00:00:01O'SULLIVAN: Today is May 7th, 2026. This is an interview with Chrysanda Porter, who served in the Army from October 1982 to November 2008. We'll have Chrys break down her service a little bit more as she introduces herself. This interview is being conducted by Megan O'Sullivan for the Wisconsin Veterans Museum Oral History Program. No one else is present at this time. Really briefly, Chrys, can you go over what years you were in which parts of the Army?
00:00:27PORTER: I joined the Army Reserves back in 1982 and switched in 1985 to the active component. And in 1995, I took Clinton's buyout and had to serve a minimum of three years, and I spent 13 then in the Wisconsin National Guard.
00:00:52O'SULLIVAN: Wow, I think they got a good trade on that one. So thank you for explaining that to me. Now we're gonna go back in time to where you grew up. Can you tell me a little bit about your upbringing?
00:01:02PORTER: I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. My dad was in the National-- well he was in the Navy and then he was in the National Guard and the Army Reserves and he kind of always said, you're going to do this, you're gonna join the Army, you're gonna be a nurse, you're gonna go to school. While I joined the Army I went to school and um then I decided I was--I needed something different. I didn't want to go to school and went active Army then in 1995. But when I was in the Reserves back in Nebraska--
00:01:33O'SULLIVAN: Well, before we even go into that, what's the name of your dad?
00:01:36PORTER: My dad? Gary.
00:01:38O'SULLIVAN: Gary
00:01:38PORTER: G- A-R R-Y
00:01:39O'SULLIVAN: G- A-R R-Y
00:01:40PORTER: Cooney
00:01:42O'SULLIVAN: Cooney. Spell that too.
00:01:43PORTER: Cooney, C-O-O, N-E-Y
00:01:46O'SULLIVAN: And he joined the Navy first?
00:01:47PORTER: He was in the Navy.
00:01:49O'SULLIVAN: And then what's name of your mom?
00:01:50PORTER: Shirley.
00:01:51O'SULLIVAN: Shirley. And what did Shirley do?
00:01:53PORTER: Um, when I was really little she worked for an insurance agency and then she ended up being a bank teller and did a wide variety of jobs for the bank.
00:02:08O'SULLIVAN: What was it like growing up in Nebraska? You were in a pretty big city.
00:02:13PORTER: We grew up in the capital. I kind of had the best of both worlds. My grandma lived on a small acreage, about 30 miles from town. And so when I would have long holidays, I would go out and stay with her, or we didn't have school. Or in the summer, I was farmed out to different aunts and uncles and. My grand, that one grandma.
00:02:41O'SULLIVAN: That one grandmother, was she on your mother's side or your father's side?
00:02:43PORTER: My mom's side.
00:02:44O'SULLIVAN: Mom's side--
00:02:46PORTER: And so, I mean, I had the best of both worlds. I was in the city, but yet I knew what it was like to be on a farm. We, she raised chickens, and she always had a pig every year. We raised rabbits. We ate them like we ate the chickens. And we had a couple of Shetland ponies we could ride and a quarter horse, and she lived in a really small town that we rode the horses all over, rode our bikes. In Lincoln, I lived kind of right smack dab in the middle of town. But you had the university, which is a Wisconsin major thing now, but they were very popular, so you know you had The Sea of Red, which here in Wisconsin, we have the same color red.
00:03:27O'SULLIVAN: Right.
00:03:30PORTER: That ah you grew up with the university being a major part because we don't have any pro football or anything. They really put their heart and soul into their sports at the university.
00:03:44O'SULLIVAN: So did you attend a lot of games growing up?
00:03:46PORTER: Um my dad's best friend was a student down there and so my dad would buy his season tickets so I did get to attend a couple of games. One of the cool parts for me when I did get to go is an uncle, his brother was best friends with a player that got paralyzed and so I could go down and talk to his brother during halftime. So it was kind of neat as a kid that you knew someone on the sidelines.
00:04:14O'SULLIVAN: Right
00:04:15PORTER: I got to meet a couple of, they ended up becoming professional football players, through my uncle because of that. But just the whole university type of thing was very big in Nebraska. Our major thing as a family, when I was about 12 we started going to Colorado to go skiing, so we went from summer vacations to winter vacations. And that's what I kind did up until I graduated. So I got to see a lot -- because my parents hadn't really seen a lot of the world, I guess you could say. So we would go through a lot different things. Um
00:04:59O'SULLIVAN: Kind of prioritizing experiences.
00:05:01PORTER: I just yeah and I give as as far as a lot of it is history means a lot to me because a lot what we stopped at was historical museums. Dad says yeah they were free that's why we stopped. [LAUGHING] Ironically enough but you really learn too but we were like in South Dakota, Colorado, North Dakota, Wyoming. There's pictures of us in Western Minnesota in the Detroit Lakes area which they've continued to fish at for the last 60 plus years. So I got to see a lot of the Midwest, I guess you could say. And I'm thankful for that because it also gave me my love of history, but it gave me a love to go travel.
00:05:44O'SULLIVAN: Yeah, absolutely. Tell me what high school you attended.
00:05:48PORTER: I attended the, it was called Lincoln High-Lynx. It was about a mile from where I lived. It's the oldest high school still in Lincoln. I wasn't really involved in sports. I was involved in like the um pep squad or pep team. I don't know that we really have those anymore, but I knew a lot of, had a lot of friends that were on the athletic teams. And would go and support them, so I was involved in the school with a lot of that. I was involved with like Junior Achievement, a few other church-type programs. So I tried to stay busy, did a lot a babysitting. I have a brother that's seven and a half years younger than me, so i babysit for a lot his friends. So probably is not Kosher in today's standards, but I think there's a couple of times I think I had about 12 kids that were--
00:06:47O'SULLIVAN: Oh my gosh.
00:06:48PORTER: -- all related it was like for a two-week time period but they was they were all related with my brother so you had a group of like five or six boys, and then I had their siblings and they you know they all played great together otherwise, I babysat my brother's best friend and we would take off and either ride our bikes or take the bus downtown. And my mom worked at the main branch of the bank and we would stop in and see her and back then you could take food into the movie theaters. I'd buy them happy meals and we'd go see a movie--
00:07:19O'SULLIVAN: Nice.
00:07:21PORTER: um, so I you know, we never it wasn't a barrier that you know we had a bus we could catch on like a block from the house. So we utilized that and his best friend that I babysat lived like a block down and those two we just we took off and went downtown and did--
00:07:37O'SULLIVAN: Yeah, it sounds like you really got had, like you said, the best of both worlds, a really active city life, a really active country life. Besides your dad, do you have any other relatives who were in the military?
00:07:49PORTER: I have a nephew that served.
00:07:52O'SULLIVAN: What about when you were growing up? Was there anyone else that you were aware of?
00:07:53PORTER: When I was growing up, no. Um--
00:07:57O'SULLIVAN: How did your dad's military service kind of like impact your upbringing? Were you, was it something that, you know, you said that he was always talking about your future.
00:08:07PORTER: Um, I want to say right around the time my brother was born, he was like, he tells me now that I was looking for a second or a part-time job and he could make more money if he went back into like the National Guard and Reserves for that one weekend a month as opposed to finding, delivering pizzas or whatever back then. So he went back into the military, and he had to be gone for-- What is it, two weeks out of the summer? And kind of the way that I supported, I'd always make him his favorite cookies when he left.
00:08:42O'SULLIVAN: Oh, that's so sweet.
00:08:44PORTER: So he would take a container of cookies. And dad was always gone, mom hated it, but he was always around the two weeks right around my brother's birthday because he has a summer birthday. But I grew up with that, not knowing a whole lot about the military, just knowing, and then I was going to go to college and that's part of the reason I joined was to help pay for college.
00:09:06O'SULLIVAN: But you never did attend college.
00:09:08PORTER: I attended a year.
00:09:09O'SULLIVAN: Where did you go?
00:09:10PORTER: University of Nebraska in Lincoln.
00:09:13O'SULLIVAN: So that was right in town, right?
00:09:16PORTER: Yep.
00:09:17O'SULLIVAN: And did you have ah like something you were studying at the time? Or were you just?
00:09:24PORTER: I lived at home when I went and at that time, I was, it was probably more gen-eds, but I did more for teaching. I'd always wanted to be a teacher.
00:09:36O'SULLIVAN: So you started, you graduated from Lincoln High Links, and then you started at the University of Nebraska. When did you start thinking about maybe the Army was the right choice for you?
00:09:52PORTER: So, to a certain point, I was on a delayed entry program, so I joined in October of 1982. I had already was in college, so they were helping pay. I didn't go to my basic training until that next summer. So I was in one of the satellite units of the 82nd Field Hospital that was in Lincoln, and we drilled out at the Veterans Hospital there in Lincoln. And we helped do patient bed care, and just learned some of the different things since we were at the hospital. I originally signed up to be a hospital cook. Normally you do your basic training and within a year you end up going to your schooling. Mine was about two years I had already been in and they hadn't contacted me to go to school.
00:10:58O'SULLIVAN: Oh wow.
00:10:59PORTER: And I went to annual training with them and talked to the nurses and they switched my job to becoming a medic and within like a month after us getting back, I ended up being at Fort Sam Houston to become a medic in October of 84.
00:11:18O'SULLIVAN: So going back to when you first got on that delayed entry program, how did you decide on the reserve at that point?
00:11:27PORTER: I kind of looked at, because my dad was prior Navy, I looked at the Navy and my dad says stop and think about it, they don't make rank really fast. Um, and he says stop and think about too because you could end up on a ship, and it was like, aah, uh, uh. I originally went to join the reserves earlier that year. I don't remember if it was the spring time or more like August, but the fiscal year is October 1st and they had already filled their quota for females so I had to go back in October when the quota opened back up for the fiscal year.
00:12:06O'SULLIVAN: How did you feel? Were you um, surprised by them?
00:12:11PORTER: I think I was surprised by that. Back then, I don't think the um that that really impacted mentally as to what that really meant that they can only have so many females. Looking back now, yeah, it kind of makes me mad that you had a quota on how many females could be in, compared to whatever. But it was also in the beginning stages of I think things really changing back in the 80s because you had just gotten done with the Vietnam War and looking at the different roles where they were changing. But it didn't stop me from joining because I was right back in the recruiter's office--
00:12:56O'SULLIVAN: --that October.
00:12:57PORTER: Yeah, a few days after October hit, so--
00:13:01O'SULLIVAN: So we know, probably have some idea about how your dad felt, because this was kind of in his plan. How did your mom feel when you told her?
00:13:08PORTER: She hated it.
00:13:09O'SULLIVAN: She hated it.
00:13:13PORTER: When I left to go on active duty, my parents and my brother took me to the motel that you stay in before you leave. My dad had tears in his eyes because I was leaving and my mom just didn't say nothing. It was like, [arms folded in front of her] grrrrrrr. And my brother and I were fairly close, we were pretty close back then, you know, he was kind of upset that I was leaving, but he understood too. And my dad is very-- He holds onto his money very tightly, but he shoved a $20 bill in my pocket. That's something I can remember.
00:13:48O'SULLIVAN: Probably felt like. $1,000 at that point.
00:13:50PORTER: Back then, $20 went a long ways.
00:13:55O'SULLIVAN: So, um you were in the delayed entry program, then you went to boot camp, where was that?
00:14:02PORTER: Fort Jackson, South Carolina.
00:14:04O'SULLIVAN: And you had traveled in the Midwest quite a bit at that time. Was this your first time going to South Carolina or that region?
00:14:11PORTER: Yes.
00:14:12O'SULLIVAN: And how did you get there?
00:14:14PORTER: First time on a plane.
00:14:15O'SULLIVAN: First time on a plane. How did you feel flying for the first time?
00:14:18PORTER: Scared.
00:14:19O'SULLIVAN: You were scared. Um, what was-- Bootcamp like? What was the training like? Was it what you expected?
00:14:29PORTER: A lot harder, I wasn't very athletic back in the day. You know, sports were not my thing. But I think a lot of people thought that I was gonna fail and it's like, no, if you put your mind to it, you can do it. I got through it. Probably the thing that bothered me the most was the heat.
00:14:47O'SULLIVAN: Uh huh.
00:14:48PORTER: I'm used to in the Midwest when it rains, it cools off. When it rains there, it gets hotter.
00:14:54O'SULLIVAN: Yeah.
00:14:56PORTER: But I made it through. Uh-- Basic training came back home, to--
00:15:02O'SULLIVAN: Before you went home, was there any specific things you remember about basic training or did you meet anyone that sticks out in your mind?
00:15:11PORTER: Not in necessarily in basic training. I think I was, I can look back and I can say I had a female and a male drill sergeant. Female was harder on us. I was selected out a few times saying, well you can't march and then you went down, like when they had duty overnight and they'd have you do some of the drills and it's like, well, you know what you're doing. I think you got the wrong person. Um, I love my candy. And I can remember in basic training you got to go like-- Week seven out of eight or week six out of eight you got to go, I don't remember exactly where we went, but we got to go somewhere you got the soda you got the-- and I made a giant Snickers candy bar last for a week.
00:15:57O'SULLIVAN: Uh-huh. You just wanted to--
00:15:58PORTER: That was mine--
00:15:59O'SULLIVAN: savor it?
00:16:00PORTER: Yep. Well I think that's one of the things I could get, but otherwise we ate a lot of cherry cough drops and that was the closest you could find a candy. You learned how to make your bunk, sleep on top of it where you didn't have to redo it every day.
00:16:17O'SULLIVAN: Were you training with men at this point?
00:16:20PORTER: No. We were only women. And pretty much -- I was in what they called "new Hollywood". So at Fort Jackson they had old World War II barracks that you still trained in, and they had some older barracks that were a little newer. And then they had the brand-new ones and I was and some of the brand- new ones. And i want to say It was like a quad, there was like four where we would line, you know, meet down from our, where our barracks were, we would meet downstairs and it was kind of a covered area. So we were in New Hollywood and had that, but you had some air conditioning, but it wasn't all that much. I can remember I would go to church service just so I could take a nap on Sundays.
00:17:16O'SULLIVAN: [both laughing] Very resourceful.
00:17:18PORTER: Even went to Spanish Mass and I didn't speak Spanish. [both laughing] But, I mean, that's, I can't recall really making really good friends, but not have it -- back then it was a pay phone. Didn't get to call but a couple of times. Back home I still I think in a box at home still have the letters from like my cousins and my parents and stuff just because. And grew up a lot.
00:17:47O'SULLIVAN: Mm-hmm.
00:17:48PORTER: You grew up a a lot. But it also taught me a lot, like your locker had to be set up kind of for inspections, you had a certain, and I think that kind of set a mind frame for me is I left all that in its place and I bought extras so that I could wear it every day. Or I had set those two whatevers, like two pairs of socks, two t-shirts, aside in my locker it was rolled so I would not have to keep doing it every time we had an inspection or somebody came through. So I mean it taught me a lot. Made me strong. I don't think my dad thought I would make it a career. I think now he's proud that I did.
00:18:36O'SULLIVAN: So when you went to basic, did you feel like, determined that you were gonna finish it, or was there times when you were like, I can't do it?
00:18:46PORTER: I can say probably there was a couple of times when I was just exhausted, it was like, God, am I going to make it through this? Am I going make it though this? But you just keep going. There's times when it got to be a little too much, that's when you kind of volunteered to go do KP because you got to ride the bus back, or you got, okay, I had to go clean in the kitchen. That's minor compared to doing a rucksack on your back.
00:19:10O'SULLIVAN: Sounds like you try to find every workaround and shortcut and resourceful--
00:19:15PORTER: I try to use my resources pretty well.
00:19:19O'SULLIVAN: So then you were mentioning, and then you headed back home after basic, and you were drilling at that point. And that's, you said that you didn't get your next schooling for a longer gap than you expected.
00:19:35PORTER: The little unit that I talked about that I was in in Lincoln, when I first started, we were maybe 10 people. When I came back, we were—
00:19:42O'SULLIVAN: What's the name of the unit again?
00:19:44PORTER: We were a detachment of the 82nd Field Hospital, and we were under the 89th ARCOM, which with the reserves, kind of covers a lot of them Midwest, different types of units. But they had grown. Um that even though I wasn't school trained because I had worked on the wards with the nurses and people who had been there prior to me leaving, we, I was put in charge of some of the people to say, okay, we have to go do-- We did patient bed care, like helping give bed baths, helping with some of the, cleaning some wounds of whatever veterans were up there, we would go around and take vital signs. I guess one of the times I can recall is they sent me in to do vital signs and didn't tell me the guy was in a coma. and I'm like, he's not waking up. [both laughing] But I mean, I was put in charge before I had had the training, but because I had been more hands-on, I knew what was going on.
00:20:54O'SULLIVAN: So, you're given some leadership opportunities and you felt comfortable with them.
00:20:58PORTER: Yep.
00:21:00O'SULLIVAN: And, did that make you want to seek out more leadership? or, just kind of accept what was put--
00:21:05PORTER: Just kind of a step into what we were doing. We had two great nurses that kind of were in charge of us going over things that they did a lot of in-depth explaining. And one of the gals that I ran around with in my nash, in my reserve unit, she was in pre-med to be a doctor. So they were always seeking more things for Kim to learn how to do. And they drug all of us right along in there. There was many veterans liked to learn how to do a catheter. There'd be like six of us girls, 'do you mind if they watch'? And they would explain everything that they were doing. So they gave us a lot of great opportunities for that.
00:21:47O'SULLIVAN: And you mentioned this person, Kim. Is that someone you're still in contact with?
00:21:50PORTER: No, I would love to be able to find out.
00:21:53O'SULLIVAN: Do you know her last name?
00:21:54PORTER: It was Hisong. She had a scholarship to one of the schools and played basketball, and I actually went and watched her play basketball in college and, you know, we kind of lost touch when I went active duty and she was, I guess we kept in touch a little bit because she was still in the reserves, but we didn't have social media and that to be able to help track and know where different people were. So, I have looked a couple of times, but I don't know if she got married and changed her name.
00:22:28O'SULLIVAN: Right.
00:22:30PORTER: But yeah, her and I kind of got close. She went to school there in Lincoln. Because of her and like I said, the two lieutenants, they did a lot in order to help us learn. And it set me up more in a better place to become a medic because I'd already done some of the stuff hands-on before I went to school.
00:22:55O'SULLIVAN: Right. So just to explain this to me, we're going to go back in time a little bit. Your dad was saying that you're going be a nurse, you're gonna be a nurse. Then you enlisted. Did you enlist specifically connected with medical?
00:23:07PORTER: I was going to be a hospital cook, so nothing necessarily medical.
00:23:12O'SULLIVAN: But connected with the--facility.
00:23:14PORTER: I was connected with the facility,
00:23:17O'SULLIVAN: Got it.
00:23:19PORTER: And because I wasn't trained when I went to annual training that year, I worked with the nurses in the hospital, or the nurses within our unit that they were working, I was kind of like their gopher, and I kind of said, I haven't been trained. And they were, did the paperwork. And we were in Fort Knox, Kentucky., and within about two months from that, I was on my way to Fort Sam to do medic training. So they had switched my military occupation to being a medic.
00:23:56O'SULLIVAN: So when you started AIT, when you headed to Texas, how did you get there?
00:24:04O'SULLIVAN: Again by plane.
00:24:06PORTER: You flew. And when was this? What year was that?
00:24:10PORTER: I went in October of 84.
00:24:13O'SULLIVAN: And do you know what unit you were with there?
00:24:17PORTER: That I don't recall right off hand.
00:24:21O'SULLIVAN: Says here, Company E, Second Battalion. Is that that point or not quite yet?
00:24:28PORTER: That could have been, it's the training unit. And we were there again, they kind of had the newer barracks and we were in the old World War II barracks.
00:24:41O'SULLIVAN: And you were being trained as a medic--
00:24:43PORTER: Yep.
00:24:44O'SULLIVAN: and this was your first time in Texas?
00:24:45PORTER: Yes.
00:24:47O'SULLIVAN: And how did that feel?
00:24:50PORTER: It was a culture shock because I met up with the gal when we first got there. I was told by all the other people from my unit, oh yeah, you can have your civilian clothes on the weekends. And they changed that by the time those people got back and I left. So I had this whole bag of civilian clothes and I met up with a friend that we're still friends today. That her husband happened to be down there. She was going, she was active duty. And I said, here, take this bag of clothes to your uncle's house so that I have access to them. And she did. We happened to drinking on the weekend and we went to HEB, which is a grocery store down there. Yes, I was drunk and nobody was speaking English around me. And I'm like, am I in the right country?
00:25:43O'SULLIVAN: uh huh.
00:25:45PORTER: Am I on the right spot? So yes, it was very eye-opening because I had no clue. Lincoln has a big diverse of students that come in, but they all spoke English. So that was not something that was-- You you found you know in Lincoln and their grocery store stayed open, I think like twenty four/seven where we were at. The biggest thing in Texas though that surprised me back then is everything was closed, they had blue Sundays. Everything was closed on Sundays you didn't go shopping on Sundays, and I was like, what? But Texass was a shock. It's the first time I had a brown Christmas, I hated it.
00:26:21O'SULLIVAN: Uh huh. What was your friend's name?
00:26:24PORTER: Her name was Mary [Sinclairly??] back then. And we have, that's one that I was able to keep in touch with and haven't seen her for many years, but we do talk via social media, texting and that type of stuff.
00:26:39O'SULLIVAN: That's great that you're still in touch. When you got to Texas, what were you, what were your hopes for what would happen next? Just that you'd get trained and have a little more focus?
00:26:49PORTER: Kind of just, get trained, just trying to figure out what was going on. I think that's kind of when I decided that-- The whole army thing wasn't that bad because you, I mean we trained but yet it wasn't like basic training. They didn't take all your nights. You wasn't under scrutiny 24-7. It was more that you went to class, you trained, you studied, you did what you needed to do. And I stayed over the Christmas break because being a reservist I didn't have any accrued leave that I wouldn't get paid, so I stayed and I worked, and we did odd jobs. And I didn't mind it. I didn't mind what we were doing, and I think that's part of when I got back from that is kind of when was like, okay, this, I need something else, and so when I kind of decided to go to active duty, so--
00:27:50O'SULLIVAN: So you came back, and then what happened next? You're just back to the same old routine for a little while?
00:27:56PORTER: Kind of the same old routine, jobs weren't necessarily going the way that I kind of wanted or whatever and I'm like kind of got a wild hair and said let's just go active duty.
00:28:08O'SULLIVAN: What were you doing on the civilian side for jobs and stuff?
00:28:10PORTER: I worked like three jobs. I was a clerk at Shopko. I worked in a luncheonette from when I was 16 to then food service. I'd help cook, serve, all of that. And I was a teacher's aide with the Lincoln Public Schools and floated around to different schools but I had gotten on basically full time with one of the high schools. Um there working with kids with disabilities. So I mean, I enjoyed it, but it working three, I mean I was working like 80 hours a week trying to make ends meet that I'm like, this isn't worth it, this is not what I wanna do.
00:28:55O'SULLIVAN: And where were you living at the time?
00:28:59PORTER: I was living with my cousin, we were renting an apartment. So--
00:29:04O'SULLIVAN: Okay, so then you were already thinking about it a little bit, and then tell me about the kind of process and what happened when you decided to join the active army.
00:29:17PORTER: I just went down and started talking to the recruiter, and at that time, because I was like two weeks shy of being prior service, they wouldn't take me as being a medic, so I had to choose a different career path. I could be a grease monkey and work on vehicles, or I could do administrative and type, and I already knew how to type from high school, so I went the administrative route and became a, at that time it was called a personnel action specialist. In today's world, I want to say it's more of an HR specialist.
00:29:55O'SULLIVAN: Now, when you first started hearing about what a personnel action specialist was, did you know right away what it was? Did they explain it to you? You were like, I'll figure it out as I go.
00:30:07PORTER: I had really necessarily no clue what it was until we got—I ended up back at Fort Jackson in the training area to become—it was called a 75 Echo, and so I was in school for that.
00:30:22O'SULLIVAN: So you had a second AIT once you joined the Army, and then when did you, what year did you go back to South Carolina?
00:30:35PORTER: It would have been--I believe it was about October of '85. I ended up back on active duty, 'er ended up on active duty to do the schooling and then I ended up staying there working for the hospital for my first duty station on active duty and I worked in the personnel office.
00:31:00O'SULLIVAN: Do you know any of your units when you were there?
00:31:02PORTER: It was USA Med Act at Moncrief Army Hospital. And I was there from, technically I don't think I signed in until the end of December of that year of '85, and I was there till February of '87 is when I moved to-- I got stationed in Germany. So we worked in the hospital I ended getting pregnant with my daughter--
00:31:37O'SULLIVAN: So if you were pregnant, that means you met someone along the way. When did that happen?
00:31:42PORTER: Like, February, when I first got to the unit, I ended up pregnant. I did not marry the dad. I was a single parent. Didn't know exactly what I was going to do.
00:31:53O'SULLIVAN: Was he in the military?
00:31:54PORTER: He was military.
00:31:55PORTER: Were you guys dating or just? We dated and then it kind of broke off and I'm just like, nope, I don't want the hassles. At first I thought I would give her up and when I saw her I couldn't do it. So my parents didn't know about it until she was 10 days old. My dad cried, yelled at me. My mom cried, my brother cried.
00:32:18O'SULLIVAN: How old were you at the time?
00:32:20PORTER: 22.
00:32:21O'SULLIVAN: 22. And then part of not telling them was because, were you telling the other people around you that you were going to put up for adoption?
00:32:30PORTER: For the most part, it was kind of the route I was going towards. I ran around with some really good friends that they were just supportive no matter which way that I went.
00:32:42O'SULLIVAN: How about the Army? How did they react to your pregnancy?
00:32:46PORTER: Um, our, my, I guess, higher-ups, they were, they worked with me and, and, you know, kind of, there was a counseling there if I needed it. Um, just trying to figure out what I was doing, but I was on orders for Germany.
00:33:04O'SULLIVAN: Before the orders for Germany, what did your day-to-day look like when you were doing personnel action specialist work in South Carolina?
00:33:13PORTER: A lot of what I did there was like awards and I helped with promotion boards, which actually helped set me up as being a lower enlisted to see how it ran. And I helped run one or two of them and so when I had to do some later on, I knew what I was doing. But I did a lot of the awards, so I had to learn, this was way before computers. But the memory writers that they used to have where you could type it all in and it would save it. I mean we didn't have the big screen we had this little tiny bar to look at. That's what I would type them in and I had to do that on a monthly basis. But we ended up losing our personnel sergeant and I was kind of second in command. But the one thing that they made us do was learn everybody else's job. So if somebody was gone and someone walked in, you could help them, which is something that I, kind of the way that I was raised. I worked with a lot of the, we had a lot civilian personnel that worked in the office, too. And you kind of learn their jobs so that, you know, we wanted an office that It didn't matter if that person was there or not, that you could come in and be taken care of. It might be that you're taking a note to give to like the civilian gal that worked with all the doctors and that. It might be that you had to take a note so that she could get back to them because we didn't always know the answer, but we still was, you know, trying to take care of them when they came in to the office. Because I was pregnant, towards the end I wasn't going out and doing the physical training with them that they would do at night, so it was more of a 9 to 5 job. There's times we had physical training in the morning, and a lot of times because of our hours we did it more at night.
00:35:22O'SULLIVAN: What's your daughter's name?
00:35:23PORTER: Kiri. It's K-I-R-I.
00:35:27O'SULLIVAN: K-I-R-I. And then I have here, you're kind of touching on it a little bit, but besides being pregnant, I'm sure that made a huge difference. What was the transition like being, going from reserve to going to active duty?
00:35:40PORTER: I was homesick.
00:35:41O'SULLIVAN: You're homesick?
00:35:42PORTER: But my dad kind of finally said to me, stop calling until you need something [O'Sullivan laugh]. I got homesick, it was more just because I didn't really know anyone,. So then I got involved with a group of people that we all worked with and lived in the barracks. One guy rented a house and we would go there on the weekends and because I like to cook, I'm the one that did the cooking. And they wouldn't, because I was pregnant they would all get drunk and then it was every payday, 'can we eat your ice cream'? [O'Sullivan laugh] Because we would all go shopping like after we got paid and that was something I can remember buying you know the small containers of Haagen-Dazs because that's what I was hungry for and, 'yep you owe me'. [O'Sullivan laugh] Um, so--
00:36:31O'SULLIVAN: So when you were a personnel action specialist, you were working in a, like an office--
00:36:37PORTER: an office
00:36:40O'SULLIVAN: with military people and civilians; how many people were in that office?
00:36:43PORTER: [counting on fingers] Probably about eight.
00:36:48O'SULLIVAN: Eight. And, you talked a little bit about what you did on your weekends, what other things did you do on your downtime?
00:36:57PORTER: Explored South Carolina.
00:36:59O'SULLIVAN: Do you have any places you really were excited about?
00:37:02PORTER: There, we took off and, that was the first time I saw the ocean. We took off and went to Myrtle Beach. Oh my gosh, what's the name of the--We went to Myrtle Beach is where I saw ocean for the first time. I can remember I was pregnant with my daughter and ended up—I saw the rich houses and the poor spots in Charleston. And I got lost and ended up-- driving around, probably where I wasn't supposed to, but I just kind of took off in my car and did whatever. I had some good roommates and we would kind of go off and do things, but until I had my car down there, there was a couple of good friends in the barracks that had cars that would take you to get something to eat. But I can say there again, I kind of went into culture shock with the South of-- South Carolina is still fighting the Civil War. And there is a big degree between Blacks and Whites and--
00:38:02O'SULLIVAN: Was that something you're aware of the first time you were there, or only when you went back?
00:38:06PORTER: Only when I went back. Because on the first time we really weren't off --
00:38:09O'SULLIVAN: exploring at all.
00:38:11PORTER: And part of what made me really aware of it is Jack was Black. My roommate and I were both white. She was from New York, and he took us to like a church's chicken or something. And either he was looking at her necklace or she was looking at his, we were all just friends. But this lady that was behind the counter, literally threw my food at me because of it. And it's like, what did I do? And that's when I realized South Carolina, I haven't necessarily seen it in some of the other states that I've been in, but South Carolina is still very much intertwined with the Civil War, and I'm thinking, that was a hundred and X amount of years ago that this is still such a conflict.
00:39:05O'SULLIVAN: And so you said your friend's name was Jack?
00:39:08PORTER: His name is Jack.
00:39:09O'SULLIVAN: Still someone you're in contact with?
00:39:10PORTER: No, I think he ended up in Germany, up in Frankfurt, about the time that I was there. But just, he was just a really good friend.
00:39:19O'SULLIVAN: Do you remember his last name?
00:39:21PORTER: That I don't.
00:39:22O'SULLIVAN: What about your roommate's name?
00:39:25PORTER: That I don't. [both laughing]
00:39:27O'SULLIVAN: You were having too much fun.
00:39:31PORTER: I guess I, there's a couple of people that I lost track of that, like I said, that we ran around with. One guy was from, Glenn was from Maui, Joe was from Michigan, and David was from LA. So we were a very diverse group. And then there was a couple other gals that ended up renting the house next to where Joe had rented the house. And, I mean, we were all from different walks of life, but we all had different jobs in the hospital. So it was just kind of neat when we all kind of knew what was going on and knew. And just the critters and the different things, being from the Midwest. Yes, in Nebraska, you have to watch out for snakes, but I can say in the 20 plus years I lived there, I don't think I really ever ran into them. My grandma used to be allergic to poison ivy. It could blow and she would break out. Us kids were out playing in the ditch and never once broke out from it. In South Carolina, we were out cleaning the front of the hospital as part of our cleanup duties. And my roommate ended up, she is the only one, I think a couple other people got a little spot. She literally had it inside and out that she was like quarantined to our room.
00:40:55O'SULLIVAN: Wow.
00:40:56PORTER: Where we were, like I was out there with him and I got nothing. I couldn't tell you, I've been, you know, through it and this and that, but it was kind of cool because the roommate before that though, she was dating an MP, so I got to know a bunch of the MPs. So when we would come in and out the gates, probably half the time I knew some of the MPs and they're like, you're kind of handy to have around. Well, I was pregnant, I wasn't drinking. They could drink and I could drive. And, we just had a good time going back and forth because the one, like I said, we spent a lot of time where Joe was. But the one thing I loved is the diversity. Like I said, we all came from totally different areas, and so David was adopted by a Mexican family, and so he would bring back chorizo and stuff, and he would cook his stuff. Glenn would cook stuff kind of that he ate in Hawaii, and Joe and I kind of were from the Midwest, but my mom always made us pot roast on Sundays, so okay, you throw a roast in and that, and they're like. Oh my God, I haven't had this in so long. Well, we got tired of eating in the barracks or, you know, in the mess hall and that. So it was, we just had a, had fun on life and would sit and listen to music. And I was always told by this group, your, your soul has got to be so much older because I loved the folk music from the sixties and they're just kind of looking at me. But we just had it. We were high on life and just having a good time is is kind of what I look at it now is yeah, kind of dumb and and doing some of the things but that's just what you did. And whether I was with that group of friends or like I said, I knew a bunch of the MPs that we ran around with them too that um was in parts probably of Fort Jackson I wasn't supposed to be at but I mean with the MP's who's gonna get me in trouble? You know, they're the ones you're gonna call
00:42:59O'SULLIVAN: Right.
00:43:00PORTER: So yeah, just kind of had fun and did things, but there again, I can say we were, it was hot enough that I passed out one time with the heat. That me and the heat don't mix, but when it rained, it got hotter there and I'm just like, what is with this, because I was used to the Midwest.
00:43:21O'SULLIVAN: And you said your daughter's name is Kiri?
00:43:23PORTER: Kiri.
00:43:25O'SULLIVAN: And how did things change after she came along?
00:43:28PORTER: Um. Well, right after that, I left to go to Germany. And so my mom and dad kept her for me for six months. So they got to see her for the first time when she was about three months old. And my dad will tell you now that if I wouldn't have taken her back when I got her, he wouldn't give her back to me. So I gave the three of them, I guess the four of them because she was more like a little sister to my brother. He's 15 years older than him. They fell in love with her. And she's mixed, and my dad accepted her wholeheartedly. They have a bond probably stronger than what I have with her. Maybe not so much now, but as she was growing up, her grandparents meant the world to her. Like I said, my brother, it's more like a little sister. My cousin, who I was around a lot with her upbringing, never put her down. She carried her on her hip. Mom says she would carry her around the house on a pillow.
00:44:37O'SULLIVAN: What was your cousin's name?
00:44:38PORTER: Teresa.
00:44:39O'SULLIVAN: Teresa, and your brother?
00:44:40PORTER: Troy.
00:44:41O'SULLIVAN: So when you were pregnant you already knew you were going to Germany, right?
00:44:48PORTER: I think towards the later part of it.
00:44:52O'SULLIVAN: And how did you feel about that? Were you, you know, you'd like to travel already so were you excited?
00:44:57PORTER: For the most part, I was kind of excited because my grandfather, from what we were told, my grandfather on my dad's side, my grandpa Cooney, was adopted by the Cooneys. And the story went that he was adopted when he came over from Germany. I think the story has changed now that I've done some of the ancestry. But I was excited because it was part of my-- Ancestry and I could go back, and I didn't have to pay to go over there. So I was over there in the beginning without her and I set up everything and then I came back and got her, but they had her for about six months. And, um--
00:45:41O'SULLIVAN: And so you so initially you were pregnant. You were thinking about everything for adoption. And then when you knew you were gonna not do that, did you know immediately she would be going with your parents when you first went to Germany or did it take a little while to figure that out?
00:45:55PORTER: It took a little while to figure it all out, just because of the way the military is structured and in order to get the permission for her to come over. I didn't have that necessarily when I left, but they were willing to keep her for that, for a time period.
00:46:13O'SULLIVAN: Okay, so do you remember what year it was that you got to Germany?
00:46:18PORTER: February of 1987.
00:46:23O'SULLIVAN: And why were you there? What was your objective? Were you on a mission?
00:46:28PORTER: Reassigned to Germany, so I was there a minimum of two years. So we were there from February of '87 to February of '89. I was in a small town called Ansbach, which was about 30 kilometers from Nuremberg. There again I was a personnel action specialist, which I want to say was supposed to be like a hundred and some jobs that I could do. And I started off-- The 177th Personnel Support Battalion, which then for whatever reason changed to the 400 Personnel Support Battalion. I did ID cards. So it was a job that I hadn't done. So I dealt with the public kind of for the, I want to say about the first year was there, dealing with civilians, contractors, spouses, and military making their ID cards. And that's the old ones where you put them in the typewriter and they're a controlled substance. So you had to keep good records on the numbers of who you give them out to and the documents. There again, unless you had duty overnight, you work basically like nine to five. We did our physical training in the morning. But me and our orderly room clerk, so our companies, like HR specialist today, her and I, our kids were a day apart. She had a car and I didn't, and we kind of ended up running around for the two years that I was there.
00:48:17O'SULLIVAN: And do you remember her name?
00:48:20PORTER: Yes, I have her on Facebook and I just totally do. Joanne Carpenter.
00:48:27O'SULLIVAN: And were you guys exploring a lot, or was more about just doing like buying groceries, getting kids where they needed to go?
00:48:36PORTER: A little bit of everything. We took off and went to a lot of different castles and started doing folk marches and we even took the two kids. We did a bus trip to up in Holland we went to, or we were in Amsterdam. We did the tulip fields. They had a kind of like our Rose Bowl parade, they had a tulip parade. We went to a Dutch windmill. So we did a bus, a weekend bus tour that was quite interesting with two babies under the age of two. But we had a good time, but we kind of explored whatever her, she was married and her husband was a military child and his dad was stationed in Shate, Belgium. And so we went there for Thanksgiving one year. And neither one of us knew the language, but we could remember that the number two was Twa. And so we would point to what we wanted in the case and say Twa, and so her and I kind of took off and we'd put the kids in strollers and away we went. And I can say one time we were shopping in downtown Nuremberg, and you hear of the red light district in Germany? Yeah, we turned down the redlight district and we looked at each other and said, I think we made a wrong turn.
00:50:08O'SULLIVAN: I made a wrong turn.
00:50:10PORTER: But we weren't afraid to get in her little car and kind of take the kids. We went to a bunch of different castles and did the tours.
00:50:21O'SULLIVAN: So when you were in South Carolina in the beginning, you were homesick. How did it feel to be so far away from friends and family when you are in Germany?
00:50:32PORTER: We, with my parents, I set up that like we had a specific, because of the time difference, for the most part we had specific time of the month that we would call. It was like, I want to say like a Saturday night, they would call me, it would be later, but it was a decent time for them that I could talk to everyone. Unless there was an emergency or something then we could, my dad paid for us to come home. I came home. Six hours after I was there to pick up Kari. They brought us home again then in June the next year, and I went fishing in Minnesota with them, and then they came over and spent their 25th anniversary, like two months before that, with, they spent a week or two weeks with me, and we had rented, by then I had my driver's license, I didn't have a car, but we rented a car. And I drove them around Germany so that they could see things.
00:51:39O'SULLIVAN: Just the two of them, or did Troy come too?
00:51:40O'SULLIVAN: Just the 2 of them. Troy stayed home with the dog and. Gave his girlfriend a promise ring way with him.
00:51:48O'SULLIVAN: Oh, that's sweet!
00:51:50PORTER: So, yeah, a good friend stayed with my brother, and they came over. So that was their 25th anniversary. They came over, like, in September of that year. My dad would look down at the speedometer, you're going too fast! No dad, that's kilometers, that not miles, it's not. But he also, in Germany, if you get off-- On the wrong exit, you can't just get back up on there and he sucks at reading and telling me where I needed to go. But he would also watch the cars going around us and like a Lamborghini swerved around us and He's like--What was that? you know um-- But they they had a good time my mom really enjoyed it. Her first plane flight they came and visited me when I was in South Carolina. My dad was doing his annual training at Fort Knox, Kentucky and she flew down there and she had turbulence and she's like 'that was rough'. That was and she'd not really been we had visited the south once but that was like Tennessee and that kind of stuff. She ordered tea, because we drank a lot of iced tea. She's like, it came sweet. I said, yeah, mom, you've got to tell them you don't want sweet tea. So that was a big thing for her, flying overseas, because they flew from Nebraska and I'm not for sure, they ended up in England and they lost their luggage.
00:53:23O'SULLIVAN: Oh no.
00:53:24PORTER: So they at least listened and they packed like a set of clothes in their carry-on. I picked them up and their bags were soon delivered. But they had a good time going around. Took them to the, you know, crystal factories and we went to Munich and I took them to Auschwitz. And that was an eye-opener for me.
00:53:45O'SULLIVAN: Was that your first time there?
00:53:48PORTER: That was my second I had gone with friends prior to that. And uh, I had a hard time with that because our history records don't necessarily tell us all of what I learned when I was there. I read a lot of books on stuff with Hitler and Germany and seeing that I got. Taking them around like we went to the eagle's nest with my mom and dad. Just learning what Hitler did. And then, of course, because I looked more German, they would come up and talk to me, and I'm like, nein-nein, English, English. I don't, you know, I knew that very little that they teach you on how to, you now, here's your numbers and how to ask some of the basic things. But I was probably in the best shape of my life because I pushed that stroller with my daughter all over Germany. I had a steep hill that I had to climb every day. And then I came back to the States and had to drive everywhere that I went in order to get there. So, but we didn't there again didn't stop me. Hop on a train, go somewhere, or, like I said, my best friend over there, she had a car and we would take off and go wherever. Her husband was abusive and she got very mad at me and another friend because we put the child safety locks on on the back of the car and got her in the car, and says we're taking you to the MP station to turn Bobby in because she showed up on my doorstep with a fat lip and a black eye, and I'm like, no, this is not, We don't play with this. So she was mad, but it changed her life, but she was mad at me for a while. It's like, no, you guys don't deserve that. You don't need that. But we, like I said, we still have each other on social media. I became very good friends in the two years that we were there, and we kept in touch after I came back to the States.
00:55:55O'SULLIVAN: So, I'm just circling back, you said the first year you were doing ID cards.
00:56:01PORTER: Then I ended up switching over and I did schools that military personnel would have to come back to the states for. So they had a system called SIDPERS, which is, they were giant boxes that was kind of their computer type system. I would, they would put in an application in order to be able to go to certain schools that were back here in the states that weren't. available there in Germany. It's kind of-- So I did that, but there again, we were supposed to know everybody's job. And when I first got up there, I got in trouble because the non-commissioned officer in charge of us was like, you need to quit telling people you don't know the answer. I said, I can't lie to them. I went with them to go ask the person so that I could learn, but I'm not going to tell somebody a lie. And, um-- He didn't like that, and it's like, no, I can't do that, because I hate it when somebody would do that to me, that I—no, let's go find out the answer. I don't know the answer, let us go find out the answer—it's not that I blew somebody off, I wanted to learn, too. I learned quite a few of the people's jobs, but I will say that at one point, I would say that I was moved up there because there was no whites in that section. They were all Hispanic or black, and it was like, okay, I kind of saw the writing on the wall for what it was back in the 80s when everything was your status quo of having things kind of laid out, and I was like okay. But I was raised that, get to know somebody for who they are and not their color. So I didn't necessarily look at any of that, but you kind of see it when some of that is presented. But I learned the job. I still would get pulled back when the person they put in ID cards would have to be gone. I would still get pulled down there to do ID cards. I had to do-- I talked to you about when I was in Fort Jackson on active duty, I had to run the promotion board, well I had to go before that board, and we have called soldier of the month or non-commissioned officer of the month that you would have to go before the boards where you have to learn all this common knowledge. And I won it a couple of times, and so that meant you had to go up again to like the next level where there was more to compete, like you did it within your unit and then you'd have to do it. I was like, I don't want to keep going up. [O'Sullivan laughing] But I had to a few times. But I mean, you got to do that. And it just kind of helped. So I knew what was going on when I would go into some of these boards to know how, you know, what's going on. What do you as the person being interviewed and asked questions, how do you present yourself? You know your hands and as you see I'm one that talks with my hands I had a very hard time. I would have to grab a hold of my legs to keep my from talking with my hands but it it helped me learn how to do the things for furthering my career and doing the different things like that. So--
00:59:37O'SULLIVAN: As your time in Germany started to wind down, how did you start to feel?
00:59:43PORTER: I was ready to come back to the States. I miss some of the culture. I miss the food. That was kind of a big one. It took me a while before I would taste stuff, But I had some of the best food from all different cultures. Some of the the best Chinese, I ate Greek, and I wouldn't say that I would have done that necessarily here in the States. I don't like American beer. So I loved the German beer, and the ironic thing is the first place my husband and I ended up stopping when we were looking to see if we were going to move here was at Leinenkugels. A great tie-in, but I mean, I loved the hefe weiss, and so that was one of the first beers I had here. But I miss the food, I miss a lot of the food. It took a while because their stuff is different from what we eat, you know, a brochen and you think of a hot dog that's a foot long and a hard roll. That's not a hamburger, a hot dog bun. That's how do you eat this? They eat mayonnaise with their french fries. You know, just different things. But I miss it. I want to go back. And one day I'll probably take my daughter and her kids or her whole family back over there.
01:01:19O'SULLIVAN: How many kids does she have?
01:01:21PORTER: She has four.
01:01:22O'SULLIVAN: Wow. That's a big family.
01:01:24PORTER: Yeah, um she wanted six and ended with four.
01:01:28O'SULLIVAN: Sounds perfect to me. She's probably disappointed. [Porter laughing] I think it sounds great. So you left Germany and where do you go next?
01:01:37PORTER: I had put in a request for Fort Carson, Colorado, Fort Riley, Kansas, or Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and they sent me to Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
01:01:46O'SULLIVAN: How did you feel when you got there?
01:01:49PORTER: I was okay until I realized all the critters that lived there, and then it kind of was like, ah, I was driving to my-- apartment and there was a spider crossing the road and I could see daylight under that spider. I didn't realize there was tarantulas there. I'm like, oh that's a big wolf spider. No, they're like we have tarantulas, we have centipedes, we have rattlesnakes. We have, and I'm, like oh, ew, not my cup of tea when it came to the critters, but I was closer to home. I was within 500 miles from home.
01:02:29O'SULLIVAN: And have you met the person that would become your husband yet?
01:02:34PORTER: I got there in February. And--
01:02:38O'SULLIVAN: What year?
01:02:40PORTER: '89. I left Germany a month before the wall came down in Berlin.
01:02:46O'SULLIVAN: Wow.
01:02:48PORTER: That's how I can remember it. My girlfriend said that, Joanne said it totally changed after the wall went down.
01:02:57O'SULLIVAN: Well, as someone who likes history, that probably would have been cool for you to be part of.
01:03:02PORTER: One of the trips when I came home, I got my passport so I would not have to travel on my military ID, and would travel with my passport, and we ended up in Berlin, and at that time you had to have special papers to be in Berlin. So when I got off the plane with Kari, and I looked around, and you had the polizei, you had they had like a level above where we all sat in the airport with the German Shepherd and the machine gun. I set her on-- I think we went to the bathroom and I set her on her lap, and I'm like, we ain't moving until we get back on that plane. Otherwise, I mean, it just, you didn't necessarily see a whole lot or run into a whole a lot, but I'm not getting in trouble for being here. So it was, I can say I've been in Berlin, 'cause I did, I touched down and spent a good hour or so, but that's something that is very much I can remember that being in the news and everything back then. We got to Fort Sill and it was different, a different community. My job there was working in the casualty assistance office where we were a 24 hour, seven days a week. We had someone in there in order to do notifications. For anyone who died in the state of Oklahoma and Arkansas, or had family of a deceased or injured service member within those two states. And I ended up working nights for quite a while.
01:04:44O'SULLIVAN: Did you know when you went there that you'd be doing casualty?
01:04:47PORTER: Mm mm [shaking head no]
01:04:47O'SULLIVAN: When did you find out? Like shortly after?
01:04:50PORTER: When you were in process, they were--They were basically like, here's what you're going to be doing, this is the job you're going to be doing.
01:04:54O'SULLIVAN: How did you feel about it?
01:04:58PORTER: I don't know that, not knowing anyone in that, it was a little more difficult being a single parent and trying to figure out how to set everything up. But we got it, we made it work. And in September of that year, I went to a leadership school that I needed in order to get promoted. And that's where I met my first husband, is we were in the same platoon. And there was only maybe a dozen females out of about 50 or 60 people and you're basically gone for 30 days.
01:05:35O'SULLIVAN: Where was that?
01:05:38PORTER: At Fort Sills, we were training right there. But I sent my daughter back home with my mom and dad again. They had her probably closer to two months because I shipped her off before and then trying to work around their jobs in order to bring her back. And I ended up meeting him there. I'm out there trying to ruck it the last week. You have to go out actually in the field. I weighed about 115 pounds and I was trying to carry like 65 pounds of my back. And they wanted you, you know, you got a weapon somebody's got to carry the machine gun, somebody's got a carry this. I was the shortest, we're in a firefight, you're supposed to drop and roll. I dropped and I couldn't roll because I didn't have enough weight to, so I sat there like a turtle on its back. [both laughing] But the guys were very, they treated me very well. That is something that I had never really done. I wanted to listen, I wanted learn. You had infantry guys, you had artillery guys, you had, you know, we were all from different walks of life. But when it came there, you're getting inspected and learning all of that. There again, this is what I wear. And this is my display. You don't touch the display. And I was lucky enough that I lived there that we had like one weekend. I went home and cooked fried chicken and baked cookies and I took it back and shared it all with everyone because I wanted real food. And they all looked at me like I was nuts. But I'm like, no, I'm used to cooking for myself. I'm not used to eating mess hall food and that. And they're like, this is great. But I kept all that in my car down the street and you know you would have at least what you know some time for you to get prepped for whatever you're doing the next day if I needed something, I could run down to my car. But they all kind of looked at me like why are you doing that? because it makes my life a whole lot easier. Yes it was that you had to duplicate a lot of things but it just helped in the long run And, I um--
01:07:54O'SULLIVAN: So you said you were doing that to earn a promotion. What was your rank before doing that training?
01:07:59PORTER: I was an E4. I was a specialist. In order to go up to be a sergeant, you had to do, I don't know what it's called now, but it was PLDC--
01:08:13O'SULLIVAN: So you did the--
01:08:14PORTER: primary leadership development course. It's called something else now but you needed that in order to go from an E4 to an E5. And I--
01:08:27O'SULLIVAN: Did it happen once you completed it or just completing it qualified that?
01:08:32PORTER: Completing qualified for that. Some people were already maybe necessarily in E5 and they had to get it. It was kind of more off of a point type system within your military occupation, and I needed it in order to be looked at in order get promoted.
01:08:50O'SULLIVAN: And throughout your career previously were you pretty motivated to stay on top of like increasing your rank?
01:08:57PORTER: To a certain point. With my dad being in, he's like do correspondence courses and so because I worked a lot of nights and I was by myself locked in a building waiting for information, or technically waiting for somebody to die. I ordered them and did them when I was working in order to be able to do something productive. So I did a bunch of them while I was working and that helped me later on.
01:09:33O'SULLIVAN: So you start taking that more seriously when you got to Fort Sill.
01:09:37PORTER: For the most part, because I had a little more time because of what my job was. With the casualty office, we also had to start doing what's called a line of duty, which if you look at what the civilian role does. So if you got injured, they had to make a determination whether or not it was within the line of duty or outside the line duty, as to whether it is the equivalent to like a workman's comp type claim. I did those also on active duty and I also did them, helped do them when I was in the National Guard because I had done them and understood. Some of the parameters, maybe not in the beginning, but when I transitioned from the active component to the reserves in the classes, it made more sense to me as to why you did the line of duty. But I, you learned a lot of compassion. We had a very sick sense of humor because you were dealing with death all the time. Being an E4, technically we worked directly for the commander of the post. And we would have to call out to these National Guard and Reserve Units to say, we have somebody who's deceased, like a retiree, that we would send someone to help them fill out all the paperwork. And we'd have to them and say you need to have a casualty assistance officer go meet this widow and we'd give them the information. We took all the funeral honors for those two states and we have to call and say we need a funeral honors sent here. But being an E-4, I would be talking to an officer and it's like, nope, I don't have to do that. Yeah, you do. I am calling you because I work directly for the commander of the post and this is what, and he's like no, I don't. I say can you hang on and I would put them on hold and I would tell the E7 that was in the office, you need to tell them that they got to send somebody out because we had to keep track of that. And that the case was open until they called back and told us that it was closed was all the paperwork, them getting their new ID and that. You would have widows calling, that the body was still warm, it'd be minutes that they calling and reporting this and they're still crying and that. Or it would be six months and nobody from the Army has contacted me over my husband and you're out in the middle of nowhere. We were never notified. I had to go make an ID card for a widow that was out in the middle of nowhere that was nothing. So I had to get everything ready from our ID card section because I didn't work there anymore, but I knew so I went with E7 to go out to assist with stuff like that. So we made sure that we took care of them and was taking care of the different ones within the area and everything that we could do. There's times when we had a, I got to know the job pretty well that when I would get one and I would see something that didn't go along with the regulation, because I kind of got to know the regulation front and back, I argued with Department of the Army for different family members to make sure they got their stuff. One of the ones, I can remember the old bat phones, you know, the old black phones. We had like three of them and I had a crash. It was actually in Arkansas, it was like around Fort Chaffee. But you had Texas kind of, and we didn't cover Texas, but it was right. I had three different phones going because we had three different lines. And I was trying to take information, and I wrote. I had notes. This is this police office, this is this office, because I was in by myself until I could get somebody to come in and help. We did mass casualties a few times, so I talked about being in that school that I did in September where I met my first husband. They had a unit because we were field artillery so we were the people, to most people it looks like big tanks, but they're a long range where a tank is a short range. Artillery can shoot miles. An artillery round landed in the middle of a basic training group that had been out at the range, and they had just lined up in order to leave. And they had a mass casualty. So I came in, we were actually out in the field doing that training that I was talking about that we got rumors of it, but I came in on the aftermath and so I read through that in order to know because we were still getting asked questions. So we dealt with mass casualties in many different ways. And then with the first Gulf War, I was married with my husband. And was pregnant with my son, and he was in Saudi. He was one of the artillery units that left like in October of that year. And um, I had to learn what they did in Vietnam for casualty assistance. The toe tags and the old—we had to scrounge them up, and I had to train the National Guard and reserve soldiers that were coming on to Fort Sill, how we were going to try to handle the mass casualty. 'Cause nobody, we had no idea how we would be dealing. We got lucky during the first Gulf War. that there was only one notification we had to make and technically it was after the war ended and it was because they found a live round.
01:15:32O'SULLIVAN: Oh wow.
01:15:33PORTER: So I did that I was at Fort Sill for around six years and I did that job for about four years.
01:15:45O'SULLIVAN: Before you move on from that, how many people were in the casualty assistance office?
01:15:52PORTER: We had three casualty assistance officers that were anywhere from an officer or E7 or above. And then there was maybe about five to six clerks that were E6 and below that manned the office during regular hours and then there was a rotation of those of us that worked nights. Because like I said we were there was only three casualty assistance offices in the United States at that time that were 24/7 and we were one of the few. But those are some of the ones that come to mind that I dealt with while I was in there.
01:16:40O'SULLIVAN: When you were working overnight, were you working by yourself usually?
01:16:45PORTER: Yep. You were locked in the building by yourself.
01:16:47O'SULLIVAN: And then you met your first husband in that training in September-ish of 89. How did you guys go from being strangers to being more than strangers?
01:17:00PORTER: I kind of started dating after we got done with class.
01:17:04O'SULLIVAN: Was he stationed there as well?
01:17:06PORTER: He was stationed at Fort Sill, too, and just kind of went from there. We were married in May of that year, the next year, so we got married in May of '90. He left in October of '90. He came back in, like, April of '91, and my son was born on my golden birthday of February 27th of '91. And I had a ruptured uterus and they told us that we would have been five minutes later to the hospital, we both would have had been dead.
01:17:50O'SULLIVAN: Wow.
01:17:51PORTER: And my first husband decided to stay with his unit, that his unit meant more than what we did. So, it kind of changed the course of our life. So when he got back, he was back, I don't want to say come, as soon as he got back, like in July he was on orders for Hawaii. And within, we were divorced by '93. It just, he was not committed and caused me a lot more headaches. I met my husband that I've had for the last 31 years, maybe 32 this year. He came to work in the casualty assistance office.
01:18:35O'SULLIVAN: What's his name?
01:18:36PORTER: Renee.
01:18:37O'SULLIVAN: And what's your son's name?
01:18:39PORTER: Joshua?.
01:18:44O'SULLIVAN: Um, and when did you first meet Renee?
01:18:48PORTER: I think he came to work in the office in January of '91, and he became my supervisor. And I was still married. We worked with each other, and things kind of later then kind of transferred over, and I had to switch jobs. I went upstairs and did, I helped with awards. I helped our congressional liaison. I helped do what's called emergency leave. So if somebody had a sick parent or a parent died, they could go on emergency leave whether or not they had the leave to go on. But if you had to go, sometimes some of those had to like out of the country. We had to get special permission and had to do what was called a message that we sent to Department of the Army. You were supposed to have a security clearance, and I didn't. But I was the one in the office that knew how to do them. So my E8 came in one day and she's like, yeah, you got a security clearance, right? I'm like, no. Oh, I said, but I'm the only one that knows how. So somebody that had a security clearance looked over my shoulder to make sure I was doing it right. And that, and then from there, I worked up there for a year or so, I ended up transferring over to the-- reception station at Fort Sill where all the basic trainees come in, in order to do basic training at Fort Sill. And I worked in S3, which is-- My main job was to um take the rosters that we would get. And they would come in for different military occupations that I'd have to count all those different numbers and make sure the numbers came out and help with, okay, we have a hundred privates to go over here to be trained for this. And that ended up leading me into, they filmed In the Army Now at Fort Sill. I was a young mother, did not watch MTV anymore, had no clue who Pauly Shore was, [O'Sullivan laughing] did NOT want to. It didn't mean anything to me, but I know a lot of the extras, and I had to save a hundred privates, and if you watch the older movies, you see what we used to call a cattle car. So it's almost like, just like it sounds, there's no seats, there are a couple of bars, almost like you're riding a subway or a rail train. There's a couple bars to hold onto, and they shove all these trainees in order to ship them to different things. So you got put on a cattle car, but we had two out of the four that matched, and they didn't end up using them, but I had to specifically hold a hundred privates for it and that. Everybody got all excited. I'm like, I don't know who this is. I don't care. [O'Sullivan laughing] But it was cool that you can say that you were there. Like I said, I knew a lot of the people that were extras in it.
01:22:29O'SULLIVAN: How long before they were filming did you know they were coming to film?
01:22:34PORTER: I'm going to say we had at least a few months.
01:22:38O'SULLIVAN: And you were kind of just not interested?
01:22:42PORTER: I was not, I had two young kids, it was not anything, I mean. Back in the day when MTV first came out, yeah, we watched it, but that was not something I really watched and paid attention to. I can say that we had seen a couple of his movies, but it was like, okay. But yeah, you could go down there and you could have taken pictures with them and the cast and all of that. But it just, it wasn't my thing back then.
01:23:11O'SULLIVAN: So, you ended up the rest of your time in Fort Sill doing that transfer reception station work, and any other things that happened besides that movie, anything of interest?
01:23:29PORTER: I think that was one of the bigger things, just kind of-- I guess when I was still there, my husband was up here looking for a place. The bombing in Oklahoma City took place while I was still down there. And when I was in Germany, the bombing of Lockerbie, Scotland was like a month or two before I left. That for me, even like with 9/11 and they were like, oh, we've got to figure out the security. And it's like, you have no idea, people. You have no ideas what. Because when I left Germany, I had to check my bags in Frankfurt three times. I had to verify they were my bags. Before, and I had a long layover, but before I ever got on the plane, and it's like, they really cracked down after that, that we have no clue over here. I flew out of Minneapolis to go home for a funeral right after 9/11. I'm in Omaha, Nebraska, which is about that big [holds up finger and thumb] ]of an airport. I got wanded, I got scanned. And when I went through Minneapolis to fly there, nothing. But I'm like, everybody freaked out here, and it's like, no, I've already been there, done that kind of with being in Germany. I was there during a pretty peaceful time in Germany. But you still were, they still looked for people that might have put bombs up underneath, but for the most part back then the Germans were thankful that the Americans were over there that they were pretty secure. So I got lucky with that, but I had put in—I was on orders for Korea three times. Part of it is the first Gulf War kind of stopped it, something else, and then Clinton that had the buyout. Where you, If you were a certain military occupation, you could apply to see if you got a severance or a tight pay. And in my career, that was about 13 years worth of service. I had seen two people in my military occupation make it up to E6, and so I was married to my second husband by that time. And he had, he's seven years older than me, and he had, hadn't made E-8 and he's like, he was close to, he had his 20, he did almost 21 years, and I'm like, okay, I'm going to put in to see, and take the buyout, and still had to do time in the National Guard. At that time I had 13 years worth of service. I wanted, at that time it didn't make any sense for me to quit. I took the money and applied for the buyout which got me out of the orders to go to Korea, because you couldn't be deployed for if you had put in for that. Because then I would have been leaving my two kids with my husband and would have done over in Korea by myself and I didn't want to leave my kids. So.
01:26:52O'SULLIVAN: Yeah. So, previously you were kind of like when you got to go to Germany, you were looking forward to that, but then as more overseas orders started coming in, you're like, I don't want that in my life anymore.
01:27:05PORTER: [Shakes head no] Mm-Hm.
01:27:06O'SULLIVAN: I need to be here with them. And then what happens next?
01:27:09PORTER: I put in for the buyout. With Renee retiring, they would move him anywhere in the world. And, my dad was, like I said, he was National Guard Reserve. He was an active reservist stationed at Fort Snelling. So we drove up from Oklahoma. We left my two kids with my mom and dad and we came over to Wisconsin. He is from Virginia and I'm from Nebraska and his his sister lived in Florida. And she was mad that we weren't looking at Florida to go, but his niece called him and said, there's no jobs here.
01:27:47O'SULLIVAN: Did he kind of know what type of job he wanted, he was looking to do, or?
01:27:52PORTER: Not really. But what we did is this might have been about a year before we kind of knew what was going on. That um, like I said, the first place we stopped, ended up stopping was Leinenkugels, not knowing anything about Leinies, which was just kind of cool because it's right up the road now. But uh, we ended up taking the back roads up, and I want to say we were around Rice Lake, and then we came back. We camped out at Lake Wissota. We ended up down in the Dells and camped in the Dells, and then we took the River Road back. But we collected newspapers and different things on the areas. What are you paying for? What was minimum wage, and what are you paying for jobs? What are your schools like? What is the cost of living? At that time, we wanted a hobby farm. What can we get and with me getting the buyout they would move me back to basically what's called your home of record so they would have moved me. I would have got the mileage for the move from Fort Sill to Nebraska, but I could take my stuff wherever so we did that and we rented for a year. I was in the--
01:29:07O'SULLIVAN: How did you decide that? And you went to Black River at that point?
01:29:11PORTER: I, so in that whole process of leaving, it's like, well, what are we going to, what unit are we going to put you in? What military occupation do you have? And they looked at me and said, you got a military driver's license? Yep. You got a civilian driver's license? Yep. So we did a 4187, which is just your generic paperwork, and says, OK, we're going to make you an 88 mike. Which meant that I was supposed to drive a semi-truck, and I'm like, uh, okay. I got to the unit the first time, and it was their community service, and it opened up to the public, and the person in charge of me says, you need to go out and talk to them about this truck, and I am like, no. I have no idea what this is. [both laughing] I, and I was still looking for a job, and um I went in and took my little portfolio that they told me to make up for taking on job interviews and said, can you use my skills somewhere else? So I started working in their HR office and then I did a lot of extra orders for the National Guard and was going in and helping and I helped out in Tomah that I switched from Black River down to Tomah. And then someone had gotten me to where I did extra orders to, over with the Wisconsin Military Academy. And then they were willing to let me transfer over to there. So I spent a year or so with them, but there wasn't necessarily a whole lot of work. And because of my other skills, I brought in my sewing machine and was sewing. I mean, I still got all my jobs done, but I was helping soldiers I was sewing on their names on their jackets and their different things just to try to help out and to keep busy and things that I kind of already knew how to do and had the abilities to do. But there again, I just stayed busy and did as much as I could.
01:31:14O'SULLIVAN: Did you guys end up getting a place with some land to get some animals?
01:31:20PORTER: Did I what?
01:31:21O'SULLIVAN: Get a place for some land because you said you wanted a hobby farm.
01:31:23PORTER: We wanted a hobby farm. They wanted too much money with what we could afford to buy it, but you would also need another $10,000 to put into it, and we didn't have that. So we ended up, we're basically a mile outside of Eau Claire with an acre, so we kind got, not the hobby farm but we got a nice corner lot. Within the block of my house is a fitness trail that Goodyear and Eau Claire had dumped rubber in during the wars that nothing can ever be built there, and there's a trout stream. So I used to go down there and walk it all the time and when we first got a black lab I would go throw the stick into the water for the lab. It's a beautiful area, but I'm-- closer to most stuff where we're at than people that live on the other side of town. But we rented for a year, applied, and his, he retired off of active duty. His retired pay paid for our house payments, so then we both got jobs. I kept getting laid off from a lot of the jobs that I had. I went through a few of them, and I finally said, I'm going back to school. And I took with working at the Wisconsin Military Academy as a training unit that were training all the time, that I was able to do extra days on what we call orders to get pay. And I was making more doing that two or three days a week when I didn't have classes, why I went to school.
01:32:59O'SULLIVAN: Where were you going to school?
01:33:02PORTER: I started in UW-Eau Claire and then I switched to UW-Stout and I got my degree from UW-Stout.
01:33:09O'SULLIVAN: In what?
01:33:10PORTER: Vocational rehabilitation.
01:33:11O'SULLIVAN: And how did you decide on that?
01:33:14PORTER: I was going for special ed. There's a test you have to take in the state of Wisconsin, they have some of the highest scores. I took that test for reading four times and I missed it twice by one point and a few points the other two times and I said, I'm done with this.
01:33:31O'SULLIVAN: Just change direction.
01:33:34PORTER: At the time at UW-Stout, special ed fell under voc rehab, and so I just went and talked to the director of voc rehab and said, can I switch? And so I had like one year left, and we did it with all my credits transferred over. And so it's a degree in vocational rehabilitation with a minor in psychiatric rehab. And--
01:34:01O'SULLIVAN: We knew all those years ago that you maybe wanted to go into teaching and it sounds like--
01:34:05PORTER: I did, but I, at some point I was able to still fulfill some of the teaching. I was an instructor for the military at the Wisconsin Military Academy. I helped teach some combat lifesaver skills for that course. I also helped teach with a crafts with a pre-college program called Upward Bound that my kids were in when I was a student, and I also drove for them. So I still had a lot of opportunities that I was able to teach and be around the kids. I drug my kids everywhere, even though I was married, my husband worked like a second shift, so to a point I was still a-- single parent, and it's like, nope, here you go, we're going here, we are going there. And so I still kind of had the best of, I made the best of what I could. That I still taught. A lot of the students thought craft should be an easy thing. But you really have to use a lot of math and different things. We did anywhere from making macramé necklaces to-- scrapbooking and basket weaving and I had my daughter would come in, and she helped teach afterwards when she graduated and she was a counselor for the program and I had a an athlete that took it. And we're weaving a small basket, 'I can't do this'. Well until you get it up to about this[shows fingers, 2 inches apart] pieces [motions with arms going everywhere] and I my daughter is just like, 'keep going, [Chim??]. Keep going. It'll come together'. And then once she got up that far, it gets easier. And she's like, 'I made this'. Yep. But it's just like you being out running, you can't quit. And so it was fun, but they thought it was going to be, oh, this will be easy. Well, no, you still got to do all the projects. So the instructor kind of gave me full rein, But the kids learned a lot. They--I enjoyed it. But I, because my daughter was. And it—both kids went through, but I started—because I was a student at the university, I had a geography class and we had to drive a van. Well, they needed drivers. I had my van license because of the class. Kari's like, my mom has a van license for the university, so I drove for them for like ten years. Um, but-- You know, all of that kind of plays in with each other's. I was still with the Guard, that they knew that I had to be gone for different things. I worked various jobs, and being a National Guard soldier is not as easy, or even a reserve soldier, is not easy as you think, because you have to maintain your family life, your professional career, and your military career. And sometimes they blend. Sometimes they don't. So I mean you stay very active and very busy and you make things work and--
01:37:25O'SULLIVAN: So you said Rene was working second shift, what was he doing?
01:37:28PORTER: He-- worked for Menards for about a year and then ended up in Menominee with the Badger Ironworks, which is an iron foundry that was family owned. And he was one of their mechanics/electricians. And he worked for them until they closed. So he was there for close to 20 years.
01:37:49O'SULLIVAN: And then what year did you graduate from UW?
01:37:53PORTER: I graduated in 2007.
01:37:57O'SULLIVAN: And then did you use that voc rehab degree?
01:38:02PORTER: I used, so with, I ended up with disability with the VA, and rather than use my GI bill, I went through with voc rehab, and they paid for me to go to school. And my kids weren't, my daughter was in high school, my son was in middle school, and they would go down there with me and I said, here, how are you going to pay for school? Because being a student, I really couldn't. But my voc rehab, with the job I did with the Department of Veteran Affairs, technically I was reviewing pension claims, which is kind of a welfare type program that the VA has. So I did the majority of everything except for compensation claims through the Pension Center in St. Paul.
01:38:57O'SULLIVAN: Was that a civilian job?
01:38:59PORTER: That was my civilian job. But I was-- I got the job in August of 2007. I graduated that May. I can remember I had been over there for an interview. I interviewed for two different jobs for them. The bridge on 35 collapsed on one of the days—I was already back over here, but the bridge on 35—collapsed on one those days that I was over there for an interview. But I got that job and started over there, and it got to be too much with the travel that way. And then my once a month down to McCoy. I already had, what 25 years in that when I went in in that September 'cause they're like no you gotta do this and you gotta do that, and I just started like two weeks and I'm like I can't do this. I request to retire after this date. So I gave myself a year to transition and called my husband and my daughter and my daughter started balling, 'but mom you love it you love it'. I said yeah but my body can't handle it anymore. It just got to be too much and um but I loved what I did, no matter what my job was.
01:40:22O'SULLIVAN: What was that year like when you knew your life would be shifting a little bit?
01:40:28PORTER: It was sad, but a lot of things had changed, that it wasn't the same. And when you talk to recruiters when you're in, that when it changes for you and it's no longer fun, it's time to get out. And that's kind of what it had. I missed my kids that I work, I missed, I missed my military family. But I was able to keep in touch. I continued to help with the family support program here with Wisconsin and went back to my unit and was their family support coordinator. I also helped them when I was still in the unit. That last year, my one stipulation to my supervisors, I was a unit historian. And I had started taking pictures with the field artillery unit when they would do live fires. I said I want to go out on every live fire, and they start like from March, September, October that they would go out because they're training. And so I got to go and take photos of all that.
01:41:37O'SULLIVAN: I want to circle back when Renee retired, was that a big shift as well or because you were still in, it wasn't as prominent?
01:41:47PORTER: We technically got out the same day, but he had more leave to be able to, he was up here looking for a place for us to stay, but I was still doing like the last couple of weeks of my stuff before I moved up. So it was, yeah, what are we going to do? It was a big transition, it did help that I took the buyout and got a lump sum. That we didn't have to worry about where money was going to come from until that first check came in until--
01:42:22O'SULLIVAN: And I'm not sure we actually went over, then what was the process like when you moved here and then you joined the Guard, right?
01:42:32PORTER: Yep. So, I really had no clue necessarily with the guard, so it was learning. I was able, they wanted me to, they were also teaching the truck driver course and they wanted me help with that and I didn't feel comfortable with that because I had not ever been to that school. But they were willing to bring me on and help with other things that I knew how to do. So I was able to do that until I-- You know, I did a couple of weeks here or there until I found a full-time job, and then I still helped do extra weekends and different things when they needed help with different stuff. And that's how I ended up the Military Academy, their training unit, and so we constantly had--
01:43:20O'SULLIVAN: when was that, you started there in '99 or before?
01:43:24PORTER: Actually in '98, I was over there doing extra weekends that didn't interfere with my drill duty with the 1158th. And then they offered me a position with the general studies and I was working with officer candidates where I had also done those type of, it's different on active duty, but I had done their packets in order to send off to the Department Army. So I kind of knew the process, it was just a little different, but I knew the documents I was looking at and worked with them with the officer candidate program and then switched over to where I was reviewing and making sure all our instructors had all the documents they needed in order to be an instructor. And then I switched over to the human resources office and was in charge of the different awards, whether it was a state award or federal type award. And, trained all my girls on, or all my lower enlisted how to do it, and maintained what kind of came and went during drill weekends. But I also did a lot of the forms for all the, there's a, it's kind of like your graduation certificate and stuff that says what you did while you were in. Each one is kind of unique to the individual from their classes. I typed those up for the different units, and because I had been on active duty more than a lot of the other National Guard in our section, I knew I guess other avenues of the different things. But there again we were all kind of cross-trained to know how to do each other's jobs so that you could help when they came in. So I did a lot of that training, I was an equal opportunity representative for the unit for quite a few years. But at one point they asked me to help give some of the classes because I had been a representative for longer than what some of the advisors had been advisors for that. So I had a lot of unique opportunities to still do teaching just in a different way. Um, and I-- Took advantage of that. The last five years I want to say I was in, I did extra weekends helping the Chaplain Corps. They did marriage enrichment classes and so I got to go to Niagara Falls for a week to learn to be an instructor for that. I did help teach a couple of those classes but for the most part I was like the administrative help. I typed their certificates, I gave the instructors what they needed and kept things. I took pictures, we took a couple pictures and that would go on their certificate. Um, but I got to travel, not being from Wisconsin, I got to travel all over the state of Wisconsin and see, uh, the diversity of this. And I got go to Door County every year. So I was loving, I was lovin' it. Even though it was in the off season, I'll go to Door County any day. [O'Sullivan laughs] Um, so yeah, I, I go with the National Guard, I got to do a lot of unique opportunities. Not just my two days a month, two weeks out of the year. I think I averaged, for some years, probably more than six months on different types of orders helping out. So I helped the head chaplain with a lot of that. I did it more than the chaplain's assistants that were here. So I even helped that after I retired. I didn't-- It was a hard transition to just totally step away from everything I had been doing.
01:47:15O'SULLIVAN: Right. Do you have any names of people that you really connected with over that time or that you're still in touch with?
01:47:23PORTER: Yeah, there's a lot with the National Guard that I can give you names. But I can say that I really felt, it was probably four or five years ago now, my best friend's son was going to be deployed, and I went to their deployment ceremony in Menominee. And because of the different things I have done, my name was known, even though I was, I considered myself a transplant with the national guard, I wasn't part of the good old boys' system. I came in from active duty from another state, is Joni Mathers, who was a general, came up and gave me a hug, that, and knew who I was and called me by names, and pretty much everybody that was at that head table, I had worked with at some point and got hugs. And it was like I made a difference, I made an impact, and that means volumes for me is when she did that. But there's a group of us that we still get in touch, we're on Facebook, I have a lot of, I think all the kids that work for me, under me, a lot of my field artillery guys. They were family. I mean I was, my license plate reads Sergeant Mom, and that's what they called me a lot. As I took care of my kids. You had to learn to take care of yourself, and know the regulations, but I made sure to take of a lot the guys that I got to know. And, the two supervisors, or technically three supervisors I had towards the end, we still get together at least like once or twice a year. It doesn't mean that we don't, you know, we text and keep in touch, but--
01:48:58O'SULLIVAN: What are their names?
01:49:01PORTER: Margaret [Deal??], Mary Ann [McMillan-Yurel??], and Sherry Olson. We still, we meet like once a year at least for lunch and just talk. Um, but-- Like I said, all my clerks that I had at one point, I have on Facebook, I run into them every now and then.
01:49:26O'SULLIVAN: So you worked for the Department of Veteran Affairs doing pension claims for a little while before you retired, and then you continued with the VA?
01:49:36PORTER: Yep, for 17 and a half years.
01:49:38O'SULLIVAN: And you talked a little bit about how, you know, even Kari was like so shocked that you were going to leave the military. Can you talk a little bit more about, like-- What that transition was like, how it felt.
01:49:59PORTER: Kind of surreal, because at that point I'd been in the military more than I'd been a civilian. Just, I gave myself that year in order to transition. I didn't want to just do it overnight. I needed to tell myself I'm done. This is what I have to do. This was to this point that I have this. It won't be that long and I'll be, you know, I made my goal, I retired and that was at one point my goal. My goal was to get my 20 years while I lasted more than that. It was sad, it was. I didn't miss all the hustle and bustle, I missed the people. I missed all the faces and I think that's why I went back as a family support person. As I could still go down there and see the faces but I had a whole different role.
01:50:55O'SULLIVAN: RIght. Having such a long career and working with so many different people, is there a specific unit that you feel the most connected with?
01:51:05PORTER: Probably more with the Wisconsin Military Academy. I think I spent the most amount of time there. Active duty wise, there's still a couple of people from when I was at Fort Jackson at that first one, made good friends, but there again, that connection was really hard. From that first AIT though with the medic, I still have, Mary and I still connected, and when I first started with the VA, she worked at the hospital. She's in Indianapolis. We could email each other because we were on the same network. The kid that I said was my brother's best friend, his mom worked for the VA back in the day. He started working for the V.A. nack I think about the same time I did. I reached out to him via-- with the VA. So, I mean, I've made a lot of different connections with different people. You run into different people, um. When I was at Fort Sill there was three of us from Nebraska. And my dad's unit, when he was an active reservist, he was out in western Nebraska. And one of the gals that I was stationed with, she read his last name, which was my last name at that time. And was like, did you ever have a kid that was at Fort Sill? And so you realize it's a small world. So he was out there inspecting her unit and he asked. But I think I took unique things that I learned over the years.
01:52:44O'SULLIVAN: You say Cooney was your name?
01:52:46PORTER: Cooney was my maiden name
01:52:47O'SULLIVAN: Cooney was your maiden name when you entered service.
01:52:49PORTER: Yep. And then it was Cruz with my first husband. And then I switched it to Porter when I got married the second time. And so growing up, or my kids growing up, my daughter was a Cooney and my son was a Cruz and I was Porter. I was called, I answered to all of them. You know, we just, but there's times my daughter, okay, I need you to take, my son played hockey, I needed to take him. I gotta leave at this time because I'm going to the hockey game and I would zoom and I'd be in uniform. One of the practices my son was at, it was a dry land practice, so they were in doing different things and the kids are doing pushups. I'm like, boys, these aren't pushups. [O'Sullivan laughs] and I got down and did pushups and I'm, like, oh my God, I was so sore afterwards. But., you still got down and did a push-up and just, you know, they would see me in uniform, so they knew. And doing this whole I'm not invisible, it does count, because I've been places and it's like you go for dinner on Veterans Day, oh so we have one veteran, no. You have, there's three of us, we're all veterans.
01:54:05O'SULLIVAN: Do you remember when you started thinking of yourself as a veteran?
01:54:10PORTER: I'd say more so in probably about the last 15 years. It was never, like when I was on active duty it was, you didn't have as much that they did for veterans. It's really come about more probably in the last 20 years that you saw it. But starting to stand up proud and say, no, I served. I gave you my time. And you know, when you said squat, you squatted. You did what you were told to do and you, and yes, I butted some heads throughout my career, but I stood my ground and I knew my regulations. And I know, for the most part, where to go look for things. And we did things the right way. We didn't always. And so I butted heads with a few commanders and it's like, no, this is the way the regulation reads. This is the it's done. You're not, you know, you don't get this award because you don't qualify for it, you know. And they got mad at me, and it's like, sorry, but it's here in black and white. It's kind of what I taught, I call them my girls because mostly I had girls. I did have, two guys that worked under me, but it's, like, no, this is how you do it, this is how you want to go about it. Back at Fort Sill when we would have to do what we call CQ, and you had to be up all night and you had to have one other clerk with you, my husband would always bring me Church's chicken and I hated, it was like eating grease and I'm like, we're done with this. I would talk to the kid that I had working with me and I'd say, what do we want to eat? We'd throw a roast in the crock pot and we fed everybody. We would do something, but they're like, why do you do this? I said, because when you get where I'm at, I want to see you do the same thing. So, it was way before ever pay it forward. But remember what it was like when you were that lower enlisted and you were lonely and you were tired and you just needed some comfort from home. So to put a roast and the potatoes and stuff in a crock pot, let it cook. When I was at the reception station, I had all the kids from the barracks, they were down there eating with us. They were, you know, doing that. But it was it was to pay it forward and you took care of those that were under you and I guess from the-- Leadership school that I went to that first one is you get to know your soldiers and know what they're about and that is something that I tried to teach both my kids In that pre-college program my daughter was in, the director was from Kenya and he was very strict on certain rules. I said take a step back Think about what he had to do and he went to a private school and that that is what he's doing with you guys. She was one of his favorites, so she got away with a little more, but it made her stop and think about things. And that's something with my 26 years I got to meet people from all over the world. I learned to cook some of the best fried chicken from a friend of mine that we were stationed together in Germany. She grew up in South Carolina. The way I make my chili and I win awards for is from somebody else I met at Fort Sill. We combined what we did. I don't eat hot chili, but I make it and I win awards. But you just, you learned so much from people from all over and the diversity, I tried to teach that to my kids and my grandkids. And I will say that my heart sunk. We were at the American Legion in Onalaska and they have a nice little statue outside and I'm outside explaining it to my grandson probably about five years ago, so he was like eight or nine. This is for fallen soldiers. Well, they were gonna die anyway, Grandma, and it's just like, Caleb, you're missing the point! [both laughing] But, I mean, just those things that you can you can say. And I remember they were talking about the month of the military child, and I never thought of it as being that. But I was like, oh, wait a minute, that was me back in the day, and i did all the little things for my dad. For him to go away for those two weeks. And then he became AGR, but I was already long gone. But every year he was gone from closer to three weeks because he was always advanced party. So I'd always make his cookies and different things to send with him to eat while he was gone. To this day, I'm still taking care of soldiers when I hear there's somebody and you need a care package. I don't hesitate. You know, you just continue to support those. And working at the VA, I've learned how to, picked up on the different things to say: I can't represent you, but it doesn't mean I can't read your documentation to see if there's a way that maybe we can help you increase your disability or maybe you're not using the right keywords. Kind of like with writing a resume during class with going with Revoke Rehab, you're learning to write resumes for people, and it's like, okay, last year I'm like reading it. My best friend's telling me, I think he's getting screwed. He's got this, this, and this. And I said, right as I said right here, it says because you're not doing this. You're telling me you're doing this? You need to go back in and tell him. And he got his disability increased. But it's knowing, and even when I was, whatever branch, it's it's knowing what's out there. And the one thing I can say I walked away is you always ask. The worst I can say is no. There's always an exception to policy. So you just stay focused. I mean, I had many setbacks throughout the different times of my life and the years. You put one foot in front of the other and you just keep going. And it's not that you learn to beat the system, but you learn work with the system.
02:00:17O'SULLIVAN: You said that in the last 15 years, you started feeling more like a veteran. Do you have other feelings that changed about being a veteran since you retired?
02:00:31PORTER: I think because a lot of times I look at, like I said, they looked at, it was just the guys. And it's like, no, there's just as many of us females now that we have a voice. And I can say, growing up, I was quite shy at one. And when I went into the military, it's, like, if you don't speak up, you're never gonna be heard. And I spoke up when I needed to speak up and I-- My husband will tell you that I was a pain in the butt that I stuck to my guns and was like, no. I had somebody new come in and I told her how to write the report up and she didn't do it. And he got cussed out. He's like, you need to--no. I told her what needed to be done and she did not do it, she can be the one that goes back and fixes it. I'm not going to fix her mistake. And that's just--nope. I'm more than willing to help you. I'll walk you through it. But you've got to learn, and that's how I learned, is I told you, that old memory writer? There's many times I typed it in there and didn't hit the right button, then I had to re-type it. Or learning computers, the first time I went, eight inch floppy disk, you didn't hit save or you didn't do something right, you had to re-do it. So I mean, I had to learn a lot of the different things, but I'm thankful for everything that I did learn in the military. And where I'm at today with the benefits that I had, it was well worth it.
02:02:01O'SULLIVAN: What are your thoughts on Memorial Day? Do you have anything, any traditions that you do, or any feelings about it?
02:02:08PORTER: I guess I'm with the American Legion. I belong to both the Legion and the Auxiliary. Being a dual member, like right now we're doing our Poppy Drive. I make sure that we remember and express this is for our fallen, they are not forgotten. Veterans Day is about those who served or are serving, and I want to say I believe it's Armed Forces Day for those that are active duty. I'm not ashamed to say that I'm a veteran, I'm not ashamed of what I did. And yesterday I had a doctor's appointment and I made mention about something. And she's like, oh, what branch of service? Because she was a veteran also. So I mean, it's, we're expressing it more and more. But with all the gender roles that we have, I can say I push myself more because I am a smaller female, that it's like I can do what you do. Which might have hurt me in some ways, because you pushed your body and this sixty-some year old body is not what I kind of like it to be anymore. But it doesn't stop me from jumping in the car and doing what I need to do. I'm there to support. I'm there to speak that, no, you might be gone, but you're not forgotten. We remember, you know, with the different memorials, the different things that we have. Eau Claire does Memorial Day Parade. I'm part of the committee that kind of helps with that. I have stayed active with a lot of the different things. When I see something that's wrong, I will stand up and at least speak my thoughts on it. Probably about ten years ago there was our Legion, one of my auxiliary members was in charge. Wisconsin is the only state with the American Legion Auxiliary that has a female veteran, no, homeless female veteran grant coordinator that helps with female veterans in the State of Wisconsin that might be at risk of homeless, or are homeless and need assistance. It's a one-time program that they could get. We put different parameters on the amount of money, but they could money to be able to help, maybe they fell short on their rent and they're way behind, or different things. And she would go to different programs that the VA would put on different things, and they did one on the sexual trauma and stuff. And working at the VA, and just kind of knowing what I know, I spoke up and you had the JAG from Fort McCoy and different things, and they came up to me afterwards and they're like, no, we do that. No you don't. You're missing what I'm saying. And I had to explain it. And she came up, the JAG officer came up to me and was like, that's a very good point, I never thought of it that way. So it's just standing up for-- What's out there, or educating what different programs are out there. So when I seen this come up in La Crosse, I kind of heard about it, this whole project, and it was like, no, I want to be a part of that. I want see this done more. Our auxiliary unit does a program at Christmas, and we have, we invite probably 30 some. We get an average of about 20 veterans. These veterans come together every year. With camaraderie. And we range, we lost our last World War II veteran last year. We had three when I first started going there, they had three World War II veterans. And the camaraderies of these ladies come together and want to see and want to do. We spend a couple thousand dollars, we give them some paper products, you know, hygiene and paper products. Plus we buy it and probably more little trinket type things, but we buy gifts and we give them gifts. It might be gift cards. But if you're struggling, it's just with the committee, which is usually more me and like one other person. If they need help with something, they might get extra, but they're only addressing it with us. And same with the homeless women's veterans. It's only within that committee. And just helping and knowing that you're helping, but that camaraderie of bringing these females together to say, you are important with what you did, is something to me that has been one of the greatest things that I can say. And I don't always look at myself as being one of those in that group until I get with that group. I'm just doing my role of planning it and doing everything, but in the last two years that female homeless woman, I've been in charge of it for the Auxiliary and there's times I want to take that younger veteran's-- Why did you learn how to do common, everyday, take care of your family and your bills. But it's also the way our society is. But to know that I'm helping is what I'm, kind of what I am all about. And even when I was in, it was helping. I will help you, but you gotta help yourself too. And that's, you know, when I left, my kids came up to me and they were like, we miss you, Chrysandra Porter. We miss you. For one, you knew what was going on. But I knew this is Seventh's job. I knew, this is the Seventh job. I knew what the girls' job was, I knew what my job was and, and trained them at least with the basics to know where to start and how to look. And that just, I guess, kind of the way that I was taught with my dad. So, um--
02:08:02O'SULLIVAN: Besides the American Legion and American Legion Auxiliary, are you involved with any other veterans, programs, groups, anything like that?
02:08:12PORTER: I kind of been behind the scenes for the last nine years as I got back into making cards for the Veterans Home in Chippewa Falls for different holidays, but since I retired a year ago from the VA, I go out and help set up their, they have a bingo store once a year where they play bingo and get bingo bucks and we set up. They got clothing, food, hygiene, the set and everything. We set up there big area and I've going out there and helping. I do cards like 75 a pop for a lot of the major holidays throughout the year and drop them off. And been helping they do a happy hour, and we will sponsor a happy hour and I go out and I help serve with the happy hour. And I finally join them as a volunteer. And so, It hasn't worked out that I've been able to go help with some other things, but so that I can help.
02:09:14O'SULLIVAN: How did it feel when you retired from the Veterans Affairs Office?
02:09:21PORTER: It was a relief.
02:09:25PORTER: Uh-huh.
02:09:25PORTER: They were more quantity and not quality with the work, and I was always taught quality over quantity. So that was a hard adjustment. But I was ready to retire. I kind of woke up January of last year and said, I can't do this anymore. I just, I was having some other health issues and that, and I'm like, I don't want to throw it, you know, 17 years down the drain. I was going on a cruise with my mom and I printed off all the documents that I would need to do and was reading through them and beginning my process and then I just kind of picked a date. And so beginning of May last year I retired from there and--
02:10:08O'SULLIVAN: Sounds like you didn't slow down very much though.
02:10:10PORTER: No, I'm probably more active now, but I'm doing things that I couldn't necessarily do when I was working, because they were all done during the day. Where now I can go do that. I also go out, I help cater at the Legion, so I help our bar manager with catering for different events. And I'm scrolling through, I used to work with the Trinity Equestrian Center with some of the horse therapy back in the day. And then my life, because of traveling for work and different things, got a little busy. They had that they needed volunteers to cook like lunches for their summer programs. And I'm like, I can do that. Yeah, it's not actually cooking. It's like heating up your chicken nuggets and french fries and not the actual cooking, cooking that I'm used to. But I enjoy that too because one of our female veterans that comes to our Christmas program, I believe she was probably getting therapy. And so we kind of looked at each other and knew I had also seen her like Wisconsin puts on the female veteran retreat at Trinity and I had seen her at that but I couldn't remember her name, but I knew the face. And so we would end up talking while she was waiting for her therapist and that of just BSing on different things. I had stuff in the oven where I was, you know, in the few days I was out there and-- I did come up to her at Christmastime and said, yes, I didn't want to say something. I wanted to keep that respect, you know. And so it was just kind of neat that you ran into somebody somewhere else. But yeah, we're always trying to do different things and make things work, and you kind of know where you can go and get things. But just knowing that you're there to help and seeing. But if you need the help, they've also been there, too. But knowing the resources in order to, whether it's relaying it for the different problems that the men might have or even with the females. So it's just knowing the different avenues. Working for the VA, I learned a lot. I know a lot of people all over. I'm not afraid to ask questions. And you understand when the system's broke and trying to figure out how to fix it.
02:12:36O'SULLIVAN: So what do you think your life would have been like if you never joined the military?
02:12:40PORTER: I wouldn't be sitting here. I wouldn't be where I am today with the retirement that I have. I don't know exactly what I would have been doing. I-- It became my life. You know, when I came back, the two guys that I worked with at the luncheonette doing food service their dad was the owner of it that, 'uh oh we never thought you were going to make it'. It's mind over matter, you get it done. And they were Air Force, and I was Army. It's a whole different, we were trained, completely different, it's a whole different ballgame with each branch of service. I can say that my step-daughter got screwed over when she went to join--
02:13:27PORTER: This is Renee's daughter? And I cussed my husband out. That's not what she wanted, that's not why is she. She never heard it, but it was me that she got screwed over by a recruiter. She ended up, she was a German national because his second wife was German. And she signed up for something that you had to be an American citizen for. And so she got the run around. I'm like, no, you tell her that she needs to go for what she wanted. She wanted to do nursing and she ended up being a psych tech. I was like, no, you tell her she needs to go for what she wanted. The ball game is now in her court that this is more of the field that she wants. And so she did, you know, she got into the field she initially wanted. I look back and it's like, yeah, I could have been a nurse but that would have been a whole different story. And even when I went active duty I would have in a whole different place had I been a medic.
02:14:23O'SULLIVAN: Right.
02:14:28PORTER: So--but I use my medic because I help teach with combat lifesaver. I played medic when we had road marches because I had the training, so it comes in handy.
02:14:38O'SULLIVAN: You talked about it a little bit when you saw the announcement for the I Am Not Invisible event in La Crosse, but what motivated you to participate in this interview?
02:14:53PORTER: I had seen it, but never really knew what the program was because I had seen you know other pictures like via social media and that didn't know what it was so when I seen, it my daughter lives in Holman, so La Crosse is nothing out of the way for me. I'm to the point I have a granddaughter and I want her to know, no matter what you do you're not invisible you are here. So when i did the, I'm like, I'm going to do this, so I told my daughter. Of course she's busy with four kids, but I said will you, I said, she gave me the card for the reception. I said would you and Isabel go with me? So I told my daughter and my granddaughter so that she can see it means something. We were all female veterans. We were all-- now what course she plans on going on can be something different but to know, and to instill that just because you're a female does not mean you have to stay in that stereotypical role and do what-- What used to, you know, we have broke so many different barriers in the last 30 years, it's not even funny. But my daughter, even growing up, she would come up with, no, females can't do that. Where did you get that from, you know? Because growing up I walked the fields with my dad, but when I turned 12 he asked me if I wanted to shoot a gun, and I said, yeah, no you're a girl. Well, now I've shot bigger guns than most people because I shot all those howitzers that I took pictures of. You know, I took advantage. I bought a digital camera. I said, can I go play? Of course, artillery was like, yes. So I took, I have thousands of pictures of the howitzers being shot, not only with that MOS of the actual gun shooting, I went up with the guys, I don't remember the MOS now, that give them the court. These guys tell these guys where to shoot. I sat up with them, so you're up watching where the rounds are coming in and exploding. But, both my husbands were artillery, so I mean, artillery kind of became part of my life. And because of the support that I gave them, the commander at one point awarded me the Molly Pitcher Award, which is for those doing support for their artillery units. And my husband is a St. Barbara's award member from when he was on active duty. So it was a great honor to be given that and something that I hold dearly. So--
02:17:51O'SULLIVAN: Circling back to when you went to the I am not invisible reception with your daughter and granddaughter, what was that like? What was that night like? What did that feel like?
02:18:03PORTER: It was exciting. I actually saw three, or two people that I had served with in the guard. Technically it was three because of one is a dual military and her husband was there. So it was neat being able to see others that I have served with, but to see all of those women together there again as a camaraderie. We all served. We all had a different purpose. We all did something for this country to make it what it is. It just keeps expanding and growing with what roles they let women do into today's society. There is no real boundaries. And so to be able to share that with my granddaughter, I know that she's 10. I know it all didn't sink in. Someday, some part of that is going to sink in. I think it meant more to my daughter than what she's going to say to me, that I made her part of it. She grew up with the military. My son, you don't see so much or hear so much about it, but they did the National Guard does a youth camp. My daughter could have killed me the first time I dropped her off. [both laughing] I had no idea what it was exactly, but she loved it. And the kids went throughout high school she went back and was a counselor uh-- I went with him a few years and took pictures and followed the kids around in different things of all the different ages and took pictures uh-- But they made it, the military at one point because she had done so many camps made her in charge of the group and she's like 'I'm not military why am i in charge?' [both laughing] But when she got to to high school and she had band, she loved it because she already knew how to march from being in that. And there was a couple of the instructors that really motivated those kids that they absolutely loved it. But she could have killed me the first time I dropped her off it's like, what are you doing you'll have fun I'll see you on Sunday. But she went back I think there's only one year that she missed she went back every year and then like I said she went back as a counselor. So it impacted them, just to know parts of the military. I think it was a family day, I took her and the neighbor down. And of course, when you're training officer candidates, you've got someone. It's almost like being back in basic training to a point. They're yelling at you to do this, this, this, and this. Well, the girls were putting some packets together, old school, you had an assembly line of like 10 pages, and they're down there. Her and Lindsay come up, 'Mom, Mom, they were down there yelling at them. Yeah, that's part of the military. That's part what you get used to and what you do. So I mean, it's just to be able to share some of that, that she got to see some of it. Teaching our kids with the National Guard camp, it just shows you part of what mom, dad, aunt, uncle, grandma, grandpa did. And it's changed over the years, but it's still the basic. It's still getting down to the basics of what we learned. It teaches you a lot of discipline. It teaches so much more than what you think at the time. But it really set me up with how I handled things in my civilian life and took all those civilian jobs probably in a different aspect than what other people might have done in those civilian, you know, that had it before me or after me. But I took my line of duty when I was in Voc Rehab doing workman's comp and said, no, this is what you do for the military. But trying to explain in that civilian setting what's available for the militaries. So if you're working with someone that comes into that office and you're working with somebody that's military, there might be other avenues for you to look for assistance. So I actually took my line of duty from when I got injured, blacked out all my pertinent information and said, this is what it looks like. And I'm grateful for UW-Stout and Dr. Louie for letting me do that. But he's like, no, this is interesting because we don't know anything about this. So it's just, it's trying to educate the civilian and what the military does, and vice versa because some of those, even though you're a National Guard, Reserve for active duty, no matter what branch, there's some of those things that go on. I assisted my son-in-law's uncle. He had a gal that he was in the Navy Reserves. And she got injured. I'm like, no, she's entitled to this. I don't know the Navy. Thank God for Google. So I printed off what she needed to do so that they could work, because she got injured on her drill weekend, but it was affecting, She was becoming homeless, She couldn't work, her foot, she was going to be kicked out. No, she's entitled to all of this and so I printed it all off and he was a firefighter so our hours didn't quite cross. Shoved it in this mailbox, sent him a text, hey what you need is in the in the mailbox and he's like thank you, you helped. Because I think I don't think we could help her in Wisconsin like with the female veteran that I talked about. She was in Illinois, so it-- we couldn't help with some of those avenues, but it's just knowing and learning and knowing some of the key aspects to continue and help because of the HR that I did was so vast that you just keep helping. That, I at the reception I even asked the CVSO there in La Crosse because I'd like to, I need to go talk to my CVSO for some other things and I'm going to say I want to do this in our area. Because I can almost get you 20-some females that haven't done it, and we keep getting more. Just to spread the word.
02:24:19O'SULLIVAN: Right, yeah absolutely did you want to talk any more about your injury like when it happened or what happened?
02:24:29PORTER: I had my first disability with the VA is I ended up with bursitis in both my hips. I had it on active duty, it went away. I went to go to a school. I missed the run for the PT test by 45 seconds. But as I sat there I felt that feeling in my hips that I had when I first got the stuff on active duty and that's when it was finally diagnosed. Well, they didn't do my line of duty. I was getting my bills. I knew the system from being on active duty is what needed to be done, and I fought for that. I, last week, got awarded, I am a 100% service-connected disability. I have had to fight for it, but I have a lot of different things wrong in my body. I'm just thankful that I documented it when I was on active-duty and I could relate it back. It's been a long struggle. And it probably hurt more that I worked for them and knew the system, but because of that, I fight for it. But that was probably one of the harder things is learning to deal with the disability. Minor other than, you know, I was service connected for my breast cancer. But-- That is the only one that is physical. It's like the majority of us, you might not see it. It might be mental. It might like mine is my hips, so you don't see it, you see me walk normal, but it causes me from not sleeping. I can't run, I can't-- So that was a hard thing, was learning how to deal with a disability. And I had a profile that I walked instead of run than the last portion of my career because of my hips. That was not easy. That walk, two and a half miles in, I don't remember exactly how many minutes, that was not that easy. That you almost wanna run and you can't run. You wanna do that jog and you cant do that, you've gotta-- that was hard. And so it's just been, this is wrong and this is wrong. And I didn't give up the fight. I would re-file and I would re-file. It's finding the right words that I finally gave up and I went to a CVSO and said. My body's broke. I'm looking for my last 10 percent. And I got an email last week with the last claim that I had that I made it to 100 percent.
02:27:07O'SULLIVAN: And you worked so unbelievably hard for that.
02:27:11PORTER: I, I had to It's just a relief knowing that I won't be a burden to my kids, but it also, I can move forward and know that I have, I'm covered. It's not that my struggle is over. My struggle is just, it's in the midst of what it is.
02:27:34O'SULLIVAN: When was your cancer diagnosis?
02:27:37PORTER: I had breast cancer in 2017, and I found out two weeks ago I have cancer again.
02:27:44O'SULLIVAN: So sorry to hear that.
02:27:46PORTER: Huh?
02:27:47O'SULLIVAN: I'm so sorry to hear that.
02:27:49PORTER: We're dealing with it. We have surgery on the 19th. So I've been an emotional wreck [both sniffling] but my granddaughter, all my two oldest grandkids, helped me get through it the first time. I have four beautiful grandkids. Love them to death. They're my life. I knew there was something wrong, I already had a doctor's appointment, brought it up. Had a procedure, I went down and saw my mom two weeks ago. I was at Mayo yesterday, I have to go to Rochester. I had cancer in my uterus, well, I had a ruptured uterus when I had my son, it's like, I want to say, why did you take it 35 years ago? I also had a lump in my breast when I was pregnant with my son and we tested and different things. I did a breast reduction. I don't know where that lump went. I had a mammogram in August of 2016 in November. I felt something weird. I had my daughter look at it. I'm like, I don't mean to be weird, but does this feel different? And she's like, yeah. So I was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer in January of 2017. And I chose my lump 35 years ago was on my right side. My cancer came in on my left side. It took me five years before I'm like, what are we gonna do, tell me no? No, it gave me the majority of my disability. We went in for a couple other things and like I said, I got 100% going forward. It's a relief on me. I'm not gonna complain. We've had TRICARE since my husband retired off of active duty, so I have great healthcare. And I kind of get to choose and I have used Mayo for at least the last 15 years. I had switched from Marshfield and back and forth, but I love my Mayo Clinic like there's no tomorrow. I will get through this too. That's just, I'm a fighter. I'm not gonna give up. I was down visiting my mom when I found out that I had it. I had had a procedure just before I left and my mom and I had been doing some traveling and we didn't do it this year because she thought she was gonna have a knee surgery. Just kind of looked at her and said I believe I got cancer again and so we're dealing with it.
02:30:29O'SULLIVAN: Where is she living now?
02:30:30PORTER: She is back in Nebraska for the summer, but she lives down in Mission, Texas. So I jumped in my car and watched my grandson play soccer, this was his first year, and I had one winter coat. We got the other winter coat in my car. [both laughing] I was like, thank God I'm leaving for Texas, thank God, I'm leaving for Texas. And I spent a good week down there with her. And then she was, she wants her car with her and she decided that I would take her back to Nebraska and I'm kind of like, that's not on my route, but I guess I'm just going to do one big loop. So I got back last Friday and knew I had this and was actually looking forward to it and yeah, I'm just kind of happy to be a historian in the family that my story is out there. Yeah.
02:31:26O'SULLIVAN: Yeah, is there anything else about your story that you'd like to tell us about, anything we didn't cover?
02:31:34PORTER: I think we got a lot of it. I guess there's always, you think of the little things here or there when you get done, but--
02:31:41O'SULLIVAN: You had 26 years, so there's a lot of stories. And then that wasn't the end of your service by any means.
02:31:47PORTER: There's a lot of stories. I guess my only other thing is, I will get for you, it's just kind of been a doctor's appointments lately. I have quite a few years of photos that I took when I was with the National Guard. I'm going to put them on a flash drive and I'm gonna send them to you and I will try to go through and label some of them if I know who's in them. Most of it's when I was with Wisconsin Military Academy because like I said I went out with, I became the historian. Nobody wanted to take pictures. I love taking my pictures, but I also love it because I didn't have to stand at parade rest for like an hour and a half. I could move around and take pictures. So some of it are change of commands and promotions, but it's showing the military history, and I went out for quite a few different live fires. So you have three or four different types of guns that we shot here at Fort McCoy from different positions. Like I said, I followed a couple of guys, but some of those guys, like I said were my family that I still have on Facebook I see. I've seen their kids grow up. They're graduating from high school and I'm like, oh my god, I'm old. But I want to share that. You guys do, I want to give it back so that you guys can share. You use it for whatever you want, but I will try to label when, where, and what. If there's people in it and I can remember who they are, I will try to label that for you, so I want to give back. And you might be hearing from me because I got to make an appointment to go see my CVSO and try to get this project going in other places. I just I thank whoever started this for doing it because some of the biggest inspirations, and I would I met a couple of World War II female veterans and I said, thank you, because you're the one who started it to give me a path to follow. And they're like, but I didn't do nothing. Yes, you did. You had enough guts back in the 40s to do it, and not everybody can do it. So yes, I'm very thankful for what they did, when they did it. And I'm thankful that I've got to meet a few different ones, so--
02:34:14O'SULLIVAN: Well, thank you so much for the time we spent here today. It is May 7th, 2026, and this concludes the interview with Chrys Porter.
