened here.” There's still some things that weren't fun to talk about. But I did my job and had the evening off to go have fun. LR: How long were you at Biloxi this time? 36 JN: I think it was six weeks. Looking back, I should have stretched it out, but I was just excited. I wanted to go on leave and go visit my mom and sister. I wanted to get to my next base and see new things. LR: Of course. Why not? JN: Yeah, it was an amazing time of life. I would have been 21, maybe, so I was young. LR: Wow, already so much life experience. JN: Yeah, right? You know, before that I learned how to ski in the Alps. LR: Oh, geez. JN: I was doing everything, just trying everything. LR: So it was more than just a career. JN: I wasn't doing everything, but I was trying new things. LR: Yeah, that is really cool. JN: Yeah, and working very, very hard also. LR: Sounds like it. Just a couple more questions. Coming home and going home and visiting your mom and sister: was that a good thing, to be home? JN: Yeah. The second time I was able to go home, I remember for some reason, we went to my mom's family—we were up in South Dakota, and my mom's from a ranch family in South Dakota. A lot of my cousins have served on my mom's side. We visited my uncle Dennie, who was a signalman in World War II. He was so proud of me; he just gushed all over me. He wanted to hear everything that was happening. He had met his wife in Germany. My aunt was German, and she was one of the secretaries that he met and married her and brought her to the ranch back home. They wanted to hear everything that I could talk to them about. They made me put my uniform on and take pictures with everybody. It's a real special occasion. My uncle Dennie was so proud of me. It was sweet. LR: So it was a good trip home? 37 JN: Yeah. LR: Okay. That's awesome. Then you were able to go to Sicily? JN: Yeah, then I PCS’d—Permanent Change of Station—to Sicily from leave. I went home on leave and then went to my new duty station. LR: Are you okay if we pick up from there next time? JN: Yes. Thank you. LR: No, thank you! Like I told you, this is the first time I've heard a story like this where there's so much that’s interesting. It’s not just, “I’m here, I’m doing my job, I’m bored.” You're going out, you're experiencing, seeing things, and you're so young. JN: Right? LR: It's just amazing. Part 2: February 17, 2023 LR: All right. I'm going to do another quick introduction. Today is February 17, 2023. We are continuing our interview with Julie Newland. We're just going to jump right back into where we were. We were still at your first duty station, and now I can't remember the name of the base. JN: Zweibrücken, in Germany. LR: Thank you. You wanted to talk about what the mission was at your first base? JN: Zweibrücken was in West Germany because there were still East and West. I was there 1986 to 1988. The mission was a reconnaissance base. We were in the communication squadron—the 2143rd Communications Squadron of the 26th Tactical Reconnaissance Wing. We had our F-4C phantom jets that were equipped not with bombs, but with cameras. They were long-range reconnaissance jets. When I was there, there were a lot of sorties, which is where they're taking off all the time, going places, and coming back. To this day, I love the sound of jets. It's the sound of freedom, right? I love it if someone complains in front of me about the 38 jets’ noise from Hill Air Force Base here in Utah. I'm like, “No, no, no, no. It's the sound of freedom.” So I got to where I love that sound. It was a recon base and a supply base. We had little planes called Sherpas that were fun little boxy boat-looking planes. Those would move supplies around, and that was the mission. We were part of NATO operations. When we were doing exercises, occasionally those would be international exercises, and they each had a name to them. There were some small exercises all the time, and then bigger joint exercises that were out in the fields and pretty intense. LR: Is there any other story you want to share before we move on? JN: Yes. So in Germany, I talked a lot about the good things, and it's easy to reminisce about lots of good things. I talked about how it was my first time away from home. I was able to go back after tech school and back between PCSing to my next station. But the reality was, my sister was going through a divorce, so she was writing to me about hard times that she was going through. My mom's sister died, who I was close to. I just wasn't able to be there for things going on, and just making a phone call wasn't really an option. I have some letters from that time. It was really hard for them back home. Even though I wasn't making much money, I wrote in my diaries that I was sending money home and thinking about how I could help during that time. Holidays, you just get used to it and deal with it. If I was working a shift all alone on Christmas or Thanksgiving, that's just the way it was. When I talked about the guys that I was friends with, for a while, I was one of just a bunch of guys. But the reality is, the common way a woman was referred to was ‘bitch’. If I was hanging out with the guys and they were referring to someone on TV or walking down the street, that would be the name the woman would be called. I started to observe things like that, which was different. I grew up in an all-female household 39 and in school, no one would say something like that commonly. I had a thick skin, but it was enough to where I wrote about it in my diary. Two decades later, I'm still friends with one of the guys I wrote about saying that so often. He was actually shocked. He's like, “Really?” I'm like, “Yeah,” and I read to him out of my diary: this is how you referred to women back then. It's interesting how you know people for so long, and if somebody writes stuff down, it's like, “Oh, probably didn't want to know that.” But the things that we accept as normal are really weird through the years. I noticed that reading back through my diaries, I dated a guy that was kind of the rebel of the guys dorm. Actually, my friend I was talking about never understood why I was with him, but he was like the bad boy. I wrote in my diary about how I was so in love with him and that I had told my mom I wanted to marry him. Then through time, I started noticing how he spoke to me. So my diary, it's interesting. It changes where I start becoming aware of how I'm being treated. When I talk about going to Paris—I hadn't recalled this before—but in my diary I said that we had broken up and there was no way I was going to be alone on Christmas on a day off. That's why I went to Paris. I just signed up with a tour and went alone. You know, there were things that the guys would all do as a group that I was completely not invited to because they were just going to go get in trouble and drink and get in fights. Even though I was part of [it], that was my friend base, it was definitely different. Some of the other things that I want to make sure and bring up is, there was an occasion where people had medical emergencies, you know, things happened. But I had a friend who had an abortion on what you say is ‘the economy.’ She had a German doctor do her abortion and yelled at her the whole time. That was 40 something that she didn't share with the military; her entire situation was just off the books. I talked about at work how things would be so quiet that I couldn't even tell my frequency was dialed in. But it could be the opposite also, where there would be storms over the ocean and the frequencies would be really hard to listen through. So if you can imagine being in a 10 by 10 sealed room with static blaring at you for 12 hours, that was often the case, and so it was at Zweibrücken that I went to the doctor. I said, “I have this ringing in my ears. I don't know what that is.” I get paid now for tinnitus and have hearing aids because of that. For the rest of my life, I have a friend in my ears ringing at me. So, you know, there was just life. Life was happening, good and bad. There's a lot of really good memories for sure. LR: So I have two questions: did you ever know the pay discrepancy? Were you paid less than your male counterparts? JN: You know, I've been thinking about that. I don't know that I was. I haven't looked this up, but I was thinking that I should mention to you that even though I joined with college credit behind me, it was never offered that I could go in as a higher rank because that was a thing. You could go in with a stripe or two, depending on how much education you had. You couldn't be an officer because you didn't have a bachelors, but as enlisted, there were perks like that. So I went in with nothing. I had a little bit of college anyway, and I joined in advance. But I didn't know anything about that, so being able to negotiate something like that or represent myself to a recruiter as something that I should deserve wasn't part of the conversation. I did look up how much I was paid in my diary, and it was about $900 a month. I can't remember if that's take-home or not, but out of that, back then when the GI Bill was offered, you had to pay for the first year of your service into it. It was $1600 total for the first year, which is a lot of money. That amount each month was 41 taken out of my paycheck. I actually compared that to my full-time work working for the bank, and it was probably about half of what I was earning as a new employee, working a couple of years. But the lowest level employee working for the bank was about half. I did do things, like I saved up for six months to buy a camera. That's back when they did rain checks, so it took me six months to buy a camera. I was able to buy my car, which was a salvage, so that was a lot of money. Then I was able to send a little bit home, so it all worked out. LR: My last question before we move on—and you don't need to answer this if you don't want to. I was wondering: you said you had a thick skin, but having never been referred to in that way before, would they just say that about other women, or would they refer to you? JN: Other women. LR: So never to you? JN: Never to me, because I was one of the guys. It was like I wasn't even there. I was Julie. It was weird. When I noticed it, it was weird enough to where I wrote about it. LR: That is interesting. JN: Yeah, and the thing is, I was so young. I was 19 when I was with my first group of friends. The other thing about when you're first in the military is you get used to making friends and then seeing them leave. So like I said, that was my first group of friends, and then when they left, I got with the bad boy, and he eventually wrecked my car and got kicked out of Germany. That was good for me. I guess I got off with a good deal. LR: All right. Thank you for sharing all that. When we left off, you had gone home for leave before you went to your next duty station, which you said was in Sicily. JN: Yes. LR: What was the name of your next duty station? The next base. 42 JN: Comiso Air Station, and it's C-O-M-I-S-O Air Station, Sicily. Before I went to Comiso, I flew back to Germany because I had my car and my belongings because I lived in Europe. I was PCSing from Germany to Sicily. My friend Bob, he said, “Julie, I'm going to drive with you down to Sicily.” So he actually came with me, and he was my best friend—and spoiler alert, my second husband later in life. But he made sure I got down to Sicily because even though I could drive my car just fine or read a map, I wasn't going to go alone. So he just said, “I'm going with you to get you to your next base.” We took a week and went through Switzerland, went through Luxembourg, went through Pisa, stopped at the Vatican, went to the Sistine Chapel, got robbed at the Sistine Chapel. Let's see, the funny thing back then was there was no Google Maps. There was a map and signs… I just looked back and I just shake my head. We were trying to find… What's the town starts with the P? With the volcano. LR: Pompeii. JN: Pompeii. We're trying to find Pompeii, and the little turkey kids—little shits had changed all the signs to make the tourists go round and round and round and round in circles so we never could find Pompeii. We were both so mad, and the little kids, you know, a big group of kids ready to steal from you if you stop the car. We're like, “This can't be happening. It's got to be here somewhere. Where is Pompeii?” So we never get to stop at Pompeii because we were there, but all the signs were wrong. All the little kids started running saying, “Hey, we got one!” you know, so we got out of there. We spent the night at the ferry and took the ferry at Reggio Calabria and then on to Sicily. Drove me in and checked me in. It was an incredible, incredible trip. The base that I went to was an old World War II landing strip, and the wing there was the 487 Tactical Missile Wing. It was a nuke base. We had missiles that 43 are called GLCMs: Ground Launch Cruise Missiles. Those had nuclear warheads that could be steered to many places from Sicily: they could reach Africa, could reach Russia, could reach a lot of places from Sicily right on the Med. I volunteered to go there, and I knew what I was getting into. I was such a geek that I read a book that I'll never forget called The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces. It was the height of the Cold War, and so I went there with my own understanding from reading that book that the nuclear arms race was like a poker game, is how it referred to it. To keep the peace, you had to have equal build-up. That's how the Cold War was escalating, with the arms build-up. So I went through with that understanding that I was going to a nuke base, and my job was to work on a network called the Cemetery Network. If you can imagine in the movies, you have the two people in the missile silo in the farmlands of North America ready to turn the key. LR: Right. JN: Well, instead of having that missile, we had them on trucks. We had small missiles, and a lot of them that could be deployed. They were moving targets with nuclear warheads on them. The World War II part of the base was [that] the 82nd Airborne had landed to liberate Italy on the beach near Gela. The people of Sicily—like many, many people of Sicily—loved us being there. It was not Mussolini. It was the end of fascism. It had only been 40 years since the end of World War II, so a lot of people had really good things to say about Americans. But we had nukes there, so there were people that didn't like that also. There was actually a town called Vittoria that was right next door to Comiso. They had painted really big signs that they were the denuclearized zone, that they were not into what was going on over there. So when I got there, we had briefings 44 about the cities. At that time, there were mafia killings that were happening. The judges were taking down the mafia families, and so the judges were being killed on the freeways. I hope I have that right. That's how I remember it. So, we were briefed not to look American, not to drive through Gela at that time. There were towns that we were not allowed to go to, and being a woman… Fortunately, I spoke a lot of German by then, so I could just be a German tourist at the market. That's how I would go shopping. At first, I would just be a German tourist, so I could blend in better, I think, than a lot of the guys, which is kind of nice. LR: All right. I should have written it down. I get so caught up in listening. JN: You do the same thing as me. LR: Let's see, you talked about being in the 487th. Were you doing the same job as you were at? JN: Yeah. I was in the 487th Tactical Missile Wing, and my squadron was the 2189th Communication Squadron. So I had to learn Morse code. I had to be sidearmqualified to go there. I had to have a top-secret security clearance, and all that took—I used to tell myself about a year—to just get all of that in line. It was a big deal to go there, and so I did everything that was required. I got there. We were required to live on base. When I first moved there, the radio shop was at the end of the old flight line. It was just kind of a shack. Not even hardly secure. Two, three months after, they actually had built what they called a “nuclear-hardened’ radio building. It was the arms race, right, and usually communications are one of the first things to take out. So we moved from the end of the runway to this big block structure where it was halon entry and double-coded. It was like going into a vault, a big vault, and so we were just sealed inside a big 45 cement box when we went to work. It was about the same size as a shop, but it was all Morse code. I loved it. I was really good at learning new things and doing that. LR: Okay. What time did you get there? In late ‘89 or ‘90? JN: In 88, so the end. LR: Oh, that's right. JN: Time flies. The fall of ‘88, I got there. I can't remember what month, but I know in my diary, I talked about moving into the new building about November. I made friends really fast. I hooked up with one of the guys building the building, and he was a great kisser. You know Jim? LR: Yep. JN: He was sweet. Yeah, I was young, so fabulous friends, just fit in right away. I loved shopping on the economy, the Mediterranean diet. Everything's fresh. I want to talk a little bit about my roommate, too, and I want to kind of talk about good and then bad, so maybe I should wait. But there were lots of really good things, lots of wonderful people. I was able to travel around. I brought some photos to show you of just traveling around the area, seeing Greek ruins, hearing stories from people in the winter. I went skiing on Mount Etna. You know, you don't ski on an active volcano very often! And just hearing stories: one day I was driving—and just to preface this, I would usually go somewhere with someone with me. It was still quite conservative, and being a female alone, people looked at you like, “Who are you and why are you alone?” But one day I was out just looking around, and there was a place on the beach that sold statues. You know, lots of white, big white statues; I thought, “Oh, let's stop and look.” So I just pulled in, and I was the only one there. The man who ran the place came out. He was so excited to see me. He said, “Are you American? Are you at the base?” 46 “Yeah, yeah.” Now, you'd probably be like, “What do you want from me?” But in a place like that, they're just happy to meet an American. He was of the World War II age, so he actually invited me in for tea. He was like, “Would you please sit and talk with me?” I'm gonna cry because of that, but people did stuff like that. They wanted to tell you how grateful they were for you to be there. It was incredible. It was really incredible, being in a place like that and hearing stories from people like that. But I do have bad to talk about. LR: Before you do, I wanted to ask what your favorite memory is of that time. JN: Yeah, I have a really good one. Thank you for saying that. So when I was with Jim, the good kisser—I'll have to reach out to him and let him know I talked about him. He was part of an E&I team. I think that means Equipment and Installation. They would travel around, build stuff, and then go somewhere else and build stuff. So when his team was there, I think that they had a rental that they were staying in near the beach. We could see the beach from there. He was usually at my little place, you know; I had a bunk bed. We were young and skinny and both of us could fit in a bunk bed, so he was usually at my place. One time I went on a day off, weekend or something with their team, and they had a big celebration at their place by the beach. The landlord almost wouldn't let me stay. I had to swear that we were married. LR: Oh, no. JN: She was like, “No, no, you are not to be here.” I had to swear to her that I was married to him and it was okay. I am so sorry. I don't like to lie, but it was a really long way, and nobody wanted to take me back to base either. But there's always wine, there's always something like that. What I remember as the best thing was we woke up in the morning really early, right as the sun was coming up, and we had the Kokomo song, "Way Down in Kokomo," and we used to replace Comiso with 47 that: “Way Down in Comiso.” They just turned it up really loud and we all just kind of looked out over the Mediterranean. I actually have a picture of it in my album. I do have another thing that's really positive that I'd like to mention. When I went there... I'm trying to preface it so it makes sense. I was given the collateral duty of being the historian for the squadron. What that meant was I was given a scrapbook. I didn't know anything to do with it. I didn't know who, nothing was labeled. Just pictures of probably when the base was opened in 1983. So it was, what, five years of unlabeled photographs by that point? I think that started the conversation about me getting a pass to take pictures on base, which was huge. You weren't allowed to take pictures on base. You'd get jacked up and your camera taken away. But my Captain Hess was a photographer. He loved taking photographs. He's like, “Julie, I'm going to get you a pass. We're going to document the GAMA [GLCM Alert and Maintenance Area],” which is where they stored the missiles. I'm like, “Yeah!” So he actually got me a pass to photograph on base, and we went in. This is such a long story, I'm sorry. We made a date, and I dressed in civilian clothes on a day off and went in. It was the highest security I've ever been through in my life. Everything was searched. He's like, “Don't move fast at all. Just move very, very slow.” We went in, we were told what we could and could not photograph, and we did it. Then when we went out, they confiscated our film. So, I never saw the pictures, but maybe one day, somebody is looking at the drawdown of the base, I had gone through with my captain and documented how it was. LR: Interesting. JN: It was pretty cool because the GAMA was in its own secure area inside the base. The base was secured by the Italian Carabinieri, the elite police. Then the GAMA was another double-fenced secure area within the secure area. It was interesting to 48 be in there. But through the photography pass and things like that, I made friends with the civilian photographer on base. By that point, I had taken photography since I was in seventh grade. It was my thing. I was talking to him and he's like, “I have a darkroom at my house you can use.” I'm like, “Yeah!” I would go to his house and process my photographs and get to know his family. They had me over for supper and everything was in Italian, so I didn't really understand anything, but hopefully I made a good impression on them. I think I did, because he wanted to matchmake me with someone when he knew I was getting out of the military. He wanted me to stay there, and that was interesting. I told him no. When I told my sister, she's like, “Tell him I'm interested. I'll go there.” But anyway, I made friends, you know, had a wonderful family that welcomed me in. I never understood why I wasn't questioned about using a photography darkroom off-base. I always thought of all the things, somebody should ask me about that. But I have some really cool photographs that I made from then. He actually had a studio in his town in Pedalino, and he displayed some of my photographs. It was pretty neat. LR: That's pretty cool. JN: Yeah. But anyway, photography was a wonderful thing to do. I had a friend, Paul; we did a documentary video. We just put it in the back of my car and drove around town. I need to dig that out. But that was fun, showing my mom what it was like to drive in Sicily. I think she enjoyed seeing stuff like that. LR: Yeah, I bet. So did you re-enlist before you went or while you were there? Or did you re-enlist? JN: No, I was on a four-year enlistment, so my total service ended up being about three-and-a-half plus years. Before I kind of get into everything, it was during a time 49 of cutbacks. There was the buildup of the Cold War and then the takedown right around that time. So in Congress, it was the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings [Balanced Budget] Act that was allowing people to get out early. People that were waiting to retire, some of them could get out a little bit earlier to free up money and a position for other people. Bases started closing around that time, so I did not have an opportunity to re-enlist. LR: All right. I don't really have a question. I'm just going to let you tell your story. JN: Okay. So I try to talk about the good, and then I want to talk about the bad because that impacted the rest of my life. So the thing about Comiso was I was told before I went there that it was a drinking base, and I didn't know what that meant. A friend that had come from there in Germany, he's like, “Just start drinking now.” I was like, “What?” and I didn't really listen to him. I was like, “Whatever,” you know. But it was a “drinking base.” Drinking was… Everyone drank too much. I'm not kidding. I'm going to just generalize: everyone drank too much. When I was living there, it was still really high-alert type stuff. Our country had bombed Libya a couple of years prior, so everybody was just waiting. “Okay, when are we going to get it?” because we were right across the ocean from Libya, and they had little missiles. We had big ones, but they could shoot them over the Med at us, you know? So all of the artwork and things that were in people's windows were kind of a “Fuck you, Libya.” They and Russia: it wasn't just the Red Threat, it was those guys right there are going to get us. It was high-stress. People had to leave their families to go there. So, I would tell myself this: it must be island fever. My roommate Tina, who's still my friend, had to leave her newborn baby and her husband at the time. She would just kind of go away once in a while, and then she'd come back, just kind of get it out of her system. She had 50 pictures of her baby next to her bed, and I got to meet him later in my life. So it was pretty cool, but she had to leave her baby. A lot of adultery. There was someone who became my friend. He was my senior master sergeant. We were from the same hometown from Mesa, Arizona. In talking, I found out—well, I was going to go back home and he was getting ready to retire, so he shared some things with me that he probably wouldn't have with other people: how they wouldn't let him retire, that they were keeping him there longer, and it was really hard on his family. I can't remember, it may have been his second or third year there. He had been there a while and they wouldn't let him leave, so psychologically, it was pretty wacky. My really good friend Paul, he and I, you just help each other. Even though he wasn't my boyfriend or anything, we would give each other massages because that's just how you had to get through. I hope he doesn't mind me telling this story. I remember yelling at him one night when I was giving him a massage and I counted like 80 knots in his back. LR: Oh, wow. JN: I'm like, “Paul, look at this.” I just started counting and pressing on each knot. He worked in COMSEC [Communications Security] and did a career in communication security. He actually invited me to a stress management class on base, and that was the best thing ever where they just had a dark... There was nothing called stress management at the time, so I was like, “Yeah, that sounds really good.” I went and we laid on the floor in a dark room, and it was the first time I could shut my eyes and relax. Even though we were in such a beautiful place with beautiful people, it was very wild. The gate would be protested fairly frequently, so we would literally be locked in because they would say, you know, “Nobody is going in or out. There's a 51 protest at the gate.” That was just the way it was. As far as food, we weren't supposed to, but we cooked in our rooms. We had a little hotplate and a little fridge. When I went to look at food to buy on base, it was all moldy and disgusting, so I never went back there. There was probably a burger place, but I don't remember getting food there. Anyway, we would just try to help each other out, but it was highstress. The thing that I'm avoiding talking about is what I'll get into next. LR: Before you do, let me ask you this quick question. You said everyone drank. JN: Yeah. LR: Does that mean even the higher-ups? JN: Well, obviously, I don't know about my commander or people like that, but I'll give you an example of how it was condoned. LR: Okay. JN: I went to my first and only toga party there in my life, and, you know, it was Sambuca. Oh, Lord. Drinking shots of Sambuca and “jungle juice.” Coolers of jungle juice, which is fruit and every type of alcohol thrown into a cooler and all mixed together. I had too much to drink. I went back to my room the next day when I got up and pretended I was not one of theirs; the higher-ups were walking around. I peeked in, and we had a day room which had a kitchen. Everything was wet with beer, soggy, like it had been flooded with alcohol. They let it happen. That's how they let people be. They just drank a lot, and so they were there the next morning trying to figure out who they were going to grab to clean it up. That's just how things were. LR: Okay, not “How do we stop this?” “How do we clean it up?” JN: Well, that was my impression. Alcohol was just free-flowing. Thankfully, we had amazing food to eat. We would still go out in groups to have wonderful meals in the community, many courses of amazing Mediterranean food. 52 LR: Okay. Sorry, I didn't mean to hijack what you were trying to get to. I was just curious. JN: No, I learned what a drinking base means. I'm gonna back up. I talked about some good experiences. My welcome on the job was to be assaulted. The very first week I was on the job, I was assaulted. I always thought that since I wasn't raped, that it wasn't anything that I should share. But we didn't have words to use back then; we didn't have harassment. We didn't talk about assault, you know? So my welcome to Comiso was basically to be put in my place, and it was severe enough to where I left my body. It was trauma like anybody else's. I mean, even I felt guilty for a long time because I'm like, “Well, I wasn't raped.” You're supposed to be strong, right. So anyway, I have a memory lapse from back then. I've obviously talked to a lot of psychologists through the years to understand that that was the one of the biggest things that happened to me. Even though I worked alone most of the time, I was in the Air Force. When you first get to a base, you have to make sure and get checked off that you can do your job, so it was part of that process. In uniform with people with power over me, and one of them chose to abuse it. So my interpretation of how things went with what has been determined constitutes harassment and falls under the military sexual trauma umbrella through a couple of decades of work. Sorry. That's just how it was classified. When I look back, I think about how there were so many people who could have helped me along the way. Even though I had a thick skin, it was like gaslighting. I didn't know what gaslighting was, so I told myself, “Well, I just need to work harder. I need to do my job harder, be better.” I would run a lot. We had a route, me and my roommate; she actually ran a lot. I was like, “Yeah, I need to run too, so we would run the perimeter around the GAMA.” It was like the securest 53 place on earth for any woman to take a run. Hopefully we gave them some enjoyment seeing a girl run around. I ran so much thinking that if I just work harder and be healthier, that it'll all be better. But I ran so much that I got severe shin splints. I mean, I always smelled like Bengay all the time. I just would rub Bengay all over my legs. What I noticed was I had arrived there the healthiest, happiest in my entire life. I wanted to be there, it was all exciting, you know? But I started getting that, how I was treated, and I don't want to talk about anything on the job, but it kept getting worse. Then I feel like there's this perfect storm where the dormitories I lived in, it was basically ‘Animal House’, right?... I used to tell people. “Well, I haven't slept in six months.” When I would get off work, for a while, I was taking Italian, learning the language, and we'd go on little trips. I started withdrawing from things because I didn't have the physical ability to do anything more than my job. A lot of that enjoying where I was at went away really fast because I just became so broken down. So I say it was like a perfect storm because when I would try to sleep, the building I was in was made of metal, and it would shake from everything going on in it. I would try to sleep and everything was just music and the physical building was shaking. I became the victim that people were like, “What's your problem?” So, I talked to the first sergeant, the person that you go to, because I still didn't relate this as harassment. At work I thought, “I just need to memorize more, be able to say that paragraph exactly what it says,” because that's the extent of how I was being pushed. So I talked to the first sergeant and he laughed at me. He's like, “What's your problem?” and he went away. I talked to my neighbors. I'm like, “Guys, I'm trying to sleep.” 54 One of them I actually worked with, and they're just like, “What the fuck's your problem?” I tried to sleep in my car. That sucked. It was a little car. But anyway, what happened was the stress of the harassment, the environment, and no sleep was just catastrophic to me. I went to the security police twice. They're like, “What's wrong with you?” I wonder why I didn't go to the man who was from my hometown, and he eventually helped me. But I always thought, well, chain of command. We're told to do the chain of command, and that's what I was doing, and it didn't work. I basically gave up, and the exercising didn't work, so I'm like, “Well, I'll drink. Everybody else is drinking. Maybe that'll make me go to sleep.” What happened was… I can't remember if it was before that or after. I knew I was in a bad place; I could hardly function. Mental Health is on base, and I knew when I went to Mental Health, my security clearance was going to be gone. I knew that I was never going to be treated the same again because when you have top secret security clearance, you don't go to Mental Health. You're supposed to be fine. So I knew walking into Mental Health that that was it. I'm sorry, I need to backtrack. There were physical symptoms. This is really bad. I got to where I couldn't open my jaw, so I went to the dentist and he put TMJ in my records. What happened was I eventually ground my teeth out of my head. These front teeth are fake. I ground my own teeth out of my head. LR: Okay. JN: Yeah. [Inaudible] take a break? LR: I have to take a break. JN: Me, too. [Recording pauses for a break]. [Recording begins again]. 55 LR: Okay. All right, getting back into things. If you wouldn't mind just backing up just a little bit and giving a little bit more context to your story. The question I'm going to ask, if it's okay, is that you talk about your ‘welcome’ to the base. Was that something that continued? Was it just one time or was it more systematic? JN: Yeah. It's taken me a long time to even be able to talk about it, you know? For a long time I just trivialized, and it's just something that happened. Like I said, I wasn't raped, so why should I have issues with that? But what happened was I was on the job in uniform the very first week. I experienced an assault, and I didn't know what an assault included. I didn't have the words to describe, but what happened was I recall leaving my body, and I don't believe I said a word or moved. I don't know how long. I have no memory of anything after. So how do I know I wasn't raped? I just have a feeling that I would know, physically, if someone did that to me. It was very traumatic. Total power play. I didn't know what freezing was until 20 years later. I knew fight or flight; well, I didn't fight or flight, so I don't know what that was that I did. So I found out later, “Well, that was a freeze. You froze.” So I told myself it didn't happen, just pushed it out of my brain. That just didn't happen. Never, ever talk to the person that did it about it. Never yelled or nothing. But what proceeded was I ended up being put on nights because I passed everything. What I started noticing was—which is the harassment part of it—was I was being treated differently. Looking back on it, from my perspective, looking back through history, it appears to me as retribution for not giving in, because in that way I did fight. I pretended that nothing happened and that I could do whatever was asked of me in my job. I don't want to get into too… I don't want people to nitpick through history that I wasn't strong enough. 56 LR: I don't want you to worry too much about that. I want you to be able to talk about what's important for you, because you can't control how people look at your story. This is your story, and if you want to talk about it, I want you to feel comfortable talking about it. In this space right now, there is no judgment, because this is your story. JN: Right. LR: This is your memory, what happened to you, and that is what matters. JN: So like I said, I kept thinking, “Well, I just need to work harder.” It was gaslighting, when I look back on it. Gaslighting you know: “Well, it must be you.” So I just worked harder. I memorized more. I did more on the job, you know? Perfection is the point. But what I want to say is it was a secure location. I mentioned that I did a lot of diary writing. I did not write anything about the things that went on, but I did write. I have a whole four pages from my time at Comiso that I wrote, and I wrote at one point, “I don't think I can take this much longer.” It was bad. I remember my coworkers saw, and one of them came out recently to me that he had been sexually raped during his time in the Air Force. I didn't know that at the time. It's not something that he shared, but he saw what was happening to me, and he was the one person in my shop that said something to me. So I knew he saw what was going on, and basically it was just, “Get through it,” you know. “You're just going to get through it,” because we were only there for a year. “Just get through it.” He saw how I was being treated. At one point, he was… let's see, how did it work? At one point, he took over for me, and I had been crying so much on the job that he said, “Julie, everything's wet!” because I had literally been bawling my entire shift. At one point, I punched the nuclear hardened facility. You know, that's not a good thing to do! 57 I didn't know what to call any of it. I didn't know how to describe. You're the property of the US government. You do what you're told, so how do you describe that? It was that bad that I couldn't even write about it. I couldn't tell anybody about it because I didn't know how to describe what happened. I was still going out to group suppers once in a while to eat with the person who did that to me and pretending that nothing happened. You can lie to yourself to try and get through things, but when things started manifesting physically with my body not working, that's when I had to ask for help. I talked about not being able to open my jaw. I had never had that happen before, so I think they prescribed me mouth guards. But like I said, I have fake teeth now. Every dentist since then has commented on, “Are you bulimic? Why don't you have any enamel?” “Well, it's all chewed off, and I'm not bulimic. I love food.” Other things that were happening were I had migraines for the first time in my life. I had the worst headaches I ever had, so I went to the doctor. “I have migraines that won't stop.” I had tried things to make it better. Didn't work, so I asked for help. That didn't work. Let me see if I'm forgetting anything. I did have a coworker who had the worst migraines of her life also for the first time, so there were two of us females in that shop that were having medical issues. I can't remember her full name. I'd love to hear the rest of how she turned out. She would have disabling migraines where if you saw her with one, she'd just put her head in the corner of the room to push against it because it hurt so bad. I always thought that was interesting: out of a small group of people, two females are having issues. I was really good at my job. I figured I could just keep doing my job… until my whole body stopped. So my friend Paul that I had mentioned, the one that I 58 would massage—I told him that I had issues. Well, he would come and check on me, and he's still my friend and I'm so thankful for him in my life. One night when I was dressed to go to work—I was on night shift, so I was all dressed. I knew that he was coming by to say hi and check on me, and I think that's what allowed me to collapse because I knew somebody was coming. So when he came, he found me in uniform, curled up on the bed just in fetal position. Checked out. Gosh, sorry. I'm going to back up again. I'm so sorry. A big part of what happened—like I said, I think it was a perfect storm. I could have probably got through it if I could have slept. But sleep deprivation! You can't NOT sleep. I'm skipping over my mental health thing, too. There was a time where my roommate came in, usually when she wouldn't have during the day, when she would have been working. I was so sleep deprived, I was laying in bed, sleeping with my eyes open. She thought I was dead. I freaked her out completely. There were things like that happening. I mean, she saw it happening, and she and my friends there were like, “What are we going to do?” They didn't know what to do. The other thing I wanted to mention before continuing or being in fetal position was I went to Mental Health and they were the biggest gaslighting people of my life. I'd been thinking about what I was going to say, and Major Drew is the person who I saw, and I have letters from him in my file. I went to him for help, and he proceeded to help me by talking about my father's death as a child and how, you know, “Oh, you must be depressed about that. Tell me about your childhood.” It makes me so angry when I think about that. That's negligent. Then I try to put a different perspective hat on it, too, and I think, “Well, he was Mental Health at a nuke base. His job was to get people out of there, probably.” So I think, “Well, maybe he was doing what he was told: find a reason to get rid of people that are having problems.” Either he was severely negligent in his duties as a human or he 59 was just trying to get me out. I don't know which, but all he did was make me cry more, so he was of no use. One of the last times I think I was at that office, there was a female captain at the Xerox copier. I remember I made a last-ditch effort to say, “Hey, it's not depression, and this is what's going on.” I used whatever words at the time to describe. She told me, basically, to suck it up and go back to work. There were security police; there was the first sergeant; there was the mental health guy; there was the dentist; the female captain. So many people that could have helped. “Do you have food? Do you have shelter? Do you have sleep?” you know, not, “Your dad died when you were young, so you must be sad.” It just makes me mad. There are probably ten other things that I was going to offer, but there were people that saw what was going on. When my friend Paul found me, I didn't know until, like I said, like 20 years later that he got permission to sit with me for three days. He said, “I was authorized to sit with you until you could be med-evac’d,” because there were no airplanes. We were a nuke base, so we had to wait till an ambulance could take me to Sigonella, which is the naval base on Sicily, to then be med-evac’d to Germany. So my friend Paul told me decades later, “Yeah, I sat with you for three days, Julie.” I don't remember any of that. Trying to think if there's anything big I wanted to bring up. Basically, I mentioned military sexual trauma and harassment. When you talk about things that happened to someone on active duty, the VA looks for big changes in behavior or something. I went from top performer—I actually got a medal for my work, Air Force Achievement Medal, from Germany. I showed up at a place that I volunteered to be. I was excited about it. I went from that to fetal position, getting med-evac’d. In the long run, that's what people look for to determine if something really happened. So 60 even though I didn't have the words through the years, I knew something happened because look where I ended up. I do remember being med-evac’d. I remember the ambulance that took me to Sigonella couldn't get on base because of a protest. I just think this is funny as hell. I knew enough Italian by then where I was pissed off, and I was in uniform, and I got out and I argued with the Carabinieri. You don't argue with the Carabinieri at all. I told them in Italian, “I'm sick. I'm going to the hospital. Let me through.” He's like, “What?” I think the guy that was driving was like, “What the hell is she doing? Where's my patient going?” cause I got out and started arguing with the Carabinieri. The Carabinieri was kind enough to lead me back to my seat and sit there while they finished. We finally got to where I was supposed to get on a plane, and I remember I was just checked out. But I do remember, like, “I think I'm probably supposed to be on that plane.” They almost didn't get me. They almost forgot me. I was just sitting over there and I kept hearing like, “Last call,” and I went up. I'm like, “Hey, I think I'm supposed to be on that plane.” That's how I finally got med-evac’d. “Just put me on the plane. You know, I probably should go with them.” So I was med-evac’d. All I knew was I was going to the hospital, that I was med-evac’d to an inpatient mental health ward. They determined that what happened was I told the doctors several days prior to my being in fetal position that I wanted to sleep, and I had tried to take cold medicine because I was just trying to do everything. They took that as trying to kill myself. So because I say I'm trying to sleep, I took cold medicine, you know, alcohol, nothing is working. You know, that's probably how I was talking. Nothing's working. I can't sleep. So they took it as a suicide attempt or suicidal ideation or something. But I just wanted to sleep; I didn't want to die. 61 So I was med-evac’d. I was inpatient. They, thank God, allowed me to sleep for two weeks. I got there and I could hardly walk. I walked with a shuffle. I could hardly eat. When I was first checked in, I remember the nurse taking her fingers around my arm and they met. So I was very thin, you know, not in any good physical shape at all or mental shape at all. I shared a room with a lady captain who had been outed as a lesbian and was suicidal and just talked about dying the whole time, so thank goodness I just slept so I didn't have to listen to her. But that's the atmosphere that I was in, and I was so thankful they just let me sleep. During that time, my friend Bob, who was still stationed in Germany, actually came to visit me. He was still my best friend, and I think he just wanted to save me from whatever was happening, so he proposed to me in the hospital and I was like, “What? Sorry, bad timing, Bob.” But I think he just wanted to save me, you know, from whatever he… He was there during a time where we could eat. He told me later he was just shocked because I would pick some little morsel, and that was it. So that shocked him just how bad it was. I was there for two weeks, slept for two weeks, and that's probably what saved me. I mean, I've had doctors tell me, “Julie, you could have died. You can't just not sleep.” From there, from Wiesbaden—it's an Army hospital, I believe—I was medevac’d to a horrible place that no one should have ever been allowed to have, called Wilford Hall. I think it was at Lackland in San Antonio. It was an inpatient mental health facility. None of my records show that I was even there, so I have no idea what the hell they were doing recording anything about me. It was a big black hole. I was scared to death to be there. The people that worked there, I don't think they had a clue about their job. Just horrible. I'm going to back that up with some information. They would bring in Chucky at night to show for movies. Do you remember Chucky? 62 LR: Yeah. JN: Yeah, that's what they would bring in for fun. So here I am. I'm with Jesus. There was a guy who ‘was Jesus’. I was with a lady who fried her brain on peyote in a Native American ceremony when she was on leave at home and was found hanging off a building somewhere. Another lady was probably assaulted at some point. She would just practice karate in the corner all day. You know, defense moves. Old man who just would come from shock therapy, drooling on himself all night. And here I am. I had slept for two weeks; I'm feeling pretty good. I was scared to be there. I didn't know what, where the hell? Why am I here? All I knew about places like that was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. That's all I knew. I'm like, “What is this happening to me?” I had a top secret clearance, so I was visited there by people that debriefed me, and they were looking at me like, “What the hell are you doing here?” I'm like, “Yeah.” So they debriefed me not to say anything, divulge anything about anything that I had been involved in at Comiso at work. So I had to sign a statement about that, and I always thought, “Well, this is interesting. I'm in a mental ward. I could say anything,” looking back on it. I had a pretty good excuse to say anything I wanted at that time. But I'm a rule follower, you know, so I'm like, “Yes, sir.” Signed it. I had earned privileges. It was that type of system where you had to earn your trust, so they got to where they would allow me to go for a run. That felt good. I could get out and exercise. I came a long way in a couple of weeks of shuffling to then running. All I wanted to do was get out of there, so I did. I just did everything they said. In the meantime, my senior master sergeant friend back at Comiso from my hometown, he was working the system for me. Thank God. His name's Bill Wallace. 63 Fantastic person. So he told me on the phone, he said, “Julie, I am going to find out what is going on in my shop. I am going to find out what's going on and deal with it,” because I didn't have words, I didn't know what to describe. He actually moved his desk into the radio shop and worked there for a while. This is how I understand it. He told me, he said, “Julie, I can get you out earlier. Your enlistment’s ending. I can get you. You're released just a few months early.” I'm like “Really? Really.” I remember asking him, “Is it honorable?” “Yes. Honorable service.” “Will I have my GI Bill?” “Yes.” “So those two things?” “Yes. Yes.” I'm like, “Yeah, great.” I had to go back to Comiso to out-process. Because I was still active, I was still stationed there, but as I was leaving Wilford Hall—where I can't find any records of anything ever—a female major sat down with me, who I'd never met, and told me that I had an Adjustment Disorder, that I was not adjusting. So my discharge says character and behavior disorder, adjustment disorder. That's what it says, and then it says honorable. So I yelled at her and, you know, you don't yell at a major. I mean, she could have locked me in a little room and just left. When this person I'd never met—who couldn't have any more than two weeks of seeing me run around a track or building birdhouses, didn't know me—says I have a behavior or adjustment disorder, character and behavior disorder… So I yelled at her, and I said, “I do not have an adjustment disorder.” I remember telling her I requested to go there. I loved my job and I love Sicily. That was the end of that. So I had that hanging like, “What the hell?” 64 So I went back to Sicily. I was not allowed, thank God, to work in my shop again. I had been debriefed. My security clearance was gone, so I was put on the switchboard. It's my trivia question for my entire life. You know, “What's the strangest job you've ever had?” I was a Sicilian telephone operator. LR: There you go. JN: I worked on the switchboard because I was in the communications squadron. I knew my numbers enough to transfer a call because we had one line in, one line out. You had to go through the switchboard to call onto base and off base. I was really good. I liked doing that. That was really fun. I liked the Sicilian ladies that I worked with. It was just a big soap opera—like a Spanish novella, but it was a Sicilian novella. I got to see the things that the ladies were going through and dealing with. I just worked on the switchboard for my last month of service. I loved it. I got sleep. I was on day shift, and so when everybody was done partying, they eventually went to sleep at night, so I got to sleep. I was fine again. It was good and relatively fine again. I learned recently in life that the person who was to blame in my situation was removed from my shop also and was not allowed to retire. That's how it was told to me that they exited the military on some reason to get rid of them. That's how it was told to me. That's how I understand it. Whether that's exactly true, I don't know, but I just know that he was dealt with. What else? When I was out-processing, there were still people that could have helped me that didn't that I'm really angry about still. It's hard to forgive. You know, the anger just eats you, and you have to forgive. But looking back there, I had opportunity for legal counsel on my out-processing. I did not agree with the reason on my DD214 at all. I expressed that they had put in my file that I was an alcoholic because I had said that I had tried to use alcohol to sleep and that I 65 needed to go to AA, so it was all me. I was government property. I did that to myself. You know, “Why did you do that to yourself? Oh, you're an alcoholic? Well, you have to fix that.” So that's what I was dealing with, and I was so young. I had a legal appointment. I went to the place where you do that. They said, “Your lawyer's in Torrejon, Spain. You can call him. Get on the phone.” I said, “Hi. I'm Julie, this is… I'm being discharged as honorable.” It was less than 10 minutes. Their advice was sign, sign, whatever is put in front of you, just sign it. I think the fun part about this for me is looking back on it. This is how that played out, and it's funny, the satisfaction I get in some little things through life. Later in life—and I'm skipping way ahead—I was in Constitutional Law. My professor mentioned in class where he was when I was in Sicily and what he was doing; he was a JAG officer. I went up after class, I told him—he's still here in Utah. He's high up, a legal person—I told him how I didn't appreciate how his office didn't help me, and that was a real quick conversation. I don't think he ever looked me in the eye again. But it was like my chance to be like, “Hey, you guys suck.” I just realized what happened; the communication feedback loop came full circle. LR: Yeah. So just for context, fall of ‘88, you go to Comiso. JN: Yes. LR: How long were you actually there? JN: I was in and out of the hospital and home by the beginning of August. LR: Of ‘89? JN: Of ‘89. LR: Okay. So you did not finish your year? JN: No. LR: But you were close. 66 JN: I was close. Then I had a few more months of my four-year enlistment. Basically, they would have been planning to have someone come in anyway. At that time when I was back, they were flying out the nuclear warheads. I saw the helicopter flying out the warhead. They were starting to draw down the base. I just remember looking up: “There goes the warhead. Here it is. This is it.” The people after me, I think for probably about a year, drew down the base. The GLCMs were taken and dismantled as part of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty. I do have a little bit of a Russian story to share because it's historical and I think it's interesting, so I'm going to go back. When the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty was happening, you know, we're a NATO base with nukes, so the Russians came to visit. I was very accustomed to looking like somebody's daughter or somebody's wife and walking around, and nobody in uniform would bother trying to reprimand me for anything or tell me to do something. They didn't know who I was because I worked night shift. Nobody ever saw me. So they told everyone, “The Russians are coming. Stay inside. Nobody's to be driving around. Nobody is to be walking around.” I took that as a personal invitation to go see what was going on because I'm a curious person. I knew when their meeting was going to be about ending, and so I chose that as an opportune time to go shopping. I just remember there were a bunch of old Russians in red sweaters. They all had matching red sweaters with jackets, and they had actually come and checked out the nuclear hardened facility where I worked. They had already visited and we’re like, “Oh, there's Russians in our space.” It's kind of contrary to everything that we were taught. That was just interesting to see how the climax of the Cold War just stopped. Everything was just like, “Okay, now we're going to have a treaty and we're just going to start taking everything down.” 67 LR: Interesting. JN: It was incredible. My friend Bob came and visited me once I was back home because he had proposed to me. Right? LR: Right. JN: He came and visited me while I was working on the switchboard, and we took like a weekend and went to Palermo. It was very romantic, very sweet. Oh, this is what I was going to say. So I am a rule follower, but I also love to learn things. I love to learn about where I'm at. There were elections at the time, and there was a Communist Party, and so all over town there were posters plastered that said Vota Comunista. I have one now because I said, “Bob, let's go to the Communist headquarters and ask if we can have one.” He loves learning about history and everything, so he's like, “Yeah, I'll do that with you.” I'm like, “I will talk, just be there with me.” So we went to the Communist Party headquarters during about this time, when the Russians were visiting. “Well, why can't we go visit them?” We were still both active duty Air Force. I didn't have my security clearance anymore. He had his. But before we went in, I did a wave and knocked on the door. I had memorized how to ask, you know, “May we please have a souvenir,” or something to take home with us. So we knocked on the door. They let us in; they were shocked as hell. You know, these two Americans showing up. It was a really dark room with all these old men sitting in it, smoking cigar-type things. I broke out my little thing that I had written out. They were so sweet to us. Beyond being shocked, they were so kind. One of the men just said, he goes, “Come here.” He took us to their supply closet, and he's like, “Take whatever you want back to you Americans.” 68 So we each took a poster and said, “Thank you very much. It's wonderful to meet you,” that type of thing, and left. So hopefully they have this crazy story of two young Americans showing up. Bob and I did stuff like that. We went all over Europe. He was very special to me. Yeah, then I went home. LR: I just have a couple of questions, following up. JN: Okay. LR: I know you said that going to the Mental Health Clinic was just a reason for them to get rid of your top secret clearance, once you go there. JN: Well, that's how I just figured. It's going, it's gone. This is it. LR: Did they ever tell you why you were losing it? JN: No. No one ever talked, so I knew when I went to Mental Health and escalated my complaining that I was not a team player anymore. I knew that I wasn't the top performer and everyone’s perfect person anymore if I was going to go to Mental Health and complain about not being able to sleep and being worked too hard. It was when I was in Texas in the second hospital, in Wilford Hall, where I was debriefed. When you have a security clearance, you have to have a debriefing when you leave access to all that. You have to sign that, “I won't share anything that I know, ever,” and you sign a paper. At least that's how it used to be. LR: Okay, so that happened in Texas, not… JN: That was when I was inpatient. Then when I went back to Comiso, I did not have access to anything classified. LR: Okay. Did you have any secret clearance at all when you went back? JN: No, no. Well, when I first went to Germany, I had Secret, and then I got bumped up to Top Secret. Then when I went back, I had just been debriefed. No discussion about any clearance at all because I was out-processing. All I was doing was transferring phone calls. 69 LR: Alright. So no one actually said to you, “You are losing your top secret clearance?” JN: No. That's a good point. LR: It was just gone? JN: I just figured it was gone because I had a character and behavior disorder, so why would I? LR: It's just interesting that no one told you it's gone. JN: No, I was just debriefed. I don't believe the debriefing had anything about, you know, “Too bad, so sad.” Never, ever, ever. It was a ‘You will not divulge, or you will go to a cement cell’ statement. But that's one thing that I just assumed—probably correctly—that I did not have, being a character and behavior diagnosis. LR: That is interesting. Okay. Going back home, you've basically experienced four years of… JN: A lot. LR: You've experienced more in four years than most people your age experience in a lifetime. You're only 22? 23? JN: It was ‘89, so I was 22, I think, turning 23. I was young. LR: Really, really young. I'm curious as to what you even thought, “What can I do now?” What was your next step? JN: I always took college courses. I always had a desire to learn. I don't know how I did it, but I got into the fall semester at Arizona State University. I got out the first week of August, and then I was into the fall semester right away. I mean, this was when you did the application by paper and mailed it. However I did that, I had my wits enough to get my application in because I knew I had my GI Bill, and I knew that's what I was going to do. I was going to go to school, and so my major was photography because I always said, “Well, if I'm going to study anything I want to 70 and pay for it myself, it's going to be what I want to study.” So I have my Bachelor’s of Fine Art in Photography. When I went back, I moved in with my mom and my sister and my niece. We were all back home for a short time. My sister had been divorced, so it was a unique time to have us all together in the house. I can talk a little bit more. I don't know how much longer you want to go, but… LR: Well, I wanted to ask a quick question, historically speaking, because as you're going home and as you're beginning your fall semester, that's when the Berlin Wall fell. I remember that time. I'm wondering what you were thinking because you had just been there. JN: Right. So I actually brought a piece of the Berlin Wall to show you. LR: Oh, really? JN: Yeah. Should I grab it real quick? LR: Yeah, absolutely. JN: [Grabs piece]. This is mine, it’s not a gift [laughs]. I’ll show it for the camera. This is a piece of the Berlin Wall [holds up piece to camera]. It was an incredible time because we were at the height of the Cold War, and then, like I said, the story's getting rewritten. I'm seeing Russians on a nuke base. They're inspecting my workspace. It was really weird to stop all that training that we've had as airmen. My friend Bob was still in Germany at that time, so he went and he helped tear down the Berlin Wall. That's why I have pieces of the Berlin Wall, because he went with a hammer like so many other people. It was just a cement wall painted with graffiti, and he said at the top was a hollow pipe. When hit, it kind of went ding, you know, really loud. He was one of the people that tore down the wall by hand with hammers because of the hatred and the desire to have that thing gone: the end of fascism. Gone. 71 Something I was going to mention before was when I was in Germany, people had rebuilt everything. They had great pride in their country; they had great shame and then great pride in how they had turned things around. It was illegal to have the swastika displayed anywhere. That was totally illegal. There were things like that that were made into law. People were just so done with it. It was a wild, wild time. LR: Interesting. JN: Yeah. But when I went back, I felt better. Things were good, you know, and the world was looking better. I'm gonna start school, so I get back, and I'm just not the same. I had been through a lot, but then mentally, there were… I was not okay. A real good thing that happened was I was hired on as a work-study at the Veterans Services Office at Arizona State University. I had like 10 hours a week, and $3.25 an hour was minimum wage then? The really amazing thing was my boss was a Vietnam-era guy, and we would cry on each other's shoulders. I didn't know what I was crying about, and he didn't know what I was crying about. He would just let me cry on his shoulder. I always felt like he understood because he just knew something was bad. He knew bad things happened, but he had things that he would be frustrated about, too. He had a fake foot, so one day he went to get a new foot from the VA. They told him he was dead. He couldn't have one because he had been pronounced dead in Vietnam. So he came, he says, “I'm back from my appointment.” “Well where's your foot?” “You know, they said I was dead.” We had this crazy sense of humor in that group. We would always get in trouble for talking too loud and too raunchy by the Residency ladies next door who were dealing with all the foreign students. We 72 always had the loud office and were getting in trouble. But Rich Wade was my boss, and I worked with him for two and a half years, and we just cried so much together. I will say, it wasn't just me that he supported. He supported everyone. He was the most giving person. There were about 200 of us when he died at his funeral. He had a massive heart attack and died. But he was very well-regarded. He had been through enough himself where he had the compassion to see when other people needed help, I think. So that was probably the best thing that could have ever happened, for me to work there. LR: Right. Well, I do think that's a good place to stop for today. Part 3: February 23, 2023 LR: Today is February 23, 2023 and we are continuing our interview with Julie Newland. It's about 10:40 in the morning. We're actually in a different room, but we're still at the Stewart Library. When we stopped, we were talking about you starting at Arizona State. You talked about Rich Wade and what a great boss he was and how he really helped you navigate and settle into this new life outside of the military. I want to pick it up there. You said you were getting a degree in photography. JN: Yes. LR: How was the transition into civilian life for you? Let's start there and then talk about your time at Arizona State. JN: Arizona State University, yep. When you leave the military, you return to your home of record, which is Mesa, Arizona. I moved in with my mom and my sister and niece, because my sister had divorced, so my mom moved back into her house where they were living. We were all living together for a short time, and that was my first semester back. My degree was a Bachelor’s of Fine Art Photography because I loved photography, and that was the thing to do. Nothing else was interesting to me. 73 Since I was a veteran, I went looking for jobs—which was the late ‘80s, so it was still really hard to find jobs. It was a bad economy. I went to the Veterans Services office and was hired as a work-study, which was the minimum wage I mentioned. Thankfully, I was put in with a group of veterans who were in similar circumstances, getting out of the military using their GI Bill, or VEAP was the Army. I don't know what that stands for. It was VEAP; it was a program. Thankfully, I was put in right away with a good team of people, and we had a lot of fun working together. Rich Wade was my boss; he was a Vietnam veteran, and his boss was also Vietnam. They tolerated a lot from our little group. There were some other people that I was with that were Vietnam in that group too, going back to school, learning a new trade on Voc. Rehab. That was the best thing that I ever could have done, was get hired there. I worked there for two and a half years of my time at ASU. People that go to ASU think, “Well, you must have just had a lot of fun going to the games and stuff all the time,” but I was a photography student, so I was in the darkroom a lot. I think that also was good for me because I needed quiet and a lot of time doing repetitive things. Looking back, that was very good. A few very good things that I did that helped me survive. The umbrella that I was working under was character and behavior disorder. That was on my DD214, which is the paper you get when you're discharged; the employers want to see through your life to show that you were a veteran with an honorable discharge. It said honorable, but it also said that I had a character and behavior disorder. So here I am, doing lots of good things. I'm back in school surrounded by good people. But my identity was taken away. Who am I? I was 22. Even though I had been through so much, done so much good work as a student 74 and working for a bank for a few years, getting medals in the Air Force, here I am. Well, what's wrong with me? The US government labeled me. The bad thing was I went with that label. I was like, “Oh, so this is who I am now?” I'm going to start crying. I did things that my first husband knows... I did things that I shouldn't have ever done. I put myself in horrible positions where I could've been hurt. I was completely suicidal. I mentioned I was at my mom's house. I was only there for maybe a semester, and I moved into town because my mom’s house was about 30 miles away from ASU. So I moved into town and moved in with a fellow art student. I put myself in really bad situations, and thank God I've never done drugs in my life. It could have been very, very bad. But I just became suicidal and sought out situations where I could have been killed. Thankfully, that didn't last very long. I knew that that wasn't me, and I was like, “Well, they said this was me, but that's not me, thank God. What the hell is wrong?” Here I am: I'm supposed to be back home doing my thing. Education's kind of my thing, learning new things. I knew something was wrong after I wanted to kill myself, but I wanted other people to kill me, so I went to the VA. I learned about 20 years later that I had checked myself into a hospital, so I went inpatient for five days. Don't remember any of that. Completely blocked out of my awareness. I learned that about 20 years after that I had checked myself into a hospital. At one point, somehow I knew about the DAV. I don't remember talking to the DAV at that time, but there's some paperwork that I went to the DAV—the Disabled American Veterans—for help. Through whatever they did, they got me to the VA hospital, and I was going through the process of trying to get help from the VA. I don't know that people know this, but just because you're a veteran doesn't mean the VA will help you. That's not the case. 75 This is a really key thing in my story. When I was at the VA, after a month inpatient on active duty, getting discharged with this horrible label, a week of admitting myself to a hospital—here I am at the VA, and I remember sitting with a clipboard filling out whatever papers they told me to fill out, and this guy walks up to me that worked there. I was in the room waiting; I had an appointment to talk to them. Whoever he was, he walked up to me—and I actually have the paper now in my file. I was halfway through filling it out, you know: “Who are you? Why are you here? What's your address? What's your phone?” He took it from me. He said, “There's nothing wrong with you. Get out.” Kicked me out. I don't know if he knew anything about me or just saw me sitting there filling out a piece of paper. He kicked me out. So here I am, suicidal, wanting… I don't know what it's called, wanting other people to kill me. This asshole kicks me out. So for decades, I stayed away from the VA. They told me not to go there. Usually when people ask you, “What's wrong with you? What's your trauma event? What's your triggering event?” Through the years, I've come to know that's called complex trauma. Also through the years, I've tried to seek help from offices set up specifically for women. “Here we are to help you, female veterans.” I've gone to places like that, and I didn't fit their scope. So it just seemed like every time I tried to get help, there wasn't any. Just bad. Very bad. Kind of switching gears, so I can stop crying. I met my first husband through the VA when I worked at the Veterans Services office—which, it's kind of ironic that I still worked for the VA and was going through all these things. My little group was safe. A coworker was a mutual friend of my first husband, so she kind of was like, “Hey, you two, you'd be good together.” So I met my first husband, Brian. He was Special Forces, and we met at the desk. I worked his file to get his benefits for him 76 and he asked me out. I looked him up and he was a straight-A person, so like, okay. I told myself, “All right, he gets good grades. I'll go out with him.” That's how I met my first husband. Do you want me to keep going on here? LR: Sure. JN: We were together a year or two, I can't remember. A while. We were married for eight years. We have a child, Sam, who we both love incredibly. We're both so fortunate. But he was a person who didn't really have emotions. Things were just always good, you know? It's like, “Well, just live your life.” We weren't a household that talked about the past. We talked about, “Well, when are you going to get your degree? How are we going to pay the bills?” Everything was future-oriented. But I do want to bring up something, because with me telling my story, it's like, “Oh, you're the emotional woman.” In our marriage, I cried all the time. It's so much sorrow—not just from the marriage, from everything. Then I want to bring up something that’s kind of backtracking, but something that I learned in Germany, actually. One of my collateral duties in Germany was to teach wartime first aid. I was being trained. I had only done it a couple of times, but what I learned from that was the biggest, loudest guys usually fall the hardest. From what I remember, when we would show photographs of what war looks like, we would watch for people to faint and try to be there to help them. My job was to watch the audience as they were watching the images, and I would just take bets, you know: who's it going to be? It was always the biggest, loudest guy—boom— hitting the ground. I think about people hearing this story possibly in the future and saying, well, “Why didn't you just get over it? You're either a bitch or a crybaby. Get over it. You went to beautiful places. You did your job. Get over it.” But it's not that easy. I learned just through the years that your body absorbs all that trauma, and even 77 though you don't, you don't get it, it's there. I tried to avoid it for a long time, just distract myself. “Things are fine, here I am. I have an awesome guy. We're starting a new life.” Do you need a break? LR: No, not unless you do. JN: No, I'll try to get over it at the moment. But anyway, I tried to avoid it, just try to live life. What was I going to say? I knew something happened. I was like, “They did this to me. I wasn't like this before.” About every five years I would pick up my file at the VA, like, “You guys did this to me.” Technology's changed through the years, you know, from paper versions to things going online. It was about every five years, I could tell in my records, that I tried to do something, but every time I tried to do it, I would just end up falling. It was just horrible. Anyway, I graduated with my fine art degree in photography. I learned so much. I loved my studies, loved my work there. Thank God. In the future, people just kind of cared that I had a bachelor’s, so that was good. I did work in the arts a couple of times, but mostly I didn't. Like I said, jobs were really hard. I had to default to my accounting experience or my banking experience. I had two and a half years of banking experience and I'm a veteran, too. But nobody cared. They're like, “Okay, you worked in a bank.” I used that to get temporary jobs. A lot of accounting, Robert Half Accountemps. I did a lot of accounting temporary jobs, so I was just always on the go looking for employment. I don't know how much to... LR: Well, let me help a little bit. First of all, what year did you get married the first time? JN: My first marriage was 1992, and we were both Methodist. I'm still Methodist. He's not. We were married in a Methodist church, and my former mother- and father-inlaw were very active and got all the church ladies to put it all together for us. Everything was done, and it was beautiful. 78 I actually got hired on with the city of Scottsdale as an accountant, so I was on track for a really good career. I still had desires of learning more about conservation work and museum studies. I was enrolled in grad school for museum studies, and then I had to quit everything because we moved to Utah. Brian—my first husband—his job transferred him because he took a test that said he was smart. They gave everybody a test in the company, and they're like, “Oh, you're smart.” So he went from pouring lead to being an engineer, basically, taking care of things for the business. So I had to drop everything, and we moved to Utah with his job. Then I had to start all over again, which was really hard. LR: Where in Utah did you move to? JN: We moved to Sandy and we bought a house. Usually when I describe my first husband—he was a Special Forces dude—I usually describe him as a mountaineering climbing dude. We bought a house at the base of Little Cottonwood Canyon. That means I didn't see him for the rest of our marriage. He was gone. Just gone. So here I am, the emotional wife, and he's gone being happy in the mountains. We had our son at the end of our marriage, and both of us, just like I said, we're ecstatic. But it wasn't enough to save our marriage, to stay together. What was good was we had a really good divorce. We were really good divorced parents. But like I said, the big guys fall the hardest. I was just being a wife and I had a baby. We went to court, and I got sole custody and he had visitation. Even though here I am, the emotional one, the judge was like, “Here, that kid's going to you.” It's hard when you have someone that you love so much that can hurt you the worst, basically. But we raised Sam, and Sam looks just like his dad. He's got his dad's body. He's athletic, just like him. He's even-tempered, like everything's all good, even 79 though he's had some really hard times in life. He's come through it, and he has his dad's temperament. I should talk about my second husband, too. LR: Okay. I'm going to keep you here for just a minute. JN: Okay. LR: So when you moved to Utah, what jobs were you able to find? JN: I love libraries. Like I said, I was a museum studies hopeful student. I had some little jobs just trying to get something. I worked for Meridian Publishing next to Pioneer Park. I was their editor because I was good with grammar and I was, remember, the secretary business student of the year. So I worked for Meridian Publishing for a while, and then I got hired on with Salt Lake County Library. I was part-time. It's funny, because I signed up for their floater pool. Basically I was working full-time, but they didn't know it. Once they found out, they were like, “What are you doing? How many hours are you working?” because I didn't have benefits, and I should have if I was working that much. But I ended up working for the Salt Lake County Government and starting in the library system, and then I was moved to recreation. We started at the Marv Jenson Recreation Center in South Jordan, which was the first recreation center that paved the way for all the recreation centers with the ZAP Tax—the Zoo, Arts, and Parks Tax. That funded all the recreation centers that were built in Salt Lake County. They picked five of us, I think, to start up that center and figure it out. I was the only county person that was hired to move there, which I figured they did on purpose, because if we failed, “Well, they'll go back to whatever they were doing before,” right? That was my impression. I was the secretary. Basically, I was the office manager and worked with the software people to get the membership database going, and we figured out all the policies of how much and who and what the rules were. It was really awesome. 80 Around that time I was pregnant with Sam, and that's when I found out you don't want to mess with a pregnant lady because you have the people that want to cause problems. They'd be like, “Get Julie,” and I'd waddle down and tell them to shut the hell up and pay their $3 or whatever to go play their game. Through my life, I know that when faced with really hard things, confrontation, my body will shut down to a point and then I'll come out fighting. I learned that a few times in my life, that I don't just take it until it's too late. I fight. Especially when I was pregnant, don't mess with me. Brian was gone all the time. He was a night shift worker and he was climbing all day, and so he wasn't around. I was pregnant. What am I going to do with the baby when I'm working full-time? So I got a job at the government center on 21st and State with the Health Department, specifically because I knew they had a daycare on the first floor. I'm a pretty organized person. There's about a year waiting list to get into this daycare, so you put your name on the list when you get pregnant, basically. Back then, that's how it worked. So I went to work for the Salt Lake County Health Department, and I was the executive secretary this time to the director. Dr. Shlenker hired me. He was amazing. I miss him. He was a wonderful person. I worked with the Board of Health, which were amazing people to witness do their job. Then we had a new director come in who was the worst ever, Dr. Vetter. She was really disappointing because I knew she was… Sorry, this isn't about her, but it was a bad environment when she came, and I looked up to her because she's someone who got her M.D. in the sixties as a female. I was like, “Wow, awesome.” But a lot of us left the County when she was there. There was a complete exodus of people and an investigation. They had the criminal justice director and the head psychologist or whatever come in and interview us one-by-one after we had already left, and she was invited to 81 leave rather than have things in the paper. The Board of Health invited her to leave, so working for her was difficult. I guess I'm bringing this up because when I say I was home crying, it wasn't just me. It was the crap I had to deal with. I'm the lowest person on the totem pole usually, and there's not a lot you can do, so I was home crying all the time. I had a new baby who had ear infections the first six months of his life, so here I am not getting any sleep again. I remember thinking, “Well, I've been through worse.” Having a screaming baby with ear infections wasn't even as bad as what I went through before. Brian did not have the ability to help with a screaming baby. That was beyond him, so it was really hard. Really, really hard. As much as we love Sam, it was really hard during those times. I ended up being unemployed, and it was me and Sam at home, and then our marriage ended. It was the first time ever I was unemployed with a baby, with a mortgage, and starting over. LR: How long after Sam was born did you find yourself unemployed, or were you able to…? JN: He was a baby. He was probably a year by then. He's only known his dad and I as divorced. It was in 2000 we were divorced, and Sam was two years old when we were done. LR: So did you stay in Sandy? JN: Yeah. I stayed for a while, and the judge awarded me alimony. Like I said, we went before the judge. It was really bad. He awarded me alimony and child support. That was enough to live. I could go back to work and I could be okay. I did that for a while. Brian, actually, he seemed to believe he still had control over me. LR: Okay, I completely missed that. Brian did what? 82 JN: Brian was my first husband. We were divorced, but he seemed to think he still had a say in my life. So I had to start sticking up for myself even more after we were divorced. He would say things like, “Well, you can't take care of this house. You can't stay in this house.” I'm really good with finances, if you haven't gathered, and I could have stayed there just fine. So I had to stick up for myself. I'm going to say what happened with Sam just really quick, because I think it was a really good lesson in adulting with people who get divorced. Brian and I never raised our voices. We're not yellers. I may cry and we'll talk, but we're not yellers. Sam was little and he would go back and forth with visitation, you know, and at one point, I think Brian was bringing Sam back. We were probably talking scheduling like, “Well, how are we going to do this?” Divorced parents stuff. I looked down and Sam was doing this [hands over ears]. He had his ears covered. I stopped our conversation. I said, “Look what we're doing to this kid. Look at this.” It shocked us both into adulthood. We had to get our shit together right then. From that moment on, we were the best divorced parents ever. But the things that you don't think your kid is picking up on, they pick up everything. I still think Brian's an amazing person, but we had some really bad stuff that we went through. I was divorced for two-plus years. I had alimony and I was working. I went to work for Art Access, which is a nonprofit in Salt Lake City. I loved that job. I was their program coordinator. The director questioned my changing jobs all the time, but I was like, “Well, I had to move because I was a veteran. I came back from overseas.” I was hired on and I ran programs throughout the state of Utah for the arts, getting artists into the schools. It was incredible. I loved it. We ran two galleries in the Art Access space that was on Pierpont Avenue in Salt Lake City. They've moved since then. 83 We had a space during the [2002] Olympics. We set up another gallery. When you have the Olympics, you also have the Cultural Olympics. I was a single parent, basically, so Sam came to work with me during the Olympics. He remembers that here in Utah. His job was to sit in the window and wave at people to get them to come in. I knew if something happened, he would be there. If I couldn't get across town, he'd be there. But I wasn't happy. I was doing my job. I had an awesome kid. But I started thinking about my old best friend in the Air Force, Bob. This is something that I've had a doctor, a psychologist, tell me: “Well, think about things that made you happy that you did before.” I had never heard that, but I just did it. I thought about, “Well, maybe I made a mistake of not marrying Bob.” That's how my second husband came about, because I was like, “Well, I just need to go back to when things were good.” At that point, it had been 13 years. By the time we were married, we had been apart for 13 years. I talked to everybody in the family and said, “Hey, this is my plan. I'm going to move to Germany,” because Bob was still stationed out of Germany. He was with the Armed Forces News Agency, and we wrote letters. It was still email, phone. I think I proposed to him because he proposed to me and I turned him down when he proposed back in 1989. I said, “Hey, maybe the time's right.” He never got married. He was always in horrible countries and war and was back in Germany at Ramstein. That's the area where we met, and we had good times in that area. So I took Sam, and we moved overseas to finish his service. He just had six months left. I'm like, “Well, let's go over there, and then we'll see where we PCS to in your final two years, and then you'll retire.” I said, “I have a house here in Utah,” so I just rented out the house. I said, “Let's do this. It's only two years.” That would be a good place for you to start. 84 LR: Okay. What year did you marry Bob? JN: Bob Ohlin, he was my second husband. We were married in 2003 in Ramstein, in Germany. We were married at the city hall, the Rathaus. Then I didn't mention we were married at a castle. Usually you have the city marriage and then the religious marriage. I'm Methodist, and we had a church wedding at the local castle and then a wonderful meal with a whole bunch of people. I have no idea who they were that worked with Bob because it was just me and Sam, you know? It was my second wedding, and I don't know if you've noticed, but my mom and my sister, they didn't have money to fly to Germany, and they knew what I was doing. “Sure. Send us a picture.” It wasn't a big deal to fly my mother in. We just did it. I mean, it was a big deal to me. I had stars in my eyes thinking, “Life is going to be good. It's all going to be fine.” That wasn't the case. We went there in winter. It was an ice storm. It was a cold day, cold night, long winter. I'm trying to be funny. I start learning things about Bob, you know, and he just knew I was there. There was nothing for him to learn about me. I was just there. I started learning things about him, and it wasn't all good. He would drive to release stress, and he had some stuff going on, along with me having my own stuff going on that I didn't know how to describe still. We were two really good people. We just had bad stuff that didn't match. He was all about World War II. We could drive somewhere. He could tell me that that hill was where this company he knew had been. He knows all the names of all the battles and why that hill's a little bit bigger than that hill. He's that guy who knows the history of Germany. He had been there based out of Germany and then flying to the Middle East for the whole time. That was the 12 years that we were separated from each other. He spoke German and French fluently. 85 The really cool thing that he would do, as far as taking care of the monuments to the American soldiers who had died during World War II, was he would drive the Autobahn to destress—either on his Harley or in his Beemer—and he would stop at sites for American soldiers, and he would replace the flags as they would deteriorate through time. He would just go and check on the monuments and make sure that they look good. Then he would present those flags to people who were retiring. He wouldn't have them destroyed like a ragged flag should be. He folded them up and presented them as, “This is where this flag flew. This is yours now to take care of.” He was just a walking historian and very interesting. But then I learned what compartmentalization is, and things just weren't the fairytale that I was hoping for. We had the plan in place that I shared with everyone. “We're PCSing back to the States for his final two years, and then we'll get as close as we can to the Rockies, hopefully.” Usually when you're in your final two, they kind of ask you, “Where would you like to go?” So we got to Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado because there was Space Command. We PCS’d to Space Command and it was about a month. I was there long enough to buy a house with him. We bought a house together. I just knew things were just bad. I had to take Sam and go back either to Arizona or to Utah. Arizona is where my mom and my sister were, and Utah is where my son's father lived. So I left Bob. Broke his heart. I didn't have alimony anymore because when you remarry, that's gone. So we moved back to Utah and Brian said, “Well, let's try this again. Let's see if we can make this work.” So we moved in with Brian, my first husband—and that's not why I left Bob, but Brian kind of used it as leverage to get me back to Utah. He's like, “Come back to Utah. Let's see if we can make this work.” 86 That's what got me back to Utah, because I was like, “You're the only one there. I have my family in Arizona. I should just go back to Arizona.” I think because he loved his son so much, he said that. He didn't mean it, because it wasn't long after that he told me he didn't mean it. “Great. All right. Okay, let's do this again.” I had moved all of my belongings into a house that we both were in, and I had enrolled in grad school again and dropped out of grad school again. By that time, I was unemployed. I still couldn't turn in my DD214. There's no Veterans’ Preference for me because that basically didn't happen in my life. I didn't want to tell people about my service. I never got a job with Veterans’ Preference and it was a hindrance to me. [Recording ends unexpectedly.] [Recording begins again.] LR: All right. Let's go back just a minute to the Cultural Olympics. It's not something I'm familiar with. During the 2002 Olympics that were here in Salt Lake, you were a part of the Cultural Olympics. Would you explain that? JN: It was incredible. Thankfully, I was hired at Art Access, which is a nonprofit still in Utah, working with people with disabilities. My job was the program coordinator working in a two-person office. It was the director and me. My job was to manage an arts roster of many disciplines of visual dance, music… So I had this huge roster just like the Utah Arts Council has. They have a roster of artists that will go out into the schools. Well, my job was to match artists to schools K-12 as well as adult care facilities that worked with people with disabilities, mental and physical. I loved it. It was statewide. I got to do a really cool job. We also had two galleries, like I said, so my job was to hang art. I knew how to hang art from my degree. I did all the bookkeeping. I did all of the paying of the artists at the end of the shows. But for the Cultural Olympics—with the Olympics, there's always a Cultural Olympiad. The same time all the sports venues are being used, the arts venues 87 have things going on. I never heard of that either until I was part of it. We had an international traveling exhibit from Women Beyond Borders, the organization. The exhibit was a whole separate gallery that we took over and set up. We hired local craftsmen to make the display units for this traveling exhibit. It was incredible. Women Beyond Borders, I don't know if they're still around, but back then they would give a little wooden box to someone to make something out of it. It was people with disabilities specifically. Some people would make them according to their story, what they wanted to tell. I always thought my box—I still haven't made it. I still have the raw wooden box. I always thought my box that I would make would be just, for example, a refrigerator with a little note on it, because I was a latchkey kid. We grew up with our to-do lists before Mom got home, and it was on the refrigerator, and you had to get it done before Mom got home. That's the type of things; people would tell their unique stories and it was fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. One day, Nadia Comăneci came in. I couldn't hardly even gather myself, but I believe it was her. She came in and I was like, “Holy shit.” So I gave her space and it was incredible. Telling people's stories, it was all good, you know? We got to sell art. It was very popular. A lot of the art would sell, so it was supporting local artists doing good work in the schools. Everything was positive about it. I really enjoyed it, and I was there for about two and a half years. LR: During the Cultural Olympics, you said that the exhibit was the Women Beyond Borders. But were you also showing international artists? JN: Yeah. That was an international traveling exhibit. LR: Okay. Were those things for sale? JN: No. LR: It was just an exhibit? 88 JN: It was just an exhibit. Actually, in the regular gallery that we always had, we had Brian Kershisnik and Joe Adams. Brian Kershisnik is a famous painter in Utah, very well-known, and he would collaborate with Joe Adams, who had Down Syndrome. They lived in Kanosh, a small, rural Utah town. So, it fit with our mission to show Brian and Joe's art, and so we called them. We had his collaborative exhibit during the Olympics there to show that work. I can't remember who else was in the gallery, but it was really neat to have Brian Kershisnik’s work there, too. LR: That's really cool. I've never heard of them. JN: Yeah. I didn't get to go to anything because I worked—which, I mean, I had a kid and it was just me working. It was never even an option. Who has the money to buy a ticket to go to something like that? So I just worked. Sam, my son has really good memories of helping me in the gallery and being in the window. LR: That's really cool. JN: I will say, to bring a story around, my friend Tina from Sicily, she was my roommate. She came out with her son, who was a baby when she had to leave him and go to Sicily. I got to meet her son finally. That was 20… Let's see. That was 12 years after that I got to meet him. He was a teenager by then, but it was really cool to close the loop on meeting him during that time. LR: That's really awesome. JN: Yeah. LR: One thing we haven't talked about, just because it's a huge, significant event that happened: how did the events of 9/11 affect you? JN: I actually have a diary from that day, and so I've read through it through the years. I'll take it out and read it. I was working for the County Health Department, I believe, at the time and living in our house in Sandy. I had called in sick that day. I was really sick. It doesn't matter; when you have a little kid, you're up anyway, so it was 89 early. It was like nine East Coast, seven our time. It was early. I was up and Sam was playing stuff on the floor, and I had the news on, and they showed the plane crashing into the first building. What the fuck, you know? What shocked me at the time, other than all the events going on, was Sam as a little kid knew to just keep doing what you're doing. He just left me alone. I think he could feel the stress in the room. I got my journal, and I just wrote down everything that happened, everything the news was reporting. I don't want to misstate, but people didn't know what was going on, and so the president made a statement. He was Bush at the time. They talked about how all air traffic is grounded nationwide. Then the second one hit the second tower, and then things started changing. “Well, what is going on?” I have a journal from that day and it's just unbelievable. How do you describe something like that? It was a really bad day. Actually, I take that back. I was working at Art Access at the time because after that happened and people were in shock, there was a surge of patriotism in the country. We had fundraisers, give money to whatever fund it went to. That was happening down where all the artists were just raising money to send to the East Coast to help people. It was really awesome to feel the patriotism at that time because it's different than it is now. Now we're divided, and back then, we were together. LR: Thank you. Now we can go back. You've gone to Germany, you proposed. Bob says yes? JN: Yeah, he said yes before I quit my job and left the country. LR: All right. So you would propose before you went? JN: Yeah. I didn't just go. It was a lot of coordination. I wanted my family to know I wasn't just leaving. I talked to Sam's father, Brian, my first husband, about what I was doing because it's his kid. Even though I have sole custody, he had rights as 90 the dad. I talked to the grandparents, talked to my sister so everybody would know what I was doing. It was very organized. I was returning to the location and the person who everything was good in history. But the thing was, it had been 12 years. We'd both changed, so there's no way he could have ever lived up to my expectations of how things were going to be. There's no way. I got Sam a passport. That was all exciting. It's just a big adventure to Sam. He wasn't in school yet, so he wasn't even in kindergarten. He was four when we moved. “You're going to live in Germany and you're going to see castles.” I made it into a grand adventure for him, so he was super excited. He has very good memories of living in rural Germany. We lived in Langenbach, which is like 18 miles west of Ramstein. We got in line to be married at the Rathaus, which is the local government. You have to get in line, and we had to have all of our birth certificates and everything translated into German. There was a lot of paperwork to do, so that was my job, to get everything in line. Then the way it works is when it's your day to get married, they call you and they're like, “Okay, we have you on the schedule for tomorrow.” LR: Oh, okay, that's interesting. JN: Yeah. So I ran to the florist and got some flowers to hold and told Bob, my second husband, “Okay, tomorrow's the day. Ask for the day off. We're going to Rathaus.” So it took some time. Sam and I were there for about three months before everything was ready for us to get married. I told Bob at one point, I said, “I'm illegal. I've overstayed my time in this country as a tourist,” because it was beyond three months at the time. This is kind of funny: I brought my cat with me. The people at the airport were like, “How long are you staying?” I'm like, “I'm just visiting.” They were very kind to let me in with my cat because obviously I was going to be there longer. 91 Bob worked for Armed Forces News Agency, and he was a senior master sergeant. He had been in really bad places, and when we were together, like I said, I had high expectations. I don't know what his expectations were other than “Wow, okay, let's do it.”I didn't realize until later that we were totally different people, totally different circumstances. It was really good, and then it was really bad. I was undiagnosed with my issues, so I didn't have any coping skills. Living with him, I learned what compartmentalizing is first hand because he would do that. One day he stopped speaking for about three days, and that's when I was like, “What? What's wrong?” We could have really good times talking about loving the area we were in. He was a World War II buff. This is interesting—his thing was to drive fast… LR: Is there a problem? MK: I think the memory card is full. [Recording pauses.] [Recording begins again.] JN: Starting over? LR: Well, not really. We've gotten to where, I think, you were going to start talking about actually getting the help that you needed through the VA because you had to try it again with Brian. That obviously didn't work. Now you are going to talk about resiliency. That's about where we're at. JN: I just had constant change. By the time I came back to Utah, I had left my second husband. It was nine months, in and out, so it was very short. I came back to Utah because Sam's father, my first husband, said, “Just come back here. I'll help you get on your feet again,” along with other promises. Basically, the 12, 13 years were just filled with constant starting over. I couldn't get a job. I figure I applied for thousands of jobs through my life, and even though I'm really good at finding the 92 job, being qualified for the job, filling out everything they want—it was hard to get jobs, and it didn't matter if I was a veteran. So I got my real estate license. I'm like, “Well, I have to work. I have to do it all for myself.” So Sam went with me to real estate school. He has started kindergarten, but real estate was odd hours, so Sam just started going to school with me. So I got my real estate license in Utah, started doing that. I helped the bottom-of-the-market people, the first-time homebuyers. I got people that were completely clueless and needed somebody to help them. I loved helping them. I loved doing that job. It was just starting over again, you know, “Okay, let's make this happen.” Sam worked with me. He was in school, and then he worked with me or went to school with me. It wasn't very professional, but he did open houses with me; he was always with me. We made it another year and I was like, “This is ridiculous. I have to get a steady daytime job.” When you're working for yourself, you're always on. There's no downtime. I was hired by the University of Utah as a secretary, and that was after getting phone calls. “You're applying for a secretary job; you're overqualified and not getting interviews.” I couldn't even get interviews for a long time. Having a woman tell me I'm overqualified, that really sucks. I would expect more from some, I don't know. Doesn't matter. People can be stupid, so hearing things like that was like, “Gee, thanks. What the hell?” That wasn't even with my DD214 labeling me as crazy, basically, because I didn't turn that in with those applications. Now you're just overqualified. I was hired at the University of Utah to work for... I was just deciding on how I'm going to word this. This really mean-ass professor. I'm not going to say where he worked, but by the time I was ready to leave that mean-ass professor that treated me horribly, I found out that I was just one of many people that he had gone 93 through. They wanted to offer me more money. They said, “You’re the only person that's been able to work with him. Please stay. We'll give you a raise to work with him.” I'm religious, so I'd be like, “God, really? What the hell? Why?” So I told them no way in hell I was going to stay They said, “Well, we'll give you a recommendation when you want to transfer somewhere else.” So I transferred up to the Huntsman Cancer Institute and got a job as a grants officer. That was really good. I could use my skills. I was very organized. I'm the secretary. I knew how to write, I knew how to do accounting, so that got me into grants up at Huntsman. We were doing good things. It was very, very demanding working with the cancer PIs. They're the best of the best, and it was awesome. I got to do really good work to get money to fund the research. From being a realtor and working in grants, I realized I really love doing this thing. Finally, after all this time, this is what I need to be doing. So they call them ‘Grants and Contracts Officers,’ even though they're very different things. I had been doing grants for a while and I said, “I really want to work with contracts. I want to do that again.” An opening came up in Research Park working for an outcomes therapy group called PORC: Pharmacotherapy Outcomes Research Center. I was their contracts officer, and at that time, they had the contracts combined with all the payroll, all the travel, anything to do with money, budgeting, everything. I felt like I was finally doing the work that I should have been doing all this time. This was my gig. I was really good at it, working with Fortune 500 companies to do research with drugs, basically. What I want to say about this was up until that time, the way I functioned was I could work really hard for a while, and then I credit it back to the military that my body learned to stop when my stress got too high. Just some examples: when I was 94 studying for my bachelor’s, I was always trying to find a corner to sleep in. Everything was on overload. Even though I loved the subjects I was studying, it took everything I had to just get there and do it. I was constantly trying to sleep. One thing I told my first husband when he moved in with me, I said, “Don't you ever wake me up if I'm sleeping.” That was a rule. “Let me sleep because I need it.” I would get into these cycles where I would do a really good job, and then slowly I'd start taking sick days because it was too much for my body. I couldn't do it. Like that day on 9/11, when I was sick, I was really sick, like flu-sick. But on other days, when Sam was old enough to go to school, it took everything I had just to get him to school and get back home and crawl into bed for the day. I managed to do my jobs as a really good employee, and then slowly I'd start taking sick days because it was too much. How it worked out was between jobs—I was always telling myself, “Well, I'm going for a better job.” I would always negotiate. “Well, I can't start until this date,” because I needed time to just crawl into bed. I would take time just to have a couple weeks or something to reset because my body would just stop. Then by the time the new job would start, I was better. I had rested and could be a good employee to have worked for them. It happened when I was in Research Park that my body gave out. It was a really high-stress job. I loved it. I loved doing contracts. I'd use up all my sick time. I was an exempt employee, so they were working me way too much. I started to talk to HR, and I'm like, “How much can I be worked as an exempt employee?” They're like, “It doesn't matter. You just have to work.” So I ended up taking FMLA because that's a right that I had. I took a FMLA, crawled into bed for three or four weeks, and was met with a letter re-negotiating my terms of working for my employer, which was a sad-ass thing that smart people do. They talk themselves 95 into writing around the law. I knew enough to where I knew that was completely wrong. What's funny is I was actually the HR liaison for our office, and I think at that time, I personally added to my stress by being a graduate student too. My mode of operation was to load up, load everything, work 200%. Then my body would take over and be like, “No, this is not happening.” I was an overachiever of everything, every bit of energy that I had. Anyway, I got this letter and it was wrong. It was renegotiating my sick days. “This is how many sick days you're allowed to have.” Anti-any policy, they just made it up so completely outside of what the University of Utah had on the books. They just started making up their own rules. I remember going back and even though I was still not 100%, I went to my operations director, and I said, “This is ridiculous. I'm not signing this,” and I gave it back to him. So I maintained my job for a little bit longer. I didn't have the words to describe what I was going through to him. I just said I was sick, and they accused me of taking time off to practice real estate. They didn't get it at all. We went into mediation, and I think it was in mediation that it hit him how ill I was. They agreed to write me a letter of reference if I chose to fly somewhere else. I'm like, “That would be great.” Me and my overachieverness, I was in the Master's of Public Administration program. I did graduate. Got my grad degrees in MPA because I knew I wanted to do local government, federal government. I always saw my friends during their 20 years of federal service and I always knew I wanted to do some kind of public service. Thank goodness I still had really good friends from Sicily that knew exactly what I had been through, and I'd get on the phone with them and they'd encourage me to just get into federal. “Get a Grade 5. Just get in and you'll work your way up.” 96 I had a professor, Dr. Payton, who was amazing at teaching HR at a graduate level. He looked at me. He knew I was a contracting officer for the University of Utah. He goes, “You need to go federal.” “Yeah, I do.” Thank God an opening came up that was for me. It had my name all over it. I had been applying for jobs all over Salt Lake, not even getting interviews. Nothing. In the meantime, I'm working in this dysfunctional office, and they told me that I was just being a downer, basically, to the rest of the group. So I said, “Well, I'll just shut my door then.” “Okay.” So I worked for six months with my door shut, which was great for me. I love that. I applied for jobs, and thank God I got hired on with the National Park Service as a GS-9 into a 7/9 slot as a contract specialist. So I went down to Bryce Canyon National Park; I was their contract specialist. About a year after I had worked there, my boss at the time—I actually had two bosses. I had one who was my contracting boss in Denver, in Lakewood, Colorado, and then I had my day-to-day boss that was on site at Bryce. My contract-level boss shared with me about a year in that they didn't want to hire me. They said, “Well, we didn't think you'd stay.” I'm like, “Seriously?” They didn't think that with an MPA that I would want to stay there. She shared this with me after she got to know me, and she shouldn't have shared that, but she did. I knew they wanted to hire somebody in-house at Bryce Canyon. It was who you know, but they didn't qualify for the job. They didn't have the basic qualifications. Even though I am a veteran, it was a federal job, it was a professional series. So if anybody says, “Well, she's a veteran,” that's a “No, I didn't get hired anywhere for being a veteran. I qualified on my professional experience.” 97 I just want to say real quick, because I was the HR liaison and because this is a veterans’ project, I witnessed researchers talking about how veterans and prisoners are used the same in research. That's just a fact in our country. It's just a sad fact. Tuskegee Airmen classic. I witnessed H.R. professionals say, “Why do we have to look at all these veterans first? They're just wasting our time.” That was the attitude. “They're all crazy.” I was in the meetings where me and the EEO guy across the room, he caught hell from my eyes during this conversation and met with me after. They were scared of the workload. “Why do I have to do that? All that work to get through all these veterans, to get to the person that I want.” They're all, “How do we know we're going to be safe in our offices if they're coming back injured like that? How do we know that it's going to be okay?” So yeah, I took that on with the EEO guy. He saw it happening and he saw the storm. I hope that people don't do that anymore, but it exists. I will say on my federal application—it was 2009 by then, so I had been out 19 years. By then, everybody knows what a DD214 Form 4 is, and you better have it if you say you're a veteran. For my federal application, I turned it in and I just prayed like, “Please, God, please let it go through.” Because I could have an HR person be like, “Let's find a reason not to look at this person,” because that happens. I got so lucky working for the National Park Service. Very positive place. I decided when we moved there, it was another grand adventure, just like going to Germany. My son was in sixth grade at the time in 2009 we moved there. I had my MPA. I decided, okay, we’re starting over—a prime example of avoidance of anything to take care of myself. I decided, “This is me. I am the professional. This is going to work out. Just to recap, it took me six years of on-the-job training to get to 98 be a warranted contracting officer level three. It’s FAC-C Level III, which is the highest you can get because I worked my ass off. I'm a good Methodist. You work hard, do good, you know. Every day I went in and my nose was down. I worked my ass off, and they were wonderful people to work with. I got promoted to a GS-11/12 position when it opened up in Moab. My son had done his sixth through eighth grade in Bryce Valley as a Bryce Valley Mustang, and we moved to Moab, where he went to high school. I worked there for a few more years. I will say, even though I try to avoid my physical and mental anything, it caught up to me. I was really good for a while where my body wouldn't just shut down in Bryce Canyon, but it just kept coming back and there was nothing I could do. Every bit of energy always went into my job and my kid, so just add it up. What else is important to talk about? When we were in Moab, we started over, so what's new? Every few years I figured, “Okay, this is it.” Every two or three years you start over and it was a promotion. “Okay, we got it. We're starting over again.” We were in Moab for about three years. Sam went to high school and graduated from Grand County High School, so he's a red dirt kid, you know? Totally. He's lived all over Utah now by that time. He went through some really hard times as an adolescent. Really hard times, and we got through that and graduated. He moved up with his dad in Salt Lake, so here I am, not taking care of myself ever. Everything's my job, my kid, you know? I cooked. I ate good food. We would go hiking; once a week, we'd do a hike. But other than that, every bit of energy was working and raising my son. So Sam went to live with his dad for the first time ever, and I started complaining to my boss, “I got to get back to the city. There's no one to date for me out here.” I was in rural Utah and not Mormon and in Moab, which is awesome. But 99 everybody that lives in Moab, they're married and working three jobs during the season. There's no opportunity for me. After I complained for about six months, he was awesome and he allowed me to move back into my house, which I kind of skipped over. I bought a house in the middle of all this craziness that I had since 2003. When I wasn't living with Sam's dad anymore, I bought a house. I call it my “holey house” because it was the bottom-of-the market, crappiest, holeyest house ever you could imagine. Moved back there and started over again, basically. But I was doing the same job, so I got back to the city. Work was really stressful. I knew that to take care of my body, I needed to rest. I knew that much, so I was teleworking. By that time, there had been so many personnel cuts that everyone just went virtual. Our entire team had gone virtual. I was helping people from Wyoming down to New Mexico with contracts—and in Utah, and in Colorado. I was capable of doing really high-stress work, but it took everything out of me, every bit of it. I got to where my desk was next to my bed, and if I felt like I just couldn't do it anymore at that moment, I would lay down for 15 minutes and take a break. Then I climbed back into the chair. It was during this time that I started seeing a psychologist again. I picked up my file at the VA again, like, “There's something wrong. Why are things so hard?” Through my life, there's been times where I couldn't deal with the smallest thing— getting a library card. I would end up sobbing in my car for a long time till I could drive home if I didn't have the right paperwork. Going to have a prescription filled and not being on the list of covered medications. There were things that you're supposed to be able to handle that I couldn't handle. But being a bureaucrat, being the signing authority in a room full of guys, I could handle that. That was a position of power, so for the first time, I was in a 100 position of power. Basically, they had to do what the contract said. I'm the one that could read the contract, so I told them what they agreed to. I had that power of knowing what the hell was going on, to hold them accountable. It was a perfect job for me, even though my brain wasn't functioning. I would tell my doctor, like, “The things aren't connecting,” and I would say, “My wires are just crossing. It's just so confusing. Things aren't working.” I functioned for years with everything in writing. I had the perfect job in contracting. Everything's in writing. If I talk on the phone, I do a phone log. Everybody did phone logs. If you talk to a contractor about a contract topic, you put it in writing what was said and when, everything about it, so it was the perfect job for me. I'm trying to think if I've skipped over. Anyway, it was during that time that I was back in the city. Talked to a real doctor, not the VA, because the VA told me to go away 25 years ago. I found the perfect doctor. He worked with law enforcement and ex-military, and he was a clinical psychologist, so he was a Ph.D. Anybody at the VA that was questioning me, he was their peer, so he had the qualifications to say “Check it again,” because he was their peer in the field—which I didn't know at the time when I found him, but it worked out for me. Just luck, you know? I saw this doctor for three years. He documented my case. He put things into words that I didn't know how to ever put into words. I was told I was resilient, having survived, basically. One thing I told the VA again was—and it was a very appropriate moment— recently, as in Fall 2022, this is me talking to a social worker in charge of getting someone mental health assistance at the VA. I told her, “Nothing has changed in 25 years, and the system is set up for us to just kill ourselves rather than get help.” I still believe that the VA has had changes, but it's not enough. I experienced brick walls back to fall 2022, so that's 32 years after asking for help. 101 Anyways, I went to this guy. He has since died, but his name was Rock Anderson. Have you ever heard of him? LR: I'm thinking of the mayor of Salt Lake City. JN: Oh, yeah. Not Rocky. LR: Different guy. JN: Oh, I'm sorry, I said Rock Anderson. That was the mayor. Rock Underwood. Thank you. I'm glad that we corrected that. That's not the first time I've done that. LR: It's an easy thing to do. JN: Rocky Anderson was pretty awesome too. LR: Rock Underwood. JN: Yeah. Rock Underwood was a guy who worked with people who had PTSD and trauma related to first responder crap. So I found him and started seeing him. Saw him for three years. He documented my case, validated what was happening to me, documented depression, anxiety, panic attacks. Since, I've had people say complex-PTSD and full-on dissociative behavior. These are all new words to me. I never had those words. I want to talk about resiliency and what I went through, and since I write stuff down, I'm going to read it. This is what I wrote: “to be resilient is to be able to withstand and recover. I did that over and over and over again. In life, it can feel like being the ball that the batter too often hits so far out of the park that the pain of the hit and the time it takes to get back to the game in the safe hands of the pitcher in the middle of the game can feel like the end of the game itself. Just when you may think it's game over, it's time for a new batter, and it really stinks to be the ball.” I hope that makes sense. LR: It does. 102 JN: Really stinks, keep getting hit over and over. So that's how I felt, just over and over being the punching bag. So yeah, thank God I somehow found coping skills on my own. My son talks about his childhood with a lot of really good memories, and part of that, along with me playing up the moves— you know, we're going to do this now to get him on board—I found that we watch comedies all the time because I was always tired. We would put on Mr. Bean; we'd always watch Mr. Bean or Xena Warrior Princess was really big in our house. “Xena, time for Xena.” He didn't have to look at me being sad, we could just sit there and watch a funny movie or an awesome Xena Warrior Princess, you know? That would be a wonderful day. Oh, another thing I want to talk about in coping mechanisms was—so we moved around a lot, and when Sam was little, up until the time of sixth grade, we slept together. He held my hand, and I always thought that I was holding his hand. But then later in life, I was like, “Oh, my God, maybe he could sense that I needed him.” So I always thought I was holding his hand, but it was probably both of us. We slept together till he was like in sixth grade when we moved to Bryce Valley. I'm like, “You've got to have your own room, you're in sixth grade.” He probably doesn't appreciate me sharing this, but that's how we got through it. We read a story every night. He grew up to be an incredible reader, always worked in the library. I'm big on libraries. That's how my life was so organized: being a mom so I didn't have time to fall apart. That was a huge blessing, just being a mom, and even better, having the kid I have. Somehow I had these coping mechanisms. I didn't understand what selfmedication was until I heard that term. I'm like, “Oh, I did that.” When Sam would go to his dad's on weekends with his dad, I would self-medicate. I would get a bottle of wine and a movie, and that was it. Then I was down, and later grad school filled that 103 weekend, so I switched to something positive. I'm like, “Okay, on the weekends, Sam's not here. I'm going to be in grad school.” So thank God I switched my coping mechanisms out, some part of it. I was always just fighting to survive, and whenever I went back to the VA, I think the last time before things started really going was when I had been with a guy. When you go into the VA, you have a C&P hearing compensation and pension hearing. So I kept fighting. The VA, I'm like, “You guys did something. Something happened to me that my body doesn't work, it stops.” The last C&P, really horrible, was one of the first things they asked, “Well, are you in a relationship you know with somebody? Are you married? How's home?” I had just left an abusive asshole, drunk. I can't believe that that happened, but it did. That's probably about how I stated it. “I just left someone who is an abusive asshole drunk, and things are better now.” So reason for denial: she's having personal issues, just breaking up with someone. So here I go back to Rock, my psychologist at the time. I'm like, “Guess what just happened to me?” He's like this, and I'm going to say how he called them. He said, “Julie, you have to think of them as bottom-feeding scum suckers. They are bottom-feeding scum suckers.” I said that at his memorial after he died, like he was the best. He gave me words for the anger that I had for people that pencil whip me off of their calendar to get rid of me. He helped me fight that, and I hired him to represent me at a hearing with a hearing officer. Actually, at the VA officer hearing, she pulled records that I had been trying to get for decades. During my time in Phoenix, I had always said, “Well, I started all this paperwork in Phoenix, couldn't get anything to happen over the phone. So I drove there from here.” I drove to Phoenix and went to the counter, said, “Where 104 are my records?” She had them at the hearing. I was like, “Oh, that's nice to have these.” It took years to get my file from the Air Force because I didn't do the paper right. You have to say you want a C-file. I never heard of what a C-file is. They don't offer information. I didn't know what a veteran service officer was until decades into this. Veteran Service Officer, the DAV VSO, helped me. Even though I knew enough before to go to the DAV, I didn't know they could do everything. They could do it all for you for free. That's what they're there for. I just knew the VA told me to go away. “There's nothing wrong with you.” All my care was private, my own insurance, my own dime through decades. Finally Rock got everything through, and I was awarded 100% Permanent and Total Service-Connected Disability benefits, which is insane, literally, to get that. That took years of working with Rocky on top of the decades of picking up my file every few years. He's the one that got it through because I told him. I laid everything out. He heard it all. I'm like, “This is what I did when I was acknowledging the crazy label.” He's like, “Holy….” He documented it all. After my paperwork was done, he died a month later. He had a massive heart attack and he was a year younger than me, so I'm in debt to their family. I sent his wife flowers for a year after that. Anyway, he documented everything and just told me, he's like “Julie, once you're validated with all this, you'll feel better.” Right now, this is 2023. It's been five years since this validation of, “Yeah, we did this.” I know my coping skills. Now I have more tools to deal with life. I had to retire from my job, and I actually need to mention what happened real quick. I was talking to him about crossed wires. My mom had died of COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. I cared for her during her last month of life, 105 which was incredible. It's incredible that I had that time with her. I was still working at her house, but my boss allowed me to telework from her house, which is a regret of mine. I wish I would have told them no. “There's no working going on. I need time with my mom.” But we didn't know how long she would last. It could have been six months or a year, but it happened to be her last month. I found out again how strong I am to deal with something like that. After she died, I went back home and completely fell apart. I made it through everything that I had to do to care for my mom and be in mom mode. I had to take care of my mom, so you do what you have to do. Then I went home and fell apart, still working for the National Park Service at the time. Even though it took me six years to get my warrant, the highest you could possibly get—I could buy anything the U.S. government needed. I could buy an aircraft carrier. It was hot. Even though I worked for the Park Service, I could have bought a lot of stuff for the Park Service, which they need very badly. So anyway, I called my boss one day. I'm like, “Boss, I can't do this anymore. I'm done.” I was the person who wanted the promotion. I wanted to keep going. I want to be the Chief, and they knew it. They knew I wanted to keep going, so what a shock! But I'm like, “This is it. I literally can't function anymore.” My brain wasn't working. We talked about it, I told her why and that I had a diagnosis. She's like, “Okay.” Then I started transitioning my contracts because you can't just stop managing a contract. It took me a month to transition all my contracts; I worked from bed with a laptop for about 4 hours a day to transition all my work to another contracting officer. Then, thank God, my boss said, “Julie, you're eligible for disability retirement.” 106 “You gotta be shitting me. Really? This is going to work out,” because actually, at that moment, I didn't have 100%. I didn't have the VA signed off on my file. I didn't have money to live on. I had been with the Park Service for nine years, and I had bought back my military time, so I had 13 years federal service. She's like, “Yeah, you've done enough years where you and your diagnosis qualifies you to file for disability.” So my job became doing paperwork to give everybody everything they needed. It took about seven months after that that all my paperwork was finished and I was completely off the books from federal. The point is, I guess, my family didn't get the story because I didn't know how to explain, “I'm putting myself in positions where somebody could kill me.” You don't explain that to your mother. I know my sister has told me, “I don't want to hear it.” When I retired, I come from a family of really hard-working people, farmers and ranchers. I went on the road and I talked to my cousins in person, and some of them are veterans. Their response was like, “What the hell is going on?” Just a lot of shame, not just for me, but for our country. “What the hell's going on?” because it was not that way when they served. You do your job, you go home, and you get on with your life, right? You don't have this friendly-fire crap come up in the end. You don't talk about it if it did. My sister personally told me, “Don't talk about it. Don't tell anybody.” I do want to mention the things that you find out after the fact are just really interesting. The cousin that was chief of the Air Force, Carl Newland, wrote the genealogy that I mentioned before. You remember that? LR: Yeah. JN: He was in the VA in the black hole of a hospital, Wilford Hall, where I was about seven years before me. I find out later in life that it's in his obituary, and the family talks about how the VA was negligent in his care. He was in Wilford Hall, not the 107 mental area, but the hospital. He was a World War II chief. I don't want to say it wrong, but there was a party, either a Christmas party or a birthday party. Something was going on on the floor where he was in the hospital. He was a patient. Something happened. He was neglected because of the party. Nobody noticed that something was happening with him. He ended up getting brain damage and he was in a wheelchair for 30 years, the rest of his life. My family blames the VA for that because they did it to him. I personally have a lot of anger with the VA, and people don't believe me, but I can't walk into the VA hospital. I've been there twice. I have panic attacks. I’ve grabbed people and said, “Get me out of here,” because I didn't know where I was or to get out. It's just wild, the things that you find out. Because I went into public administration, I read books that had my father's name in them, and I'm like, “Why is there another person named Chester Newland that's out there in the world that I don't know about. Whose name is Chester anymore?” So about five years after grad school, when I was on a work trip with the Park Service, I'm like, “I've got to find out who this guy is.” He turned out being my first cousin, a distinguished professor of public administration at Sacramento. He's in his nineties now. He just stopped working recently, and he's probably still working, but he cared for Carl. He took charge of his care for 30 years after the brain damage in the VA. I found out he was named after my dad. It's just wild how things come around full circle. My son from growing up, being under my chair in school, he's working on his Ph.D. He's just finishing probably next year in educational psychology. He's a statistician for the State of Utah. He's grown up in school since he was before kindergarten. He was in the law library with me, sitting at a desk when I was in grad school when he was older. He grew up doing things like that, so it's just wild how things have come around. 108 I don't know if I'll ever be in another relationship. I don't know that I could ever have someone with power over me in my life, regardless of how nice they are, you know? As an empty-nester now, it's pretty wild to be able to be aware of how my body works with stress as well as things that I can't control, like my migraines. That just happens and it sucks, but I know what it is now. I do want to say one more thing about physical symptoms. I talked about having tinnitus, and I didn't know what to call it, just ringing in my ears. When I was labeled and going to school at Arizona State, my stress would get so high that the ringing in my ears would get louder. There were times when I had a fire alarm going off in my head and just saw the lips moving with the professor. Didn't know why, so I must be crazy. “I just get these. This just happens. Do you know why?” I talked to people who wrote books on sleep just trying to figure stuff out. I'm like, “What does sleep deprivation do to me?” I talked to an author of a book called Sleep one time, and he was just appalled by what I was telling him. Just these decades of trying to figure out what the hell happened. Thank God my son has come through it all and is an amazing person. What else should I mention? LR: The only other thing I can think of, because I think you've covered all of the important things—I wondered if you wanted to talk about what you're doing out with the CM. Continue Mission? Exciting, that's pretty cool. JN: Yeah. This is a really good, happy ending part. LR: Yeah, I think that's a great way to end. I'll have one more question as a follow-up. JN: I'm going to include a little bit more. When I couldn't work anymore, I had to figure out how to be healthy again. I was pretty much in bed for a year, and Sam just kind of would check in on me and he allowed me to. He knew I needed it. Once I was done being in bed for so long, I decided, “This is ridiculous again. What am I going to do now?” I did have the approval from the VA for my file. I was eligible for voc. 109 rehab. I had to quit my job because of what happened. I was eligible for retraining. So I went to the VA voc. rehab person. I said, “Hey, I want to study fitness. I want to be healthy.” I knew I didn't necessarily want or need to make money from it. I knew for my own health I needed to learn. I'm a textbook-type person, so I knew that rather than going to all these other people telling me how to do it, I wanted to learn how to do it. I got an associate's degree in fitness and health from SLCC, Salt Lake Community College. I went back to SLCC, got a two-year degree to learn how to be healthy, lost 70lbs. Started living, just recreating. I think I called the VA for like a year asking, “Don't you guys have something that I could do?” Either I wasn't wording it right or I was getting the wrong people. I would tell them, I'm like, “I have issues with the VA. Don't you know somebody, because I'm not going there. You've got to know somebody that works with veterans in the community.” So for about a year, every few months, I would call and be like, “You got to know somebody.” Finally a message gets put to somebody who has a clue and they're like, “Yeah, I know an organization, and they're called Continue Mission. I just bowled with them last night. You should go hang out with them.” I'm like, “Really?” I'm pretty good at Googling things, but I hadn't come across them ever. Now they're like they're all over the place, socially, on the Internet. So I was in bed for about a year, got my degree, and started recreating with them, and they were very supportive. It's a nonprofit that was started by the Hansons, Josh and Melissa Hanson, because Josh was a person who volunteered after 9/11 at an older age because he wanted to serve his country. He was in the battle of Fallujah, and he was sent in to clear the roads for the Marines. I hope I said that right. He was a forward engineer driving the reinforced tanky-truck thing that gathered the bombs so that everybody else could come through on the roads. 110 Anyway, he has his own incredible story. He's a TBI PTSD person, and his wife quit her job to take care of him. They started this nonprofit that I started recreating with about three years ago. I just started moving my body instead of changing houses, and just slowly, I started getting better. I've been recreating with them for about three years. Now I'm retired, basically because my stress has gone so high. I know what I neglected to mention. Once my mom died and I couldn't work anymore. I was in bed for so long because my—this is how I would describe it. My brain felt like it blew up. There was nothing happening any more up there. That's how I described it to my doctor. I'm like, “My brain blew up and my entire head hurts.” It wasn't a migraine. It was stress and everything. People don't get it, but that's what it felt like. That's why I was in bed for so long. It took me time to get out of bed, to go back to school, to learn how to be healthy. They were amazing at Salt Lake Community College. They were so tolerant of an older lady that had questions about everything. “Why do you now drink a Coke,” you know? Anyway, so I started recreating, learning how to take care of my body, being the resilient person that I was. I'm Methodist, so service is a huge part of my life. And I did have a lot of leadership time in the Methodist church. Learned a lot. I met a lot of people. The First United Methodist Church in downtown Salt Lake City is my home church. They do a lot of really good work through there. I decided that if I wasn't going to work anymore and I couldn't volunteer any more, I had to resign all my duties at church, which was hard. I decided to move into a rural community, so I moved up to Honeyville, Utah. I live in a house in Honeyville and I decided my service project was going to be growing more food than I needed to give away. So I've done that. This would be my fourth year. I just grow more food than I need and I give plants and seeds to people. I collect seeds, give seeds to people. I decided that was my service project to give 111 back. In the meantime, I'm cycling and hiking and just living with other veterans— living in general with other veterans who have been through a lot themselves. I’m just feeling grateful to have come through it. It's along the way. People are still having teammates kill themselves. When you're in a group of veterans, there's so much trauma and ongoing crap that people are dealing with. “My old whoever just killed himself.” People check on each other. I didn't realize it, but I have so much anger. A lot of it's with the VA; a lot of it's with our society where we are as a nation right now. It's really frustrating. I'm careful what I feed my brain and my body, as anybody should be. I usually read nonfiction about what really happened from the source, and people like Madeleine Albright, just amazing people who talk about their stories. I try to fill myself with good information, positive good vibes. I try to be around good people. My son, every time we get together, he's always laughing at me because we have this wonderful sense of humor with each other. I just feel so blessed. I always say that I'm thankful to God for giving my son to me. There's so much trauma, but so many good things to think about. LR: Ironically, you've kind of answered this question, but I'm going to end on this question, and this is how we will end the interview. Something that I like to ask: as you look back on your life, moving forward, what do you hope your legacy is that you’re leaving? JN: Of course, I'm a mom, and my son—I'm thankful that I've been able to encourage him. He's also benefited from the VA. He got money to go through school because my award was so recent that he's a college student by the time it came through. He's been able to get a good start at life with no debt, having his master's and then his Ph.D. with no debt. I think he saw me working my ass off through the years, and I always had high expectations of him as well, being a single parent. He's always 112 worked his ass off in everything. He's always worked multiple jobs, and I think he scaled back to two jobs right now. He's a data analyst with the State of Utah, so a statistician, and he's doing research with the University of Utah still and taking a class for his PhD. He cut back his research assistant hours. He had like four jobs, basically, so he's back to like three jobs now. I'm pretty sure dragging him to libraries his whole life did something to him, reading his whole life that made him a reader. I'm really proud of him and who he is as a person. He's a kind human. He recognizes bad in the world and questions it. I think the people of the 20-year-old generation are awesome because they're seeing so much and learning what not to do and the hypocrisy that happens. They question it, and at least I see it being questioned. He calls me on my prejudice that comes out. He's like my mother, and I do the same to him. I give the eye. He calls me out on little things that I shouldn't be judging. That's pretty awesome. I talk about my cousins who worked into their seventies. Most of my cousins are in their seventies now, but all the way up into the early nineties right now, living cousins, and there's very few that don't work. Everybody works. It makes me wonder: well, I've survived this long. What am I going to do with a couple more decades or more? I don't know what is going to happen, but I'm that person that's always setting goals. The problem is I have to keep them realistic, have to keep them down so I don't overwhelm myself because now that I know, I've just got to keep it toned down. I'm really proud of my son. He's the next generation. I think his dad and I did really good raising him. He sees things, like I said, that he questions. You know, last year he called me and he's like, “Mom, maybe I should leave the country. What is going on? Maybe this isn't the place to live anymore.” That was huge. Here I am, public servant is my deal. I want to be a service to our country, and that's how he 113 was raised. We talked about history and what we've been through in our country, our family legacy. I kind of talked him down. I'm like, “Look at what Grandma dealt with through her life from 1938 to 2017. Look what she went through.” I told him, “We're just going to get through these things and just be a good person, do good in the world.” I still say my prayers every night, and I usually thank God for being here still. “Thanks for letting me be here still and for having an awesome son.” I usually say, “Help us make good decisions and do good in the world.” My mom was an amazing person who never said a bad thing about anybody who lived a good life. I think about her a lot and her expectations of me and what I say to my son. Actually, in the photos that I'm sending you, I have a picture of my mom and my son. She's whispering him sweet, sweet things that she wouldn't tell me what she was saying. So instead of being out in public crying and being my own little spectacle of a cloud over my head, even the people that I don't know, I try to go out and look decent and smell good. After climbing out of my bed for a day or two, I put a smile on my face to try and make another person feel okay, and leave big tips to the person in the restaurant. I try to do good things, little by little. Sam, my son travels. He loves traveling, thank God, and he went to a country recently. I'm not going to say which country, but he went to a country and he came back and he said, “Mom, everybody's nice. Everyone was nice, and we don't have that here.” Just being a parent that talks to their kid about being a good person and what that does in the world, that's pretty huge. LR: I want to thank you for your time and your willingness to share your story. 114 Julie Newland, Shadow Box, Top to Bottom 2189th Comm Squadron; AirForceCommCommand; 2143rd Comm Squadron; Ribbons: AirForceAchievementMedal; DistinguishedUnit;GoodConductMedal;Overseas Short, OverseasLong, Marksman, Basic, ColdWarVictoryMedal. Small Display Medals. Stripes E-1 to E-4 Senior Airman. Dog Tags. Misc. Pins: Civil Service 10 yr pin, MPA PiAlphaAlpha Honor Society; Challenge Coin 1 Chester George Newland (Father), B: 13 Dec 1910 D: 21 Nov 1971 Doctor of Osteopathy. Family Practitioner in Apache Junction, AZ 2 Arlene Faye Reis Newland (Mother) B: 14 Dec 1938 D: 22 Dec 2017 Widowed at the age of 33. Raised two daughters, Millie Suzan and Julie Maris Worked in the medical administration field 3 Newland Family History, by Carl Newland, 1944. Introduction Carl Newland was Chief in the US Air Force. Medical malpractice by the VA resulted in brain damage 1981. Cared for by Chester A. Newland for the remainder of his life = 30 years and died in 2011. 4 Chester George Newland, Arlene Faye Reis Newland Julie Maris Newland, Millie Suzan Newland Dog = Lady 1971 outside of where we lived behind the doctor’s office in Apache Junction, AZ 5 American Legion School Award Received in 6th Grade 6 Arlene Newland and brother Dennie Reis Julie Newland and Suzie Newland Dennie served in WWII, Battle of the Bulge, Signalman 7 1986 Basic Training. Women’s Bay Lackland AFB, San Antonio, TX 8 1986 Basic Training, Last Day Dog Pile and Happy Faces! Lackland AFB, San Antonio, TX 9 1986 Julie Newland graduation photo from Basic Training Lackland AFB, San Antonio, TX 10 1986 Ground Radio Operator Technical School Keesler AFB, Biloxi, MS 11 Zweibruecken Air Base, West Germany. c1986-87 Radio Operations L-R: Julie Newland, Steve Opps, Alex Kokovidis, Jon Wren, TSgt Cherwood. 12 Julie Newland, c 1986-1987 Traveling in Bavaria in salvaged Ford Escort. Outside of gasthaus. 13 Julie Newland, Christmas 1987. Bus tour to Paris. 14 Zweibruecken Air Base, West Germany. Radio Operations shop at Christmas, 1986. Tree decorated with teletype tape. 15 Newlands: Julie (top), sister Millie Suzan (left), mother Arlene (right), Niece Lauren Eleyse (bottom). 1988 on leave before going to Sicily. 16 Zweibruecken Air Base, West Germany. Julie Newland Receiving Air Force Achievement Medal. 1987 17 Comiso Air Base, Sicily, 1988. Roommates: Tina Christianson Kros and Julie Newland 18 PCSing from West Germany to Sicily. Drove down. Stop at Pisa. This is on the Leaning Tower of Pisa, 1988. 19 Vittoria, Sicily, 1988. Communist town, off limits. Sunset over the Mediterranean. 20 Julie Newland, Agrigento, Sicily. Valley of the Temples. 1988 21 Julie Newland, photograph with disturbed emulsion effects. Agrigento. 1988 22 Julie Newland, 1989. Waiting for medical evacuation. 23 Student of Fine Art Photography, Arizona State University. 1989-1993 24 25 Julie Newland photography. “S is for Sex” Microwave Mountain, East Mesa, Arizona. 26 Brian Thomas Dutton (Army veteran) and Julie Maris Newland (Air Force veteran), May, 1992, Tempe, Arizona 27 Brian Dutton, Castle Valley, Utah c 1994 28 Samuel Orion Rae Dutton (B: 15 Jan 1998), 1999. Baking with mom. Sandy, Utah 29 Samuel Orion Rae Dutton, Julie Newland Reading our favorite book visiting at Grandma’s house. 30 Julie Newland, Master’s of Public Administration and Pi Alpha Alpha Honor Society 31 Sam Dutton and Arlene Newland. Receiving sweet whispers from Grandma. 32 33 Sam Dutton, studying at the University of Utah. Face-timing during Covid 34 Sam Dutton, Wasatch Trail Race, Salt Lake City, Utah 2023 35