Oral history interview with Ingrid Ruffin

WOMEN VETERANS HISTORICAL PROJECT

ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION

INTERVIEWEE:Ingrid Ruffin

INTERVIEWER:Hermann Trojanowski

DATE:May 8, 2007[Begin Interview]

HT:Okay. Today is Tuesday, May 8, 2007 and the time is 9:50. My name is Hermann Trojanowski, and I’m with Ingrid Ruffin at the Jackson Library at the University of North Carolina [at] Greensboro [UNCG], and we’re here to conduct an oral history interview for the Carter Women Veterans Historical Project.

Ingrid, if you could tell me your first—I’m sorry, your full name, and we’ll use that as a test for our voices.

IR:Okay, my name is Ingrid Jovonne Ruffin.

[recording paused]

HT:Thank you so much for talking with me today. I really, really appreciate this.

Could you tell me just a few biographical bits of information about yourself, such as where born.

IR:Okay. I was actually born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1979. My mom was sent there by her family because they couldn’t afford to take care of her here in North Carolina, so I was born there.

HT:And where did you grow up?

IR:I grew up in—well, after my mom gave birth to me in Brooklyn, she returned to her family home in Ahoskie, North Carolina. And then, when she graduated from high school, she attended college in Durham, North Carolina, so I spent most of my life in Durham, North Carolina.

HT:Can you—can you tell me something about your parents and siblings?

IR:My mother is a nurse at Duke University. She’s attending graduate school there as well. My father retired from the navy in 2005. They were never married, but I have a stepmother who’s name is Shirley McCaskill. Oh, my father’s name is Charles McCaskill, and my mother’s name is Felicia Ruffin. My father, yes, my father served in the navy for over twenty years, and he retired in 2005. I have two sisters and one brother. My—I shared—I shared my mother with my brother and my sister. My brother is nineteen years old, and my sister is twelve. My brother is now serving in the army.

HT:Oh.

IR:And my sister, she’s in middle school. And then my father and step-mother adopted a baby, and she is one years old now.

HT:So you have a long history of military service in your family.

IR:Yes.

HT:That’s great.

IR:Yes, my brother’s—my father’s sister actually served in the army. And my brother’s father served in the army. So, yes.

HT:Now, where’d you go to high school?

IR:I went to high school no at Southern Durham—at Southern High School in Durham.

HT:And did you have any favorite subjects?

IR:My favorite subjects were art and English.

HT:And what did you do after graduating from high school?

IR:Actually, I first came to the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. And I attended here for two years before joining the air force.

HT:And do you recall why you joined the air force?

IR:I—I guess the best thing to explain is that I had become disillusioned with the education process. It seemed so shallow at the time. And I really couldn’t appreciate it, and I felt like I needed to learn a little bit more about life before I could appreciate the things that I was learning in the classroom.

HT:Right. And what made you decide to join the air force?

IR:Well, I talked to a member of the recruiters. I talked to the navy. I talked to the army. Didn’t—I just realized I’d never be a Marine, so that went out of the window. [laughs] One of my family friends is actually a navy recruiter, so he talked to me and told me the real scoop about military and what to expect. But I realized I didn’t like swimming, the idea of being on a large boat at any time, just—no. So the navy went out the window. And then the army recruiter seemed kind of seedy to me, so I was like, no. And then I finally talked to the air force recruiter, and he was like, “We’re very selective about our people. It’s whether or not we want you.” [laughs] And after that I was sold.

HT:Do you think your—since you dad was in the navy, and you had other family members in the military, did that influence your decision at all?

IR:I think so. My family has pretty much always looked positively upon the military. I know I had a great-great-cousin, he served in the army in Vietnam, and [unclear], you know, I had my grandfather’s father had served in the military. We actually have old pictures of him in his uniform. So, you know, I guess that I’ve always—even when I was a little kid—I remember as a little girl saying I wanted to an army man when I grow up. [laughs]

HT:Now, when you decided to join, did you parents have to sign papers because you were—

IR:No.

HT:They didn’t.

IR:No, because I was—how old? I was twenty.

HT:Twenty, okay.

IR:Yes.

HT:And where did you enlist?

IR:I enlisted—I enlisted at—in Durham. I was living in Durham, but I guess Raleigh, because I had to go to the MEPS Center [Military Entrance Processing Station] in Raleigh, North Carolina.

HT:What kind of center did you go to in Raleigh?

IR:The military entry—it’s called the MEPS. I don’t actually know what the letters stand for. [laughs]

HT:Is that M-I-P-S or—?

IR:M-E-P-S.

HT:Oh, M-E. Okay. And what type of—okay, can you describe the process of joining, such as did you have to take a written test or some physicals and that sort of thing?

IR:Well, the first thing I did was take a entrance exam and it’s called the ASVAB [Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery] which is A-[S]-V-A-B-S—couldn’t tell you what it stands for. [chuckles] But everybody who joins the military has to take it.

HT:Okay.

IR:And after that—I got pretty high scores, but I didn’t choose my job until I actually went to basic training. But it wasn’t until I came in to finally leave for basic training, because it was actually about a month because I went to study abroad in Africa before I went to basic training. So it was a couple months in between taking the exam and signing the initial paperwork that I actually had to do my physical. And I didn’t do my physical until it was time for me to leave and go to San Antonio [Texas] for basic training.

HT:And you mentioned that you went to Africa for a month. What were you doing there?

IR:I was studying abroad. I was studying African art history and culture and textiles.

HT:Okay, through the university?

IR:Actually through North Carolina State University.

HT:Oh, okay. Well tell me about that. What was that like, going overseas for, I guess, the first time in your life?

IR:Yes, it was. It was very life changing and made me appreciate American even more. Like, I was so gung-ho and ready to join the military after I came back from Africa. Africa is a nice place to visit. Ghana is a wonderful country. The people are warm and welcoming, and it’s definitely different than America to a point where, you know, there whole thing—if a person appears to be rushed, they make you slow down. And that’s one thing I learned from that is just that sometimes you have to pull yourself back. But I loved America after that trip.

HT:What did you learn art-wise?

IR:Art-wise?

HT:Or textiles or—?

IR:Well, just that there’s a different aesthetic. American—the Western aesthetic, I guess, is more art for art sake. But in Africa, if something is beautiful, it has to be useful. And if it’s not useful, then it can’t be beautiful. And I like that idea, you know.

HT:When you decided to join the military—if we can go back to that time in your life?

IR:Oh, yes.

HT:What did you family and friends and coworkers think about you doing this?

IR: I think at that particular point in my life, people were not surprised about anything that I did, or rather it was just to expect the unexpected. Because—it was funny, because when I was growing up, I was a very scared child. I really didn’t want to do—I had big dreams, but I didn’t want to do anything. [chuckles] Because I had many—I had numerous opportunities to leave home and explore the world. I had the opportunity to go to a private school in—up North. I can’t remember where it was. It was like in New England. I had the opportunity to study abroad in Australia for a summer, but I wasn’t willing to do—put forth the effort. If someone had done it for me, done everything for me, I would have done it. And at some point in time during my twenties, I just got this idea that I was going to live life and do whatever, and picked up, went to Africa, and decided to join the military. I just—

HT:Just did it?

IR:Yes, I just did it. I just, somehow, I decided I was just going to embrace life. And then I remember in art class—it was art history class—always, the teacher would flash these slides of these famous places and architecture and paintings. And there would always be, well, at that time I thought snide-type people who would be like, “Oh yes! I remember when I went to Rome and I saw that.” And I was like, “Ew.” And then I realized that I was actually just jealous and I wanted to be that person to say, “Well, I’ve been there, and I saw that, and I wasn’t as impressed as everyone else is.” [chuckling] But, you know, I wanted to be able to form my own opinions about the world from my own personal experiences. And so what better way to do that than just to pick up and go.

HT:That’s right. [laughter] Would you recall when you actually joined the air force—what month and date it was that you entered, or went to basic training, maybe?

IR:When I went to basic training?

HT:Yes.

IR:Oh. I came back, I think it was in September.

HT:Of 19—

IR:1999.

HT:September ’99, all right.

IR:Yes, it was. It was in September 1999.

HT:And I think you said earlier that you went to basic probably at Lackland Air Force Base [Texas].

IR:Yes, I did go at Lackland.

HT:And how long was that training—how long was basic training?

IR:Well, that’s a story.

HT:Okay.

IR:Normally, air force basic training is six weeks. I like to believe they liked me so much they decided to keep me two weeks extra. So I got what they call recycled, because I couldn’t complete my run in the necessary time. And it’s very odd because I’d always been a physically fit person. And I don’t know what it was, you know, about that time. But, so I had to do—stay a little bit longer. [laughter]

HT:So can you tell me about some of the days at basic training? What was the first day like?

IR:Oh, the first day. It’s just odd. I remember standing there—I had—I had my hair was in an afro. I had a natural hairstyle, you know, for black people. [chuckles] And I was just so fresh, sensitive. I’m still a very sensitive person. And I remember as I was standing out there, it was sort of like a light dawn, you know, so I’m scared because I don’t know what to expect. And these people, they just come up, and they seem okay, the TIs [training instructors] with their big campaign hats. And they’re like [yells], “Pick up your bags and follow us.” So, we just followed them. And we go up to what would become my barrack—my first barracks. And when you are a civilian coming in, you’re called a rainbow because you don’t have uniforms yet. And then that, “Oh, look at the rainbows!” because everybody’s looking all different and everything. And they pretty much make you hate everything that it means to be a civilian, you know. “Civilians are others. You don’t want to be a civilian,” you know.

Oh, my first day, we walk in and you go into what’s called the day room, just a big sitting room, and there’s a couch in there. Some of us decided to sit down. I don’t remember if I was one of the people that sat on it. But I know some of us decided to sit on the couch. Well, the TI comes in shortly after, and he says [yells], “Who are you? Did I give you permission to sit on the couch? You don’t deserve to sit on the couch!” And it was like oh, I realized that maybe I got myself into something more. [chuckles]

Then after that it’s like, “Take your bags to the bunk.” So we go take our bags to the bunk and go stand beside a bunk. And then about five training instructors come in with their campaign hats and commence to inspect our civilian luggage. And if you had anything that was just out of the ordinary, just made you stand out, they came on you. And like two of them saw my sketchpad—because I was an art major at the time—saw my sketchpad inside of my luggage and they were like, “Oh, so you’re an artist. Are you sensitive like an artist?” And, I mean, they made me cry, because they were just picking on me. And I was like—but all of those feelings—it’s just a drawing, right? All my life people had rewarded me for the fact that I had artistic ability, but these people were taking that thing and just like, making me hate it. [laughs] And, yes, that was my first ex[perience].

HT:Were the TIs all men, or were some women as well?

IR:We had some women, yes. They called them girls [unclear].

HT:And were they—when I was in the air force, we just had men, of course. So were the women equally rough?

IR:Oh, woo, some of them you couldn’t even tell—because we had an intercom system where sometimes the TIs would check up on us and call on the intercom system. And we always had to go—we had to give our—what is it called? Our—something statement. I forgot what it’s—some kind of statement. Well, you always go, “Yes, sir. Ingrid Ruffin,” something, whatever. Whatever I had to say I had to preface it with this statement. And sometimes when you were doing [unclear] the female TIs would come over, and it would sound like a man. And they’d say, “Ingrid what are you doing? Blah, blah, blah.” And you’d say, “Sir.” And then [yells], “Do I sound like a man to you?” And it’s like, ooh, I do not want to answer that question. [laughs] “She thinks I sound like a man.” And it’s like, “Oh, no.” [laughter] But yes, they were quite rough.

HT:What did you think of the food?

IR:It was good. That’s all I know. You just had to eat it fast, so I really don’t remember it too much. I just remember putting it all—mixing it together. My favorite breakfast that I still love today: grits and bacon and butter and eggs and everything going—goes into it. [chuckles] And you get it down as fast as you possibly can and just run out the door so that way you weren’t the last person.

HT:Right. Do you remember what a typical day was like?

IR:Woo. Get up really, really early. By the end of it you were dog tired, which I think we’d usually go to bed around 8:00 or 9:00 [PM]. And, you know, from college student, you’re used to staying up, partying all night. No, those people [ran your day?]. It was just spent marching. Everywhere you went you walked. And PT [physical training] in the morning. And they’d give us—we’d usually have some sort of academic class learning about what it means to be in the air force and just all our customs and courtesies.

HT:Did you have to perform KP [kitchen patrol]?

IR:Oh, yes. Oh, that was the best detail. Everybody loved KP. Oh, I had the coolest details. I had KP duty. When I got recycled, I had to babysit some of the younger flights, where I would have to walk them to and from the chapel or to the hospital. Then also did KP duty, and I also did clean up of the parade grounds. But KP duty was the best, because we’d get to eat the desserts. And one of my friends actually got in trouble because one of the civilian workers said something to her, and she was like, “I hate civilians.” Because, you know, by that—we had been there long enough at that point we’d be thoroughly indoctrinated. Anyway, the civilian workers told our TI and she got in trouble for that. It was funny.

HT:And did you ever go out to the rifle range and practice?

IR:Oh, yes. Yes, we did. We did M-16—because at the end, I think it’s the fourth or fifth week you do a thing called warrior week. And during that you get qualified for M-16 week, learn all the more, like I guess you say, combat aspects of being in the military. Do marches. We did like a six mile march through snake infested waters. And—

HT:So you were at Lackland, I think, in the fall of September ’99?

IR:Yes. I didn’t leave until November. I was actually there for Thanksgiving. My graduation from basic was during Thanksgiving.

HT:Because I was there October and November.

IR:Oh, it was cold.

HT:Yes, cooler then.

IR:Cooler.

HT:Yes. I’m glad I wasn’t there in the summertime. Let’s see. What were some of the academic instructions like, do you recall, during that time?

IR:Well, of course we learned about things like military equal opportunities, sexual harassment, don’t do drugs. They taught us about like financial responsibility. How finances work in the military; as much as we needed to know. They’d just get up there in teach and we’d always have to come into the room to a position of attention until they say, “At ease,” and then you kind of relax your body, but not too much. [laughs] Because you didn’t want to be the guy to fall asleep.

HT:Okay. And what was your uniform like? What did you wear?

IR:We wore the—it’s kind of hard because they actually changed the uniform now, but that won’t go into effect until a long time from now. I guess it’s the [pause] it’s kind of hard because they look like what was the old—it’s BDUs, the battle dress uniform, but everybody’s changed to digitals now, and I can’t—I don’t know how to explain it. Just green—it looks like camouflage.

HT:Camouflage. You wore camouflage—

IR:Stereotypical—

HT:—really the entire time. So you didn’t really wear skirts or anything.

IR:Oh, no! [laughter]

HT:No skirts.

IR:No skirts at all. We did get fitted for our dress uniforms which included a skirt and pants, but because we had a brother flight, we would wear pants in order to match our brother flight.

HT:What was a brother flight?

IR:It was a flight of all males.

HT:Oh, I see.

IR:That they were our partners.

HT:I see.

IR:That, like, we did our academic training with them. We pretty much did all of our training with them. The only thing we didn’t do with them was sleep.

HT:Because the women were in a separate barracks, I assume?

IR: Yes.

HT:Or at least separate floors.

IR:Separate floors. We were in the same building but separate floors.

HT:And what were the barracks like?

IR:Open bay, where it’s just—we had two rooms. Okay, you walk into the door you have your two sleeping quarters where it’s just like row of beds, row of wall lockers. Then you had your bathrooms on the left hand side as you’re coming in through the door, and that’s open bay showers. And then we had bathrooms; the only privacy you could get was going to the bathroom, pretty much.

HT:[chuckles] I remember that very well.

IR:Yes. I would take naps in the bathroom; I’m not going to lie. Like during academic—

HT:Naps?

IR:Yes. Like during the academic classes when I would feel myself tired, I would just go to the bathroom. I would lay—I would put the toilet seat down and put my head on my elbows and I would go to sleep. [laughs] Because nobody would harass you, because they taught us at the very beginning about OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] regulations, they cannot tell us when to go to the bathroom. And so I took that to my advantage. And they were not going to come into the bathroom unless you were gone for an abnormally long time to check up on you. But I would go in there.

HT:So you were that tired you had to take naps in the day?

IR:Yes. Only a few times. But I—that bathroom was—Still today I use the bathroom as a place that I just—if I need to get away from people. I learned nobody will bother you in the bathroom. No one will ask you what you’re doing.

HT:Oh my gosh. Well did you make any friends with the—

IR:Yes.

HT:—with the other airmen?

IR:Yes. Actually one of my friends, she was in my first flight and she got recycled with me. And we’re still in contact today. And one other girl, we were friends like during the military, she’s out now. And then there were some people who I didn’t realize that we were in the same flight until after, well into—.

HT:Yes, right. Did you ever get the opportunity to go to downtown San Antonio?

IR:Yes, I did. Graduation—when my family, they came, they allowed our parents and family and friends to take us off base. So we did the like River Walk thing. I have a picture of me, my mom, in my uniform, and I look horrible, standing behind the River Walk sign.

HT:Well after boot camp, could you tell me about what you did next?

IR:Went to technical school, where I learned how to be a 1-Charlie-5-3-1 (IC531), which is aerospace [warning and control – corrected by veteran] operator. It’s a ground version of the AWACS [airborne warning and control system] which I know nobody knows. It’s like, “Okay, yes, that makes a difference.” The AWACS is a big airplane with a dish on it, and so it gives you an overall air picture from the aspect of the ground.

HT:Right.

IR:Right. And then, mine was looking up and theirs was looking down

HT:And where did you go to technical school?

IR:Keesler.

HT:Keesler?

IR:Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi.

HT:Mississippi, yes.

IR:Biloxi, Mississippi.

HT:How long did that training last?

IR:Oh, how long did that last? I went there in December, got to my first base in March. It seemed like it was way longer than it actually was, but I think so. Yes. December, January, February—like three, three months.

HT:Three months.

IR:Three or four months.

HT:Can you tell me something about the training you received at Keesler?

IR:Oh, [makes a noise]. It seemed intense. It was so much information, you know. They didn’t expect us to be experts, because with my particular kind or career field, once you leave it, you could go to any number of units. And whatever you learned in technical school, you’re going to learn something completely different. So it was just a lot of working on a computer and doing simulations and stuff and written tests.

HT:Lots of—lots of studying I would imagine.

IR:Yes. It really wasn’t that much, because the information, for me at least, really wasn’t that hard at all.

HT:And what was a typical day like at Keesler?

IR:Get up—oh, morning PT. We had to go out in front of the court, do PT. We had—and then they’d do like muster, that’s what they’d call it. Muster? Yes. M-u-s-t-e-r. And they’d make announcements and stuff like that about things going on. And it depended on what phase you were on, because you had all your different phases, where you’d—When you first get there, you’re not allowed to wear civilian clothes at any time. Then after you take a PT test and you have good behavior, then you’re able to move on to the next phase, which is to go off base, but you can only wear your blues, your dress uniform, like the, I guess professional—casual-professional look, [chuckles] which would usually be like your blue shirt and your pants. And then you go to the next phase; you’d be allowed to wear civilian clothes and go off base. And then after that, it depended on how long you stayed there, how many phases you went through, because there’s some people whose tech school was like a year. And they were eventually able to have their family there, drive a car.

HT:Yes, yes.

IR:Oh, but the average day was usually just eat, get up, go to class, have muster, have breakfast, go to class. You’d have to march in formation with your class, which my class was like five people. And march to class. And because I was the highest ranking person in the class, I would have to call cadence. And I would be in charge of my flight. And so what I’d do is while we were near the TIs, I’d call cadence, and then when we’d get away from that I’d be like, “Guys, look, you all know how to march. I’m not going to keep doing this.” So then we’d march and when we’d get up near the class building, I’d start calling cadence again, just in case somebody—. [laughs] I think it was so funny because one day I was marching back from class and I was like, “Hup, two, three,” and everybody was all in line and behaving well, and one of the TIs passed and he was like, “Now that’s how you’re supposed to march a flight.” It was so funny, because I was like if he knew what we were doing before we got in sight of him, he would not have said that.

HT:Now were your evenings free, basically?

IR:Yes, the evenings were free. Spent most of my time sitting out in the hallway talking or going to Club BDU, or it’s actually the Vandenberg Club which is the NCO [non-commissioned officers] club, and hanging out there.

HT:And what were the room accommodations like—your sleeping quarters and that sort of thing?

IR:It was just two to a room. You had a roommate. It was quite nice. It was like a hotel suite. Nice accommodations.

HT:Yes, nice accommodations.

IR:Yes.

HT:And so, did anything unusual happen while you were at Keesler—humorous, memorable moment type things? It could be either on base or off base, because I’m assuming they would probably let you go off base for—to visit the town or something like that.

IR:Okay, actually I think I have like two kind of memorable things. One was my first time going to a church off base. I introduced myself and I can’t remember my name. I couldn’t remember how to introduce myself. Because they were like, “Oh, nice to meet you. What’s your name?” And I was like, “Ruffin.” And then I was like, no, I don’t say Ruffin. You know, it’s like I had this whole weird coming into—

HT:Because everybody in the military calls each other by the last name.

IR:Yes, by their last name. So I was like, “Ruffin, Ingrid, Ruffin,” and like for—I don’t know, it felt like it lasted for a very—that confusion lasted for a very long time to me. And I was like, “Oh, my name is Ingrid Ruffin.” But of course, they were used to dealing with military people, so I think they sort of like could understand the confusion I was going through. But it was funny.

HT:So after—after Keesler, what was your next duty station?

IR:Shaw Air Force Base. That was my very first duty station.

HT:And that’s in South Carolina?

IR:Yes. In Sumter, South Carolina. Sumter.

HT:And how long were you there?

IR:I was there, ooh, from March to June of the next year, I think.

HT:June 2000?

IR:Yes.

HT:And by this time it was already—so March to June of 2000.

IR:Yes.

HT:So that wasn’t—not a terribly long period of time.

IR:No, I wasn’t there—wait a minute. No, 2001.

HT:2001, okay.

IR:Yes, because I was in Iceland when September 11 happened.

HT:Okay. And what type of work did you do at Shaw?

IR:I worked in the Air Operations Center, the AOC, as a surveillance technician, and I basically just identified tracks. And it was kind of cool, because during my short time there I got to do a lot of things that airmen didn’t usually get to do. One of the first tasks—cool tasks that I got to do was my boss brought me to his office and he said, “Ingrid, I need you to become an expert in—” what is that system called? I can’t even think of the name of the system. CTAPS [Contingency Theater Advanced Planning System]. I think that’s what it was called. CTAPS. Couldn’t tell you what it stood for.

HT:Okay.

IR:I can’t remember that. [chuckles]

HT:Was that C—?

IR:C-T-A-P-S. No, it was TBMCS [Theater Battle Management Core Systems]. That’s what—okay.

HT:T-M

IR:T-M-B-C-S.

HT:Okay.

IR:Okay, yes. And so I had to go in—I had to go to—the contractors came from, I think Lockheed Martin actually was in charge of that system. I think. Don’t quote me on that one. But they came in and they trained a few people how to run this system, to know the ins and outs of this system. So I did this—

HT:This is a radar system?

IR:No.

HT:It’s not? Oh, it’s not.

IR:No, it was like a tracking—it was a war planning system. So they would take the information that they would get from the radars and all the different links, because there’s so many different links and ways to get surveillance information. They would get this information. They would also have information for like our resources, allocation of resources. And then from within that system, the plans people would create war plans like where to send our aircraft and different things.

So in two weeks I had to become an expert on how to run the system. And then my thing was I had to sit there. Like I had to sit at the TMBCS system and people would call me for help. And I also had to train the general at the time, who was General Wahl, who was in charge of the SWAAOR, which is Southwest Asian A—Southwest Asia AOR [Area of Responsibility]. He was in charge of this whole area. And he was set up at the 9th Air Force, because that’s what it was at Shaw Air Force Base. I was with the 9th Air Force. And I trained his assistant in how to use TMBCS so he could show the general how to do it. And so what would happen is I would sit there, and it was a joint forces operation, so we had [U.S.] Navy, Marines, [U.S.] Army was there. And we also had some people from the Royal Air Force, from England. And they would just come up and I would have to show them. If they couldn’t understand stuff I would have to show them how to use the system and how to fix, troubleshoot, and do problems. And if I couldn’t figure it out, then I would call—find some way to figure it out.

But for the most part it was pretty cool, because I was an airman and there was a tech sergeant who was working with me. And most often people would come up to the tech sergeant and people would ask him a question, and as soon as they left he would ask me the answer, and I would tell him, and he’d go back. And one time I got a little full of myself and somebody was getting ready to find him and I was like, “You know what, just go ahead and tell me what the problem is, because all he’s going to do is ask me how to fix it.” [laughter] And I think I might have gotten in trouble for it, but at the end of the exercise, I did get an award for being an outstanding performer.

HT:Great.

IR:Because I did that job plus the job that I was supposed to do, which is ID [identify] tracks. They pretty much covered the screen because all the tracks, like hostiles and all these different—all the tracks had different colors. And then my job, my real job, was to color the tracks.

HT:Let me digress for just a second. Since you have an art background and you went to a very technical area, did you feel uncomfortable with this at all, or do you wish they had given you a more art type related position in the air force?

IR:Yes. I would probably still be in the military if I had been given more of an art type thing.

HT:Say in relations or, I mean, public relations.

IR:Yes.

HT:Or photography.

IR:Yes.

HT:Or writing for a newspaper or something like that. There are those type of jobs.

IR:Yes.

HT:Yes, yes. So it’s really strange that they would have put you with a very technical thing when you obviously have very—such a wonderful background in art.

IR:Yes. But that was one of the things that kind of haunted me my whole military career, even though I tried to do the very best I possibly could in the job that I had been assigned, I just didn’t feel—like, I didn’t have necessarily the passion for it that I saw some of my other peers have, you know. Like I could care less about the radius of a TPS-75 [radar system], even though I knew what it was because I had to know what it was. And sort of like there would be some moments where I’d be thinking to myself, “I don’t care about this stuff. Why are they making me learn this?”

HT:Did you ever in your career with the air force ask to be transferred to another career field?

IR:Actually, I tried. I tried out to be an AFN reporter.

HT:FM?

IR:AFN, Armed [sic, American] Forces Network. Be on the AFN radio. They said that I didn’t speak white enough. And that hurt my feelings.

HT:Oh.

IR:Because people always said that I just sounded like an old white lady. And I was like, “How do you say that?” But, you know, a little training.

HT:And you’d have been good at that I’m sure.

IR:Yes, but you know what, I’m glad now that I didn’t, because I wouldn’t have been able to come back to school like I have and have the experience that I’ve had these past two years, and so everything worked out in the end.

HT:It generally does. It really does. Yes. Well after Shaw Air Force Base, where was your next duty station?

IR:My next duty station was Keflavik Naval Air Station in Iceland.

HT:Can you spell that?

IR:Keflavik is K-e-f-l-a-v-i-k.

HT:Okay. And that’s in Iceland.

IR:Yes.

HT:So going from the heat of Shaw Air Force Base to the cold of Iceland must have been quite a shock.

IR:Yes. Oh, I’ve forgotten to say—I’m sorry. I also, while I was at Shaw Air Force Base, had the opportunity to go to Saudi Arabia for two weeks.

HT:Oh, TDY [temporary duty].

IR:Yes, TDY. And there my main job was to figure out how to break a system. Because they were doing like tests and they just wanted anybody who could—I was just punching in information and just doing my worst job ever to see—because it was a system that filtered classified information. Because the AOC in Saudi Arabia, we shared it with the British, we shared it with the Canadians, we shared it with the Saudis and a couple other countries. And the information on the U.S. side, we owned—we had kind of different levels of how close of a friend they were and how much information they got. So my job was to see if the system could be broken, so that way they technical people could come in and fix it.

HT:And were you successful in breaking it?

IR:No. So it was a good system. Like, if it wasn’t broken, that was a good thing. And if it did break, that was still a good thing because then they’d find out the problem. It’s almost like a firewall, but it was a classified firewall.

HT:And I’m assuming you flew over since you were only there for two weeks.

IR:Yes. And it was pretty cool, so it was hot and I learned the difference between desert heat and southern heat. So it—

HT:The humidity.

IR:Yes. It was like I didn’t—It was funny, because it was sort of like in Saudi Arabia, your skin just burned. It was like you just felt hot. You didn’t sweat, you weren’t wet; you were just hot. And you didn’t realize that a breeze could be hot. [chuckles] And then when I came back in, because it was during the summertime and I flew back in to South Carolina, I realized just how humid it was, because I realized I felt wet. Like my skin always had this damp feeling about it. And so I learned a very important lesson. And this is, of course, shortly before I went to Iceland. That’s the same way. And then I learned what it really meant to be cold, in Iceland.

HT:Do you recall how long you were in Iceland?

IR:A year.

HT:A year. And do you recall—what was it 2000—?

IR:2001.

HT:2001.

IR:June. I think it was like June—July 2001 to—yes, that’s roughly the date.

HT:To July 2002 or something like that.

IR:Yes, and then I went to Germany after that.

HT:And during this time, did you ever go on vacations in between these—?

IR:Yes, I went home on leave a couple times in between. That’s why the dates are kind of fuzzy in my mind, because the actual time I arrived there—

HT:Sure, sure, yes. Well, what was your first impression of Iceland?

IR:This place is barren. Because you look out the window and it was just rocks and moss, no grass. The trees were shrubs. It was quite desolate, stark. [chuckles] Brown and black with hints of green.

HT:And what were the accommodations like in Iceland? Were you—the barracks and housing and that sort of thing.

IR:Okay. Well the first barracks I lived in I shared a room with a person, but the thing that separated us was a wall. You didn’t have doors. The only doors were on our closets and our bathroom. But where we slept, we didn’t have doors. So what you do is you put up a shower rod and put up a shower curtain, and that was the bulk of your privacy.

HT:And what about a door to the hallway?

IR:Oh, yes [HT clears throat]. And that was the first accommodations that I got because shortly after that I put on E-4, which is senior airman, and so I was able to move into 1+1 dorms, which was basically my living quarters were all by myself, and I shared a bathroom and a kitchen with another person. I had a suitemate.

HT:I’m going to turn this—

[recording paused]

HT:Okay.

IR:Where were we? Iceland.

HT:You just got into Iceland and noticed how desolate and brown the place was.

IR:Yes.

HT:And you were talking about your housing accommodations.

IR:Yes. Okay. Yes, I was at suitemate. That’s where I stopped. And my phone is ringing. [chuckles] Yes, that was it, where my—the last place because I lived in two barracks while I was there. The first one I shared a room with a wall separating us, and then I moved and I shared—I had a suitemate.

HT:Suitemate, yes. And what type of working did you do while you were in Iceland for that year?

IR:I can’t even remember. I was in the 932nd Air Control Squadron, and I cannot remember what we called the building, but it was this big cement building. It had no windows. And of course it was built during the Cold War, so it had its particular issues. You always had to go through like this security before you could get into it. It was a very secure building. And you had police forces that worked in there and checked people in and had weapons and that stuff. And [pause] I did just mainly air surveillance again. Just IDing tracks and calling out to airplanes.

HT:Were you able to do any traveling while you were in Iceland—touristy-type stuff?

IR:Well, I went to—like a few times to Reykjavik, which is the capital of Iceland. I actually flew to England because my father was stationed in England at the time. So I went there for Thanksgiving that first year. And yes, so I just spent a little time with him there.

HT:And what about touring Iceland itself? Did you get a chance to do any of that?

IR:Oh, I went ice caving, which is you just go inside a cave and walk around in the dark with the flashlight. [chuckles] Which, I don’t know, it was a lava cave or something. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But it was an experience.

HT:Is there much to see and do in Iceland?

IR:Well, oh, we did go to—they have a big jazz festival. We went to a jazz club one night. And we’re sitting there having a good time, you know, and because I’m a black woman in Europe, I tend to stand out in the crowd. And one of my first experiences standing out was when the photographer continuously kept taking photos of me. Like we were sitting at the table; I was with my friends. And they just, you know, just snapping away. [laughs] And then while we were at the club, I went downstairs and they had this room which is like a VIP room. It was really nice. A cognac room is what I think they called it. And I was standing at—the room wasn’t open yet, and I was just standing looking at it, just being curious.

And the guy was like, “Oh, you can come in. You can come in.”

And I was like, “What? If it’s not open—”

And he was like, “No, come in.”

So I just come in look around and everything. And then these Icelandics tried to follow me in and the guy was like, “It’s not open yet. You can’t come in.” [laughs]

I was like, okay, either it’s because I’m black or because I’m beautiful. I don’t know which one. But that was fun. But I have to talk about that jazz club experience. Okay, so we’re sitting there. We’re having a good time. And there’s jazz musicians from Iceland, all over Europe, and America, and we’re jamming. And then this kind of older white gentleman gets up on the stage and he starts scatting, you know, with the band. He’s like [imitates scat] and all this, and it was sounding good.

And we were like, “Wow. But why did that man get up on the stage?”

One of the Icelanders was like, “He’s the mayor of Reykjavik.”

And I’m just like, “I just saw the mayor of Reykjavik scatting in a bar in Iceland! This is life.”

And it was great. So that was my one. If I saw the man now in the streets, I wouldn’t recognize the guy. But it was still just pretty cool that, you know, that was an experience that you wouldn’t get in America.

HT:Well, did you ever just—were you ever at the subject anytime of discrimination because you were a woman or because you were black in either the United States or overseas?

IR:Well, one time we did have one bad experience. We were walking—it was me and two of my male friends and they were black gentlemen, and we were walking from another concert that we had went to in Reykjavik. No, no, I think we were looking for a place to eat. And this Icelandic gentleman walks by and says, “Niggers.”And it was all I could do, by myself with these men who were well over six feet tall and two hundred pounds, to keep them from turning around and beating this man. I was like, “He’s drunk. He doesn’t know what he’s saying, because if he was sober he wouldn’t have said that word. Obviously he’s out of his mind. So please, we don’t need any international incidents. Let’s just keep walking and ignore him.” And that was—and surprisingly enough, that was the only real blatant discrimination. You know, people might have had bad feelings toward me, but I never knew it except for that one time.

HT:And what about with your fellow workmen, fellow workers? Nothing—because you were a woman or something like that? I know women in World War II obviously had a lot more discrimination fostered on them because there were few of them.

IR:Yes. I think for me it was kind of different because for some reason I fit in well with the men. And so—because I would push myself to my physical limit. I never told them—you know, like I didn’t try to pretend like I was a man. I would be the first one to go, say “Look, I’m going to do as much as I possibly can and if I can’t, I’m going to ask the people who can do it for help.” You know, and so I think maybe I got a little bit more respect because of that. I wasn’t the kind of girl—you know, I like being pretty just like the next person, but I didn’t make that an obsession, particularly when I was in uniform. I tried to just be competent at my job and just do that, and most people they just—I was just roughing.

[recording paused]

HT:We’re all set.

IR:Okay. Now where was I again?

HT:Oh, let’s see. You’d been to the jazz festival and then you were—oh, we were talking about discrimination with your fellow workers and—

IR:Oh, yes. I really didn’t have any problems. Like, if anything, if anybody really had any problems with me, it usually was like a personal problem, like they didn’t like aspects of my personality or something that I did. I would say it was very rare that I felt like—I guess, what’s the difference? It’s—overt discrimination? You know?

HT:Yes, right.

IR:So, you know, mainly—particularly once you get overseas, people kind of—that sort of stuff somewhat goes out the window, because you’re the only Americans there so people try to, tend to come together more. You kind of forget about whatever biases, or place those biases kind of in the background.

HT:Right. What about the office of leadership? Can you give me any thoughts about that?

IR:There was some very good and there was some very bad. And the very good ones I tried to stay in contact with, even now as a civilian. And then the other ones, I just chalked it up to, “I’m going to learn what not to do and what kind of officer to be.” Because a lot of times what I would see is like the officers, they’d have these big plans, but they didn’t want to do the work to implement it.

Particularly when I became a NCO, that’s what I saw is they’d be like, “Oh, I want—we need to go on a fifty vehicle convey across Germany into the Netherlands—” which this actually did happen “—it’s going to be like—we’re going to have a great time! Sergeant Ruffin,” [laughter] “you got to make this happen!” So like I served as sort of like the representative Ops [operations] in that whole process. And he goes off on leave while this whole planning and gearing up and packing and getting equipment together and getting people together is going on. And he comes back when it’s time to go on the trip. And, of course, everybody says what a wonderful trip we had.

HT:And you had planned it all and made it all happen.

IR:And I made his dream happen. And it’s sort of like, [you know?] “Thanks, Sergeant Ruffin.” Other people would come up—and I do learn. You know, I’m not the type of person—I don’t need to be stood up in front of public people and handed an award saying that I did good. To me, the most valuable accolade is when someone takes you aside in private and goes, “You know what? I really appreciate what you did.” That rested my whole heart a lot more, because I know a lot of those awards are just trumped up and made elaborate. You know, you can lie just to get the big award, but it’s the genuine ones. But never once did he just come up to me and go, “Sergeant Ruffin, good job. Thank you for taking care of all that stuff and making it happen for me.”

HT:What was this person’s rank?

IR:He was a captain.

HT:Captain. So was he your immediate supervisor?

IR:[sighs] I actually had one immediate supervisor; he was a captain. He was just—I don’t know what he was on. He was actually an academy grad, and academy graduates for officers get kind of a bad rap, because they don’t really have all the most sense, because most of their experience, particularly adulthood experience, has been the military. So they don’t bring in that civilian experience of having gone to university that other people might have.

But I had one officer in particularly, Major Courtney, Terry Courtney—want him to go down in history—he was a wonderful officer. He was always a happy guy. And everybody knows I like to talk, and me and him would just have, like, you know, crazy conversations. On the particular convey I was talking about earlier to the Netherlands, I was his—it was funny, he was like, “You’re going to be my bus NCO,” because we had to ride the bus. [laughs] Some people were driving in the convey in the big vehicles, but then the bulk of the people were on the bus. And so he’s like, “You’re going to be the bus NCO.” And we were just cracking up, and me and him were just talking, just talking about life in general. And also when I had a hard time passing PT test, because running I guess is not my forte, he even—he was like, “I’ll go running with you, Sergeant Ruffin.”

And we would get up in the morning and go running around the track together and just talk. And that to me, that’s how real leaders should be, should be hands-on and make people feel like people. And I can respect him as a leader. I’m willing to follow him. I’m willing to do what he needs to have done. Whereas people who just, you know, leave you out and not even take time to know you or engage you as a person, I don’t want to follow that guy because he’ll leave me out in the cold.

HT:Yes, so true. So all this was going on while you were still in Iceland?

IR:No, that was Germany. I’ve gone and jumped ahead. Let’s talk about officers. I can’t even really remember. Oh, I will talk about my commander, Colonel [Don] Kepley, I think that’s what his name was.

HT:K-e

Both:p-l-e-y

IR:He was a good officer. because if you told him something about you, he knew it. Like one day he walks up to me and he’s like, “I hear you like writing.” I was like, “How does this man know all this information about me?” [laughs] But he took the time to like, when you first go in the unit, you always write stuff about you, little blurbs about you so people—to know. And he would just know stuff about you and ask questions about your life. I mean, not too prying, not too—it didn’t seem disingenuous. But he made an effort, you know. He had lots of people, hundreds of people that worked under him, and then hundreds of people that he had to deal with daily. But he took the time to get to know people and get to know your name and get to know you face, and if he saw you, he’d say hi. I actually, me and one of my friends, we were at a restaurant eating and we look over to the table and it’s a bunch of officers from out unit; he sent over dessert for us. And, you know, it was like, “Oh that is so—.” Because a lot of times people, they see you outside of work, they pretend they don’t know you. [chuckles] And sometimes, too, when you’re in civilian clothes, it’s hard to recognize people out of context, because you’re like, “I know that person’s face, but I just don’t get it. [laughs] I know them from somewhere.”

HT:That’s true. Now was this in Germany or in Iceland?

IR:That was in Iceland. Going back to Iceland.

HT:And this was Colonel Kepley.

IR:Colonel Kepley. He was in charge of Iceland when I was there.

HT:And so when did you finally end up in Germany?

IR:In 2002, because September 11 [2001]—I need to talk about that happening in Iceland, because actually, my September 11 experience was sad and funny all at the same time.

I had been in Iceland for about three or four months, and I wake up. I had yet to receive my shipment from TMO [Traffic Management Office], which is the people who ship stuff when you PCS, permanent change of station. I hadn’t received my luggage and it was going on three months—or it might have been two months or something. And I called to the TMO office, and I had already been in contact with them a few times, it was like, “We’ll call you when we find it. We can’t find it. Blah, blah blah.” I call them on—I wake up on September 11. I was off that day. And I pick up the phone. I’m going like, let me call TMO, because they haven’t called me back. I pick up the phone and I’m like, “I was calling because you said you’d call me about my shipment,” and I hear people screaming.

And the lady on the other line goes, “The towers are falling! [screaming, unclear] The tower’s falling!”

And I’m thinking about my TMO shipment. That’s all I’m thinking, you know, like nothing—what’s going on in the outside world, because I had just woken up so I didn’t know anything.

She’s like, “The towers are falling! Go and look at the news!”

And I’m like, “Well I can’t look at the news, because you have my television!” [laughs]

And then finally I get up and I’m like, let me go see what this woman, these people are freaking out about. Turn on the news, and I turn it on just as the second plane hits the building, so I get to see this thing replay over and over again. And I’m like, now I understand why they were freaking out, you know. And then after that just, you know, of course, the whole world changed, at least—particularly for me and military members.

HT:Was there more security involved after September 11?

IR:Well, we started having to put up door guards, checking people’s IDs and stuff like that. I don’t think we had our increased security conditions, call it FPCON or Force Protection Conditions, and so we did have elevated conditions. All the bases overseas, nobody could leave—well, if you lived off base, you could leave the base, but if you lived on base you couldn’t just go off base. Yes, so things got a whole lot tighter. People got really serious.

And it was particularly interesting because the Iceland airspace got flooded, so we had all—it’s like we had all these tracks that were going towards the U.S., and then swooping back around and trying to find places to land, because they couldn’t get into American airspace. And so we had people working on that and that lasted for a couple days, because I came back to work and they were still getting aircrafts landing in Iceland and all these other places.

HT:And you worked just with military aircraft, no civilian aircraft?

IR:We had to like ID air—just any aircraft that came through, because when you’re in Iceland, we got—we would get flight plans every day. And, you know pretty, much if an aircraft went too far off a flight plan or they didn’t respond when we spoke to them, then we would send out, you know, they have to scramble. But it was pretty intense sometimes.

HT:And then after all this was over, you finally ended up in Germany sometime later?

IR:Yes.

HT:In 2001?

IR:Yes.

HT:And what was the name of the base where you were stationed there?

IR:Spangdahlem [Air Base]. S-p-a-g—no, S-p-a-n-g-d-a-h-l-e-m. Spangdahlem. Spangdahlem.

HT:And where is that?

IR:Spangdahlem?

HT:Yes.

IR:[laughs] It’s in Spangdahlem, Germany. I know, it’s never [unclear]. It’s in the southwest. It’s very near France.

HT:Okay.

IR:Like Luxembourg is an hour away.

HT:Okay.

IR:Driving really fast. Maybe it’s less—I meant more, going slow—the speed limit.

HT:I’m assuming this is an air force base.

IR:Yes.

HT:And what type of work did you do there?

IR:There is where I was trained to be an electronic protection technician. I worked in the TP—worked—I operated the TPS-75 radar, and I also was—my daily operate—or my additional duties was in the mobility section of operations. So I—pretty much I was in the office that got people packed up and on the road, and took care of our vehicles and stuff like that for operations.

HT:And did you have any memorable events happen until you went—while you were in Germany.

IR:Woo, that whole trip was memorable. [laughter] Well, we left—well, okay, let me think. Well, from Germany I went to Iraq, but that’s, you know, later on in the story. I’ll start—let me—I’m trying to think. The first restaurant I went to—and I think they have restaurants like this here in the States, but they’re hard to find—was a hot stone restaurant where they give you this hot stone, like you can’t touch it because it’s hot enough to cook meat—and that’s what they do. They bring out little bits of raw meat and vegetables and everything and butter. And you have this hot stone, everybody gets a hot stone, and you just pick the meat off and put it on your stone and cook it how you want it.

HT:I’ve never heard of this.

IR:Yes, oh yes. It’s called—this restaurant called Eiffel Park. It’s in Bitburg, Germany, which is down the street from Spangdahlem. It was on the B-50 [Bundesstraße 50] just in case you want to go there to eat. Off of the B-50. Yes. That was that, and then—I’m trying to think what else, what other interesting things that I can tell people about [chuckles] that can become public notice. Well things really didn’t get exciting for me until Iraq and after.

HT:Okay, so you went TDY to Iraq?

IR:Actually, okay, I’ll tell you what happened.

HT:Okay.

IR:It was March 20, 2003, my twenty-fifth birthday. And I got a war for my birthday. That’s what I like to tell people. [laughter] And at that time, I was in Airman Leadership School [ALS] to become an NCO. Oh yes, this is a fun part of my story. And so my unit, pretty much even before the official announcement, we had started getting some notices that we’re going to be taking some action, so our unit’s preparing and they’ve already been telling us—not telling us where we’ll be going. Turkey had been thrown out there as one of the locations we would have been going. Kuwait. And so we’re just gearing up, and while I’m in tech school, I go to—I go back to base and I—well, not tech school but Airman Leadership School. And I go back to base and I’m walking around one of the stores and I see one of the guys from my unit and I was like, “I hear talk that things are, you know, going down.”

And he was like, “Well, I can’t talk, you know, because it’s classified information.” But he was like, “I know where we’re going.” And he was like, “It’s not good.”

And I was like, “Oh, crap,” you know.

And eventually I found out where we were going, and it was Iraq. And at first, my name wasn’t on the list of names of people that were supposed to be going, so my job at that time was just to make sure everybody’s paperwork was filled out and mobility. After I graduated from ALS I came back to work. And so my job was that and I was like, okay, while the unit’s deployed I’ll just go back to school and maybe travel around Germany when I’m not at work.

And then they changed their plan and shortly before we leave they say, “Sergeant Ruffin, you’re going to go to Iraq.”

I was like, “Oh.”

I didn’t know how to react. It was sort of like, oh, you know. And then—well, actually I wasn’t even Sergeant Ruffin yet, I was still Airman Ruffin at the time. So we planned and helped—I’d do all the helping with packing up all the stuff and getting us going, and we set up a command center where we were like—because when you’re moving over twelve million dollars worth of equipment, over a 135 people, you got a lot of coordinating to do. So—

HT:So that fell—you had to do all that?

IR:Yes, I did that, because like—up until the last minute. I had to tell them, I was like, “Look, I’m deploying, too. I need to go and pack my bags and get my stuff in order.” So like a week before we deployed they finally were like, “Okay, well then you go, because you’ve got to be on the plane.”

And so I finally got to do all that. And it wasn’t until the day I landed in Iraq that I put on my staff sergeant stripe, and so it was sort of like all the sudden things changed, because people—everybody in my unit knew I was a newbie, but then I would be walking around our, you know, everyone was like “Oh, yes, Sergeant blah, blah, blah.” Or “what do you think?” And I’m like, “Why are you asking my opinion? I don’t know. [laughs] I’m new at this.”

It was a funny experience, because right before we left I had been trained on how to put up what we call Alaska Small Shelters, which are tents but they’re a lot more solidly built than regular tents. So I had to figure out how to—learn how to do that. And so when we got to Iraq I had to teach everybody how to put up the tents. And so I’m just learning how to give orders and do everything, so I’m getting frustrated. I’m hot. I just want people to listen to me and do what I tell them to do. And I don’t know how to do this. And just like people just seem like they’re slow. And I’m like, “Just get the [unclear] and put it on here, put a stake in the ground! Just get it—” [laughs] and, you know. Yes, it was a big learning process for me on how to be a leader and how to get people to do things.

HT:And that was called an Alaskan Small Shelter, is that right?

IR:Yes.

HT:I’ve never heard of that term.

IR:Yes. You’ve probably seen them. Most people have seen them. They’re pretty cool, because they hold air conditioning and heat better than regular tents, regular A-frame tents. It can be more insulated, and so it was nice and cool in those tents. And we actually, when we first arrived in Iraq, we lived in a gym. And it was with a 130—over a 135 of my closest friends and some strangers. We had the army, they were living upstairs and sleeping on the bleachers, and we had the security forces, because it was an old Iraqi abandoned base, so we just took it over. So we were living in there for a while, and we had a few problems with the fact that we had females living in the [gym – corrected by veteran], because some of the army guys when they heard that, they would come and watch us. We’d wake up and they’d be watching us sleep, or the Iraqi workers would be sitting on the bleachers watching us. It’s very strange. And we’d only been in Iraq a short time. And you know, I was like American men already acting crazy, like they’d never seen a woman before. But the Iraqis, I could understand their curiosity; the American men, not so much. I was like, “You see girls all the time. Why are you acting—?”

HT:But there were women in the American army over there as well.

IR:Yes. And—but they weren’t living with the guys. We were the only ones in the—you know, there’s this thing among the military forces that army girls aren’t the most feminine or cutest girls [chuckling] and in the air force we had the cute girls. It’s just really weird, you know.

But we lived with them and then our commander realized it would just be better if we just lived on our sites. So we ended up—we had some extra Alaskan tents, so he put us out there. Because they hadn’t built the living area on the base yet, so pretty much people were sleeping—they were sleeping in anywhere they could. But our unit was lucky because we got funding—a lot of money. We’d do these things—we were living on our site and we were living in these nice cushy tents, as cushy as a tent could possibly be. It was cool when it was hot, and you could, you know, work on the temperature, so that was lovely. And it also stayed dark, which is very important when you’re working a night shift, because you’re sleeping during the day. Well, other units got wind of this, and so when we built out tent city, we had to move out of our nice cushy tents and move in with the other air force people, and those tents were not cushy at all. Because when it was light, the tents were light, so you’re sleeping—and it was hot, so you’re sleeping during the day, and you got light all the sudden coming in, and then you’re hot because it couldn’t keep cool, because it didn’t have that necessary insulation or lining.

HT:So why did you have to move out of the Alaskan Small Shelters?

IR:I don’t know. I—it seemed like I guess our commander thought it was a good idea at the time. [chuckles] It seemed like a good idea to him. And also the fact that we had—they had trailers with working bathrooms, because we didn’t have flushing toilets. We had outhouses.

Oh, I’ve got to tell you a funny story about my first day in Iraq. [laughing] Now, I grew up a small country girl, because the house that my mother grew up in Ahoskie didn’t have indoor plumbing. And so I was kind of—I was familiar with it, but it was something that had—was far in my past, where I had to use a chamber pot or just use the bathroom outside. So we get to Iraq, we’re laying and we walk around for a little bit, and everybody’s like, “Well, where do we use the bathroom?” Well, we go to the gym and the army guys are like, “The bathroom’s that way.” And behind the gym there’s a track and to the right of the track is an outdoor toilet. This isn’t your ordinary outdoor toilet; it has no walls. All it is are planks, wooden planks set up with toilet seats that I went and brought with us from Germany because our people—we had people, our advance party call back to us and say, “Bring toilet seat covers. Tell—actual toilet seats.”

And we go look out there and we’re like, “I don’t—I don’t see anything.”

He’s like, “You see those wooden—that wooden box out there? That’s your toilet.”

HT:Latrines then, right, basically?

IR:Yes, it’s—no, it was a hole—wood over a hole in the ground. A trench was built with wooden—and so I—it was broad daylight, and I had to go really bad because I had just been on a flight, a four or five hour flight from Germany. And I had eaten before we got on this flight. So I said I had to go. I couldn’t do it. So one of my friends, because we had the buddy system, so she was like, “I’ll go with you.”

So we go and I’m sitting out there and I was like, “Okay, is anybody looking?”

And she’s like, “No, nobody’s looking.” And then she’s like, “Wait a minute. Well, there’s a guy over there in the building with binoculars.” [chuckles] So and then at that same time, people decided they needed to run on the track and then there was one toilet here and there was another on the other side of the field. A guy decided he needed to go use [unclear] on the toilet. Then people started coming out talking to him while he’s sitting on the toilet, okay. Turn facing look at—his back is to me, but the people who are talking to him are like looking in my friend’s direction. Because my friend, she’s like looking. She’s like, “These people—why are everybody? You know, they’re looking!”

And so I was like, “Well look, I got to go.”

Finally, you know, I don’t care, and I’m not going to get sick out here because I can’t go to the bathroom. Because people did end up getting sick because they couldn’t do it, or they would go use the bathroom at night. But, yes, that was my very first fun experience.

And then we ended up making friends with some of the guys in the comm squadron [communications squadron], and the comm squadron actually built an outhouse which had walls and it was like the kerosene toilet. Instead of a hole it had kerosene buckets underneath, and so people were assigned to be shit stirrers. And that was actually ended up being a punishment for some guys in my unit, because they blew up an MRE [meal, ready to eat]. And it’s like, you don’t fake explosions in a war zone. You just don’t do that. And so their punishment, up until the time they left, was to be shit stirrers. They got to be assigned that duty.

But the comm people were very protective of their toilet, because they’re like, “Look, I’m not stirring—I’m not going to stir other people’s shit who don’t stir.” That was a controversy, okay. The toilets were very serious. But later we had friends in the comm squadron who were like, “You can use the toilet if you don’t get me in any trouble telling them I said you could use it.” [laughs]

HT:So how long did you have to use this system?

IR:Well our unit, we ended up digging a trench on our site and we built outhouses, so we still—you still had to poop in a hole, but at least you had a house. That was—but it was so funny because every one of those things that—when you went to the bathroom, you didn’t want other people—because they built two side by side, right. They had doors.

So you’d go in there and people—one of my airmen was like, “Hey, Sergeant Ruffin, is that you?”

“Well, yes.” [laughs]

HT:So they didn’t have separate facilities for men and women, I guess.

IR:No, no. And I was like, “Yes?”

And he’s like, “I’m uncomfortable. I need to talk to you.”

I was like, “Well, I’m uncomfortable talking to you.” I said, “Most of the time we always pretend like there’s nobody on the other side.” [chuckles]

He’s like, “But I don’t like this, because I saw you go in here and I know you’re in here. So it kind of—.”

I’m like, “But you could have just pretended that you did not see me go in here.”

But you’d always know somebody was going in the toilet anyway, because you had to carry your own toilet tissue with you.

HT:You’re kidding.

IR:Yes! And I had just brought some baby wipes that I had written my name on. “Sergeant Ruffin’s baby wipes.”[laughs] And I had my toilet tissue in my side, my cargo pocket on the side. So when you went to the toilet, people knew.

HT:It’s a completely different experience out there I bet.

IR:Yes. But oh, but going back to why we had the toilet. Those conditions was one of the reasons why we moved into tent city. Because once other air force people came, they brought trailers that were like bathrooms, mobile bathrooms with running water and everything. So you got to imagine that we were just like [gasps].

HT:So what did you guys do for showering and that—everything?

IR:Every four—two or three days in water bottles. We would leave water bottles out. Like the ingenuity of the human mind just, just—

HT:So you left the water bottles out to heat up?

IR:Yes, and like we really weren’t supposed to, because water was something that was precious. So we would kind of like—the women, because women had—you know, you can’t go unclean for too long. It’s not—you know, men, y’all can kind of play around with it a little bit, but for women that’s not good for anybody. [chuckles] And so we had intermittent—when we were living—okay, first, when we were living in the gym, we had intermittent water supply. So some days the water would work and you could—they had showers in there, but they were real nasty and grody, so you’d be like [bangs the wall]. And we’d take combat showers, so you’d turn the water on, you wash, you turn the water off, you scrub down, and then you rinse off and get out. But of course it was cold.

Then we found this place that was a former bakery on the base, and they had—I don’t know why they had showers in there, but it was like really open bay showers, so we would go every couple of days there. Because water was very scarce, so you could only do it every few days. But baby wipes—we used baby wipes. Then a guard unit came that did our job. They were like augmenting us, my unit. So they brought a shower tent with them, so we could—you had scheduled days when you could take showers. And that was awesome, like, you know, to be able to take a shower, but you had to take combat showers again or share water with other people. [chuckles] Like sometimes stuff would drop on the floor and I’d say—I’d be like, I will just have to buy some more, or I got another bar of soap back at the tent. I would just not touch it. And then when the other air force people, like the services units and stuff came, they brought the tents with us, and—I mean not tents, but trailers, bathroom trailers—and so that was great. And then, yes, so near the end of my tour there, that’s what we had were the trailers where you could take showers and there were flushing toilets, and that was like an exciting thing.

HT:Now you were there for about four months, I think you said.

IR:Yes.

HT:Can you imagine having to live under those conditions for a year?

IR:No, like I—to me if anybody talks bad about those army guys, I tell them to shut up because you have no idea. Like even in the short time we were there, these guys were losing their families. They were losing their friends. And still they tried to hold on to like some semblance of humanity. You know, they tried their best. They try their best every day. And it was just like a part of me really hurt. Even though I was leaving, I felt bad because I knew those people wouldn’t be coming home for a while. Some of them didn’t even come back home.

HT:That’s right. And many of the men have been deployed more than once.

IR:Yes, and a few of the guys were like they had done Desert Storm, you know. [chuckles] And so yes, that was definitely—that really changed, to me, my understanding of war. Because when you don’t know the people, it’s easy to just not care, to bicker back and forth in Congress over money, because it’s not personal. To get caught up in little stupid issues. But when you know these people, you’re like look, just do whatever you can to give them all they need. Because when we first arrived there, my unit because, I don’t know, some fluke we had all of this money, and we were able to get true bullet proof vests, okay. There’s a difference between a bullet proof vest and some of the things that the army guys were wearing. Like I had an inch thick plate in the front and the back of my vest, which, I mean, added like ten pounds. And some of the army guys are like, “How did you get that?”

And I was like, “My unit, our supply people were able—we had the money, so they were able to get it for us.”

And some of them still didn’t have vests when they were first there in Iraq. And it’s just—I don’t know.

HT:Did you ever feel like you were in any kind of danger?

IR:I mean—

HT:While you were in Iraq?

IR:I mean I felt as safe as a person could feel safe in a warzone. I mean, we had air force security forces. We had the army. So, you know, I could go to sleep at night. We had bombs going off; some of them were planned, some of them not so much. One of me and my friends, which is a funny story at the time, were going to the pool on the base. Like the pool hadn’t been cleaned out but they still had a water spigot.

HT:A swimming pool?

IR:Yes, where you could do laundry. And they also had built an outside shower over there. It was amazing some of the things we did. And, but so we went over there to do laundry and I was just sitting over there with her and I was reading a book and I hear [mimics gunfire]. And both of us kind of like look at each other like this. You know like, “Okay, you didn’t hear that. Did you hear that?” We’re like, “Yes.” Well, there’s like a little pool house and there’s some Arabic interpreters from Turkey. They’re over there and they were chilling, and they ran over into the pool house. And we were like, okay, where’s the fire coming from so we don’t run in the general direction of it. And we see—we see like security forces behind the building going [mimics gunfire] shooting back at these guys. And so we run into the pool—the Turkish interpreters are like, “Come over here! Come over here!” And so we’re running across to get in there and all of us—like, ever see the Beatles, they do the thing where all of their heads are sticking from behind the telephone pole? Well we were all doing that. We’re all looking out the [doorway – corrected by veteran], so it’s sort of like going up. We’re all [sighs]. [laughs]

And eventually the gunfire goes down and we go back to the place we were staying at and we walk into—walk up to the door, and one of the people who was a member of my unit, he’s standing in the door and he’s like in full battle dress. He’s got his sidearm on. He’s got his M-16. He’s ready to get into the gunfight. And we’re like, “Holdup, cowboy. The battle’s already over.” [chuckles] “What are you doing?” You know.

At the time it was completely hilarious, but then after years of thought, I was like, “What the hell. How did I think that was funny?” I always tried to tell it to my family like it was funny, and when I started to see other people’s reactions I was like, “Well, maybe it’s not as hilarious as I thought it was at the time.” But all I remember is just like laughing. Like you’re in danger, but the human mind learns how to cope so well that you don’t always process the danger. Because it was like even—I felt like I wasn’t really there. You know, I always felt like I was a character in some little thing, like I was watching myself. I had an out of body experience.

And then, of course, we had bombs going off occasionally. And it’s funny because sometimes we wouldn’t even know that the difference between the planned explosions that the ordinance guys would blow up the bombs, the ammunition they would find, or whether it was an explosion with an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] or somebody trying to blow us up until the next day. And one morning we got up and they were like, “Oh, yes, by the way, last night they tried to target the radar”—where I worked, but they missed. They missed our site by a couple miles. And it’s just interesting. But I think maybe at that point they had started making it—minimizing the time that the EPTs, or electronic protection technicians, spent in the radar van because there was sort of like—that was one of—it’s the highest place on base, you know. And then it’s real easy to target.

HT:And EPT stands for electronic—

IR:Protection technician.

HT:So I guess by the time you left after four months, you were glad to get out of there?

IR:Yes. Yes, I was a little giddy. But it was weird because I was the last name they called to get on that plane. And then because—

HT:To leave?

IR:Yes, because transportation to get in and out and it was hard to get. And so my friends, other people in my unit, I think about twenty of us—twenty—twelve—I don’t remember. It was like a few of us that actually got to leave on that one plane when they finally said that our part of the mission was done. And like everybody else had to stay there for another month before they could get transportation out.

HT:Now, this was in 2001 that you went over there?

IR:2003.

HT:Oh, 2003. TDY.

IR:2001 was when Afghanistan started.

HT:So once you got back to Germany, what did you do at that point?

IR:Stay away from people, from all human—I didn’t want any human contact. I wanted to—I didn’t want people to be near me. I stayed in my apartment and ate.

HT:This is a typical reaction for people who have been over—

IR:I think so.

HT:—TDY.

IR:Particularly in that—not like, not a regular TDY. This was something where I had been around people 24/7. If you got privacy, that was a very rare thing, because you always had to be around somebody, could never be alone. And so, yes, for two weeks I didn’t answer my phone. People come to my house; I’d stick my head out the door like this and be like, “Yes, what you want? I’m sorry, I’m busy right now. Bye.” [chuckles]

HT:So were you off duty at that time? There typically two—

IR:Yes, they give you two weeks.

HT:Oh, two weeks. Okay, okay, yes. Sort of makes sense—

IR:Yes.

HT:—to re-acclimate yourself to humanity.

IR:Yes. But it was so weird because my first day there I had—the way my apartment in Germany was set up was that I had this big huge picture window in the front of my house, so I could see everything on the front of the street. And the thing that greets me my first five minutes back in my home was cows’ behinds. They were herding, because it’s a very agricultural town, a farming town, so often you would see like goats and little sheep herds and stuff, people doing that. But all I saw was—like I had my back turned, I don’t know what I was doing, and then I turn around and all I see is like this herd of cows going up this side street in front of me, and I was like, “Only in Germany.” Oh, I was like, “I’m back home now.” [laughs] And it was kind of funny, and I took a picture of it, too. I was like, “My first sight back home.” [chuckles]

HT:Oh, gosh.

IR:And yes, that was—

HT:Did you guys have to undergo any kind of debriefing when you got back or mental health screens or that sort of thing?

IR:Yes, we had to go through a process where they took like samples of our blood and just let us know that if you feel any blah, blah, blah, call mental health and stuff like that. It really wasn’t too much.

We got a debriefing before we actually left Iraq from the base commander and he was like, “When you go back home, remember that you can’t talk to your family the way you talk here.” I guess because you start cursing a lot, which you did, because you, you know, start f-ing this and a-hole that and every other word is some swear word and, “Get the f- down, the cable down!” And you know, it just yelling—yelling at each other, and you, you tend to be a little bit—courtesy tends to go a lot out of the window in these things. You know nobody’s mad at you when you do it. It’s like, whatever, you know. And he—that was our debriefing and just about how our family and friends—things would be different for us and just not to react, and that our family and friends were able to live life without us and so things may have changed, and you got to do the adjustment period, find out about how you fit back in to that equation. Yes, I think that was the most of the briefing. We were just cracking up because we started—we were like, “Passing the f-ing peas, Mom.” [laughter] And just say it like, put curse words in there and working it into our conversations just because he said that.

HT:So Germany was not your last duty station was it?

IR:No. Shaw Air Force Base.

HT:So you came back to the States after being in Germany for about a year or something?

IR:Two years.

HT:You were in Germany for two years, okay.

IR:Yes. Because that’s what I said earlier was that the fun didn’t really started until after Iraq. Because I don’t know what it was, we just went crazy; particularly once all of my other people came back from Iraq—came back. We just went crazy. We just were like— it was like always partying. You just lived life.

One of the most important things—like the thing I got about war, and to I guess best help civilians and people who have never been to war understand, is that war is life distilled. It’s like it’s down to the bare necessities of life. Your main concerns are surviving, nothing else; just having the basics of life and making it to the next day. And so you go from that environment to return home where people’s concerns are, “Well, Becky said she didn’t like me.” And you’re thinking to yourself, “Well, freaking leave Becky alone and move on! Why are you upset?” You don’t understand, you know. It’s sort of like you can’t understand why people react they way they do to stuff because you’re like, “That’s your major concern? That’s what you’re so upset about?” And a few times even now like I know I make people mad because I’ll start laughing about stuff that they’re like deeply disturbed. I’m like, oh my god. [laughs] This—it’s like, it is so wonderful that you can still be concerned about those things, that that’s the worst thing you can think of right now.

HT:So after you came back you never reverted to that former sort of carefree type?

IR:Yes. It’s been very hard, like sometimes I will catch myself reverting back and I’ll feel weird because I do. Or when I find myself complaining about certain things, I go, you know what? It’s a lot worse out there for some other people. Let me shut up and just be grateful that I have this to be complaining about. You appreciate life so much more. And I don’t know, it’s just weird because your mind is completely different. I remember when I first got back, I came back to work and one of my troops was moving off base and she needed to find some boxes. Well, the big thing in Iraq was MRE boxes, those are some very good, sturdy boxes, and they’re great for construction if you need a bookshelf or a place to store your food or clothing, and that’s what we used them for. People would be like, “Ooh, give me that MRE box,” after we had distributed the MREs for meals. And when I came back to Germany, one of my troops was moving and I remember seeing a box in like a McDonalds or something and thinking to myself, “Ooh, that was a good box. I need that box.” And then I was like, “But why do I need that box?” [laughter] Because I was home, I didn’t need a box for anything. And it was just so weird, this coming back and your mind. And my first shower back at home, and I was so excited getting in the shower, and I remember wetting myself down and turning the water off.

HT:Oh.

IR:And I was like, but I don’t have to do that anymore. Because it was such an automatic reaction that I had gotten used to; everyday for four months that’s what I had done.

HT:So how long do you think it took you to get back to sort of a more normal state of mind?

IR:A very long time.

HT:Really?

IR:I’m still probably not in a normal state of mind. [laughter] Oh. Because, I don’t know—yes, it’s changed me for the rest of my life. And so I really—this is normal for me now. And like I really didn’t realize how I was affected until after I had gotten out of the military. It didn’t hit me like—because I had been diagnosed with PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder], but not like a real severe case or anything. But I didn’t realize how things had affected me until I returned to school and I could never feel comfortable. Like I had roommates my first year back, and they made me feel so uncomfortable living with them, because they didn’t seem to care about their own personal security. And I had been so used to always—you always have to be alert to everything. And then when I went in and talked to the doctor about it, I realized that even before then I’d been kind of weird, because I remember I was in South Carolina, it was actually after I had left Germany, and I was driving down to work one day and there was this like cord in the middle of the street, and all I could think to myself was, “I don’t want to drive over that cord. I don’t want to drive over that cord.” And I could just—couldn’t—this was like, you know—and I drove over it and I don’t know, on the way to work that was how I was feeling. And even now I’ve seen these cords. I don’t know what it is. I’m sure it’s something for the department of transportation. And in my mind I’m thinking, “Why would you put something like that in the street? Why would you do that to people?”

HT:Thinking that it might be a bomb or something.

IR:Yes. And I’m like, oh my god. I was like, does no one else think this is strange that this thing is in the middle of the street? And like, you know, I don’t necessarily get in a panic, but still something clicks in my mind that goes, “This is not right.” And always having to be aware of what’s going on because you know—I just the—I guess the breaking point of realizing that I might have had a problem was I was walking down the street back to my home here in Greensboro, and this man walks up behind me and like I had been so used to always looking over my shoulder to make sure nobody would walk up behind me, nobody could surprise me, and it scared the crap out of me. He was just walking. He was minding his own business. And he was just like, “Oh, I’m sorry.” Because I was like [gasps] like that. And I was like, “Oh, maybe I have a problem. I don’t think other people react that way when people walk up behind them.”

HT:Gosh, yes. Now you think that was typical reaction of people—

IR:I’m sure not always, you know, I think everybody like—you get kind of—because the period after you came back from war, all of us went just—

[recording paused]

HT:Okay.

IR:Well, I guess I was at the part where I spent a lot of my time drunk, my weekends off drunk in Germany after I came back from Iraq. And I don’t know, like—for when I—maybe I was starting to have a reaction then and I didn’t realize it, because I didn’t feel like being—dealing with people. Like things people would say would just be so unentertaining and just so—it seemed so trivial. And for a while I was like, “Well, I was only there was four months. How could—I don’t even feel a right to feel weird,” you know.

HT:Right.

IR:Like, I’m like I shouldn’t feel anything. It was such a short time. It wasn’t like I was out there driving on the convoys or doing these things. But, you know, and I do trump it up to that I’m a fairly sensitive person, you know. And then once I start reflecting back on it, like when it was happening, it didn’t seem like that big of a deal. Then after reflecting on it, I was like, there were so many times where my life was at risk but when I was in that moment I didn’t allow myself to feel that way. I always felt secure when I was in Iraq. It wasn’t until I left that I started feeling insecure.

And then I realized that—I guess my thing is in a warzone you know what to expect. There’s a certainty of danger, so you get used to the idea that, hey, something might happen, so your mindset gets on that. But then when you come into civilian life, particularly in western culture, in American society, where you don’t ever have to think about the idea that somebody’s going to blow up something. Yes, we have our freak incidents of violence, but people don’t live with that threat on a daily basis. And then when you come back, and all sometimes I can think is any minute now this peace that we hold so dear could be [claps] gone just like that. And you know for me, it’s the fact that there’s fighting men and women who are in these other countries keeping those people away from here and that America acts in such a way that, you know, I don’t think most Americans understand that that their liberty—you know, yes, you might not agree with the president. You might not agree with the reasons we went in there, but because people are over there, war is not here. And I think that’s something that sort of haunts me on a regular basis, is that this thing that we—is so—that other people don’t realize how precious it is. And you know, yes.

HT:Interesting, yes. Well do you recall, on a lighter note, any embarrassing moments other than the toilet business?

IR:Oh, I got in trouble for—I’m going to tell you what I got in trouble for. This is one of those incidents where being a female was something that worked against me. Okay, it was a 120 degrees in Iraq on a hot summer’s day—on a cool summer’s day, okay. It was hot. It was beyond hot. It was unbelievable. It’s just—we’ve even wrote a blues song one night, me and the guys. Some of the guys had a guitar. And we were like, “It’s so hot.” I was the vocalist. It was great. [laughs] And we were just talking about how hot it was, and stuff like that. “It’s hot as hell.” Just think of different ways to describe the hotness.

Well, when we were first there and we were living with the army guys, I am a small-chested woman. And so sometimes, in order to feel comfortable in hot environs, I would not wear a bra. Because I’m like, well shoot, they’re not going anywhere. And I didn’t think it would be offensive to other people that I didn’t wear a bra. I was like, well, everybody has got bigger concerns than what’s going on with my chest. That was my logic at the time. Well, one day one of the sergeants from the army guys, the army unit—I think it was the 720th or the 7—something, the airborne guys—101st airborne, came up to me and says, “You know you’re wrong, right?”

And I was like, “What are you talking about?” You know, because I was sitting outside by myself reading a book.

And he was like, “You know you’re wrong.” He’s like, “Because you—.” He wouldn’t even tell me what he—what I was wrong about.

Then later one of the senior women comes up to me and they were like—well, no, actually I was talking to her about it. I was like, “I don’t know what he—.”

She was like, “Well, some people have a problem because you don’t wear a bra.”

Now, I was not the worst dressed female there. There were girls walking around there with booty shorts on and why you would pack booty shorts, really short shorts—

HT:Right, cut-offs.

IR:Yes, in Iraq. Why would you even pack that? Because I didn’t even pack civilian clothes. Why would you do that? Just went out of my mind. Nobody talked to them, but they talked to me, because I didn’t wear a bra. And I was upset about it because I was like, hold up, there’s men walking around here with their hairy chests, fat hanging all out, walking around here sunning. Nobody says anything to them, but you’re going to come to me and say something to me. I was like, breasts, all they are are really meant for food for babies. So if you’re thinking of them as anything else than that, maybe you should change your mind. At least, that was my logic. It was sort of like I could see his side, but just because they picked me, I was like—but why don’t you make it—why single out one person. Make a rule for everybody. Don’t sit here and—you know, I don’t know what it is about my breasts that everybody was obsessed with. [laughter]

But eventually they made a base-wide rule because I’m sure they had other problems like, you know, because females were in the warzone and that could—I can understand how it could be a distraction. But all somebody had to do was come to me and say it and then make an announcement for everybody. Not just make it about me and what I was doing, because I wasn’t the only person doing it. And the fact—you know, in the military, men and women are serving together. I’m like, how about you tell that muscle-bound man who I look at everyday thinking to myself, “Wow, he’s great,” tell him to put his shirt on because that’s distracting me from my job. But eventually, once a lot more people started coming to the base, they did change the rule. Now I can laugh about it, but I was deadly serious about that. I was very angry that people were obsessed with that.

HT:Oh, gosh. [laughter]

IR:Oh, yes, and I have another one too. We went out into town.

HT:Oh, you were allowed to go off base.

IR:Well, not everybody was.

HT:I was going to ask you—my next question was how did you spend your spare time?

IR:I went out one time and to Kirkuk Air Base—no, into the town of Kirkuk.

HT:Okay.

IR:Because they were having an exhibition soccer game. And I think there might have been only three females in our group. It was a small group because it was the soccer team that the armed forces had put together and then a few people just kind of like serving as a cheering section. Well, we go off the base and we finally get to the stadium, because it was gridlocked; the traffic was horrible. And then on top of the fact is that we had two tanks—a tank in front of us and a tank behind us. We had our own escort.

HT:So what kind of vehicle were you in?

IR:A bus.

HT:Oh, just a regular—

IR:That they bought off a town. Bought from somebody in town that had a bus. It was funny because it was like pink and it had—the windows had been shot out. [laughs] So we’re on this bus and we’re going into town. And I thought it was so cool.

And so some Iraqi officials came in and they were trying to give us our own section so that way people wouldn’t come too close to us, because I had my weapon. I had my flak vest—this was before I got a bullet proof vest. So we had all this stuff; we had our guns and weapons and everything. And so we were just sitting there. They were trying to make it so that we would be by ourselves, okay. But soon as the crowd comes in, they start pressing on us trying to get as close to us as possible. So the guy, he was like beating them and telling them to stay away from us and like yelling at them in Arabic and whatever and, you know, like, “Stay away from us.” Eventually the game starts and he can’t control them. So they come in, you know, and a father sits down in front of me and he has his little girl with him.

And he turns around and he says, “Talk to her. She speaks English. Talk to her.”

And I’m like, “Well, what am I going to say?”

He’s like, “Just speak to her.”

And so I sat there and I tried to talk to her, and she was just sitting with me and she was so afraid. But I didn’t think anything about it, is that I had my M-16 like right between my legs. And then one of my friends sat down.

He was like, “Well, let me take your weapon because they might be frightened.”

You know, you’re sitting there. So I had to make myself a little bit more friendly, appealing to the child. And so that father and daughter left, and then another father and daughter came and sat down right in front of us again, and he says the same thing, “Talk to my daughter.”

And I’m like, “Okay.”

So I talk to her, blah, blah, blah, and everything. And soon, people started wanting to take pictures with me. And so we’re sitting there with my friends and like this guy—you know how at Disney World they have people walking around with a camera and they give you a ticket and everything. There was a guy like that at the soccer game. And so these groups of Iraqi men would be like pulling on me so that I could take a picture with them. And so my friends are getting very uncomfortable about this.

HT:Were you the only female at this—

IR:No.

HT:Oh, okay.

IR:It was me, another girl—but this girl, she was sort of like—she might have been Hispanic, so she looked more Arabic than anything—and then there was a blonde haired, blue eyed girl. And for whatever reason, the crowds were around me and the blonde haired, blue eyed girl. And so the Iraqis would be like—it was near the end of the game so we’re trying to leave and get back to our bus, so it’s a very uncomfortable situation, you know. But they kept pulling on me, and they’re like, “One more! One more!”

And then my friends are like, “No, she’s got to go now!”

You know, and all this getting kind of aggressive. And so they’re taking pictures of me. There’s like—I’m sure I’m in somebody’s photo album. [laughs] A small town Kirkuk family, “Look at her.” They don’t even know who I am.

And so we finally get back to the bus, and we’re sitting there a while because we got to wait because like our soccer team is doing—you know, they’re doing their photo opps [opportunities] and dealing with the officials and stuff like that. So we’re sitting there and the tank guys, they’re doing security. Well, a crowd starts forming up near the window, because I’m sitting at the back of the bus with one of my friends near a window. And a crowd of men are like in this back of the bus, tying to jump on the bus, talking to me.

And like calling me, “Bring your friends back,” so they can look at me. And they’re going, “I love American women. I love you,” and all this stuff. “I want to go back to America with you.” And it’s like this whole crowd.

And I’m like, “Is this how J-Lo [Jennifer Lopez] feels?” and then we start laughing and everything. Because they’re like, “You’re a little mini celeb[rity] aren’t you?”

And then like the tank guys are coming up trying to do security to keep them from jumping up on the bus. Now a few of those [Iraqi] guys, I see things in their eyes that aren’t the friendliest. It’s like a few of them are teenage boys and you know, if there’s a woman in the vicinity, a teenage boy, I don’t care what country you come from, is going to look. But you could see kind of like in some of those people’s eyes, they weren’t the most loving individuals. [chuckles] But the security guy, he was like, “Get away from the bus. Get away from the bus.”

And then they’re yelling back to me, “Why is he so mean? Why is he so mean?”And I was like, “Because he doesn’t know if you want to kill us!”And then you know, they’re totally like—I’m like, “You better not jump on that bus.”

And they’re like trying to jump on the bus and the window and everything. And I’m like, “You better not jump on that window because I’d hate to see what he’d do to you.” [chuckles]

And then eventually we finally go back to the base and everything and we have a good laugh about it. Everybody’s like, “I couldn’t have done it,” and blah, blah, blah.

And, of course, again, another one of the things, the crazy things I’ve done in my life, where I was like, maybe I shouldn’t have done that.

HT:Well, did you feel like you were in any kind of danger at that point?

IR:At that point, no.

HT:Kirkuk—Kirkuk, I think, was fairly sort of a fairly—it wasn’t—

IR:Peaceful, yes.

HT:Peaceful area, yes.

IR:Fairly peaceful. It still had—the violence wasn’t really against the forces, it was really mainly like sectarian violence and violence against the Turks and the Kurds and the Arabs. Because you know, I learned—when I went to town, I learned the difference. Because actually, when we first got there, there was these little boys that were surrounding us.

And I was like, “So—so you’re—” said something about Iraqis.

He’s like, “I’m not Iraqi. I’m a Kurd.” And he’s like, “Oh, and my friend, he’s a Turkmen,” and like explain all these things that like all these different ethnic groups. To everybody else who’s not familiar with that area, they all look alike, you know, like as far as ethnicity. But they know the difference.

And that was mainly all of the violence, and our guys would get in between it and try to stop them. And few of the times they would attack the safe houses that we had in town because we would—some of the army guys actually lived off base inside of the city. And so a few times they did get attacked, but the bulk of the violence was just the people that lived there.

HT:Anymore interesting things happen while you were in Iraq?

IR:[pause]

HT:Or when you got back to Germany? Before you got back to Shaw.

IR:Before—Germany. Germany was just fun. Just I went travelling a lot, went to Paris. A couple—went to Paris twice, went to England again. I went to my first rock concert in England. I saw the group—what is it called—Dashboard Confessional. Me and my friends went there and we were standing in line and there’s this pop singer named Craig David, and I was being funny because it was like all these punk rock kids are standing in line, and I looked at my friend and I was like, “You mean to tell me this ain’t a Craig David concert?” And they start cracking up. And then the punk rock kids are kind of like looking like this at me. [chuckles] It was just completely hilarious. It was one of those you had to be there things. [laughter]

And so that was fun. Then another—of course I’ve been addicted since then. We went to this other rock concert called Rock am Ring. It’s hosted by MTV Europe where they had over a hundred bands, and they had a lot of major bands and I got to see those people.

HT:What was the name of that group again?

IR:Dashboard Confessional.

HT:Yes, Confessional, right. Okay. And it’s sponsored by MTV.

IR:No, that was in England. And then the next one, which was Rock am Ring—

HT:Rock am?

IR:R-o-c-k dash a-m dash ring. And it was at Nürnburgring [Nurnberg, Germany]. Couldn’t tell you how to spell it, but it was like a racetrack.

HT:Okay.

IR:And they had all these different stages set up. They had the showcase stage which was where all the major acts were up there, like Ramstein, Evanescence, Avril Lavigne, Linkin Park, Red Hot Chili Peppers. It was great because I saw those big acts. And then they had smaller stages where I got to see the Black Eyed Peas and N.E.R.D. [laughs] And you know, it was just fun.

It was a wonderful experience, because me and the guy I went with, one of my friends from work, we came and we couldn’t find our friends, so we went over to one of the bars and we’re getting ourselves some drink. And there was this German guy who could barely speak English, but he kept buying us alcohol, and so my friend was like, “If he’s buying it, let’s just stay here until he can’t buy anymore.” And so we would keep doing this thing where we’d go, “Prost,” which is like the cheer, you know.

HT:Prost.

IR:Prost. And, you know, we’d down it. And he’s like, “He keeps buying it. We can’t leave until he stops.” [chuckles] And so pretty much that was that fun experience. Couldn’t speak—he could curse in English, but he couldn’t speak English.

HT:Did you learn to speak German while you were there?

IR:I learned a few words, you know. Of course, “Prost,” got to know how to say that. “Ein Bier bitte” [one beer please]. Ein Erdbeereis, because I love strawberry ice cream so I had to be able to say “One strawberry ice cream, please.” Entschuldigen bitte,” which is “Check, please,” I think [sic—excuse me, please]. And what else? Yes, I had a pretty cool German accent. The Germans loved me, particularly because my name was Ingrid and they were just like, you know, what is it? Sprechen Sie deutsch?” I’m like, “No.” “Nein.”

HT:Oh, gosh. So you’re back in the States by now, so what—did anything unusual happen? I guess Shaw was your last duty station before—

IR:I actually stayed—I don’t believe I even stayed there for a full year.

HT:Did you request to go back to Shaw?

IR:Yes.

HT:Oh, you did, okay.

IR:Yes, so I could get closer to North Carolina.

HT:North Carolina, yes. It makes perfect sense.

IR:When I got out. No, it was pretty much the regular American experience, just missing Germany.

HT:Really?

IR:Yes, because I was like, it’s just a different lifestyle. I was so used to the culture and being able to walk and go to the shopping malls and stuff like that.

HT:And did you ever think of making the air force a career?

IR:I had thought about it, but because I was really—I knew that if I stayed in the particular career field they gave me, I would’ve been unhappy. And so I, you know, I just had to do what was best. And I needed to finish my college education, so I was like let me do that.

HT:And so I guess you used the GI Bill.

IR:Yes.

HT:Which is great.

IR:Oh, yes, love the GI Bill.

HT:Let’s see. Well, can you describe your adjustment to civilian life?

IR:It’s been rough.

HT:Because it’s been—you’ve been out two years now.

IR:Yes. Just getting used to, kind of sometimes, the laissez-faire mentality. I was so used to—people would say I was impatient, but it’s not impatient in the military. If you tell somebody you need something done, they’ll go, “Okay, I’ll do it now.” It was always, “I’ll get it done now,” you know. And it was kind of hard to that kind of people, “Okay, I’ll blah, blah, blah.” And it just seemed to me there was no sense—there is no sense of urgency in the civilian world. Sort of like, “Oh, whatever.”

And then people, of course, would make sometimes—particularly in class, being a college student, people would make disparaging comments about Iraq or the president or soldiers, and that was just —

HT:Did you have a hard time with that?

IR:A few times. [laughter] I lost my cool in one class because this guy, everything he said was negative and it wasn’t based on fact. And I was like, “When was the last time you’ve been to Iraq? Okay, shut up then because you don’t know what you’re talking about.” And I was like, “Okay, and so you’ve served in the armed forces and you know?” Because he was basically trying to say that all the people who were in the army were dumb, had low IQs and stuff. And I was like, “Yes, they might have a few people, but for the most part the people who join the military are really some of the most intelligent people in our country. And then for you to say that and to insult these people, that you don’t even know, because you don’t have any friends or family that are in the military, it’s, you know, very ignorant of you. You’re not making informed statements. You statements are just based on regurgitated something you heard on CNN or something.”

HT:And what was his reaction to that?

IR:Eventually he shut up. He never spoke in class again after that. [laughter]

HT:Did anybody else say anything?

IR:Other people, you know—like I’m willing to let other people say whatever they want to say. And for the most part, if people say something, they’re basing it on information that they’re heard and what not. And if it’s a rational person whose not just bullying, attacking the people, then I’ll pretty much, I’ll just let them talk or whatever.

And now I’ve even gotten to the point where some of the other students don’t even know that I’ve been in the military and they’ll be saying stuff and I’ll be like, “Oh, is that true?” And they’ll being saying stuff is fact, like they’ve lived this, and I’m like, “That—is that true?” And they’re like, “Yes, because—.” You know, there’s one guy, he had went to the naval academy, but he dropped out because he realized he wasn’t meant for the military and he was just talking about all this stuff and I was like, “Oh, is that true?” That’s usually my response. And I just laugh. And usually sometimes it will come up in a later discussion that I was in the military and I’ll see the recognition in their eyes that—it’s sort of like, hmm, you got to be careful about what you say. You don’t know who the expert is in whatever.

HT:Well, how did you find UNCG different from the time you were here before you went into the military?

IR:It’s really not any different. I’m different.

HT:You’re different.

IR:Yes. It’s still the same old school, still the same old protesting about some of the silliest stuff. [chuckling]

HT:So do you think you’ve become more mature?

IR:Oh, definitely. Thank God for the United States Air Force. That’s all I got to say for everybody. I don’t think I would have made it this far if it hadn’t been for good old Uncle Sam.

HT:And so what’s next for you, Ingrid?

IR:What’s next for me?

HT:I know you’re graduating in—on Friday.

IR:May. Yes, that’s right, May 11, 2007. Well, I’m applying for graduate school. I have to turn in my writing samples and my personal statement.

HT:Here?

IR:Yes, here. I like UNCG, I really do. [chuckles] And so I’m going to finish my master’s, go on to my PhD, and hopefully become a university professor.

HT:Oh, wonderful.

IR:So I can mold these fragile young minds.

HT:And what would you like to teach?

IR:English. American—specialized in American literature.

HT:And what happened to the art?

IR:Art, I realized that I didn’t love it as much as I thought I did. I still do it as a hobby, like every couple of months I’ll pull out my canvases or my drawing paper and pencils and I’ll do something. But mainly now it’s something I do as a stress reliever and just entertainment for myself. You know, I really don’t do it for anything else.

HT:Well, Ingrid, I don’t have any more questions for you. Is there anything you’d like to add to your interview that we haven’t covered, because we’ve covered so much?

IR:Yes, I know I’ve jumped around in my narrative.

HT:That’s all right.

IR:Which is something as an English major I should—

HT:But that’s the way life is.

IR:Yes. No, I really enjoyed my time in the military service. I’m actually going, joining the reserves this summer.

HT:Are you?

IR:Yes. I love it so much I just couldn’t—I don’t feel right not being able to wear my uniform and I feel I need to do it. It makes me feel okay. I love to put on my uniform. That was like the highlight sometimes of being in the military. Some days when I couldn’t—didn’t want to go to work, just putting on that uniform, strapping on my boots and just feeling like I could take on the world, it was great.

HT:Well, Ingrid, thank you so much. It had been wonderful listening to your stories. It’s been quite an experience for you. Thanks so much.

IR:[chuckles] All right, thank you.

[End of Interview] 00:05:00WOMEN VETERANS HISTORICAL PROJECT ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION

INTERVIEWEE:Ingrid Ruffin

INTERVIEWER:Hermann Trojanowski

DATE:May 8, 2007[Begin Interview]

HT:Okay. Today is Tuesday, May 8, 2007 and the time is 9:50. My name is Hermann Trojanowski, and I’m with Ingrid Ruffin at the Jackson Library at the University of North Carolina [at] Greensboro [UNCG], and we’re here to conduct an oral history interview for the Carter Women Veterans Historical Project. Ingrid, if you could tell me your first—I’m sorry, your full name, and we’ll use that as a test for our voices.

IR:Okay, my name is Ingrid Jovonne Ruffin. [recording paused]

HT:Thank you so much for talking with me today. I really, really appreciate this. Could you tell me just a few biographical bits of information about yourself, such as where born.

IR:Okay. I was actually born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1979. My mom was sent there by her family because they couldn’t afford to take care of her here in North Carolina, so I was born there.

HT:And where did you grow up?

IR:I grew up in—well, after my mom gave birth to me in Brooklyn, she returned to her family home in Ahoskie, North Carolina. And then, when she graduated from high school, she attended college in Durham, North Carolina, so I spent most of my life in Durham, North Carolina.

HT:Can you—can you tell me something about your parents and siblings?

IR:My mother is a nurse at Duke University. She’s attending graduate school there as well. My father retired from the navy in 2005. They were never married, but I have a stepmother who’s name is Shirley McCaskill. Oh, my father’s name is Charles McCaskill, and my mother’s name is Felicia Ruffin. My father, yes, my father served in the navy for over twenty years, and he retired in 2005. I have two sisters and one brother. My—I shared—I shared my mother with my brother and my sister. My brother is nineteen years old, and my sister is twelve. My brother is now serving in the army.

HT:Oh.

IR:And my sister, she’s in middle school. And then my father and step-mother adopted a baby, and she is one years old now.

HT:So you have a long history of military service in your family.

IR:Yes.

HT:That’s great.

IR:Yes, my brother’s—my father’s sister actually served in the army. And my brother’s father served in the army. So, yes.

HT:Now, where’d you go to high school?

IR:I went to high school no at Southern Durham—at Southern High School in Durham.

HT:And did you have any favorite subjects?

IR:My favorite subjects were art and English.

HT:And what did you do after graduating from high school?

IR:Actually, I first came to the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. And I attended here for two years before joining the air force.

HT:And do you recall why you joined the air force?

IR:I—I guess the best thing to explain is that I had become disillusioned with the education process. It seemed so shallow at the time. And I really couldn’t appreciate it, and I felt like I needed to learn a little bit more about life before I could appreciate the things that I was learning in the classroom.

HT:Right. And what made you decide to join the air force?

IR:Well, I talked to a member of the recruiters. I talked to the navy. I talked to the army. Didn’t—I just realized I’d never be a Marine, so that went out of the window. [laughs] One of my family friends is actually a navy recruiter, so he talked to me and told me the real scoop about military and what to expect. But I realized I didn’t like swimming, the idea of being on a large boat at any time, just—no. So the navy went out the window. And then the army recruiter seemed kind of seedy to me, so I was like, no. And then I finally talked to the air force recruiter, and he was like, “We’re very selective about our people. It’s whether or not we want you.” [laughs] And after that I was sold.

HT:Do you think your—since you dad was in the navy, and you had other family members in the military, did that influence your decision at all?

IR:I think so. My family has pretty much always looked positively upon the military. I know I had a great-great-cousin, he served in the army in Vietnam, and [unclear], you know, I had my grandfather’s father had served in the military. We actually have old pictures of him in his uniform. So, you know, I guess that I’ve always—even when I was a little kid—I remember as a little girl saying I wanted to an army man when I grow up. [laughs]

HT:Now, when you decided to join, did you parents have to sign papers because you were—

IR:No.

HT:They didn’t.

IR:No, because I was—how old? I was twenty.

HT:Twenty, okay.

IR:Yes.

HT:And where did you enlist?

IR:I enlisted—I enlisted at—in Durham. I was living in Durham, but I guess Raleigh, because I had to go to the MEPS Center [Military Entrance Processing Station] in Raleigh, North Carolina.

HT:What kind of center did you go to in Raleigh?

IR:The military entry—it’s called the MEPS. I don’t actually know what the letters stand for. [laughs]

HT:Is that M-I-P-S or—?

IR:M-E-P-S.

HT:Oh, M-E. Okay. And what type of—okay, can you describe the process of joining, such as did you have to take a written test or some physicals and that sort of thing?

IR:Well, the first thing I did was take a entrance exam and it’s called the ASVAB [Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery] which is A-[S]-V-A-B-S—couldn’t tell you what it stands for. [chuckles] But everybody who joins the military has to take it.

HT:Okay.

IR:And after that—I got pretty high scores, but I didn’t choose my job until I actually went to basic training. But it wasn’t until I came in to finally leave for basic training, because it was actually about a month because I went to study abroad in Africa before I went to basic training. So it was a couple months in between taking the exam and signing the initial paperwork that I actually had to do my physical. And I didn’t do my physical until it was time for me to leave and go to San Antonio [Texas] for basic training.

HT:And you mentioned that you went to Africa for a month. What were you doing there?

IR:I was studying abroad. I was studying African art history and culture and textiles.

HT:Okay, through the university?

IR:Actually through North Carolina State University.

HT:Oh, okay. Well tell me about that. What was that like, going overseas for, I guess, the first time in your life?

IR:Yes, it was. It was very life changing and made me appreciate American even more. Like, I was so gung-ho and ready to join the military after I came back from Africa. Africa is a nice place to visit. Ghana is a wonderful country. The people are warm and welcoming, and it’s definitely different than America to a point where, you know, there whole thing—if a person appears to be rushed, they make you slow down. And that’s one thing I learned from that is just that sometimes you have to pull yourself back. But I loved America after that trip.

HT:What did you learn art-wise?

IR:Art-wise?

HT:Or textiles or—?

IR:Well, just that there’s a different aesthetic. American—the Western aesthetic, I guess, is more art for art sake. But in Africa, if something is beautiful, it has to be useful. And if it’s not useful, then it can’t be beautiful. And I like that idea, you know.

HT:When you decided to join the military—if we can go back to that time in your life?

IR:Oh, yes.

HT:What did you family and friends and coworkers think about you doing this?

IR: I think at that particular point in my life, people were not surprised about anything that I did, or rather it was just to expect the unexpected. Because—it was funny, because when I was growing up, I was a very scared child. I really didn’t want to do—I had big dreams, but I didn’t want to do anything. [chuckles] Because I had many—I had numerous opportunities to leave home and explore the world. I had the opportunity to go to a private school in—up North. I can’t remember where it was. It was like in New England. I had the opportunity to study abroad in Australia for a summer, but I wasn’t willing to do—put forth the effort. If someone had done it for me, done everything for me, I would have done it. And at some point in time during my twenties, I just got this idea that I was going to live life and do whatever, and picked up, went to Africa, and decided to join the military. I just—

HT:Just did it?

IR:Yes, I just did it. I just, somehow, I decided I was just going to embrace life. And then I remember in art class—it was art history class—always, the teacher would flash these slides of these famous places and architecture and paintings. And there would always be, well, at that time I thought snide-type people who would be like, “Oh yes! I remember when I went to Rome and I saw that.” And I was like, “Ew.” And then I realized that I was actually just jealous and I wanted to be that person to say, “Well, I’ve been there, and I saw that, and I wasn’t as impressed as everyone else is.” [chuckling] But, you know, I wanted to be able to form my own opinions about the world from my own personal experiences. And so what better way to do that than just to pick up and go.

HT:That’s right.

[laughter] Would you recall when you actually joined the air force—what month and date it was that you entered, or went to basic training, maybe?

IR:When I went to basic training?

HT:Yes.

IR:Oh. I came back, I think it was in September.

HT:Of 19—

IR:1999.

HT:September ’99, all right.

IR:Yes, it was. It was in September 1999.

HT:And I think you said earlier that you went to basic probably at Lackland Air Force Base [Texas].

IR:Yes, I did go at Lackland.

HT:And how long was that training—how long was basic training?

IR:Well, that’s a story.

HT:Okay.

IR:Normally, air force basic training is six weeks. I like to believe they liked me so much they decided to keep me two weeks extra. So I got what they call recycled, because I couldn’t complete my run in the necessary time. And it’s very odd because I’d always been a physically fit person. And I don’t know what it was, you know, about that time. But, so I had to do—stay a little bit longer. [laughter]

HT:So can you tell me about some of the days at basic training? What was the first day like?

IR:Oh, the first day. It’s just odd. I remember standing there—I had—I had my hair was in an afro. I had a natural hairstyle, you know, for black people. [chuckles] And I was just so fresh, sensitive. I’m still a very sensitive person. And I remember as I was standing out there, it was sort of like a light dawn, you know, so I’m scared because I don’t know what to expect. And these people, they just come up, and they seem okay, the TIs [training instructors] with their big campaign hats. And they’re like [yells], “Pick up your bags and follow us.” So, we just followed them. And we go up to what would become my barrack—my first barracks. And when you are a civilian coming in, you’re called a rainbow because you don’t have uniforms yet. And then that, “Oh, look at the rainbows!” because everybody’s looking all different and everything. And they pretty much make you hate everything that it means to be a civilian, you know. “Civilians are others. You don’t want to be a civilian,” you know. Oh, my first day, we walk in and you go into what’s called the day room, just a big sitting room, and there’s a couch in there. Some of us decided to sit down. I don’t remember if I was one of the people that sat on it. But I know some of us decided to sit on the couch. Well, the TI comes in shortly after, and he says [yells], “Who are you? Did I give you permission to sit on the couch? You don’t deserve to sit on the couch!” And it was like oh, I realized that maybe I got myself into something more. [chuckles] Then after that it’s like, “Take your bags to the bunk.” So we go take our bags to the bunk and go stand beside a bunk. And then about five training instructors come in with their campaign hats and commence to inspect our civilian luggage. And if you had anything that was just out of the ordinary, just made you stand out, they came on you. And like two of them saw my sketchpad—because I was an art major at the time—saw my sketchpad inside of my luggage and they were like, “Oh, so you’re an artist. Are you sensitive like an artist?” And, I mean, they made me cry, because they were just picking on me. And I was like—but all of those feelings—it’s just a drawing, right? All my life people had rewarded me for the fact that I had artistic ability, but these people were taking that thing and just like, making me hate it. [laughs] And, yes, that was my first ex[perience].

HT:Were the TIs all men, or were some women as well?

IR:We had some women, yes. They called them girls [unclear].

HT:And were they—when I was in the air force, we just had men, of course. So were the women equally rough?

IR:Oh, woo, some of them you couldn’t even tell—because we had an intercom system where sometimes the TIs would check up on us and call on the intercom system. And we always had to go—we had to give our—what is it called? Our—something statement. I forgot what it’s—some kind of statement. Well, you always go, “Yes, sir. Ingrid Ruffin,” something, whatever. Whatever I had to say I had to preface it with this statement. And sometimes when you were doing [unclear] the female TIs would come over, and it would sound like a man. And they’d say, “Ingrid what are you doing? Blah, blah, blah.” And you’d say, “Sir.” And then [yells], “Do I sound like a man to you?” And it’s like, ooh, I do not want to answer that question. [laughs] “She thinks I sound like a man.” And it’s like, “Oh, no.” [laughter] But yes, they were quite rough.

HT:What did you think of the food?

IR:It was good. That’s all I know. You just had to eat it fast, so I really don’t remember it too much.

I just remember putting it all—mixing it together. My favorite breakfast that I still love today: grits and bacon and butter and eggs and everything going—goes into it. [chuckles] And you get it down as fast as you possibly can and just run out the door so that way you weren’t the last person.

HT:Right. Do you remember what a typical day was like?

IR:Woo. Get up really, really early. By the end of it you were dog tired, which I think we’d usually go to bed around 8:00 or 9:00 [PM]. And, you know, from college student, you’re used to staying up, partying all night. No, those people [ran your day?]. It was just spent marching. Everywhere you went you walked. And PT [physical training] in the morning. And they’d give us—we’d usually have some sort of academic class learning about what it means to be in the air force and just all our customs and courtesies.

HT:Did you have to perform KP [kitchen patrol]?

IR:Oh, yes. Oh, that was the best detail. Everybody loved KP. Oh, I had the coolest details. I had KP duty. When I got recycled, I had to babysit some of the younger flights, where I would have to walk them to and from the chapel or to the hospital. Then also did KP duty, and I also did clean up of the parade grounds. But KP duty was the best, because we’d get to eat the desserts. And one of my friends actually got in trouble because one of the civilian workers said something to her, and she was like, “I hate civilians.” Because, you know, by that—we had been there long enough at that point we’d be thoroughly indoctrinated. Anyway, the civilian workers told our TI and she got in trouble for that. It was funny.

HT:And did you ever go out to the rifle range and practice?

IR:Oh, yes. Yes, we did. We did M-16—because at the end, I think it’s the fourth or fifth week you do a thing called warrior week. And during that you get qualified for M-16 week, learn all the more, like I guess you say, combat aspects of being in the military. Do marches. We did like a six mile march through snake infested waters. And—

HT:So you were at Lackland, I think, in the fall of September ’99?

IR:Yes. I didn’t leave until November. I was actually there for Thanksgiving. My graduation from basic was during Thanksgiving.

HT:Because I was there October and November.

IR:Oh, it was cold.

HT:Yes, cooler then.

IR:Cooler.

HT:Yes. I’m glad I wasn’t there in the summertime. Let’s see. What were some of the academic instructions like, do you recall, during that time?

IR:Well, of course we learned about things like military equal opportunities, sexual harassment, don’t do drugs. They taught us about like financial responsibility. How finances work in the military; as much as we needed to know. They’d just get up there in teach and we’d always have to come into the room to a position of attention until they say, “At ease,” and then you kind of relax your body, but not too much. [laughs] Because you didn’t want to be the guy to fall asleep.

HT:Okay. And what was your uniform like? What did you wear?

IR:We wore the—it’s kind of hard because they actually changed the uniform now, but that won’t go into effect until a long time from now. I guess it’s the [pause] it’s kind of hard because they look like what was the old—it’s BDUs, the battle dress uniform, but everybody’s changed to digitals now, and I can’t—I don’t know how to explain it. Just green—it looks like camouflage.

HT:Camouflage. You wore camouflage—

IR:Stereotypical—

HT:—really the entire time. So you didn’t really wear skirts or anything.

IR:Oh, no! [laughter]

HT:No skirts.

IR:No skirts at all. We did get fitted for our dress uniforms which included a skirt and pants, but because we had a brother flight, we would wear pants in order to match our brother flight.

HT:What was a brother flight?

IR:It was a flight of all males.

HT:Oh, I see.

IR:That they were our partners.

HT:I see.

IR:That, like, we did our academic training with them. We pretty much did all of our training with them. The only thing we didn’t do with them was sleep.

HT:Because the women were in a separate barracks, I assume?

IR: Yes.

HT:Or at least separate floors.

IR:Separate floors. We were in the same building but separate floors.

HT:And what were the barracks like?

IR:Open bay, where it’s just—we had two rooms. Okay, you walk into the door you have your two sleeping quarters where it’s just like row of beds, row of wall lockers. Then you had your bathrooms on the left hand side as you’re coming in through the door, and that’s open bay showers. And then we had bathrooms; the only privacy you could get was going to the bathroom, pretty much.

HT:[chuckles] I

remember that very well.

IR:Yes. I would take naps in the bathroom; I’m not going to lie. Like during academic—

HT:Naps?

IR:Yes. Like during the academic classes when I would feel myself tired, I would just go to the bathroom. I would lay—I would put the toilet seat down and put my head on my elbows and I would go to sleep. [laughs] Because nobody would harass you, because they taught us at the very beginning about OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] regulations, they cannot tell us when to go to the bathroom. And so I took that to my advantage. And they were not going to come into the bathroom unless you were gone for an abnormally long time to check up on you. But I would go in there.

HT:So you were that tired you had to take naps in the day?

IR:Yes. Only a few times. But I—that bathroom was—Still today I use the bathroom as a place that I just—if I need to get away from people. I learned nobody will bother you in the bathroom. No one will ask you what you’re doing.

HT:Oh my gosh. Well did you make any friends with the—

IR:Yes.

HT:—with the other airmen?

IR:Yes. Actually one of my friends, she was in my first flight and she got recycled with me. And we’re still in contact today. And one other girl, we were friends like during the military, she’s out now. And then there were some people who I didn’t realize that we were in the same flight until after, well into—.

HT:Yes, right. Did you ever get the opportunity to go to downtown San Antonio?

IR:Yes, I did. Graduation—when my family, they came, they allowed our parents and family and friends to take us off base. So we did the like River Walk thing. I have a picture of me, my mom, in my uniform, and I look horrible, standing behind the River Walk sign.

HT:Well after boot camp, could you tell me about what you did next?

IR:Went to technical school, where I learned how to be a 1-Charlie-5-3-1 (IC531), which is aerospace [warning and control – corrected by veteran] operator. It’s a ground version of the AWACS [airborne warning and control system] which I know nobody knows. It’s like, “Okay, yes, that makes a difference.” The AWACS is a big airplane with a dish on it, and so it gives you an overall air picture from the aspect of the ground.

HT:Right.

IR:Right. And then, mine was looking up and theirs was looking down

HT:And where did you go to technical school?

IR:Keesler.

HT:Keesler?

IR:Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi.

HT:Mississippi, yes.

IR:Biloxi, Mississippi.

HT:How long did that training last?

IR:Oh, how long did that last? I went there in December, got to my first base in March. It seemed like it was way longer than it actually was, but I think so. Yes. December, January, February—like three, three months.

HT:Three months.

IR:Three or four months.

HT:Can you tell me something about the training you received at Keesler?

IR:Oh, [makes a noise]. It seemed intense. It was so much information, you know. They didn’t expect us to be experts, because with my particular kind or career field, once you leave it, you could go to any number of units. And whatever you learned in technical school, you’re going to learn something completely different. So it was just a lot of working on a computer and doing simulations and stuff and written tests.

HT:Lots of—lots of studying I would imagine.

IR:Yes. It really wasn’t that much, because the information, for me at least, really wasn’t that hard at all.

HT:And what was a typical day like at Keesler?

IR:Get up—oh, morning PT. We had to go out in front of the court, do PT. We had—and then they’d do like muster, that’s what they’d call it. Muster? Yes. M-u-s-t-e-r. And they’d make announcements and stuff like that about things going on. And it depended on what phase you were on, because you had all your different phases, where you’d—When you first get there, you’re not allowed to wear civilian clothes at any time. Then after you take a PT test and you have good behavior, then you’re able to move on to the next phase, which is to go off base, but you can only wear your blues, your dress uniform, like the, I guess professional—casual-professional look, [chuckles] which would usually be like your blue shirt and your pants. And then you go to the next phase; you’d be allowed to wear civilian clothes and go off base. And then after that, it depended on how long you stayed there, how many phases you went through, because there’s some people whose tech school was like a year. And they were eventually able to have their family there, drive a car.

HT:Yes, yes.

IR:Oh, but the average day was usually just eat, get up, go to class, have muster, have breakfast, go to class. You’d have to march in formation with your class, which

my class was like five people. And march to class. And because I was the highest ranking person in the class, I would have to call cadence. And I would be in charge of my flight. And so what I’d do is while we were near the TIs, I’d call cadence, and then when we’d get away from that I’d be like, “Guys, look, you all know how to march. I’m not going to keep doing this.” So then we’d march and when we’d get up near the class building, I’d start calling cadence again, just in case somebody—. [laughs] I think it was so funny because one day I was marching back from class and I was like, “Hup, two, three,” and everybody was all in line and behaving well, and one of the TIs passed and he was like, “Now that’s how you’re supposed to march a flight.” It was so funny, because I was like if he knew what we were doing before we got in sight of him, he would not have said that.

HT:Now were your evenings free, basically?

IR:Yes, the evenings were free. Spent most of my time sitting out in the hallway talking or going to Club BDU, or it’s actually the Vandenberg Club which is the NCO [non-commissioned officers] club, and hanging out there.

HT:And what were the room accommodations like—your sleeping quarters and that sort of thing?

IR:It was just two to a room. You had a roommate. It was quite nice. It was like a hotel suite. Nice accommodations.

HT:Yes, nice accommodations.

IR:Yes.

HT:And so, did anything unusual happen while you were at Keesler—humorous, memorable moment type things? It could be either on base or off base, because I’m assuming they would probably let you go off base for—to visit the town or something like that.

IR:Okay, actually I think I have like two kind of memorable things. One was my first time going to a church off base. I introduced myself and I can’t remember my name. I couldn’t remember how to introduce myself. Because they were like, “Oh, nice to meet you. What’s your name?” And I was like, “Ruffin.” And then I was like, no, I don’t say Ruffin. You know, it’s like I had this whole weird coming into—

HT:Because everybody in the military calls each other by the last name.

IR:Yes, by their last name. So I was like, “Ruffin, Ingrid, Ruffin,” and like for—I don’t know, it felt like it lasted for a very—that confusion lasted for a very long time to me. And I was like, “Oh, my name is Ingrid Ruffin.” But of course, they were used to dealing with military people, so I think they sort of like could understand the confusion I was going through. But it was funny.

HT:So after—after Keesler, what was your next duty station?

IR:Shaw Air Force Base. That was my very first duty station.

HT:And that’s in South Carolina?

IR:Yes. In Sumter, South Carolina. Sumter.

HT:And how long were you there?

IR:I was there, ooh, from March to June of the next year, I think.

HT:June 2000?

IR:Yes.

HT:And by this time it was already—so March to June of 2000.

IR:Yes.

HT:So that wasn’t—not a terribly long period of time.

IR:No, I wasn’t there—wait a minute. No, 2001.

HT:2001, okay.

IR:Yes, because I was in Iceland when September 11 happened.

HT:Okay. And what type of work did you do at Shaw?

IR:I worked in the Air Operations Center, the AOC, as a surveillance technician, and I basically just identified tracks. And it was kind of cool, because during my short time there I got to do a lot of things that airmen didn’t usually get to do. One of the first tasks—cool tasks that I got to do was my boss brought me to his office and he said, “Ingrid, I need you to become an expert in—” what is that system called? I can’t even think of the name of the system. CTAPS [Contingency Theater Advanced Planning System]. I think that’s what it was called. CTAPS. Couldn’t tell you what it stood for.

HT:Okay.

IR:I can’t remember that. [chuckles]

HT:Was that C—?

IR:C-T-A-P-S. No, it was TBMCS [Theater Battle Management Core Systems]. That’s what—okay.

HT:T-M

IR:T-M-B-C-S.

HT:Okay.

IR:Okay, yes. And so I had to go in—I had to go to—the contractors came from, I think Lockheed Martin actually was in charge of that system. I think. Don’t quote me on that one. But they came in and they trained a few people how to run this system, to know the ins and outs of this system. So I did this—

HT:This is a radar system?

IR:No.

HT:It’s not? Oh, it’s not.

IR:No, it was like a tracking—it was a war planning system. So they would take the information that they would get from the radars and all the different links, because there’s so many different links and ways to get surveillance information. They would get this information. They would also have information for like our resources, allocation of resources. And then from within that system, the plans people would create war plans like where to send our aircraft and different things. So in two weeks I had to become an expert

on how to run the system. And then my thing was I had to sit there. Like I had to sit at the TMBCS system and people would call me for help. And I also had to train the general at the time, who was General Wahl, who was in charge of the SWAAOR, which is Southwest Asian A—Southwest Asia AOR [Area of Responsibility]. He was in charge of this whole area. And he was set up at the 9th Air Force, because that’s what it was at Shaw Air Force Base. I was with the 9th Air Force. And I trained his assistant in how to use TMBCS so he could show the general how to do it. And so what would happen is I would sit there, and it was a joint forces operation, so we had [U.S.] Navy, Marines, [U.S.] Army was there. And we also had some people from the Royal Air Force, from England. And they would just come up and I would have to show them. If they couldn’t understand stuff I would have to show them how to use the system and how to fix, troubleshoot, and do problems. And if I couldn’t figure it out, then I would call—find some way to figure it out. But for the most part it was pretty cool, because I was an airman and there was a tech sergeant who was working with me. And most often people would come up to the tech sergeant and people would ask him a question, and as soon as they left he would ask me the answer, and I would tell him, and he’d go back. And one time I got a little full of myself and somebody was getting ready to find him and I was like, “You know what, just go ahead and tell me what the problem is, because all he’s going to do is ask me how to fix it.” [laughter] And I think I might have gotten in trouble for it, but at the end of the exercise, I did get an award for being an outstanding performer.

HT:Great.

IR:Because I did that job plus the job that I was supposed to do, which is ID [identify] tracks. They pretty much covered the screen because all the tracks, like hostiles and all these different—all the tracks had different colors. And then my job, my real job, was to color the tracks.

HT:Let me digress for just a second. Since you have an art background and you went to a very technical area, did you feel uncomfortable with this at all, or do you wish they had given you a more art type related position in the air force?

IR:Yes. I would probably still be in the military if I had been given more of an art type thing.

HT:Say in relations or, I mean, public relations.

IR:Yes.

HT:Or photography.

IR:Yes.

HT:Or writing for a newspaper or something like that. There are those type of jobs.

IR:Yes.

HT:Yes, yes. So it’s really strange that they would have put you with a very technical thing when you obviously have very—such a wonderful background in art.

IR:Yes. But that was one of the things that kind of haunted me my whole military career, even though I tried to do the very best I possibly could in the job that I had been assigned, I just didn’t feel—like, I didn’t have necessarily the passion for it that I saw some of my other peers have, you know. Like I could care less about the radius of a TPS-75 [radar system], even though I knew what it was because I had to know what it was. And sort of like there would be some moments where I’d be thinking to myself, “I don’t care about this stuff. Why are they making me learn this?”

HT:Did you ever in your career with the air force ask to be transferred to another career field?

IR:Actually, I tried. I tried out to be an AFN reporter.

HT:FM?

IR:AFN, Armed [sic, American] Forces Network. Be on the AFN radio. They said that I didn’t speak white enough. And that hurt my feelings.

HT:Oh.

IR:Because people always said that I just sounded like an old white lady. And I was like, “How do you say that?” But, you know, a little training.

HT:And you’d have been good at that I’m sure.

IR:Yes, but you know what, I’m glad now that I didn’t, because I wouldn’t have been able to come back to school like I have and have the experience that I’ve had these past two years, and so everything worked out in the end.

HT:It generally does. It really does. Yes. Well after Shaw Air Force Base, where was your next duty station?

IR:My next duty station was Keflavik Naval Air Station in Iceland.

HT:Can you spell that?

IR:Keflavik is K-e-f-l-a-v-i-k.

HT:Okay. And that’s in Iceland.

IR:Yes.

HT:So going from the heat of Shaw Air Force Base to the cold of Iceland must have been quite a shock.

IR:Yes. Oh, I’ve forgotten to say—I’m sorry. I also, while I was at Shaw Air Force Base, had the opportunity to go to Saudi Arabia for two weeks.

HT:Oh, TDY [temporary duty].

IR:Yes, TDY. And there my main job was to figure out how to break a system.

Because they were doing like tests and they just wanted anybody who could—I was just punching in information and just doing my worst job ever to see—because it was a system that filtered classified information. Because the AOC in Saudi Arabia, we shared it with the British, we shared it with the Canadians, we shared it with the Saudis and a couple other countries. And the information on the U.S. side, we owned—we had kind of different levels of how close of a friend they were and how much information they got. So my job was to see if the system could be broken, so that way they technical people could come in and fix it.

HT:And were you successful in breaking it?

IR:No. So it was a good system. Like, if it wasn’t broken, that was a good thing. And if it did break, that was still a good thing because then they’d find out the problem. It’s almost like a firewall, but it was a classified firewall.

HT:And I’m assuming you flew over since you were only there for two weeks.

IR:Yes. And it was pretty cool, so it was hot and I learned the difference between desert heat and southern heat. So it—

HT:The humidity.

IR:Yes. It was like I didn’t—It was funny, because it was sort of like in Saudi Arabia, your skin just burned. It was like you just felt hot. You didn’t sweat, you weren’t wet; you were just hot. And you didn’t realize that a breeze could be hot. [chuckles] And then when I came back in, because it was during the summertime and I flew back in to South Carolina, I realized just how humid it was, because I realized I felt wet. Like my skin always had this damp feeling about it. And so I learned a very important lesson. And this is, of course, shortly before I went to Iceland. That’s the same way. And then I learned what it really meant to be cold, in Iceland.

HT:Do you recall how long you were in Iceland?

IR:A year.

HT:A year. And do you recall—what was it 2000—?

IR:2001.

HT:2001.

IR:June. I think it was like June—July 2001 to—yes, that’s roughly the date.

HT:To July 2002 or something like that.

IR:Yes, and then I went to Germany after that.

HT:And during this time, did you ever go on vacations in between these—?

IR:Yes, I went home on leave a couple times in between. That’s why the dates are kind of fuzzy in my mind, because the actual time I arrived there—

HT:Sure, sure, yes. Well, what was your first impression of Iceland?

IR:This place is barren. Because you look out the window and it was just rocks and moss, no grass. The trees were shrubs. It was quite desolate, stark. [chuckles] Brown and black with hints of green.

HT:And what were the accommodations like in Iceland? Were you—the barracks and housing and that sort of thing.

IR:Okay. Well the first barracks I lived in I shared a room with a person, but the thing that separated us was a wall. You didn’t have doors. The only doors were on our closets and our bathroom. But where we slept, we didn’t have doors. So what you do is you put up a shower rod and put up a shower curtain, and that was the bulk of your privacy.

HT:And what about a door to the hallway?

IR:Oh, yes [HT clears throat]. And that was the first accommodations that I got because shortly after that I put on E-4, which is senior airman, and so I was able to move into 1+1 dorms, which was basically my living quarters were all by myself, and I shared a bathroom and a kitchen with another person. I had a suitemate.

HT:I’m going to turn this— [recording paused]

HT:Okay.

IR:Where were we? Iceland.

HT:You just got into Iceland and noticed how desolate and brown the place was.

IR:Yes.

HT:And you were talking about your housing accommodations.

IR:Yes. Okay. Yes, I was at suitemate. That’s where I stopped. And my phone is ringing. [chuckles] Yes, that was it, where my—the last place because I lived in two barracks while I was there. The first one I shared a room with a wall separating us, and then I moved and I shared—I had a suitemate.

HT:Suitemate, yes. And what type of working did you do while you were in Iceland for that year?

IR:I can’t even remember. I was in the 932nd Air Control Squadron,

and I cannot remember what we called the building, but it was this big cement building. It had no windows. And of course it was built during the Cold War, so it had its particular issues. You always had to go through like this security before you could get into it. It was a very secure building. And you had police forces that worked in there and checked people in and had weapons and that stuff. And [pause] I did just mainly air surveillance again. Just IDing tracks and calling out to airplanes.

HT:Were you able to do any traveling while you were in Iceland—touristy-type stuff?

IR:Well, I went to—like a few times to Reykjavik, which is the capital of Iceland. I actually flew to England because my father was stationed in England at the time. So I went there for Thanksgiving that first year. And yes, so I just spent a little time with him there.

HT:And what about touring Iceland itself? Did you get a chance to do any of that?

IR:Oh, I went ice caving, which is you just go inside a cave and walk around in the dark with the flashlight. [chuckles] Which, I don’t know, it was a lava cave or something. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But it was an experience.

HT:Is there much to see and do in Iceland?

IR:Well, oh, we did go to—they have a big jazz festival. We went to a jazz club one night. And we’re sitting there having a good time, you know, and because I’m a black woman in Europe, I tend to stand out in the crowd. And one of my first experiences standing out was when the photographer continuously kept taking photos of me. Like we were sitting at the table; I was with my friends. And they just, you know, just snapping away. [laughs] And then while we were at the club, I went downstairs and they had this room which is like a VIP room. It was really nice. A cognac room is what I think they called it. And I was standing at—the room wasn’t open yet, and I was just standing looking at it, just being curious. And the guy was like, “Oh, you can come in. You can come in.” And I was like, “What? If it’s not open—” And he was like, “No, come in.” So I just come in look around and everything. And then these Icelandics tried to follow me in and the guy was like, “It’s not open yet. You can’t come in.” [laughs] I was like, okay, either it’s because I’m black or because I’m beautiful. I don’t know which one. But that was fun. But I have to talk about that jazz club experience. Okay, so we’re sitting there. We’re having a good time. And there’s jazz musicians from Iceland, all over Europe, and America, and we’re jamming. And then this kind of older white gentleman gets up on the stage and he starts scatting, you know, with the band. He’s like [imitates scat] and all this, and it was sounding good. And we were like, “Wow. But why did that man get up on the stage?” One of the Icelanders was like, “He’s the mayor of Reykjavik.” And I’m just like, “I just saw the mayor of Reykjavik scatting in a bar in Iceland! This is life.” And it was great. So that was my one. If I saw the man now in the streets, I wouldn’t recognize the guy. But it was still just pretty cool that, you know, that was an experience that you wouldn’t get in America.

HT:Well, did you ever just—were you ever at the subject anytime of discrimination because you were a woman or because you were black in either the United States or overseas?

IR:Well, one time we did have one bad experience. We were walking—it was me and two of my male friends and they were black gentlemen, and we were walking from another concert that we had went to in Reykjavik. No, no, I think we were looking for a place to eat. And this Icelandic gentleman walks by and says, “Niggers.”And it was all I could do, by myself with these men who were well over six feet tall and two hundred pounds, to keep them from turning around and beating this man. I was like, “He’s drunk. He doesn’t know what he’s saying, because if he was sober he wouldn’t have said that word. Obviously he’s out of his mind. So please, we don’t need any international incidents. Let’s just keep walking and ignore him.” And that was—and surprisingly enough, that was the only real blatant discrimination. You know, people might have had bad feelings toward me, but I never knew it except for that one time.

HT:And what about with your fellow workmen, fellow workers?

Nothing—because you were a woman or something like that? I know women in World War II obviously had a lot more discrimination fostered on them because there were few of them.

IR:Yes. I think for me it was kind of different because for some reason I fit in well with the men. And so—because I would push myself to my physical limit. I never told them—you know, like I didn’t try to pretend like I was a man. I would be the first one to go, say “Look, I’m going to do as much as I possibly can and if I can’t, I’m going to ask the people who can do it for help.” You know, and so I think maybe I got a little bit more respect because of that. I wasn’t the kind of girl—you know, I like being pretty just like the next person, but I didn’t make that an obsession, particularly when I was in uniform. I tried to just be competent at my job and just do that, and most people they just—I was just roughing. [recording paused]

HT:We’re all set.

IR:Okay. Now where was I again?

HT:Oh, let’s see. You’d been to the jazz festival and then you were—oh, we were talking about discrimination with your fellow workers and—

IR:Oh, yes. I really didn’t have any problems. Like, if anything, if anybody really had any problems with me, it usually was like a personal problem, like they didn’t like aspects of my personality or something that I did. I would say it was very rare that I felt like—I guess, what’s the difference? It’s—overt discrimination? You know?

HT:Yes, right.

IR:So, you know, mainly—particularly once you get overseas, people kind of—that sort of stuff somewhat goes out the window, because you’re the only Americans there so people try to, tend to come together more. You kind of forget about whatever biases, or place those biases kind of in the background.

HT:Right. What about the office of leadership? Can you give me any thoughts about that?

IR:There was some very good and there was some very bad. And the very good ones I tried to stay in contact with, even now as a civilian. And then the other ones, I just chalked it up to, “I’m going to learn what not to do and what kind of officer to be.” Because a lot of times what I would see is like the officers, they’d have these big plans, but they didn’t want to do the work to implement it. Particularly when I became a NCO, that’s what I saw is they’d be like, “Oh, I want—we need to go on a fifty vehicle convey across Germany into the Netherlands—” which this actually did happen “—it’s going to be like—we’re going to have a great time! Sergeant Ruffin,” [laughter] “you got to make this happen!” So like I served as sort of like the representative Ops [operations] in that whole process. And he goes off on leave while this whole planning and gearing up and packing and getting equipment together and getting people together is going on. And he comes back when it’s time to go on the trip. And, of course, everybody says what a wonderful trip we had.

HT:And you had planned it all and made it all happen.

IR:And I made his dream happen. And it’s sort of like, [you know?] “Thanks, Sergeant Ruffin.” Other people would come up—and I do learn. You know, I’m not the type of person—I don’t need to be stood up in front of public people and handed an award saying that I did good. To me, the most valuable accolade is when someone takes you aside in private and goes, “You know what? I really appreciate what you did.” That rested my whole heart a lot more, because I know a lot of those awards are just trumped up and made elaborate. You know, you can lie just to get the big award, but it’s the genuine ones. But never once did he just come up to me and go, “Sergeant Ruffin, good job. Thank you for taking care of all that stuff and making it happen for me.”

HT:What was this person’s rank?

IR:He was a captain.

HT:Captain. So was he your immediate supervisor?

IR:[sighs] I actually had one immediate supervisor; he was a captain. He was just—I don’t know what he was on. He was actually an academy grad, and academy graduates for officers get kind of a bad rap, because they don’t really have all the most sense, because most of their experience, particularly adulthood experience, has been the military. So they don’t bring in that civilian experience of having gone to university that other people might have. But I had one officer in particularly, Major Courtney, Terry Courtney—want him to go down in history—he was a wonderful officer. He was always a happy guy. And everybody knows I like to talk, and me and him would just have, like, you know, crazy conversations.

On the particular convey I was talking about earlier to the Netherlands, I was his—it was funny, he was like, “You’re going to be my bus NCO,” because we had to ride the bus. [laughs] Some people were driving in the convey in the big vehicles, but then the bulk of the people were on the bus. And so he’s like, “You’re going to be the bus NCO.” And we were just cracking up, and me and him were just talking, just talking about life in general. And also when I had a hard time passing PT test, because running I guess is not my forte, he even—he was like, “I’ll go running with you, Sergeant Ruffin.” And we would get up in the morning and go running around the track together and just talk. And that to me, that’s how real leaders should be, should be hands-on and make people feel like people. And I can respect him as a leader. I’m willing to follow him. I’m willing to do what he needs to have done. Whereas people who just, you know, leave you out and not even take time to know you or engage you as a person, I don’t want to follow that guy because he’ll leave me out in the cold.

HT:Yes, so true. So all this was going on while you were still in Iceland?

IR:No, that was Germany. I’ve gone and jumped ahead. Let’s talk about officers. I can’t even really remember. Oh, I will talk about my commander, Colonel [Don] Kepley, I think that’s what his name was.

HT:K-e Both:p-l-e-y

IR:He was a good officer. because if you told him something about you, he knew it. Like one day he walks up to me and he’s like, “I hear you like writing.” I was like, “How does this man know all this information about me?” [laughs] But he took the time to like, when you first go in the unit, you always write stuff about you, little blurbs about you so people—to know. And he would just know stuff about you and ask questions about your life. I mean, not too prying, not too—it didn’t seem disingenuous. But he made an effort, you know. He had lots of people, hundreds of people that worked under him, and then hundreds of people that he had to deal with daily. But he took the time to get to know people and get to know your name and get to know you face, and if he saw you, he’d say hi. I actually, me and one of my friends, we were at a restaurant eating and we look over to the table and it’s a bunch of officers from out unit; he sent over dessert for us. And, you know, it was like, “Oh that is so—.” Because a lot of times people, they see you outside of work, they pretend they don’t know you. [chuckles] And sometimes, too, when you’re in civilian clothes, it’s hard to recognize people out of context, because you’re like, “I know that person’s face, but I just don’t get it. [laughs] I know them from somewhere.”

HT:That’s true. Now was this in Germany or in Iceland?

IR:That was in Iceland. Going back to Iceland.

HT:And this was Colonel Kepley.

IR:Colonel Kepley. He was in charge of Iceland when I was there.

HT:And so when did you finally end up in Germany?

IR:In 2002, because September 11

—I need to talk about that happening in Iceland, because actually, my September 11 experience was sad and funny all at the same time. I had been in Iceland for about three or four months, and I wake up. I had yet to receive my shipment from TMO [Traffic Management Office], which is the people who ship stuff when you PCS, permanent change of station. I hadn’t received my luggage and it was going on three months—or it might have been two months or something. And I called to the TMO office, and I had already been in contact with them a few times, it was like, “We’ll call you when we find it. We can’t find it. Blah, blah blah.” I call them on—I wake up on September 11. I was off that day. And I pick up the phone. I’m going like, let me call TMO, because they haven’t called me back. I pick up the phone and I’m like, “I was calling because you said you’d call me about my shipment,” and I hear people screaming. And the lady on the other line goes, “The towers are falling! [screaming, unclear] The tower’s falling!” And I’m thinking about my TMO shipment. That’s all I’m thinking, you know, like nothing—what’s going on in the outside world, because I had just woken up so I didn’t know anything. She’s like, “The towers are falling! Go and look at the news!” And I’m like, “Well I can’t look at the news, because you have my television!” [laughs] And then finally I get up and I’m like, let me go see what this woman, these people are freaking out about. Turn on the news, and I turn it on just as the second plane hits the building, so I get to see this thing replay over and over again. And I’m like, now I understand why they were freaking out, you know. And then after that just, you know, of course, the whole world changed, at least—particularly for me and military members.

HT:Was there more security involved after September 11?

IR:Well, we started having to put up door guards, checking people’s IDs and stuff like that. I don’t think we had our increased security conditions, call it FPCON or Force Protection Conditions, and so we did have elevated conditions. All the bases overseas, nobody could leave—well, if you lived off base, you could leave the base, but if you lived on base you couldn’t just go off base. Yes, so things got a whole lot tighter. People got really serious. And it was particularly interesting because the Iceland airspace got flooded, so we had all—it’s like we had all these tracks that were going towards the U.S., and then swooping back around and trying to find places to land, because they couldn’t get into American airspace. And so we had people working on that and that lasted for a couple days, because I came back to work and they were still getting aircrafts landing in Iceland and all these other places.

HT:And you worked just with military aircraft, no civilian aircraft?

IR:We had to like ID air—just any aircraft that came through, because when you’re in Iceland, we got—we would get flight plans every day. And, you know pretty, much if an aircraft went too far off a flight plan or they didn’t respond when we spoke to them, then we would send out, you know, they have to scramble. But it was pretty intense sometimes.

HT:And then after all this was over, you finally ended up in Germany sometime later?

IR:Yes.

HT:In 2001?

IR:Yes.

HT:And what was the name of the base where you were stationed there?

IR:Spangdahlem [Air Base]. S-p-a-g—no, S-p-a-n-g-d-a-h-l-e-m. Spangdahlem. Spangdahlem.

HT:And where is that?

IR:Spangdahlem?

HT:Yes.

IR:[laughs] It’s in Spangdahlem, Germany. I know, it’s never [unclear]. It’s in the southwest. It’s very near France.

HT:Okay.

IR:Like Luxembourg is an hour away.

HT:Okay.

IR:Driving really fast. Maybe it’s less—I meant more, going slow—the speed limit.

HT:I’m assuming this is an air force base.

IR:Yes.

HT:And what type of work did you do there?

IR:There is where I was trained to be an electronic protection technician. I worked in the TP—worked—I operated the TPS-75 radar, and I also was—my daily operate—or my additional duties was in the mobility section of operations. So I—pretty much I was in the office that got people packed up and on the road, and took care of our vehicles and stuff like that for operations.

HT:And did you have any memorable events happen until you went—while you were in Germany.

IR:Woo, that whole trip was memorable. [laughter] Well, we left—well, okay, let me think. Well, from Germany I went to Iraq, but that’s, you know, later on in the story. I’ll start—let me—I’m trying to think. The first restaurant I went to—and I think they have restaurants like this here in the States, but they’re hard to find—was a hot stone restaurant where they give you this hot stone, like you can’t touch it because it’s hot enough to cook meat—and that’s what they do. They bring out little bits of raw meat and vegetables and everything and butter. And you have this hot stone, everybody gets a hot stone, and you just pick the meat off and put it on your stone and cook it how you want it.

HT:I’ve never heard of this.

IR:Yes, oh yes. It’s called—this restaurant called Eiffel Park. It’s in Bitburg, Germany, which is down the street from Spangdahlem. It was on the B-50 [Bundesstraße 50] just in case you want to go there to eat. Off of the B-50. Yes. That was that, and then—I’m trying to think what else, what other interesting things that I can tell people about [chuckles] that can become public notice. Well things really didn’t get exciting for me until Iraq and after.

HT:Okay, so you went TDY to Iraq?

IR:Actually, okay, I’ll tell you what happened.

HT:Okay.

IR:It was March 20, 2003, my twenty-fifth birthday. And I got a war for my birthday. That’s what I like to tell people. [laughter] And

at that time, I was in Airman Leadership School [ALS] to become an NCO. Oh yes, this is a fun part of my story. And so my unit, pretty much even before the official announcement, we had started getting some notices that we’re going to be taking some action, so our unit’s preparing and they’ve already been telling us—not telling us where we’ll be going. Turkey had been thrown out there as one of the locations we would have been going. Kuwait. And so we’re just gearing up, and while I’m in tech school, I go to—I go back to base and I—well, not tech school but Airman Leadership School. And I go back to base and I’m walking around one of the stores and I see one of the guys from my unit and I was like, “I hear talk that things are, you know, going down.” And he was like, “Well, I can’t talk, you know, because it’s classified information.” But he was like, “I know where we’re going.” And he was like, “It’s not good.” And I was like, “Oh, crap,” you know. And eventually I found out where we were going, and it was Iraq. And at first, my name wasn’t on the list of names of people that were supposed to be going, so my job at that time was just to make sure everybody’s paperwork was filled out and mobility. After I graduated from ALS I came back to work. And so my job was that and I was like, okay, while the unit’s deployed I’ll just go back to school and maybe travel around Germany when I’m not at work. And then they changed their plan and shortly before we leave they say, “Sergeant Ruffin, you’re going to go to Iraq.” I was like, “Oh.” I didn’t know how to react. It was sort of like, oh, you know. And then—well, actually I wasn’t even Sergeant Ruffin yet, I was still Airman Ruffin at the time. So we planned and helped—I’d do all the helping with packing up all the stuff and getting us going, and we set up a command center where we were like—because when you’re moving over twelve million dollars worth of equipment, over a 135 people, you got a lot of coordinating to do. So—

HT:So that fell—you had to do all that?

IR:Yes, I did that, because like—up until the last minute. I had to tell them, I was like, “Look, I’m deploying, too. I need to go and pack my bags and get my stuff in order.” So like a week before we deployed they finally were like, “Okay, well then you go, because you’ve got to be on the plane.” And so I finally got to do all that. And it wasn’t until the day I landed in Iraq that I put on my staff sergeant stripe, and so it was sort of like all the sudden things changed, because people—everybody in my unit knew I was a newbie, but then I would be walking around our, you know, everyone was like “Oh, yes, Sergeant blah, blah, blah.” Or “what do you think?” And I’m like, “Why are you asking my opinion? I don’t know. [laughs] I’m new at this.” It was a funny experience, because right before we left I had been trained on how to put up what we call Alaska Small Shelters, which are tents but they’re a lot more solidly built than regular tents. So I had to figure out how to—learn how to do that. And so when we got to Iraq I had to teach everybody how to put up the tents. And so I’m just learning how to give orders and do everything, so I’m getting frustrated. I’m hot. I just want people to listen to me and do what I tell them to do. And I don’t know how to do this. And just like people just seem like they’re slow. And I’m like, “Just get the [unclear] and put it on here, put a stake in the ground! Just get it—” [laughs] and, you know. Yes, it was a big learning process for me on how to be a leader and how to get people to do things.

HT:And that was called an Alaskan Small Shelter, is that right?

IR:Yes.

HT:I’ve never heard of that term.

IR:Yes. You’ve probably seen them. Most people have seen them. They’re pretty cool, because they hold air conditioning and heat better than regular tents, regular A-frame tents. It can be more insulated, and so it was nice and cool in those tents. And we actually, when we first arrived in Iraq, we lived in a gym. And it was with a 130—over a 135 of my closest friends and some strangers. We had the army, they were living upstairs and sleeping on the bleachers, and we had the security forces, because it was an old Iraqi abandoned base, so we just took it over. So we were living in there for a while, and we had a few problems with the fact that we had females living in the [gym – corrected by veteran], because some of the army guys when they heard that, they would come and watch us. We’d wake up and they’d be watching us sleep, or the Iraqi workers would be sitting on the bleachers watching us. It’s very strange. And we’d only been in Iraq a short time. And you know, I was like American men already acting crazy, like they’d never seen a woman before. But the Iraqis, I could understand their curiosity; the American men, not so much. I was like, “You see girls all

the time. Why are you acting—?”

HT:But there were women in the American army over there as well.

IR:Yes. And—but they weren’t living with the guys. We were the only ones in the—you know, there’s this thing among the military forces that army girls aren’t the most feminine or cutest girls [chuckling] and in the air force we had the cute girls. It’s just really weird, you know. But we lived with them and then our commander realized it would just be better if we just lived on our sites. So we ended up—we had some extra Alaskan tents, so he put us out there. Because they hadn’t built the living area on the base yet, so pretty much people were sleeping—they were sleeping in anywhere they could. But our unit was lucky because we got funding—a lot of money. We’d do these things—we were living on our site and we were living in these nice cushy tents, as cushy as a tent could possibly be. It was cool when it was hot, and you could, you know, work on the temperature, so that was lovely. And it also stayed dark, which is very important when you’re working a night shift, because you’re sleeping during the day. Well, other units got wind of this, and so when we built out tent city, we had to move out of our nice cushy tents and move in with the other air force people, and those tents were not cushy at all. Because when it was light, the tents were light, so you’re sleeping—and it was hot, so you’re sleeping during the day, and you got light all the sudden coming in, and then you’re hot because it couldn’t keep cool, because it didn’t have that necessary insulation or lining.

HT:So why did you have to move out of the Alaskan Small Shelters?

IR:I don’t know. I—it seemed like I guess our commander thought it was a good idea at the time. [chuckles] It seemed like a good idea to him. And also the fact that we had—they had trailers with working bathrooms, because we didn’t have flushing toilets. We had outhouses. Oh, I’ve got to tell you a funny story about my first day in Iraq. [laughing] Now, I grew up a small country girl, because the house that my mother grew up in Ahoskie didn’t have indoor plumbing. And so I was kind of—I was familiar with it, but it was something that had—was far in my past, where I had to use a chamber pot or just use the bathroom outside. So we get to Iraq, we’re laying and we walk around for a little bit, and everybody’s like, “Well, where do we use the bathroom?” Well, we go to the gym and the army guys are like, “The bathroom’s that way.” And behind the gym there’s a track and to the right of the track is an outdoor toilet. This isn’t your ordinary outdoor toilet; it has no walls. All it is are planks, wooden planks set up with toilet seats that I went and brought with us from Germany because our people—we had people, our advance party call back to us and say, “Bring toilet seat covers. Tell—actual toilet seats.” And we go look out there and we’re like, “I don’t—I don’t see anything.” He’s like, “You see those wooden—that wooden box out there? That’s your toilet.”

HT:Latrines then, right, basically?

IR:Yes, it’s—no, it was a hole—wood over a hole in the ground. A trench was built with wooden—and so I—it was broad daylight, and I had to go really bad because I had just been on a flight, a four or five hour flight from Germany. And I had eaten before we got on this flight. So I said I had to go. I couldn’t do it. So one of my friends, because we had the buddy system, so she was like, “I’ll go with you.” So we go and I’m sitting out there and I was like, “Okay, is anybody looking?” And she’s like, “No, nobody’s looking.” And then she’s like, “Wait a minute. Well, there’s a guy over there in the building with binoculars.” [chuckles] So and then at that same time, people decided they needed to run on the track and then there was one toilet here and there was another on the other side of the field. A guy decided he needed to go use [unclear] on the toilet. Then people started coming out talking to him while he’s sitting on the toilet, okay. Turn facing look at—his back is to me, but the people who are talking to him are like looking in my friend’s direction. Because my friend, she’s like looking. She’s like, “These people—why are everybody? You know, they’re looking!” And so I was like, “Well look, I got to go.” Finally, you know, I don’t care, and I’m not going to get sick out here because I can’t go to the bathroom. Because people did end up getting sick because they couldn’t do it, or they would go use the bathroom at night. But, yes,

that was my very first fun experience. And then we ended up making friends with some of the guys in the comm squadron [communications squadron], and the comm squadron actually built an outhouse which had walls and it was like the kerosene toilet. Instead of a hole it had kerosene buckets underneath, and so people were assigned to be shit stirrers. And that was actually ended up being a punishment for some guys in my unit, because they blew up an MRE [meal, ready to eat]. And it’s like, you don’t fake explosions in a war zone. You just don’t do that. And so their punishment, up until the time they left, was to be shit stirrers. They got to be assigned that duty. But the comm people were very protective of their toilet, because they’re like, “Look, I’m not stirring—I’m not going to stir other people’s shit who don’t stir.” That was a controversy, okay. The toilets were very serious. But later we had friends in the comm squadron who were like, “You can use the toilet if you don’t get me in any trouble telling them I said you could use it.” [laughs]

HT:So how long did you have to use this system?

IR:Well our unit, we ended up digging a trench on our site and we built outhouses, so we still—you still had to poop in a hole, but at least you had a house. That was—but it was so funny because every one of those things that—when you went to the bathroom, you didn’t want other people—because they built two side by side, right. They had doors. So you’d go in there and people—one of my airmen was like, “Hey, Sergeant Ruffin, is that you?” “Well, yes.” [laughs]

HT:So they didn’t have separate facilities for men and women, I guess.

IR:No, no. And I was like, “Yes?” And he’s like, “I’m uncomfortable. I need to talk to you.” I was like, “Well, I’m uncomfortable talking to you.” I said, “Most of the time we always pretend like there’s nobody on the other side.” [chuckles] He’s like, “But I don’t like this, because I saw you go in here and I know you’re in here. So it kind of—.” I’m like, “But you could have just pretended that you did not see me go in here.” But you’d always know somebody was going in the toilet anyway, because you had to carry your own toilet tissue with you.

HT:You’re kidding.

IR:Yes! And I had just brought some baby wipes that I had written my name on. “Sergeant Ruffin’s baby wipes.”[laughs] And I had my toilet tissue in my side, my cargo pocket on the side. So when you went to the toilet, people knew.

HT:It’s a completely different experience out there I bet.

IR:Yes. But oh, but going back to why we had the toilet. Those conditions was one of the reasons why we moved into tent city. Because once other air force people came, they brought trailers that were like bathrooms, mobile bathrooms with running water and everything. So you got to imagine that we were just like [gasps].

HT:So what did you guys do for showering and that—everything?

IR:Every four—two or three days in water bottles. We would leave water bottles out. Like the ingenuity of the human mind just, just—

HT:So you left the water bottles out to heat up?

IR:Yes, and like we really weren’t supposed to, because water was something that was precious. So we would kind of like—the women, because women had—you know, you can’t go unclean for too long. It’s not—you know, men, y’all can kind of play around with it a little bit, but for women that’s not good for anybody. [chuckles] And so we had intermittent—when we were living—okay, first, when we were living in the gym, we had intermittent water supply. So some days the water would work and you could—they had showers in there, but they were real nasty and grody, so you’d be like [bangs the wall]. And we’d take combat showers, so you’d turn the water on, you wash, you turn the water off, you scrub down, and then you rinse off and get out. But of course it was cold. Then we found this place that was a former bakery on the base, and they had—I don’t know why they had showers in there, but it was like really open bay showers, so we would go every couple of days there. Because water was very scarce, so you could only do it every few days. But baby wipes—we used baby wipes. Then a guard unit came that did our job. They were like augmenting us, my unit. So they brought a shower tent with them, so we could—you had scheduled days when you could take showers. And that was awesome, like, you know, to be able to take a shower, but you had to take combat showers again or share water with other people. [chuckles] Like sometimes stuff would drop on the floor and I’d say—I’d be like, I will just have to buy some more, or I got another bar of soap back at the tent. I would just not touch it. And then when the other air force people, like the services units and stuff came, they brought the tents with us, and—I mean not tents, but

trailers, bathroom trailers—and so that was great. And then, yes, so near the end of my tour there, that’s what we had were the trailers where you could take showers and there were flushing toilets, and that was like an exciting thing.

HT:Now you were there for about four months, I think you said.

IR:Yes.

HT:Can you imagine having to live under those conditions for a year?

IR:No, like I—to me if anybody talks bad about those army guys, I tell them to shut up because you have no idea. Like even in the short time we were there, these guys were losing their families. They were losing their friends. And still they tried to hold on to like some semblance of humanity. You know, they tried their best. They try their best every day. And it was just like a part of me really hurt. Even though I was leaving, I felt bad because I knew those people wouldn’t be coming home for a while. Some of them didn’t even come back home.

HT:That’s right. And many of the men have been deployed more than once.

IR:Yes, and a few of the guys were like they had done Desert Storm, you know. [chuckles] And so yes, that was definitely—that really changed, to me, my understanding of war. Because when you don’t know the people, it’s easy to just not care, to bicker back and forth in Congress over money, because it’s not personal. To get caught up in little stupid issues. But when you know these people, you’re like look, just do whatever you can to give them all they need. Because when we first arrived there, my unit because, I don’t know, some fluke we had all of this money, and we were able to get true bullet proof vests, okay. There’s a difference between a bullet proof vest and some of the things that the army guys were wearing. Like I had an inch thick plate in the front and the back of my vest, which, I mean, added like ten pounds. And some of the army guys are like, “How did you get that?” And I was like, “My unit, our supply people were able—we had the money, so they were able to get it for us.” And some of them still didn’t have vests when they were first there in Iraq. And it’s just—I don’t know.

HT:Did you ever feel like you were in any kind of danger?

IR:I mean—

HT:While you were in Iraq?

IR:I mean I felt as safe as a person could feel safe in a warzone. I mean, we had air force security forces. We had the army. So, you know, I could go to sleep at night. We had bombs going off; some of them were planned, some of them not so much. One of me and my friends, which is a funny story at the time, were going to the pool on the base. Like the pool hadn’t been cleaned out but they still had a water spigot.

HT:A swimming pool?

IR:Yes, where you could do laundry. And they also had built an outside shower over there. It was amazing some of the things we did. And, but so we went over there to do laundry and I was just sitting over there with her and I was reading a book and I hear [mimics gunfire]. And both of us kind of like look at each other like this. You know like, “Okay, you didn’t hear that. Did you hear that?” We’re like, “Yes.” Well, there’s like a little pool house and there’s some Arabic interpreters from Turkey. They’re over there and they were chilling, and they ran over into the pool house. And we were like, okay, where’s the fire coming from so we don’t run in the general direction of it. And we see—we see like security forces behind the building going [mimics gunfire] shooting back at these guys. And so we run into the pool—the Turkish interpreters are like, “Come over here! Come over here!” And so we’re running across to get in there and all of us—like, ever see the Beatles, they do the thing where all of their heads are sticking from behind the telephone pole? Well we were all doing that. We’re all looking out the [doorway – corrected by veteran], so it’s sort of like going up. We’re all [sighs]. [laughs] And eventually the gunfire goes down and we go back to the place we were staying at and we walk into—walk up to the door, and one of the people who was a member of my unit, he’s standing in the door and he’s like in full battle dress. He’s got his sidearm on. He’s got his M-16. He’s ready to get into the gunfight. And we’re like, “Holdup, cowboy. The battle’s already over.” [chuckles] “What are you doing?” You know. At the time it was completely hilarious, but then after years of thought, I was like, “What the hell. How did I think that was funny?” I always tried to tell it to my family like it was funny, and when I started to see other people’s reactions I was like, “Well, maybe it’s not

as hilarious as I thought it was at the time.” But all I remember is just like laughing. Like you’re in danger, but the human mind learns how to cope so well that you don’t always process the danger. Because it was like even—I felt like I wasn’t really there. You know, I always felt like I was a character in some little thing, like I was watching myself. I had an out of body experience. And then, of course, we had bombs going off occasionally. And it’s funny because sometimes we wouldn’t even know that the difference between the planned explosions that the ordinance guys would blow up the bombs, the ammunition they would find, or whether it was an explosion with an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] or somebody trying to blow us up until the next day. And one morning we got up and they were like, “Oh, yes, by the way, last night they tried to target the radar”—where I worked, but they missed. They missed our site by a couple miles. And it’s just interesting. But I think maybe at that point they had started making it—minimizing the time that the EPTs, or electronic protection technicians, spent in the radar van because there was sort of like—that was one of—it’s the highest place on base, you know. And then it’s real easy to target.

HT:And EPT stands for electronic—

IR:Protection technician.

HT:So I guess by the time you left after four months, you were glad to get out of there?

IR:Yes. Yes, I was a little giddy. But it was weird because I was the last name they called to get on that plane. And then because—

HT:To leave?

IR:Yes, because transportation to get in and out and it was hard to get. And so my friends, other people in my unit, I think about twenty of us—twenty—twelve—I don’t remember. It was like a few of us that actually got to leave on that one plane when they finally said that our part of the mission was done. And like everybody else had to stay there for another month before they could get transportation out.

HT:Now, this was in 2001 that you went over there?

IR:2003.

HT:Oh, 2003. TDY.

IR:2001 was when Afghanistan started.

HT:So once you got back to Germany, what did you do at that point?

IR:Stay away from people, from all human—I didn’t want any human contact. I wanted to—I didn’t want people to be near me. I stayed in my apartment and ate.

HT:This is a typical reaction for people who have been over—

IR:I think so.

HT:—TDY.

IR:Particularly in that—not like, not a regular TDY. This was something where I had been around people 24/7. If you got privacy, that was a very rare thing, because you always had to be around somebody, could never be alone. And so, yes, for two weeks I didn’t answer my phone. People come to my house; I’d stick my head out the door like this and be like, “Yes, what you want? I’m sorry, I’m busy right now. Bye.” [chuckles]

HT:So were you off duty at that time? There typically two—

IR:Yes, they give you two weeks.

HT:Oh, two weeks. Okay, okay, yes. Sort of makes sense—

IR:Yes.

HT:—to re-acclimate yourself to humanity.

IR:Yes. But it was so weird because my first day there I had—the way my apartment in Germany was set up was that I had this big huge picture window in the front of my house, so I could see everything on the front of the street. And the thing that greets me my first five minutes back in my home was cows’ behinds. They were herding, because it’s a very agricultural town, a farming town, so often you would see like goats and little sheep herds and stuff, people doing that. But all I saw was—like I had my back turned, I don’t know what I was doing, and then I turn around and all I see is like this herd of cows going up this side street in front of me, and I was like, “Only in Germany.” Oh, I was like, “I’m back home now.” [laughs] And it was kind of funny, and I took a picture of it, too. I was like, “My first sight back home.” [chuckles]

HT:Oh, gosh.

IR:And yes, that was—

HT:Did you guys have to undergo any kind of debriefing when you got back or mental health screens or that sort of thing?

IR:Yes, we had to go through a process where they took like samples of our blood and just let us know that if you feel any blah, blah, blah, call mental health and stuff like that. It really wasn’t too much. We got a debriefing before we actually left Iraq from the base

commander and he was like, “When you go back home, remember that you can’t talk to your family the way you talk here.” I guess because you start cursing a lot, which you did, because you, you know, start f-ing this and a-hole that and every other word is some swear word and, “Get the f- down, the cable down!” And you know, it just yelling—yelling at each other, and you, you tend to be a little bit—courtesy tends to go a lot out of the window in these things. You know nobody’s mad at you when you do it. It’s like, whatever, you know. And he—that was our debriefing and just about how our family and friends—things would be different for us and just not to react, and that our family and friends were able to live life without us and so things may have changed, and you got to do the adjustment period, find out about how you fit back in to that equation. Yes, I think that was the most of the briefing. We were just cracking up because we started—we were like, “Passing the f-ing peas, Mom.” [laughter] And just say it like, put curse words in there and working it into our conversations just because he said that.

HT:So Germany was not your last duty station was it?

IR:No. Shaw Air Force Base.

HT:So you came back to the States after being in Germany for about a year or something?

IR:Two years.

HT:You were in Germany for two years, okay.

IR:Yes. Because that’s what I said earlier was that the fun didn’t really started until after Iraq. Because I don’t know what it was, we just went crazy; particularly once all of my other people came back from Iraq—came back. We just went crazy. We just were like— it was like always partying. You just lived life. One of the most important things—like the thing I got about war, and to I guess best help civilians and people who have never been to war understand, is that war is life distilled. It’s like it’s down to the bare necessities of life. Your main concerns are surviving, nothing else; just having the basics of life and making it to the next day. And so you go from that environment to return home where people’s concerns are, “Well, Becky said she didn’t like me.” And you’re thinking to yourself, “Well, freaking leave Becky alone and move on! Why are you upset?” You don’t understand, you know. It’s sort of like you can’t understand why people react they way they do to stuff because you’re like, “That’s your major concern? That’s what you’re so upset about?” And a few times even now like I know I make people mad because I’ll start laughing about stuff that they’re like deeply disturbed. I’m like, oh my god. [laughs] This—it’s like, it is so wonderful that you can still be concerned about those things, that that’s the worst thing you can think of right now.

HT:So after you came back you never reverted to that former sort of carefree type?

IR:Yes. It’s been very hard, like sometimes I will catch myself reverting back and I’ll feel weird because I do. Or when I find myself complaining about certain things, I go, you know what? It’s a lot worse out there for some other people. Let me shut up and just be grateful that I have this to be complaining about. You appreciate life so much more. And I don’t know, it’s just weird because your mind is completely different. I remember when I first got back, I came back to work and one of my troops was moving off base and she needed to find some boxes. Well, the big thing in Iraq was MRE boxes, those are some very good, sturdy boxes, and they’re great for construction if you need a bookshelf or a place to store your food or clothing, and that’s what we used them for. People would be like, “Ooh, give me that MRE box,” after we had distributed the MREs for meals. And when I came back to Germany, one of my troops was moving and I remember seeing a box in like a McDonalds or something and thinking to myself, “Ooh, that was a good box. I need that box.” And then I was like, “But why do I need that box?” [laughter] Because I was home, I didn’t need a box for anything. And it was just so weird, this coming back and your mind. And my first shower back at home, and I was so excited getting in the shower, and I remember wetting myself down and turning the water off.

HT:Oh.

IR:And I was like, but I don’t have to do that anymore. Because it was such an automatic reaction that I had gotten used to; everyday for four months that’s what I had done.

HT:So how long do you think it

took you to get back to sort of a more normal state of mind?

IR:A very long time.

HT:Really?

IR:I’m still probably not in a normal state of mind. [laughter] Oh. Because, I don’t know—yes, it’s changed me for the rest of my life. And so I really—this is normal for me now. And like I really didn’t realize how I was affected until after I had gotten out of the military. It didn’t hit me like—because I had been diagnosed with PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder], but not like a real severe case or anything. But I didn’t realize how things had affected me until I returned to school and I could never feel comfortable. Like I had roommates my first year back, and they made me feel so uncomfortable living with them, because they didn’t seem to care about their own personal security. And I had been so used to always—you always have to be alert to everything. And then when I went in and talked to the doctor about it, I realized that even before then I’d been kind of weird, because I remember I was in South Carolina, it was actually after I had left Germany, and I was driving down to work one day and there was this like cord in the middle of the street, and all I could think to myself was, “I don’t want to drive over that cord. I don’t want to drive over that cord.” And I could just—couldn’t—this was like, you know—and I drove over it and I don’t know, on the way to work that was how I was feeling. And even now I’ve seen these cords. I don’t know what it is. I’m sure it’s something for the department of transportation. And in my mind I’m thinking, “Why would you put something like that in the street? Why would you do that to people?”

HT:Thinking that it might be a bomb or something.

IR:Yes. And I’m like, oh my god. I was like, does no one else think this is strange that this thing is in the middle of the street? And like, you know, I don’t necessarily get in a panic, but still something clicks in my mind that goes, “This is not right.” And always having to be aware of what’s going on because you know—I just the—I guess the breaking point of realizing that I might have had a problem was I was walking down the street back to my home here in Greensboro, and this man walks up behind me and like I had been so used to always looking over my shoulder to make sure nobody would walk up behind me, nobody could surprise me, and it scared the crap out of me. He was just walking. He was minding his own business. And he was just like, “Oh, I’m sorry.” Because I was like [gasps] like that. And I was like, “Oh, maybe I have a problem. I don’t think other people react that way when people walk up behind them.”

HT:Gosh, yes. Now you think that was typical reaction of people—

IR:I’m sure not always, you know, I think everybody like—you get kind of—because the period after you came back from war, all of us went just— [recording paused]

HT:Okay.

IR:Well, I guess I was at the part where I spent a lot of my time drunk, my weekends off drunk in Germany after I came back from Iraq. And I don’t know, like—for when I—maybe I was starting to have a reaction then and I didn’t realize it, because I didn’t feel like being—dealing with people. Like things people would say would just be so unentertaining and just so—it seemed so trivial. And for a while I was like, “Well, I was only there was four months. How could—I don’t even feel a right to feel weird,” you know.

HT:Right.

IR:Like, I’m like I shouldn’t feel anything. It was such a short time. It wasn’t like I was out there driving on the convoys or doing these things. But, you know, and I do trump it up to that I’m a fairly sensitive person, you know. And then once I start reflecting back on it, like when it was happening, it didn’t seem like that big of a deal. Then after reflecting on it, I was like, there were so many times where my life was at risk but when I was in that moment I didn’t allow myself to feel that way. I always felt secure when I was in Iraq. It wasn’t until I left that I started feeling insecure. And then I realized that—I guess my thing is in a warzone you know what to expect. There’s a certainty of danger, so you get used to the idea that, hey, something might happen, so your mindset gets on that. But then when you come into civilian life, particularly in western culture, in American society, where you don’t ever have to think about the idea that somebody’s going to blow up something. Yes, we have our freak incidents of violence, but people don’t live with that threat on a daily basis. And then when you come back, and all sometimes I can think is any minute now this

peace that we hold so dear could be [claps] gone just like that. And you know for me, it’s the fact that there’s fighting men and women who are in these other countries keeping those people away from here and that America acts in such a way that, you know, I don’t think most Americans understand that that their liberty—you know, yes, you might not agree with the president. You might not agree with the reasons we went in there, but because people are over there, war is not here. And I think that’s something that sort of haunts me on a regular basis, is that this thing that we—is so—that other people don’t realize how precious it is. And you know, yes.

HT:Interesting, yes. Well do you recall, on a lighter note, any embarrassing moments other than the toilet business?

IR:Oh, I got in trouble for—I’m going to tell you what I got in trouble for. This is one of those incidents where being a female was something that worked against me. Okay, it was a 120 degrees in Iraq on a hot summer’s day—on a cool summer’s day, okay. It was hot. It was beyond hot. It was unbelievable. It’s just—we’ve even wrote a blues song one night, me and the guys. Some of the guys had a guitar. And we were like, “It’s so hot.” I was the vocalist. It was great. [laughs] And we were just talking about how hot it was, and stuff like that. “It’s hot as hell.” Just think of different ways to describe the hotness. Well, when we were first there and we were living with the army guys, I am a small-chested woman. And so sometimes, in order to feel comfortable in hot environs, I would not wear a bra. Because I’m like, well shoot, they’re not going anywhere. And I didn’t think it would be offensive to other people that I didn’t wear a bra. I was like, well, everybody has got bigger concerns than what’s going on with my chest. That was my logic at the time. Well, one day one of the sergeants from the army guys, the army unit—I think it was the 720th or the 7—something, the airborne guys—101st airborne, came up to me and says, “You know you’re wrong, right?” And I was like, “What are you talking about?” You know, because I was sitting outside by myself reading a book. And he was like, “You know you’re wrong.” He’s like, “Because you—.” He wouldn’t even tell me what he—what I was wrong about. Then later one of the senior women comes up to me and they were like—well, no, actually I was talking to her about it. I was like, “I don’t know what he—.” She was like, “Well, some people have a problem because you don’t wear a bra.” Now, I was not the worst dressed female there. There were girls walking around there with booty shorts on and why you would pack booty shorts, really short shorts—

HT:Right, cut-offs.

IR:Yes, in Iraq. Why would you even pack that? Because I didn’t even pack civilian clothes. Why would you do that? Just went out of my mind. Nobody talked to them, but they talked to me, because I didn’t wear a bra. And I was upset about it because I was like, hold up, there’s men walking around here with their hairy chests, fat hanging all out, walking around here sunning. Nobody says anything to them, but you’re going to come to me and say something to me. I was like, breasts, all they are are really meant for food for babies. So if you’re thinking of them as anything else than that, maybe you should change your mind. At least, that was my logic. It was sort of like I could see his side, but just because they picked me, I was like—but why don’t you make it—why single out one person. Make a rule for everybody. Don’t sit here and—you know, I don’t know what it is about my breasts that everybody was obsessed with. [laughter] But eventually they made a base-wide rule because I’m sure they had other problems like, you know, because females were in the warzone and that could—I can understand how it could be a distraction. But all somebody had to do was come to me and say it and then make an announcement for everybody. Not just make it about me and what I was doing, because I wasn’t the only person doing it. And the fact—you know, in the military, men and women are serving together. I’m like, how about you tell that muscle-bound man who I look at everyday thinking to myself, “Wow, he’s great,” tell him to put his shirt on because that’s distracting me from my job. But eventually, once a lot more people started coming to the base, they did change the rule. Now I can laugh about it, but I was deadly serious about that. I was very angry that people were obsessed with that.

HT:Oh, gosh. [laughter]

IR:Oh, yes, and I have another one too. We went out into town.

HT:Oh, you were allowed to go off base.

IR:Well, not everybody

was.

HT:I was going to ask you—my next question was how did you spend your spare time?

IR:I went out one time and to Kirkuk Air Base—no, into the town of Kirkuk.

HT:Okay.

IR:Because they were having an exhibition soccer game. And I think there might have been only three females in our group. It was a small group because it was the soccer team that the armed forces had put together and then a few people just kind of like serving as a cheering section. Well, we go off the base and we finally get to the stadium, because it was gridlocked; the traffic was horrible. And then on top of the fact is that we had two tanks—a tank in front of us and a tank behind us. We had our own escort.

HT:So what kind of vehicle were you in?

IR:A bus.

HT:Oh, just a regular—

IR:That they bought off a town. Bought from somebody in town that had a bus. It was funny because it was like pink and it had—the windows had been shot out. [laughs] So we’re on this bus and we’re going into town. And I thought it was so cool. And so some Iraqi officials came in and they were trying to give us our own section so that way people wouldn’t come too close to us, because I had my weapon. I had my flak vest—this was before I got a bullet proof vest. So we had all this stuff; we had our guns and weapons and everything. And so we were just sitting there. They were trying to make it so that we would be by ourselves, okay. But soon as the crowd comes in, they start pressing on us trying to get as close to us as possible. So the guy, he was like beating them and telling them to stay away from us and like yelling at them in Arabic and whatever and, you know, like, “Stay away from us.” Eventually the game starts and he can’t control them. So they come in, you know, and a father sits down in front of me and he has his little girl with him. And he turns around and he says, “Talk to her. She speaks English. Talk to her.” And I’m like, “Well, what am I going to say?” He’s like, “Just speak to her.” And so I sat there and I tried to talk to her, and she was just sitting with me and she was so afraid. But I didn’t think anything about it, is that I had my M-16 like right between my legs. And then one of my friends sat down. He was like, “Well, let me take your weapon because they might be frightened.” You know, you’re sitting there. So I had to make myself a little bit more friendly, appealing to the child. And so that father and daughter left, and then another father and daughter came and sat down right in front of us again, and he says the same thing, “Talk to my daughter.” And I’m like, “Okay.” So I talk to her, blah, blah, blah, and everything. And soon, people started wanting to take pictures with me. And so we’re sitting there with my friends and like this guy—you know how at Disney World they have people walking around with a camera and they give you a ticket and everything. There was a guy like that at the soccer game. And so these groups of Iraqi men would be like pulling on me so that I could take a picture with them. And so my friends are getting very uncomfortable about this.

HT:Were you the only female at this—

IR:No.

HT:Oh, okay.

IR:It was me, another girl—but this girl, she was sort of like—she might have been Hispanic, so she looked more Arabic than anything—and then there was a blonde haired, blue eyed girl. And for whatever reason, the crowds were around me and the blonde haired, blue eyed girl. And so the Iraqis would be like—it was near the end of the game so we’re trying to leave and get back to our bus, so it’s a very uncomfortable situation, you know. But they kept pulling on me, and they’re like, “One more! One more!” And then my friends are like, “No, she’s got to go now!” You know, and all this getting kind of aggressive. And so they’re taking pictures of me. There’s like—I’m sure I’m in somebody’s photo album. [laughs] A small town Kirkuk family, “Look at her.” They don’t even know who I am. And so we finally get back to the bus, and we’re sitting there a while because we got to wait because like our soccer team is doing—you know, they’re doing their photo opps [opportunities] and dealing with the officials and stuff like that. So we’re sitting there and the tank guys, they’re doing security. Well, a crowd starts forming up near the window, because I’m sitting at the back of the bus with one of my friends near a window. And a crowd of men are like in this back of the bus, tying to jump on the bus, talking to me. And like calling me, “Bring your friends back,” so they can look at me. And they’re going, “I love American women. I love you,” and all this stuff. “I want to go back to America with you.” And it’s like this whole crowd. And I’m like, “Is this how J-Lo [Jennifer Lopez] feels?” and then we start laughing and everything. Because they’re like, “You’re a little mini celeb[rity] aren’t you?” And then like the tank guys are coming up trying to do security to keep them from jumping up on the bus. Now a few of those [Iraqi] guys, I see things in their eyes that aren’t the friendliest.

It’s like a few of them are teenage boys and you know, if there’s a woman in the vicinity, a teenage boy, I don’t care what country you come from, is going to look. But you could see kind of like in some of those people’s eyes, they weren’t the most loving individuals. [chuckles] But the security guy, he was like, “Get away from the bus. Get away from the bus.” And then they’re yelling back to me, “Why is he so mean? Why is he so mean?”And I was like, “Because he doesn’t know if you want to kill us!”And then you know, they’re totally like—I’m like, “You better not jump on that bus.” And they’re like trying to jump on the bus and the window and everything. And I’m like, “You better not jump on that window because I’d hate to see what he’d do to you.” [chuckles] And then eventually we finally go back to the base and everything and we have a good laugh about it. Everybody’s like, “I couldn’t have done it,” and blah, blah, blah. And, of course, again, another one of the things, the crazy things I’ve done in my life, where I was like, maybe I shouldn’t have done that.

HT:Well, did you feel like you were in any kind of danger at that point?

IR:At that point, no.

HT:Kirkuk—Kirkuk, I think, was fairly sort of a fairly—it wasn’t—

IR:Peaceful, yes.

HT:Peaceful area, yes.

IR:Fairly peaceful. It still had—the violence wasn’t really against the forces, it was really mainly like sectarian violence and violence against the Turks and the Kurds and the Arabs. Because you know, I learned—when I went to town, I learned the difference. Because actually, when we first got there, there was these little boys that were surrounding us. And I was like, “So—so you’re—” said something about Iraqis. He’s like, “I’m not Iraqi. I’m a Kurd.” And he’s like, “Oh, and my friend, he’s a Turkmen,” and like explain all these things that like all these different ethnic groups. To everybody else who’s not familiar with that area, they all look alike, you know, like as far as ethnicity. But they know the difference. And that was mainly all of the violence, and our guys would get in between it and try to stop them. And few of the times they would attack the safe houses that we had in town because we would—some of the army guys actually lived off base inside of the city. And so a few times they did get attacked, but the bulk of the violence was just the people that lived there.

HT:Anymore interesting things happen while you were in Iraq?

IR:[pause]

HT:Or when you got back to Germany? Before you got back to Shaw.

IR:Before—Germany. Germany was just fun. Just I went travelling a lot, went to Paris. A couple—went to Paris twice, went to England again. I went to my first rock concert in England. I saw the group—what is it called—Dashboard Confessional. Me and my friends went there and we were standing in line and there’s this pop singer named Craig David, and I was being funny because it was like all these punk rock kids are standing in line, and I looked at my friend and I was like, “You mean to tell me this ain’t a Craig David concert?” And they start cracking up. And then the punk rock kids are kind of like looking like this at me. [chuckles] It was just completely hilarious. It was one of those you had to be there things. [laughter] And so that was fun. Then another—of course I’ve been addicted since then. We went to this other rock concert called Rock am Ring. It’s hosted by MTV Europe where they had over a hundred bands, and they had a lot of major bands and I got to see those people.

HT:What was the name of that group again?

IR:Dashboard Confessional.

HT:Yes, Confessional, right. Okay. And it’s sponsored by MTV.

IR:No, that was in England. And then the next one, which was Rock am Ring—

HT:Rock am?

IR:R-o-c-k dash a-m dash ring. And it was at Nürnburgring [Nurnberg, Germany]. Couldn’t tell you how to spell it, but it was like a racetrack.

HT:Okay.

IR:And they had all these different stages set up. They had the showcase stage which was where all the major acts were up there, like Ramstein, Evanescence, Avril Lavigne, Linkin Park, Red Hot Chili Peppers. It was great because I saw those big acts. And then they had smaller stages where I got to see the Black Eyed Peas and N.E.R.D. [laughs] And you know, it was just fun. It was a wonderful experience, because me and the guy I went with, one of my friends from work, we came and we couldn’t find our friends, so we went over to one of the bars and we’re getting ourselves some drink. And there was this German guy who could barely speak English, but he kept buying us alcohol, and so my friend was like, “If he’s buying it, let’s just stay here until he can’t buy anymore.” And so we would keep doing this thing where we’d go, “Prost,” which is like the cheer, you know.

HT:Prost.

IR:Prost. And, you know, we’d down it. And he’s like, “He keeps buying it. We can’t leave until he stops.” [chuckles] And so pretty much that was that fun experience. Couldn’t speak—he could curse in English, but he couldn’t speak English.

HT:Did you learn to speak German while you were there?

IR:I learned a few words, you know. Of course, “Prost,” got to know how to say that. “Ein Bier bitte” [one beer please]. Ein Erdbeereis, because I love strawberry ice cream so I had to be able to say “One strawberry ice cream, please.” Entschuldigen bitte,” which is “Check, please,” I think [sic—excuse me, please]. And what else? Yes, I had a pretty cool German accent. The Germans loved me, particularly because my name was Ingrid and they were just like, you know, what is it? Sprechen Sie deutsch?” I’m like, “No.” “Nein.”

HT:Oh, gosh. So you’re back in the States by now, so what—did anything unusual happen? I guess Shaw was your last duty station before—

IR:I actually stayed—I don’t believe I even stayed there for a full year.

HT:Did you request to go back to Shaw?

IR:Yes.

HT:Oh, you did, okay.

IR:Yes, so I could get closer to North Carolina.

HT:North Carolina, yes. It makes perfect sense.

IR:When I got out. No, it was pretty much the regular American experience, just missing Germany.

HT:Really?

IR:Yes, because I was like, it’s just a different lifestyle. I was so used to the culture and being able to walk and go to the shopping malls and stuff like that.

HT:And did you ever think of making the air force a career?

IR:I had thought about it, but because I was really—I knew that if I stayed in the particular career field they gave me, I would’ve been unhappy. And so I, you know, I just had to do what was best. And I needed to finish my college education, so I was like let me do that.

HT:And so I guess you used the GI Bill.

IR:Yes.

HT:Which is great.

IR:Oh, yes, love the GI Bill.

HT:Let’s see. Well, can you describe your adjustment to civilian life?

IR:It’s been rough.

HT:Because it’s been—you’ve been out two years now.

IR:Yes. Just getting used to, kind of sometimes, the laissez-faire mentality. I was so used to—people would say I was impatient, but it’s not impatient in the military. If you tell somebody you need something done, they’ll go, “Okay, I’ll do it now.” It was always, “I’ll get it done now,” you know. And it was kind of hard to that kind of people, “Okay, I’ll blah, blah, blah.” And it just seemed to me there was no sense—there is no sense of urgency in the civilian world. Sort of like, “Oh, whatever.” And then people, of course, would make sometimes—particularly in class, being a college student, people would make disparaging comments about Iraq or the president or soldiers, and that was just —

HT:Did you have a hard time with that?

IR:A few times. [laughter] I lost my cool in one class because this guy, everything he said was negative and it wasn’t based on fact. And I was like, “When was the last time you’ve been to Iraq? Okay, shut up then because you don’t know what you’re talking about.” And I was like, “Okay, and so you’ve served in the armed forces and you know?” Because he was basically trying to say that all the people who were in the army were dumb, had low IQs and stuff. And I was like, “Yes, they might have a few people, but for the most part the people who join the military are really some of the most intelligent people in our country. And then for you to say that and to insult these people, that you don’t even know, because you don’t have any friends or family that are in the military, it’s, you know, very ignorant of you. You’re not making informed statements. You statements are just based on regurgitated something you heard on CNN or something.”

HT:And what was his reaction to that?

IR:Eventually he shut up. He never spoke in class again after that. [laughter]

HT:Did anybody else say anything?

IR:Other people, you know—like I’m willing to let other people say whatever they want to say. And for the most part, if people say something, they’re basing it on information that they’re heard and what not. And if it’s a rational person whose not just bullying, attacking the people, then I’ll pretty much, I’ll just let them talk or whatever. And now I’ve even gotten to the point where some of the other students don’t even know that I’ve been in the military and they’ll be saying stuff and I’ll be like, “Oh, is that true?” And they’ll being saying stuff is fact, like they’ve lived this, and I’m like, “That—is that true?” And they’re like, “Yes, because—.” You know, there’s one guy, he had went to the naval academy, but he dropped out because he realized he wasn’t meant for the military and he was just talking about all this stuff and I was like, “Oh, is that true?” That’s usually my response. And I just laugh. And usually sometimes it will come up in a later discussion that I was in the military and I’ll see the recognition in their eyes that—it’s sort of like, hmm, you got to be careful about what you say. You don’t know who the expert is in whatever.

HT:Well, how did you find UNCG different from the time you were here before you went into the military?

IR:It’s really not any different. I’m different.

HT:You’re different.

IR:Yes. It’s still

the same old school, still the same old protesting about some of the silliest stuff. [chuckling]

HT:So do you think you’ve become more mature?

IR:Oh, definitely. Thank God for the United States Air Force. That’s all I got to say for everybody. I don’t think I would have made it this far if it hadn’t been for good old Uncle Sam.

HT:And so what’s next for you, Ingrid?

IR:What’s next for me?

HT:I know you’re graduating in—on Friday.

IR:May. Yes, that’s right, May 11, 2007. Well, I’m applying for graduate school. I have to turn in my writing samples and my personal statement.

HT:Here?

IR:Yes, here. I like UNCG, I really do. [chuckles] And so I’m going to finish my master’s, go on to my PhD, and hopefully become a university professor.

HT:Oh, wonderful.

IR:So I can mold these fragile young minds.

HT:And what would you like to teach?

IR:English. American—specialized in American literature.

HT:And what happened to the art?

IR:Art, I realized that I didn’t love it as much as I thought I did. I still do it as a hobby, like every couple of months I’ll pull out my canvases or my drawing paper and pencils and I’ll do something. But mainly now it’s something I do as a stress reliever and just entertainment for myself. You know, I really don’t do it for anything else.

HT:Well, Ingrid, I don’t have any more questions for you. Is there anything you’d like to add to your interview that we haven’t covered, because we’ve covered so much?

IR:Yes, I know I’ve jumped around in my narrative.

HT:That’s all right.

IR:Which is something as an English major I should—

HT:But that’s the way life is.

IR:Yes. No, I really enjoyed my time in the military service. I’m actually going, joining the reserves this summer.

HT:Are you?

IR:Yes. I love it so much I just couldn’t—I don’t feel right not being able to wear my uniform and I feel I need to do it. It makes me feel okay. I love to put on my uniform. That was like the highlight sometimes of being in the military. Some days when I couldn’t—didn’t want to go to work, just putting on that uniform, strapping on my boots and just feeling like I could take on the world, it was great.

HT:Well, Ingrid, thank you so much. It had been wonderful listening to your stories. It’s been quite an experience for you. Thanks so much.

IR:[chuckles] All right, thank you. [End of Interview]