Sandy, Being a Women Living on a Military Base During the Vietnam War, Hist 150 Honors Spring 2021, Conducted by Scottie Hull, March 11th, 2021.

Overview of Interview

In 1966 my grandad was drafted into the Vietnam war, and one month before that he had just gotten married to my grandmother who had just turned 18 years old. When my grandfather was sent off to basic training they kept in touch by sending numerous amounts of letters to each other, which my grandmother still has. For a newly married couple this experience was hard, and far from ideal. As soon as my grandfather was done with basic he was stationed in Fort Knox, Kentucky. Since he got to stay in the U.S. my grandmother went right along with him. Although they were excited to finally be together, they had to go through uncomfortable times in order to do so. For example, they got lucky their first night there and got to sleep on the floor of someone’s apartment rather than their car liked they thought they were going to have to do. Eventually, they moved on to the base, where my grandmother was able to work and help provide for the both of them. This became really important after my grandmother gave birth to my mother while living on the base in Fort Knox. She had to help pay for the babysitter, and for food for all of them to eat. Luckily, my grandfather never got transferred anywhere or sent to Vietnam before his term was over which resulted in them moving to Waynesboro, Va. Throughout the interview, my grandmother describes her daily life on the base, the comparison of having kids on base versus off the base, and even gives me some advice to hold on to.

Biography 

I interviewed my grandmother, Sandy. She is from my mother’s side of the family. My grandmother married my grandfather at a very young age, and then my grandfather got drafted into the Vietnam War soon after. Eventually, both Sandy and my grandfather lived on the military base in Fort Knox, Kentucky, where Sandy would give birth to my mother, while also having a  job on the base, in order to help provide for her family. During the interview, she describes this experience and gives good detail about motherhood on a military base.

Transcript:

Speackers: Scottie & Sandy

Scottie H 0:00
All right, so can you start off by giving us a brief introduction of yourself, like where you came from and where you went to high school?

Sandy 0:09
Okay, I was born in Richmond, Virginia, raised there until I was 16. And then I moved to Saranda Virginia. And I finished my high school years at Wilson High School. And I later went to Blue Ridge college and attended some classes at UVA. But I didn’t finish college. I got married.

Scottie H 0:49
How old were you when you got married?

Sandy 0:50
I was 17 when I got married. Okay,

Scottie H 0:53
young.

Sandy 0:56
I turned 18 three days later. One month later, my husband was drafted in the army. Some we only had a month together before he went into service.

Scottie H 1:12
Okay, so did you did you know he was going to get drafted or, Where was the war at the time

Sandy 1:21
this was during Vietnam War, and he was 1A, which was his classification and that meant, he was draftable so we did, we pretty much expect it.

Scottie H 1:38
so you got married when you were 17. Can you describe what the feeling was like when you learned he got drafted? And how did how did you react or like, prepare for going to war.

Sandy 1:56
I cried. We had to get all of our things moved to my family’s home, and I had to move in with them. And I drove him to the bus station where he got on the bus at and I went home and I cried for about two hours and then I pulled myself together and I went out to see his parents to tell him that he was already on the bus. And I’m sure they cried too.

Scottie H 2:25
So they didn’t learn right away?

Sandy 2:27
Yeah, they knew.

Scottie H 2:28
Oh, they knew. Ok. You didn’t move to the military base right away?

Sandy 2:40
No, he had basic training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina for eight weeks. And after that he was sent to Fort Knox Kentucky, which is where he stayed the rest of his time. And I went to be with him I stayed with him the whole rest of his time at Fort Knox, Kentucky.

Scottie H 3:07
So you made that decision to go live with him or was it optional? Or did you kind of like want to, you knew you were going to live with him.

Sandy 3:15
Yeah we both wanted to do that. We we didn’t get base housing right away. We lived in a rundown apartment, cheapest thing we could find to live in because he didn’t make any money when he first went in the service it paid very little and we couldn’t even afford telephone. So I got a job on the base in housing supply, which was government office for supplying furniture to the soldiers coming into the base. And because I got a job, we were able to move on base when they he got promoted to specialist fourth class. And that was the first time you could move on base when you were e4. So we got an apartment, an apartment in the government housing on base at that time.

Scottie H 4:37
So was your parents or anybody against you moving on to the military base or was everybody really supportive of it?

Sandy 4:47
We didn’t ask them.

Scottie H 4:50
You didn’t really care about what they thought we?

Sandy 4:53
Well, I think they figured we would if we were able to be together we would be together. Because you never knew when you get sent somewhere like Vietnam, if he got sent to Vietnam, I wouldn’t have been able to go with him.

Scottie H 5:07
So you want it to spend at least when you could.

Sandy 5:09
So I wanted to be with him for the time I could be with him.

Scottie H 5:12
did you write him notes when he was in his basic training and stuff and talk about

Sandy 5:17
Yeah, I wrote all kinds of notes and he wrote me back. I still have. I still have his letters. Yeah. All kinds of drama. Because we were just teenagers.

Scottie H 5:33
Yeah that’s really young that’s my age, basically. What were your expectations of living on a military base? Did you have any or were you going into it?

Sandy 5:44
We were looking forward to it because it was regular apartments just like anywhere else. They automatically deduct your pay from your paycheck, and then my job pay for the rest of what we needed. And every morning at five o’clock, they blew Reveille over the intercom. You know Reveille is?

Scottie H 6:11
No, I do not. It would wake you up?

Sandy 6:17
Yeah.

Scottie H 6:17
So you had a good alarm clock.

Sandy 6:21
We lived just down the street from the gold vaults. Fort Knox is known for the gold vaults, where they keep gold from the country. And we live just down the street from that. And that’s where they played Reveille from, you weren’t allowed to go in there. You weren’t allowed to go anywhere in there, they had guns mounted. They wouldn’t let anybody in.

Scottie H 6:50
so that brings me to my next question. So after the 5am alarm every morning, what would a typical day be like on the military base?

Sandy 6:59
Well, after I had my first child, I had my first child there at Fort Knox in Ireland Army Hospital and it was a unique experience because it was different from public hospitals. Because in the army they were understaffed, and you had to change your own beds. And you had to, of course, change your baby and take care of your baby and stuff like that. They didn’t give you any special treatment of any kind. And it was like 15 people in a ward, but we weren’t treated badly. We were treated fine. It was just, you had to do certain things that you wouldn’t in a normal hospital. But after I had her, I would get up in the morning, I would get her ready for the babysitter. I’d take her to the babysitter. And I take my husband to work and drop him off. We only had one car. So I dropped him off. And then I went back to housing supply where I worked. And I worked as a clerk and waited on customers waited on soldiers when they came in with their families wanting furniture,

Scottie H 8:35
Okay, so did you did the babysitter like live on base?

Sandy 8:41
Yes, my babysitter’s lived on base. I had two different ones. They both lived on base.

So it sounds like the base was pretty big.

It’s like a city.

Scottie H 8:53
Oh, that’s cool.

Sandy 8:56
It has it’s own px, which is like a post exchange, it’s called. You go in and you could buy lots of different types of things that you like a store, and they had a grocery store that you bought your groceries at too, because you got them cheaper there by being in the service. You got things cheaper.

Scottie H 9:26
So was there like, did you have? Did you have friends, other wives of military men that you were friends with? Or, were there a lot of other kids on the base and stuff like that?

Sandy 9:39
Well, there were but I got to know a few women. Mostly the women that I’ve worked with. They were older than I was. But they were good to me, and they were good people. I got to know a couple people through Bobby. He got to know their husbands  in the service. When we first moved there, in our first apartment, before, we got to see the apartment, we didn’t have anywhere to stay. And we were going to sleep in the car. And we stopped in front of this house. And the guy came out, introduced himself as a sergeant. And he asked us what we were doing. You got to wait to get to see the apartment. And we didn’t know where we going to stay that night. And he just invited us in to stay with them. they had just moved in. So they didn’t have beds, we all slept on the floor.

Scottie H 10:46
So everybody was pretty understanding of each other situation?

Sandy 10:50
I mean, if they’ve been in service anytime they knew what it was like to move all the time, move around a lot have to put up with things you wouldn’t normally put up with.

Scottie H 11:00
So you had my mom on the base, how was raising a kid on the base compared to raising kid, because my aunt and my uncle were not born on the base, right?

Sandy 11:12
Yeah.

Scottie H 11:12
So how was it compared to that, what was different about it?

Sandy 11:17
Well as a baby, she was two years old, when we got out of the service, I believe. There really was very little difference. You had a babysitter. If you had a babysitter, you just you trusted them to take care of them. And took them places and they didn’t have places on the base for kids to do a whole lot like sports and things like that, because it just didn’t have it available. And my other two children were brought up pretty much the same for their first two years, except they lived near a farm. And they got the advantage of being able to play on a farm and get out and do things and stuff like that. So wasn’t a whole lot of difference in that age.

Scottie H 12:15
So my granddad, when you were living on base, he never got, sent off to Vietnam, or did he?

Sandy 12:24
No, every month, they had a roll call at their company base. And every month they all lined up in front of the company. And they read off the list of names and where you were going. So you went through every month wondering whether you were going to be there the next month or not. You never knew till the last minute. And every month he went to those and he never got sent anywhere else.

Oh, wow.

So We don’t know why. He had severe ear damage to his ear when he was young. And we think maybe that might have had something to do with it. Plus the fact that he was an only child. Sometimes that had something to do with it, but we never really found out. He just never had to go anywhere else.

Scottie H 13:13
never really asked questions just kind of went with it. That’s, that’s cool. So how long were you there after you had my mom there? How many years did you live there?

Sandy 13:32
We lived there a year, and probably a little over a year

Scottie H 13:42
Did y’all move back here or like did the war end and then he got sent home?

Sandy 13:47
The war didn’t end, it was a long time before the war ended. He got discharged at the end of his two year term. So he got his discharge and we came home. We came home here. And we rented an apartment in Waynesboro, Windsor apartments. Do you know where Windsor apartments are?

Scottie H 14:08
I’ve heard of them.

Sandy 14:08
Do you know where K. Collins is? The apartments right across the road.

Scottie H 14:11
Oh, really?

Sandy 14:12
That’s where we lived, lots of people our age lived there during the 60s. That was a very popular place to live.

Scottie H 14:20
Was it popular have a kid with you and you were that age too and live there? I mean, it wouldn’t be popular now to have a kid at that age. But was that like a thing back then.

Sandy 14:29
No, we just I was married a year and a half before your mom was born. But we decided we wanted to have a child. your granddady he wanted to have one in case he went to Vietnam and something happened to him, which was totally illogical. Here I would be with a kid and no husband. That didn’t make a whole lot of sense. But that’s what he felt. So we decided to have a child. There were lots of other children around. We just didn’t know a lot of people. And being there just a year we didn’t get to know. When we came back here, we started going to the Mennonite Church. And we raised our kids in the Mennonite Church. And that’s where we got to know people had a lot of friends.

Scottie H 15:27
so when you came back and to live here, did you go back to work? Or did you stay home? Or did he go to work? Or what were y’all doing when y’all got back here?

Sandy 15:37
Well, he that he got a job with UPS when we came back here. And he worked his whole 30 years with UPS. Till he retired. I didn’t get a job until Brent was, he must have been three or two years old, he was in a still in the baby seat. And I got a job driving a school bus and I drove the school bus for eight years. And I put the kids through school at Ridgeview Christian school. That’s why I worked during that time. But I got other jobs later, I worked at Stuarts draft middle school as a substitute teacher for five years. And I worked as a delivery driver for florist in Stuart Draft for 17 years. So I worked part time all the time.

Scottie H 16:53
I guess my last question will be this one’s kind of funny. But what would your advice be to me if I were to move away from my family one day? Because right now, my mom’s making me stay home. And it doesn’t seem like she’s ever gonna let me move away.

Sandy 17:10
She will.

Scottie H 17:11
Maybe

Sandy 17:12
eventually. I would say don’t rush into it. You’re probably ready. But once you move, life changes. That’s to be expected. There’s going to be good things, there’s going to be bad things, and unfortunately, you won’t always have your parents there to help you through the bad things. So it’s kind of your on your own. I would say don’t get married too young. Like I did. I made a good choice. I’ve met someone I’m glad I met. And we’ve been married 54 years. And you know that I wouldn’t trade him for anybody else. But I wouldn’t encourage people to get married too young because they need to have some life experience before they get married. And don’t have your kids too young either. Because you’re not really ready for them. I think your mama did good to wait a while cuz she she was more ready.

Scottie H 18:30
I don’t even know when she had me.

Sandy 18:34
She was in her 30s

Scottie H 18:35
Okay, yeah, that is waiting. All right. Well,thank you so much. I really appreciate you doing the interview with me.

Sandy 18:43
You’re very welcome.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai