Doug Graham Interview, History 150 Spring 2016, Conducted by Stowe Graham, Military Interview, March 13, 2016

A.       This interview was conducted in person in the quiet living room of his home using an IPhone voice memos app. No editing was needed other than changing the format of the audio file.

 

B.        Douglas Graham was born in the late 50’s in Pennsylvania, but he grew up in Virginia. He received his bachelor’s degree as an English major at Roanoke College. He worked various jobs, such as a flight attendant and bus driver during his time at Roanoke and after graduating. After receiving his diploma he enlisted in the Marines. In the mid 90’s he decided to leave the service and rejoin civilian life. Since leaving the Marines he has held many leadership positions, and he is currently a manager at a Target distribution center.

 

C.        Doug was in the Marines at the time of the Gulf War, but he was not deployed in the area. He was in special operations, and one of his missions was to rescue Westerners and secure the United States’ embassy in Liberia during the First Liberian Civil War. United States interference in the First Liberian Civil War had ties with the Cold War ending. Prior to the end of the Cold War, the Reagan administration was providing financial support to Samuel Doe’s corrupt and dangerous regime in Liberia because of his ability to keep out Soviet influence. The end of the Cold War brought on an end to the financial support the US was giving to the regime, and the same year a civil war erupted. The US ignored the problems they made by supporting Doe’s corrupt regime in their Cold War efforts, and sent Marines that remained neutral in the civil war in order to evacuate United States citizens that were in danger.

 

D.

SG:      What pushed you to join the service? And why the Marines?

Doug:  At some point in my life, after I graduated from college, I was doing a variety of different jobs and just didn’t feel like I was making an impact. I was actually a flight attendant at the time. I had been a flight attendant for Piedmont Airlines for two years, and it was a fun life but it didn’t feel like it was anything fulfilling. I had met a selection officer when I was working out in the gym, and I just started talking to him about it. I actually went for a run and decided this is what I wanted to do, and I turned back and ran to the guy’s office and went in a told him I wanted to sign up. It was about a month and a half later I was in the Marine Corps. But why the Marine Corps was just because it was just that. I felt like if I was going to go in the service I was going to go in the one that was the most elite or most…I don’t know, where you’re sacrificing the most was the biggest reason I went in the Marines.

 

SG:      You were trained in many different circumstances and environments. Describe some of the most memorable and/or the most difficult training exercises you went through.

Doug:  You know probably some of the most memorable are some of the OCS experiences where you’re getting indoctrinated into it. It’s kind of the cliché thing you see on TV with the severe discipline, the athletics, testing yourself both physically and mentally. Those were the times that were most memorable, a lot of them were funny. I think that and training experiences that are most memorable to me are some of the ones that were overseas like the jungles of Okinawa, cold weather training in Bridgeport, California at the Mountain Warfare Center, and the cold weather training in Minnesota and Wisconsin. We lived for a month and a half in the middle of winter, and that was pretty trying. It was a lot of fun… I was on skis a good chunk of the time. In fact that was where I met my first platoon was there. And it was funny because I had been a ski bum for years and they were all laughing thinking the lieutenant would show up and not know how to ski because they had already learned how to ski for a month before I got there, and you know me I had skied so much and got on skis and was taking them down a bunch of stuff, and they were bummed because they thought they weren’t going to have to do anything because the lieutenant wouldn’t know how to go anywhere. But, that was a great experience. That was probably one of the places I liked the most. I enjoyed it.

 

SG:      What were your expectations before your first deployment, and were your expectations accurate to your experiences?

Doug:  Um yeah, you know we had trained so much for it, and I was with what was called the MEU, or the Marine Expeditionary Unit, that was attached to the fleet in the Mediterranean, and you knew that you were, as that unit, you were the point of the spear. If anything went down in that part of the world and they needed somebody to go in quickly, like we were trained in embassy takedowns and things like that, so we always thought there’s a good opportunity we might get utilized even though there wasn’t anything specific going on in the world at that time, but we were always prepared for that. Luckily I didn’t do a lot of real world things. I spent 8 years that were primarily peaceful, the Gulf War I was involved at the time, and an operation in Liberia where we evacuated a lot of people out of that country because there was a large civil war going on. But, other than that a lot of it was about liberty, seeing the world and getting to travel and go places on Uncle Sam’s dime. We’d pull into port and spend 3-4 days having some liberty and enjoying ourselves and then go back on to a training operation. It was actually a lot of fun. It was what I expected it to be, and it ended up being that. I enjoyed it.

 

SG:      Did you see large cultural differences between the USA and countries you were deployed? If so, identify and describe these differences.

Doug: Yeah, you know everywhere you went it was like, I was in Okinawa, I was in Korea, I was all over the Mediterranean, I was in Turkey, and Turkey to me was one of the most interesting places I was at because of the melding of the east and west. That to me was very interesting. And over in Asia was incredibly interesting because it was like, my realization the first time I went to Asia was that this was so different than anything I’d ever been used to culturally. It made you realize, at least to me, how in some ways unimportant you are, because your way of life isn’t the only way to live, and you get to see people that approach things very differently. But also the things that really cool is that when we trained with counterparts, I trained with Koreans, I trained with a lot of Europeans, I trained with the Turks, but you find out that even though there are cultural differences there are so many things that make us similar to one another: the things you laugh about, the things that bring you together, the things that make people want to bond. Those things are all the same. My experience of travel and seeing a lot of different cultures made me realize that as much as anything.

 

SG:      Were there many females in the Marines during your time in the service? And do you see an increase in the amount enlisting today?

Doug: Yeah it was different when I was in, in fact I’d say it was uh…we… I was in the Marine Corps Infantry and at that time you just didn’t see women. I trained with them a little bit. I never really trained with them even when I was in OCS or the basic school. Now we had a class of women that were there when I was at the basic school, but they were pretty far removed from what I was doing. And when they actually came through I was in the infantry officer course, which is like a tough, 12-week program where you’re buried out in the field where you don’t have a lot of contact with anybody. Even when I got to the fleet, you know being that I was always in an infantry unit, you know I really didn’t have much contact with women in the service. And when I did run into them, it was more like they were in a logistical role or administrative role or something of that nature. But yeah Ive seen a huge change. Right now they’re trying to allow women into the combat arms, and the Marine Corps agreed to let them assume infantry roles and they assume to let them get through the infantry officer course. There’s a two day program you have to go through to get approved to go into the IOC, and I just watched a thing on the news not too long ago, I think like 50 some women have tried to get in the course, and they would have qualified but they… none of them have survived the two day entrance course. They’ve all dropped out and haven’t been able to make it. But, it’s no shame to drop out, a lot of men drop out of it. My attitude is if a woman goes through that training and makes it through all that training, I’d fight with her. More power to her you know haha, if she can do it I’d respect her.

 

SG:      You had a job as a flight attendant, a job that used to be known for being predominantly female. The Marines are predominantly male. Were these gender stereotypes apparent? And how did they affect your experiences in both jobs?

Doug:  Oh they were incredibly apparent. Especially the flight attendant role. [It] had different layers to it too. It was also a job that was kind of cliché, if a man was doing it he was a gay guy. So having that too was funny in that role because being a straight person, often times if you remained quiet in a social setting that maybe you walked into in uniform in an airport, there was often an assumption you were a gay guy before you were even talked to. And on the flip side, in the Marine Corps, from a gender standpoint it was like real manly kind of thing to do. But it was funny, you asked about the women earlier, I would have said there was a lot of…uh um… discrimination from a lack of better way of putting it. We didn’t think it of that as that but, it was more holding the party line and holding the circle down, saying women couldn’t do this or they shouldn’t do that or the whole nine yards. In the Marine Corps, they were always known as ‘WMs’, you always called them ‘WMs’ which stood for Woman Marines, but the going joke was ‘WMs’ stood for wasted money [chuckles]. But, again I go back to it was a different time, I think now, for the better, we’ve assimilated in so many ways, across all the spectrums we have.

 

SG:      What made you want to leave the Marines? What kind of adjustments had to be made returning to civilian life?

Doug:  When I left the Marine Corps, I was in for eight years, and there was a draw down in the military at the time. They were cutting the officer ranks very dramatically, and they had a process called augmentation, where you could get augmented. I was a reserve officer that was under an active duty contract, but as a reserve officer you couldn’t maintain your commission without having to re-up. So every so many years you would have to put in a package to re-up and augment. Unfortunately, when I got to the end at the eight year mark you had to be augmented into the regulars which was kind of like if you’re a professor it’s kind of like having tenure, you’re going to have your career going forward just out of paygrade or just years in service. But at the eight year mark if you weren’t augmented yet, you had to separate. You could go out and go into the reserves and maybe go active duty back in that way, but at that time I just decided I just wanted to get out. I was like, I didn’t feel like being a reservist. I really loved it, and I wanted to be active duty and I just didn’t feel like being a reservist for a while. So, ironically, I chose the other end and said I would go into the workforce full time and be a civilian. At first it was pretty easy assimilating I think into the civilian world. I went to work for Merrill Lynch as a financial consultant. But it was like you were sought after for lack of a better way of putting it. Military officer at the time, there were all these recruiters that would do a head hunting role for you and get you a pretty good job. So from that aspect it was very easy. And I never had much adjustment like some people do where you have that stereotype where the guy in the military is like rough and tumble and not going to get along well in the workforce, going to be bossing people around and that kind of thing. And that’s a little bit more stereotype than it really is. For me, I didn’t operate that way in the Marine Corps, so I wasn’t going to operate that way as a civilian. I didn’t have a very tough adjustment period. The thing I missed most was the feeling of doing something very important and you know the friends and the comradery that I had with the people I was in the Marine Corps with. That was the thing I found the hardest. Losing that was the single toughest thing about it.

 

SG:      The Marines had a major impact on your life. What was the most important thing you took away from your time in the Marines?

Doug:  A sense of duty, a feeling that things are bigger than yourself, to give yourself up to things, whether it’s something you want to do with athletics or it’s the job that you do. I want to do it as best as possibly I can. There’s some competition there but only in a good way. But the thing I probably walked away from the Marine Corps the absolute most just it’s important to have a sense of duty about things.

 

SG:      Do you have a better perspective on world events as a result of your time in the military? If so please elaborate.

Doug:  Oh definitely. I think one, having seen things I got to see around the world that I probably wouldn’t had I never joined the military, the things we talked about before, understanding that there’s cultural differences out there and that not everybody sees things through the same lens. The other is too, it got me very interested in history. And reading history and having that backdrop allows for understanding the present in such a more dynamic way. You see things and you realize these patterns, they’re not new. Even the things we’re seeing today in modern politics, it’s not that new. It’s been around for years, but yeah it definitely expanded how I view the world right now.

 

SG:      Can you describe the experience of evacuating Westerners from Liberia during the First Liberian Civil War?

Doug:  When you’re involved in a big military operation like that, you’re busy and you’re doing your role in it. My primary role, I was an executive officer for a riffle company which is basically second in command. A riffle company is about 220 Marines, it’s the basic combat unit of an infantry. But what we were doing was securing an embassy, and when we weren’t securing the embassy, we were securing airfields. So we were like the boots on the ground that were making sure that you know…even though we were a helicopter born company, so we flew in everywhere we went, but once we got there our helicopters were being used to evacuate the people. You had a wide variety of things you did: you’d process the people, you kind of had to put them in sticks so that they could get out on the helicopters, but for the most part we provided security for the operation. We secured the perimeter so that the warring factions didn’t come and try to disturb the ‘neo’. It was a non-combatant evacuation operation is what it was called. I think we, I want to say we moved 4000, over 4000 people, over the course of three weeks but pretty much evacuated it.

 

E.       The interview went very smoothly overall. The interviewee responded effectively to the questions, and I received thoughtful answers on his part. We never really diverged from the script. If I was to do it again I may restructure the order of my questions to flow more smoothly from question to question.