MILITARY WOMEN AVIATORS ORAL HISTORY INITIATIVE Interview No. 6 Participant Edited Transcript

Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) Date: July 23, 2019 By: Monica Smith Place: National Air and Space Museum Director’s Conference Room 601 Independence Avenue SW Washington, D.C. 20024

SMITH: My name is Monica Smith. I’m a Smithsonian Institution, National Air and Space Museum, consultant in Washington, D.C. Today is July 23, 2019, and I have the pleasure of speaking with Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army, retired. This interview is being taped as part of the Military Women Aviators Oral History Initiative. It will be archived at the Smithsonian Institution. Welcome, COL Murphy.

MURPHY: Thank you.

SMITH: Would you please state your full name and your occupation?

MURPHY: I was born Sally Dale Stonecipher. I was married for a short period of time, so I was a Woolfolk for a while, and now I’m a Murphy. So it’s Sally D. Murphy.

SMITH: And you were in the Army. Can you tell me your dates of service, please?

MURPHY: Yes. I joined the Army in 1972, at the end of the year, but reported for duty in January of ʼ73 at the Women’s Army Corps School at Anniston, Alabama, at the time. And so that was January, then. And we did a short course there, and we were sent off to the regular Army branches that were essentially the men’s branches of the Army and were trained. I went to the Military Intelligence Corps. I was supposed to be trained as a cryptographer. So we went out to Fort Huachuca. There were about five women from my class who went into Intelligence. And we went out to Fort Huachuca and we studied there. And everything was changing in the Army at the time. You know, it was — we didn’t know it, but it was a variant of the Women’s Army Corps, you know, they were starting to phase from the women’s separate service, so to speak, into integrating us fully into the Army. It was also the first military intelligence basic courses, so we were in the first classes of that. And so everything seemed new and fresh and whatever. And little did I know, when I was in Fort Huachuca, the Stars and Stripes newspaper had a very small article in it that said that the Army had opened up the field of aviation to women pilots. And I thought: wow, this could be interesting. You know, I’d met my husband1 by then, and we were getting to know each other. And he’d flown in Vietnam. I’d spent all of my college and early adulthood years watching Vietnam on television, and helicopters were a central theme of that video coverage. And I thought: well, you know, everybody seems to fly. I might as well, too. And I applied, and that opened up a whole ʼnother venue. So at Fort Huachuca, I waited. I had to get a flight physical, pass the aptitude test, and all those things. And so I was there for a couple of — three extra months while the Army sorted this out. The Army’s intention was that in the first class, there would be three women, and we were all three going to come from Fort Huachuca, from an Intelligence background. At that time, the Intelligence flew — the Intelligence services flew airplanes, and we did signals and collection, and imagery and all sorts of intelligence operations. But they were on an airplane basis. But at that time also, the Army no longer trained pilots just to be airplane pilots. You had to go through the rotary wing training program

1 Daniel J. Murphy. MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 first, because that was, and is, and continues to be, the main interest of the Army, is in helicopters. And so they were going to send three of us to that course, and then we go to airplane school, and we’d be three Military Intelligence-rated officers for aviation. And it just turned out that the other two women — one got delayed, and one decided not to go. So that’s why I ended up in the position of where I was the first, and only, woman in that class. It would have been nice if there had been someone who you got along with. It wouldn’t have been helpful at all if you went with somebody who you didn’t get along with, but if it had been another woman in the class, a couple of women, that would have been nicer, I think, better. But as it turns out, it worked out just fine.

SMITH: That’s great. Let’s back up a little bit and find out how you got there.

MURPHY: Okay.

SMITH: So can you tell me where you were born, and —

MURPHY: Yes. I was born in Wichita, Kansas. And my father was a textbook

[5:00] salesman — schoolbooks. And my mother was a housewife, although she’d been trained as a cosmetologist. And I have an older sister, Susan, who I always pull out and wave at people when they get all overly interested in being the first woman Army aviator and ask about that. I always say, “Yeah, but you should meet my sister, because she’s a lumberjack.” [laughs] She’s not really a lumberjack, but she’s spent all her time in the lumber business and owns some lumber companies and all that. So I guess it was just in our makeup to go out and try new things, you know?

SMITH: That’s—alright…

MURPHY: We grew up in Prairie Village—Overland Park.2 Went to high school there.

SMITH: Okay.

MURPHY: I did all of my schooling there. We were fortunate that — in a way, because we didn’t go to the same schools, you know? The suburbs were growing so quickly that — she was a couple of years ahead of me — that she’d go to one high school, and I’d go to the other high school, so it was almost like being an only child, but you had the benefit of having a sibling [laughs] at home. So we grew up, and we grew up in an environment that was very interesting. My mother, if she’d grown up in a different period, would have done wonderful and wild things. She would have aspired to and achieved great heights. But she grew up in a time when opportunities weren’t available to women. And my father and mother both encouraged my sister and I to do whatever we wanted to do. And there was plenty of praise, plenty of boundaries, and we grew up — I think she would tell you also — we grew up in an environment where we never doubted that we could do whatever we wanted to do, because that’s the way we had been raised. When people probe, you know, where I was excluded from things, you know, when I was treated badly and rejected, I can come up with like three, you know? In high school, I couldn’t get in the drafting department. I couldn’t sign up for the drafting courses, because they were closed to men. They didn’t have a women’s golf team, although one of my classmates was the state champion golfer — junior

2 Kansas.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 golfer, and — but they didn’t — women couldn’t be on the golf team. And there’s a couple of other little things like that. But I really have to dig.

SMITH: Your classmate — I’m sorry, your classmate, who was a woman?

MURPHY: Yes, my classmate who was a woman was the Kansas state junior golf champion, but she didn’t have a venue in high school to play, which I thought was maybe the biggest. And then of course, none of the sports were open to women. There weren’t any women’s sports. This was way before Title IX. And so we had the drill team and the cheerleading squad, and that’s about as athletic as the women were in organized high-school activities at the time. And I was a cheerleader, and I enjoyed it. And it was wonderful. Went off to college, to Kansas State College of Pittsburg — Pittsburg, Kansas. It’s now Pittsburg State University, I think. Wonderful education. Joined a sorority that I enjoyed until I outgrew it and met lots of good friends. Had a good education.

SMITH: What was your major, your course of--?

MURPHY: I majored in history, and I had a minor in library science. They have both served me well. When I finally retired completely from working for a living, I was more a proofreader/editor for this whole company, because no one can write. No one. [laughs]

SMITH: Tell me about that.

MURPHY: Yeah. So I — you know, it was a good education. It was a good environment. It was Kansas. I mean, it was the ʼ60s. We didn’t have Vietnam protests. We had a whole bunch of men in ROTC. You know, women weren’t allowed, of course. They could be on the drill team, but they weren’t in ROTC. And you know, so we were that throwback, back-woods sort of Kansas stereotypical college, which there were plenty of. They were patriotic and not demonstrating and all that. So that made it a lot easier when I decided — I was in my graduate program, and I decided to join the Army. I made the decision twice. The first time I made it, and people talked me out of it. Yes?

SMITH: Excuse me. I just want to get your parents’ names in there before we move onto the service.

MURPHY: Oh, yeah. Well, my father was Joseph Dale Stonecipher, and my mother is Margaret Louise Douglas Stonecipher.

SMITH: And was anyone else in the military in your family?

MURPHY: My father served in World War II. He had a horrible time getting in the Army because he was colorblind, and he was about 5 foot and a half inches tall. And he had — he had a real struggle, you know, before he could pass all the exams and all that to come in. But he was in World War II. And then

[10:00] in — I’d guess I’d say not really a — well, my aunt was a Marine, but I didn’t know that until, you know, I joined the Army, and then, you know — but she had been a Marine as a young woman during World War II. But then, most of the men — most of the fathers in the neighborhood had served.

SMITH: Right. So what led you to join the Women’s Army Corps — the WAC?

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

MURPHY: You know, the answer to that question changes the older I get. [laughs] I don’t know if I forget or if I put it in a better context. But the context was, when I went to college, my view — and I think the view of a lot of women — was that I needed to be a nurse, a teacher, or some sort of clerical position. That’s what I needed to train to. And they’d just started computers, but at the time, it looked very uninteresting, because it was all punch cards, you know, stacks and decks and sorting, and that sort of thing. And so I was studying history, and I added on library science. And I went for a teaching degree. And I’d had many teachers in my family, and so I thought that’s probably what I’d do. And at the end of the course of instruction, we had in-classroom instruction. So I went back home to where I’d gone to high school and taught for a semester and was painfully aware of the fact that I did not want to be a teacher. Part of that problem was probably because I was only two and a half years older than the people I was teaching. And it was a difficult time, and I was a very serious — and the Vietnam War was going on, and it would come up in studies. And nobody else seemed to care. And I’d look at these 17-, 18-year-old boys and say: you know, you really ought to pay attention to this. [laughs] This could become very interesting to you. And I just got disillusioned. So I go back and do what many people do. You go on for a graduate degree. [laughs] So I got my master’s degree, eventually.

SMITH: In history?

MURPHY: In history, yeah. And so while I studied that, I once again looked into joining the Women’s Army Corps. I had before, and everybody talked me out of it: oh, no. You don’t want to do that. All those women are strange, or you know, no, you don’t want to —

SMITH: Family members? Friends? Both of those?

MURPHY: I had a — I was — by the time I was in graduate school, I was a teaching assistant, and my instructor drug me to meet a woman that was teaching in the high school who’d been a WAC years before, I think during World War II. And he says: you must meet her. You must talk to her, because she’ll tell you, you don’t want to join, you know? So I got cold— and none of my sorority sisters, of course, were — had any idea this — that that would be a good course for any of us to follow. So I backed away. I shied away.

SMITH: And what university?

MURPHY: I was at Kansas State College of Pittsburg.3

SMITH: For graduate school?

MURPHY: For graduate school as well.

SMITH: Okay.

MURPHY: Yeah. So we — I backed away, you know? Maybe people know better than I do. I doubt it, but maybe [laughs] they know better than I do. And then like a year later, I thought: no, this is really important. So I —

3 COL Murphy finished the last hours of course work at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, but transferred the credits back to Pittsburg for her Master of Science.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

SMITH: What changed? I’m sorry. But what —

MURPHY: I think a combination of the fact that I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I know I didn’t want to do what I’d planned to do, to teach. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to just go home to the same neighborhood I’d grown up in. I wanted to do something different outside that. Although it was a lovely place to grow up, I was interested in doing something else. I think it was the fact that Vietnam was so resident in our — that period, and the video coverage on television, the men in the field, the firefights, the helicopters and all that, I think all that combined to say: well, here’s an adventure, you know? Here’s something unusual. Here’s where you can be bigger than yourself. Here’s something that is unusual and might hold lots of fun secrets, you know, fun things to do that you can’t consider. And of course, that all turned out to be true, you know? But by the time I apply — by the time I applied and was interviewed for the Women’s Army Corps, I’d married a school sweetheart. And although that was like a two-year marriage, I was married at the time when I’d joined the Women’s Army Corps. Which, like six months before, would not have been allowed.

SMITH: They were discharging —

MURPHY: They were — if you got married, you were discharged. If you got pregnant — which, of course, you would be married before you got pregnant — you would be discharged. By the time I was in my first courses, both at WAC Center and at Fort Huachuca, there were women

[15:00] who, like me, were married. There were women who had children but no husband. And so all of that turned on a dime. I remember my husband at the time was also a serving Army officer, and so that was pretty smooth.

SMITH: What year was this?

MURPHY: This was 1973, ʼ72, ʼ73, and —

SMITH: And you had a direct appointment, can you explain that?

MURPHY: I had a direct appointment. The only way a woman could get into the Women’s Army Corps was through a direct appointment. There was no WAC ROTC. There was no WAC presence in West Point. Heaven forbid. You know, so you — what happened were — the women — I would say, with the exception of some enlisted women who went to OCS, I think we had two OCS candidates in our Women’s Army Corps orientation course when I joined. The rest of us were highly educated, and some of them had already been in the professions. So we all had college degrees. Most of us had master’s degrees. Several of us had run a business, were teachers, were scientists. I had a roommate who’d been a nun, you know? There were women from all sorts of backgrounds who had had life experience as well as at least a bachelor’s degree.

SMITH: About how many were in your course? You’re talking the WAC.

MURPHY: Yes, the Women’s Army Corps.

SMITH: Officer Orientation.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

MURPHY: Orientation course, yeah.

SMITH: Okay.

MURPHY: It had been the Women’s — you know, Basic Course, until they started making these changes, because after we did the Orientation course, they would then send us to a Basic course. So they had to re-wicker it.

SMITH: Got it.

MURPHY: So —

SMITH: That was at — so the orientation at Fort McClellan?

MURPHY: Yes.

SMITH: Was it — okay.

MURPHY: In Anniston, Alabama.

SMITH: Right.

MURPHY: And it’s the only place I’ve ever been where the predominance of women was so strong that instead of answering the phone and saying, “May I help you, sir?” it was, “May I help you, ma’am?” I mean, men were a scarcity in Anniston, Alabama. It was the home of the Women’s Army Corps, and it was stuffed with WACs. I mean, they were everywhere. They were running all the facilities. They were running the training programs. I mean, it was an alternate universe. It was very enjoyable for a while. Yeah. But — I forgot what we were talking about.

SMITH: So then after the orientation course, you went to the Basic Course at Fort Huachuca. Or is that —

MURPHY: Yes.

SMITH: Am I getting that mixed up?

MURPHY: Yeah, I was talking about the —

[Phone Rings 17:36-17:42]

[TAPE PAUSED]

SMITH: We were talking about your commissioning source and…

MURPHY: Right.

SMITH: …direct versus OCS candidates.

MURPHY: Right. In the orientation course, most of us were direct appointees, had applied and been accepted. And there were two, I think, women who were enlisted women who were essentially in OCS, Officer Candidate School, embedded in our classes, learning the same thing, being evaluated slightly different, but not so you’d notice. And those were the only two ways a woman could be an officer in the

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

Army at that time, was through a direct appointment or through OCS. It was interesting that years later, when they opened up ROTC, big deal. I mean, it was huge. I mean, a WAC could not walk down the hall of wherever they were working and see another woman officer and not stop and talk about how wonderful it was that ROTC had opened itself up to allowing women candidates. And so, it was interesting also when they opened up at West Point, despite the class at West Point that greatly rejected opening the field to women — the classes that were in session then. It was a wonderful experience. It was good that they had finally gotten around to doing that. It added some legitimacy to it. It was very difficult for those women. I met several of them years later. Lots of scars. It was very difficult for those women.

SMITH: I’m sure. I’m sure. So after your orientation course, and you went to Military Intelligence Basic course at Fort Huachuca?

MURPHY: Yes. While we were at — in the WAC at Fort McClellan, many briefings were provided to the entire class about: what does the Adjutant General Corps do? What does Ordnance do? What does Logistics do? All the various branches. And they were soliciting women to join their ranks, which was very nice. And talking about, you know, what type of skillsets you might be interested in, and all this, that would apply to them.

[20:00]

And so we actually got to pick. We actually got to write down what branches we want. To my knowledge, everybody got their first pick, but that may not be true. And so I had selected Military Intelligence, probably because my entire family at that point were in Military Intelligence in the Army. My husband at the time, and his brother. And so all three of us were in Military Intelligence. And my husband at the time and I both ended up being pilots flying for Military Intelligence. So, you know, it all kind of fit nicely together. Except the marriage fell apart. [laughs] You know, that was kind of interesting also. But we went to — the women in my class, I would guess there were probably — I knew this at one time — I’d guess there were probably 9 to 12 of us in the class, and it was the first Military Intelligence Officers’ Basic course, so they were still trying to figure that out as well. So the course we went to with the Women’s Army Corps was new, and wickered around to the new reality for the WAC. And the Military Intelligence Corps Basic course was new, and they were trying to figure out: what were the relevant skills? There were some common, basic, “you’re a soldier” skills that they taught us, and then there were special skills for Intelligence that they were — would teach us.

SMITH: But this was a gender-specific course, correct? Or no?

MURPHY: No. This was — there were like 9 of us, and there were like 15 men.

SMITH: Oh, great.

MURPHY: And it was so interesting. Out of those 15 men there were like 3 who were like us, right? Going to school. Going to stay in the army. The rest of them were Reservists and National Guard — I think mainly Reservists — who had somehow managed to avoid their military service during Vietnam. You know, they’d been drafted at some point, but I mean, one of them was a judge in Florida. You know, a couple of them were lawyers, a couple of police officers. I mean, there was this very experienced, somewhat older group of men in our class, and the Army had gone out and swept them up. And some of

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 them, like, six months before [laughs] — before they were going to be out of their obligation. But they’d swept them up, sent them off to school. So they’d gotten trained in their branch, and then they went back home, you know? And I’d be really surprised if any of them served another day after that. They were well on the path to their own careers. So when we graduated the Basic course in Military Intelligence, the — whatever that would be, the dozen of us who remained, went on to a Tactical Military Intelligence course.

SMITH: So when was this — I’m sorry, the graduation — approximately?

MURPHY: Yes. This would be ʼ73, still.

SMITH: Okay.

MURPHY: This all happened in ʼ73. [laughs] It was a very interesting year. But so we stayed there at Fort Huachuca, and we did the Tactical Intelligence Course. And there were some men who joined us, because it was a course open to all branches. And it would just give them some Tactical Intelligence training. And that’s where I met my current husband, was in that course. I often say that if it hadn’t been in the middle of the desert, he never would have noticed me. But it was very fortunate to me. Wonderful man. Wonderful helpmate, for — ever now. We’ve been married what, 45 years now? So — but — so it was during that phase — my husband had flown in Vietnam as a helicopter pilot. He was an Infantry officer at the time and had gone to Vietnam, and he’d flown. And there were a couple others in the class who had that experience. And so when you ask: why did you join — why did you go to flight school, maybe that’s another reason I went to flight school. Lots—you cannot spend any time with Army pilots without getting into war stories. It’s impossible. So there was lots of talk and conversation about experiences. Some of them funny, not — some of them — a lot of them not very funny. But lots of texture about it. So when I read this little article about the field opening up to women —

SMITH: In Stars and Stripes?

MURPHY: In Stars and Stripes. And it was funny. They used to — you’d open the newspaper, and on the second page, there was this little column. And it was just little two-liners about stuff going on around the Army. And in one of those two-liners — you know, and it didn’t say it was open to women. It said it had changed the prerequisites so that you were no longer required to be male, or however they phrased it, right? Not being completely stupid, and having a master’s degree, I figured out [laughs] that they meant, you know, women could join.

SMITH: [laughs] Right.

MURPHY: So I applied, and it was really interesting, because

[25:00] you had to go get a flight physical. Well, I’m in Arizona. I mean, you know, I’m in the middle of the desert in Arizona, right? I had to go to Fort Devens, Massachusetts, to get my flight physical. I never could figure that out until about 30 years later, [laughs] when it occurred to me that they were both Military Intelligence posts. So, you know, I couldn’t go down the road to Fort Bliss, which would be a couple — four hours, or whatever, and have a flight physical. No, no. I had to go all the way across [laughs] the country to get a flight physical, because of the connection of the posts, you know? Where do I go to find

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 a flight surgeon? Oh, you know, Fort Devens. Okay. So they sent me there. And the doctor was very nice and polite, and it was an interesting experience. And he didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t go to flight school. But he admitted it was kind of difficult to fill out the paperwork, because there were no standards for women going to flight school. And so he said, you know: you look perfectly healthy to me. You know, if they want to train women in flight, then you ought to be able to go. Years later, once again back at Fort Huachuca, I get this letter from the Army. And the Army tells me — the Army surgeon, flight surgeon — tells me that I have a substandard height, that I am not suitable — that I am not at the right height to be a pilot. Well, you know, I already have four years’ experience flying for the Army, [laughs] and I’m a little miffed, you know? And I am substandard now. Well, I guess they’d gotten around to making standards, and I was like a half-inch too short or something. So I had to go to the local flight surgeon that they had then there, and I had to get measured again. And they send it off, and they compared it to the measurements I’d had from the Air Force flight surgeons when I was stationed in Germany in my first tour. And I was a different height. You know, in some I was 5’3”, some I was 5’3 1/2”. Some I was 5’2”. And they accused me — this one doctor accused me of faking my height on my flight physical. And so I went in to see the flight surgeon. I said: does this guy have the slightest — who measures themselves, right? I mean, have you ever in a flight physical— I mean, you may weigh yourself.

SMITH: Right.

MURPHY: You stand on the scale and you move the little weights around and so, like that. And I can see myself going: no, I need to be 5’3”, you know? But anyway, so we roll back. But eventually, they gave me a waiver, and it was all right that I was too short. And of course, coincidentally, when I get in another assignment at Fort Riley, I’m like only the third shortest pilot there. There’s a Hispanic man who’d been flying airplanes for 15 years who was the shortest. And then there was another captain — who lived across the street from me — but there was a captain who was — we used to back up — you’d have to do formations, and you’d do parades and stuff, and they’d size you. And so every time we’d have to do one of those, we’d end up back-to-back, you know? And the people trying to figure out, you know, which one’s tallest — I always figured if they couldn’t tell when we were standing next to each other, then they probably couldn’t tell from the review stand either…

SMITH: Exactly.

MURPHY: …which one of us was tallest. But I think they probably just did it to harass Dave. But I asked him once. I said: do you have a letter saying that you’re of substandard height? No, no. I said: well, I need you to know that you are of substandard height. [laughs] We got off the topic.

SMITH: Oh, no, you’re fine. So did you have any exposure to flying before?

MURPHY: No.

SMITH: Okay.

MURPHY: Which is really interesting. When I — when I went through flight school, I didn’t have any experience flying, and I’m not sure any of the other men did. The men who were in the Air Force came out of the Air Force Academy to rotary-wing training with the Army, they all had experience from their course at the Air Force Academy. But I don’t think anybody had lots of experience flying.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

SMITH: Okay. Can you —

MURPHY: Years later, I met COL Richardson, and you know, and a lot of other women who actually have their college degrees in aeronautics, you know, and flying and stuff. I met a couple of Navy women who should have been test pilots before they even joined the Navy. So in my personal experience, I was not surrounded by people who had experience in flying, when I was in flight school or soon thereafter, you know, previous to joining the military.

SMITH: You just mentioned COL Richardson, Laura Richardson…

MURPHY: Yes.

SMITH: …who is now LTG Richardson.

MURPHY: Is she really? I didn’t know that. Woo!

SMITH: Yeah.

MURPHY: Wow, good for her.

SMITH: So let’s talk about when you were notified about flight training. Tell me how that happened and what your reaction was.

MURPHY: I’m sorry, what did you say?

SMITH: When you were notified…

MURPHY: When I was notified.

SMITH: …that you actually got the flight slot.

MURPHY: Well, that’s interesting, too. They’re all interesting. I’m at Fort Huachuca. I’m in school, and this colonel — I want to say Calloway — shows up. And he’s hanging around the back of the classroom, and you see him around, off and on, one day.

[30:00]

And when classes were over, I was told he wanted to talk to me. So he and I went into an auditorium, and we’re sitting there. And he’s from Headquarters, Department of the Army. And he’s the Aviation Branch chief, I think. Anyway, he was from the Aviation office in D.A. And he wanted to meet me and talk to me. And I think it was just a — we’re putting a lot of eggs in this basket, you know? And one of us needs to meet this woman and see if she’s completely crazy, or if she’s made of stern enough stuff to try this on, and all this. And so we sat there and talked for a very long time. And that was kind of the conversation. He says, you know: you’ve qualified to go to flight school, and I wanted to talk to you about that. And I’m sitting there going: well, it’s been great fun so far. I liked going to WAC training, and now we’re doing the MI thing, and it’s all new too, and new to me, and new to the branch. And you know, everything’s changing. And this is wonderful. And yeah, I really want to go to flight school. And I’m thinking: this is all going on in my head, and at the same time, he’s telling me: you know, this isn’t going to be easy. I said: no, I understand. Learning how to fly is difficult. He says: no, I don’t think you quite understand what I mean. We think you can fly, because you did well on the aptitude test, and

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 there’s no reason to think that they can’t teach you. And — but it’s going to be difficult. He said: it’s going to be you and everybody else. And he told — that’s when he told me they’d planned to send the three of us, but it hadn’t worked out. And I, of course, thought: well, that’s all right. You know, I can handle this. It’s no problem. And I went through flight school with that attitude, except for a few points where it got really tough, right? But he’d warned me. He didn’t try to dissuade me. He just said: you need to know that this is going to be different. And I said: sure, you know, I’d like to go. And he was happy that I — he hadn’t talked me out of it. And I understand from third parties that for years, he was rooting for me, you know, on the sidelines. You know, I don’t know that I ever met him again.

SMITH: Did the other ladies have similar talks, that you were aware of?

MURPHY: No. They had been disqualified by that time. One woman had withdrawn her application. Once again, they said she was — it’s a standards thing. They had told her that she needed to lose a couple of pounds, and that outraged her, you know? This was before all the emphasis on weight. And I don’t know how they made that determination at the time, because there were no standards. But somebody in the system had decided she needed — you know, she was not heavy. But anyway, so she just said: well then, I’m not interested. And she didn’t pursue it further. The other woman, Mary Jo Carr — and I had been in WAC training together, and we went to MI together and later served at Fort Rucker together. And Mary Jo was that woman who should have been in Army Aviation from the beginning. She did fly as a civilian before, and she — when we were in WAC Center, the WACs were pushing the envelope on everything, you know, trying to get the women integrated. And one of their tasks was to ask for volunteers to take the Army flight test the aptitude test. And there were four or five women who said: sure, I’m interested. I’ll take it. And they took it. And Mary Jo was one of them, because she seriously wanted to be an Army aviator, and was a pilot already. So she took the test. So by the time we take the test again, when it’s offered and apply, they find out she’s taken it before. And at least, at that time, you couldn’t take the aptitude test more than once, because it skewed the aptitude results, because you knew what was in the test.

SMITH: Sure.

MURPHY: So they disqualified her, and so then that became a real issue, between the WACs and Mary Jo and others about — this isn’t fair, you know? Then take the results of our first test, you know, if you don’t want her to use the second. But anyway, it was probably — right after I left Fort Rucker, so it was probably two years later before she actually got into a course. And she did get into a course, and she did become an Army aviator. And she flew airplanes for Military Intelligence, you know? So it was delayed, but it was gratifying to see, when she’d persevered.

SMITH: Okay. Well, let’s talk about Fort Rucker.

MURPHY: Ah.

SMITH: And you mentioned in some of the paperwork that you gave us for the interview — which I greatly appreciate. It was very helpful — that you felt like some of the male officers were not quite prepared for you to come to flight training.

MURPHY: Oh, yeah.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

SMITH: So what was your first day like?

MURPHY: My first day was administrative, of course. And we all show up, and we meet each other first time, and we get a lecture from the battalion commander and a welcoming thing

[35:00] and lots of paperwork. And Public Affairs had us fill out forms, you know, for our hometown newspapers, because that was really important. This is still Vietnam, still going on, and the Army’s looking for positive press in the local newspapers and stuff, as they always do. And we’re all sitting in this little — they’re almost like high-school chairs with the little wraparound desks on them. And the room’s full of people. There’s a class that’s halfway through that has come from Fort Walters, Texas, to finish their training at Fort Rucker. And there are those of us who are going to do all of our training at Fort Rucker. And so there’s two classes there, and one’s halfway through their training, and they think they’re pretty big stuff. And there’s the rest of us who are hoping to be pretty big stuff, but we’re just starting our flight training.

SMITH: How long was training and —

MURPHY: About nine months for the helicopter program.

SMITH: And what was your class designation?

MURPHY: I read just the other day. It was 74-14. [laughs]

SMITH: [laughs] Okay.

MURPHY: Yeah. I had forgotten that. We had maroon hats. They could keep the classes straight by the color of the caps they wore — the baseball caps. I gave mine to the Women’s Army Corps Museum.

SMITH: Did you have a motto, or —

MURPHY: Not that I remember

SMITH: Okay.

MURPHY: But there were — so in all — in these two classes, I’m the woman, right?

SMITH: How many students?

MURPHY: I noticed.

SMITH: About how many students?

MURPHY: I’d guess 50, maybe.

SMITH: A good-sized class.

MURPHY: Yeah. Well, this is two classes. This is the class that was halfway done. The Army used to train their pilots in an initial phase at Fort Walters, Texas. This is Vietnam, so they’re training a bunch of people. And they start them out at Fort Walters, Texas, and then they move them to Rucker at midpoint. Well, we weren’t training as many people by the time my class came along, so we did it all at Fort

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

Rucker. The Army was, you know, shrinking down its expansion during the war. But so — out of these 50 people, I’d guess there were 25, maybe, in my class — officers and warrant officer candidates together. It was a pretty small group. I think we fit on one bus. [laughs] But so we’re sitting there, and we’re getting the briefings and all this, filling out paperwork, public affairs paperwork and all this. And the battalion commander is, I guess, kind enough to point out that I’m the first woman to be going through the program, and here I am, you know? Lt Woolfolk. Here I am, right? And the class booed me, right? [laughs] I’m sitting there going: what? What did I do? You know, and not all of them, and not like at a football game.

SMITH: Right.

MURPHY: But there was this little undertow of booing, and I went: oh, hmm. It took me a while to figure it out, you know? That was my very first experience with somebody saying: we don’t want you here. The good news was the half of the class that was my class, I never got any negative feedback from. In fact, there were a couple of incidents where they, you know, stood up for me, when it was needed.

SMITH: Such as when?

MURPHY: At the very beginning, people just couldn’t help themselves, you know? The Standardization Pilots, who were the instructor pilots for the instructor pilots that are the instructor pilots for the other instructors — the highest level of instructor pilot—just couldn’t wait. There were like three of them there at Fort Rucker. And one of them came down to fly with me one day. Only me. Didn’t fly with any of the guys. That was —

SMITH: That was standardization?

MURPHY: Yes.

SMITH: So, okay. At what level — like, what rank was this person?

MURPHY: He was a warrant officer. He was a CW3.

SMITH: Okay.

MURPHY: In the Army, the majority of the pilots are warrant officers. And he was a CW3 if I recall correctly. He may have been of substandard height, [laughs] now that I think about it. But anyway, he came down to fly with me. And we’d flown — I’d probably had five hours of flight time, maybe not even that. So he gets in, and we’re flying around. My flight instructor, Bob Agee, was very unhappy that he had been booted out of the cockpit that day in favor of this Standards guy. Bob Agee had been a warrant officer Army pilot with Vietnam experience, but he had gotten out, and he contracted back to be an instructor pilot. He had hair like this long, which drove everybody crazy. And so — and he was a very relaxed sort of guy. But that kind of miffed him, that I’d been singled out. He’d been kicked out. He had a program. He had things to accomplish, you know? But so this guy — who fortunately, I can’t remember his name — came and we flew. And at that time, we were flying maybe 20 minutes, 30 minutes a day, you know? And I was in that cockpit with him for, I would say, an hour. That might be an exaggeration, but it felt like an hour. You know, I was just this wiped-out little limp noodle, getting back on the bus that day. I was just exhausted.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

[40:00]

But he had come down to get a feeling for whether or not I could fly. And he was doing all kinds of stuff. He was trying to — there’s this relatively unobtainable feat in a helicopter, and that’s a standard approach. And it’s the angle you establish in your approach to your landing point. And you’re always seeking that, and especially when you don’t know how to fly the aircraft yet, you know, you’re seeking that point, you know? And he was showing me how to — well, I didn’t know — I didn’t have that down yet. I didn’t know how to do that. He’d help me.

SMITH: Five hours. [laughs]

MURPHY: Right, right. [laughs] And so he’d go down, and then he’d fly it back up this way, which I thought was magic. But he’d do it this way, and then we’d do it again. And then we’d do it this — and then we’d do it again, you know? And so there were all these stressful situations. He was nice enough, but he was just a Standards pilot. He was the IP’s pilot, for the IP, for the IP. And so he was very accomplished, and he had forgotten what it was like to be in your first, second week of flight training. So we got off the bus, and our class leader — Kennedy. His last name was Kennedy. He grabbed me, and he says: come with me. [laughs] And off the bus we went. A bunch of guys were hanging around, waiting to see what was going to happen. And CPT Kennedy took me into the company commander’s office at the school, and he says: this has got to stop. This isn’t fair. This isn’t right. And he talked to the company commander, who didn’t know anything about what was going on. That wasn’t his part of the business. And he got upset too. And then he called the battalion commander, and the battalion commander was — said: don’t worry about it. I’ve got this. Right? It was maybe a six-minute conversation with all these conversations. But I never got visited again, right?

SMITH: But — he had flown with you several times at that point, or no?

MURPHY: No, just the once.

SMITH: Just once?

MURPHY: Just once.

SMITH: Okay. Alright.

MURPHY: But it was non-standard interruption, non-standard help.

SMITH: Sure.

MURPHY: Non-standard approach, you know, just was hard on Sally. It was not right. And so I mention this primarily because that’s one of the times that somebody really went out of their way to help me out. And they got the chain of command involved. And I’m sure it was just somebody going: oh, geez. I didn’t think about that. I should have told everybody, you know, leave her alone, all that. Because the Standards people had the right to go in and pop into any place they wanted to, to assess either the pilot or the quality of the training they were getting. So he really wasn’t out of bounds. He was just at the wrong time, you know? Because of course later, we had all kinds of flights with Standards people. But so that was one of the times.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

SMITH: And what —

MURPHY: My class itself was very supportive, but a lot of them were very supportive by just being themself, you know? We didn’t have personal relationships. I did with a few, mainly the Air Force Academy graduates. But you know, with a few — a couple of the guys I flew with as stick buddies, you know, got to know them, their wives, and all this. But a lot of them were just — did their thing, stayed out of it, stayed peaceful and all that. We’d get together with a group — and it was interesting, because some of the wives would come up to me, and they’d go: what’s it like? You know? And they’d want to know, you know, how hard is it, you know. My husband tells me that, you know, I couldn’t do this. And I’d say: well, your husband’s wrong. [laughs] You know? You can do this, you know? And I found out in some of those conversations that some of the men would take their homework home, and their wives would do them, because some of the men, being Air Force Academy graduates and a couple of Army Academy graduates, and other people in the group, already had some flight experience. And the remedial stuff we were doing in workbooks and stuff, they had — already knew. So their wives had an interest, so their wives would do their homework at night and give it to them, and they’d hand it in. So essentially, the wives were getting all the ground school training [laughs] without any of the flight training.

SMITH: Interesting.

MURPHY: But I found that interesting. But you know, at the time, you know, you had to be a big, burly, hero sort of guy. You know, big watch, aviator sunglasses. You had to be that person…

SMITH: Right.

MURPHY: …to fly. That was the image. So women didn’t, by and large, fit that image. So a lot of the early years were about persuading people that it had nothing to do with gender, you know? It had everything to do with aptitude. And I will tell you — and I tell everybody when I’m interviewed, or any opportunity that I get — the very best instructors, teachers, mentors, that I have ever had, have been Army warrant officers who taught me in flight school. I mean, knew their business inside and out, shared everything they knew, were very patient with repetitive questions, repetitive errors that they were trying to train out of you, and stuff like that. It was the best training I ever got, but…

SMITH: Can —

MURPHY: …there was one day, when I’m walking to the classroom from my

[45:00]

BOQ room, walking down the sidewalk. And this guy is walking the other way. And he’s a captain, and I’m a lieutenant. And I salute him. And he says something to stop me from walking on by. And he asked me what in the hell am I doing in a flight suit, right? And I go: I’m in flight school, and I’m going to class. And he goes: no, you’re not, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I said: yeah, I am. And he had just returned from Vietnam, and he knew for a fact that women could not fly in combat. And so we didn’t need ’em, because we didn’t need anything that shortened the rotation rate of men back to Vietnam to fly. And so his math said that you couldn’t train women, because they’d never deploy. So obviously, I was masquerading as a flight student or something. But he wasn’t very polite, and he wasn’t very articulate.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

And so we parted our ways, and I went to class. But that is one of the few times I remember somebody singling me out. I had a couple of experiences where I’d go, like, to the doctor’s office and be waiting in the waiting room. Or, I remember once at Fort Bliss, I was sitting and waiting for housing. I had my paperwork to get assigned housing, and there were other people sitting there. And there’d be another aviator there, and by this time, I’m rated, and I have my wings on. And they look at me. You know, and they’d look again. And then they start drilling me about emergency procedures, [laughs] or the capability of aircraft, or something, right? You know? And silly me, I’d just come out of flight school, you know, where you answer questions like that all the time. I figured I had to answer the questions. You know, so I’m asking [laughs] answering these questions to these perfect strangers who are trying to, you know, trip me up. And it happened once when my husband was sitting there. And we finished and all that, and he said: why in the world did you answer that guy? Well, I said, he asked. And he says: you don’t have to answer every Tom, Dick, and Harry’s question about your qualifications to fly. And I went: oh. Yeah, I guess you’re right. [laughs] A little light comes on, you know?

SMITH: After nine months of answering every question… [laughs]

MURPHY: Right, you know?

SMITH: …you’re just used to that.

MURPHY: And everybody was more experienced than I was, so — [laughs]

SMITH: You mentioned previously about having a “stick buddy.” Can you explain what that is?

MURPHY: We were trained in pairs. They’d rotate every once in a while, the pairs, but for several weeks, you’d fly with the fella — you know, the other student, in some category of the training. So in our basic — first time in the initial trainer, I was assigned to a fella — with a fella to one instructor pilot. So you’d have one instructor pilot and two students. That’s because you’re only flying for 15, 30 minutes. So you go — in that aircraft, it was just the instructor and you. And you’d fly, and then I’d hop out, and the next — the guy would hop in, and then he’d get his training. And then, when you were in the classroom setting, you know, you’re all intermingled and doing your own thing. But when you were at the flight line and not flying, you’d be in the ready room, and you’d be sitting there with your stick buddy and your instructor pilot. And he’d be drilling you on stuff, asking you questions, you know, what you’d memorized, what you’d do in this situation, emergency procedures, and stuff like that. So you were kind of a pair. And then you’d move into a slightly different phase of the training, and they’d switch you up with a different stick buddy. And so I think I had maybe four, maybe five, stick buddies the whole time I was in flight school.

SMITH: Did you ever stay in touch with them? Just —

MURPHY: No, but we’d bump into each other every once in a while. Larry Wurtzel was an Air Force helicopter pilot, was a general officer by the time he retired. He was in my class. He almost got me in serious trouble, too.

SMITH: How so?

MURPHY: But — that was his Air Force Academy stuff.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

SMITH: Prank?

MURPHY: Pranks. Yeah.

SMITH: Okay. You’ve got to tell me now. [laughs]

MURPHY: No.

SMITH: Please? No?

MURPHY: No.

SMITH: You’re not going to — okay.

MURPHY: No. No. No, that wouldn’t be fair, since I mentioned his name.

SMITH: Ah.

MURPHY: If I hadn’t mentioned his name — [laughs]

SMITH: Alright.

MURPHY: After all, he has an image to uphold.

SMITH: [laughs] As a general officer—that’s very gracious.

MURPHY: But —

SMITH: What aircraft were you flying?

MURPHY: We were fly — we — TH-55 was the first one. A little bitty trainer. Part of it really was made by Mattel. You know, you could touch every part of the aircraft, and you put it on more than got into it, you know? And you put a large man, and a large

[50:00] pilot, and a large student, in the aircraft, and it just strained to take off, you know? It was just [laughs] difficult. And my instructor pilot and I were both small in stature, so you know, it didn’t take as much power for us to fly in that aircraft. But seriously, when it got to the point where we could fly solo, you know, you’d have to fly around the traffic pattern. And your instructor would get out and say: okay, this is your solo flight. You know, remember everything I told you. You know.

SMITH: Tell me about your first solo.

MURPHY: And he’d hop out, and immediately you go, oh! [laughs] Because of the weight in the aircraft was, you know, so much adjusted. It was fairly uneventful. My first flight, I was middle of the road. About the same time — getting approved to solo about the same time everybody else was. And he got out, and that’s what he said. He says: don’t forget anything I told you, you know. Go. See you when you get back.

SMITH: And this is Bob Agee?

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

MURPHY: Yeah, this is Bob Agee. And he would go up then into the tower of this little training pad we had. And he’d go up in the tower, and they’d watch you. I don’t know what they expected — you know, I guess they — if you froze up, I guess they could talk to you on the radio or something. But so you’d take off. I think it was three take-offs and landings, just staying in the traffic pattern. And I landed and shut down the aircraft, and everything was wonderful. But as we — as the groups started doing their solo flights, you know, you get a little emblem for your hat, and —

SMITH: What did that look like?

MURPHY: If I recall correctly, it was a little disc that you’d put behind your rank on your hat. I think that’s when we got that. But —

SMITH: Any other celebration?

MURPHY: Oh, yeah. So we’re coming back from the flight training, and we’re going back to the unit. And they stop by this motel that I guess offered its swimming pool. So if you — when you soloed, you got pushed into the pool with all your stuff, and checklists and stuff. But it was a big celebration. We got little certificates — hand-drawn certificates about your first solo flight. But that was great fun.

SMITH: About when — do you remember about when in training that happened?

MURPHY: I’d say 10 hours, something. Yeah, it was pretty quickly. It was —

SMITH: So you started — what month did you start?

MURPHY: I started in September.

SMITH: Okay, so —

MURPHY: And the solo was probably still September, maybe October.

SMITH: Okay.

MURPHY: Yeah.

SMITH: Not too cold. [laughs]

MURPHY: Not too cold. And it’s Alabama, you know? [laughs]

SMITH: True.

MURPHY: How cold is it going to be?

SMITH: So your next aircraft after the TH-55?

MURPHY: We — the Army took you from that, and they — from your learning how to fly phase, the initial entry piece. They would then put you in a Huey…

SMITH: Okay. Wow.

MURPHY: …to learn instruments. You were not rated in the Huey. You did not know how to fly the Huey. You could not take it off. You could not land it. But your instructor — this is when you’d have two stick

18

MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 buddies. And so there’d be the instructor. There’d be one of the students, and then the other student would be in the jump seat in the back, watching — not watching. Whatever. Trying to learn, you know, by watching. But they — instruments was kind of a new thing. Not new. I mean, the Army had been flying instruments in their airplanes forever. But it was kind of new to be training the helicopter force en masse to fly instruments. And so I think the thinking was: you put your students in there, because if they’re going to wash out, this is where you’re going to get them, you know? This is — if they don’t have the aptitude for instruments, we no longer want them. Most of the helicopter pilot cadre could not — not cadre, but most Vietnam-era helicopter pilots did not have instrument ratings, because they weren’t going to need them in Vietnam. And then when they came back, if they came back, they got instrument training, some of them. But so the Army — once again, constant change. You know, it’s the ʼ70s. Everything’s changing. And so now, we were all to be — when we graduated, we were all to be instrument rated. So you went from just learning barely how to fly to going in the instrument training. And most of it was in the aircraft. The simulators were new. They’d had those crazy old simulators they’d had forever, the little blue boxes and, you know, spin it around, whatever simulators. But you know, the fully automated, digital, big-box, hydraulic-assisted training systems were just now entering the Army training program. So most of it was done in the aircraft, and some of it was

[55:00] done in the simulation arena. But so there’d be two of us in the Huey with an instructor, and you’d fly, and then at some point, you’d swap out and you’d fly. So when I was in flight school, there were two other women, commissioned officers, in training. One of them was Linda Horan. She was right behind me — I don’t know, a month or so. And she was a maintenance officer, and she had prior military experience, more than I had. She had actually had real assignments [laughs] and been overseas before she came into the flight program. But then there was also a woman, LT Susan Dunwoody. And when we were in training — or maybe I was already out of training — but when I was still at Rucker, there was an incident. There was a — I want to say a hydraulics failure. But there was an incident that was handled very well, but it was a crash at one of the training sites. And I mention this because up front was her stick buddy. In the back is Sue in the jump seat. And there’s the instructor pilot. And forever, that was known as Sue Dunwoody’s aircraft accident. [laughs] You know? And I’d go around post and people and people would say: oh, yeah. LT Dunwoody had an accident. LT Dunwoody was a passenger in the back of the aircraft. [laughs] You know? Not that it would have made it any different. I mean, it was a failure of an aircraft component. It wasn’t a pilot-induced problem or anything. But I always thought that was interesting. Ah, Sue Dunwoody’s accident you know?

SMITH: Because the perception at that time was oh, one of the--

MURPHY: Yeah. Because she was in the aircraft, right?

SMITH: Right, so her issue.

MURPHY: But stick buddies were important, you know? You didn’t really have a lot of time. You didn’t really sit around and talk to each other a lot. I mean, nobody did. Not just me. I mean, it just — but some of them developed closer relationships. But it was somebody who was going through the same thing you were. It was kind of a measurement stick, you know? I had a horrible time with this today. How did you do? Oh, I did okay with that, but I did horrible with this, you know?

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

SMITH: Right.

MURPHY: So there was a — it was helpful to be in this mess with somebody else.

SMITH: Absolutely. Can you describe the competition among your classmates? Was there much, or was it more — cooperate and let’s get through this together.

MURPHY: I’d say it’s more cooperate and get through this together, but it was really more — we’re each individuals, and we’re each doing our thing, you know? Yeah. No, I don’t think there was a lot of competition. We had a couple of fellas who got set back because they couldn’t — they had trouble with the instruments. Or, one person developed — I’d describe it as a fear of flying, but you know, it was something. And so they, you know, work through their issues and be set back into another class. So we lost a couple of people along the way, but not nearly as many as I’d think, you know? That would be maybe what, one percent? And —

SMITH: That’s pretty good.

MURPHY: Yeah, I think their screening programs — you know, the testing and all that — is pretty good.

SMITH: And you mentioned that you — you knew you had good hand-eye coordination.

MURPHY: Oh, yeah.

SMITH: And you were so —

MURPHY: When I was in sixth grade, seventh grade, they did an aptitude test for us. And no, it wasn’t — yeah, it was, about that time. They did an aptitude test for the whole body of students. And mine was so peculiar that when — I got called into the assistant principal’s office, and whoever was running the test — and they talked to me, and they were giving everybody career advice about, you know, where your aptitudes lie. And they just didn’t have the slightest idea where I should be, because I had this very high — I’ll say mechanical — aptitude, but it wasn’t really. It was really a more — spatial aptitudes, you know. The “which way is the box folded?” and all that. And so they couldn’t figure it out, you know. So you know, that would have been the ʼ50s, maybe, the ʼ60s. And they had no idea what to do with this little girl who had these abilities. And all they could come up with was maybe I could be a mechanic of some sort, right? So where they were worried about me, it turns out years later, that I was confident. I don’t know how I scored on the aptitude test, but I scored well enough to be accepted into the program. But in the back of my mind, I had really good mechanical aptitude. [laughs] Comes to find out, I didn’t apply it very much in learning systems on aircraft. But I had enough aptitude. And my — Bob Browning, my very best and favorite, I’d say, instructor, was my instrument instructor. And he was a CW3 at the time. And he was just a good instructor.

[1:00:00]

And I believe he sought out — when he was assigned to Rucker as an instructor, he welcomed training women, because it cannot be a coincidence that there were a handful of us in the first 20 or whatever who had been trained, at one phase or another, with Bob Browning. But he used to try to explain things. We’re talking about AC/DC current, and you know, the buses, and all this sort of stuff. And he’d say: well, you’ll know. And he’d relate it to something in an automobile or dismantling an engine or

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 something like that. And I’d go — you know? And so he’d find some way — he’d talk to his wife, he’d talk to a neighbor, he’d talk to somebody, and then he’d figure out a way to explain it to me that was maybe more relevant to my background. On occasion — I had a man say: oh, I’m so glad he did that, because I didn’t know [laughs] what he was talking about either, you know?

SMITH: But he didn’t want to ask.

MURPHY: Yeah, men don’t do that.

SMITH: Right.

MURPHY: You know, my experience is, you know — you’re at least a good foil for asking questions, and then the other men — other students will listen and go: oh, another way to look at it, you know? But he went out of his way to — and he’d know — he’d know better — he’d know before I’d know when I was going to have a bad day, when I was upset about something else or when I just wasn’t with it or whatever. And he worked a lot on my psyche, you know? And instruments was, without a doubt, the most difficult part of my flight training.

SMITH: How did he help you with confidence or working on your psyche?

MURPHY: I think just positive feedback, recognizing the fact that I wasn’t completely focused, you know, set it — you know, just good mentoring.

SMITH: You mention in some of your — the materials you sent that some instructors you found out later, some of the contract instructors, refused to fly with you.

MURPHY: Oh, yeah.

SMITH: Tell me about that — how you found out, and —

MURPHY: I guess it was about the time — yeah. It was in the first few weeks of flight training, about the time I had the incident with the standardization pilot. Somebody told me. They just felt I needed to know, that every one of the — we had — if we had 20 people in the class, we would have had 10 instructors or so, right? I don’t know if those numbers are right, but you know, there were a dozen of them. And the only one who accepted the notion of training me was Bob Agee. All the rest of them had refused. They were civilians, you know? Civilian contractors. And they had refused to teach me how to fly. By mid-term, kind of, about the same time I found out that had happened, some of them had come around, you know? Because you don’t always fly with your instructor. Sometimes he’s out. Sometimes, in order to advance, you have to fly with a different instructor, you know, for a second evaluation or something. So I guess by the time it really mattered, there was somebody else who was willing to fly with me. Yeah.

SMITH: So tell me about getting your initial aircraft assignment. Did that happen during training, at the end of training?

MURPHY: The Army allocates flight school — at least at that time — allocated flight school positions to the different branches of the service, based on some analysis of what’s needed. Most of them are Infantry. A bunch of them are Signal. A bunch of them are Armor. And MI had some, right? And all of

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 them were going to be airplane pilots, because that’s all the Military Intelligence branch flew at that time. We knew when we were selected that we were destined for airplane training — if somebody had clued you in, and they had me, you know? So I knew I was going to go to airplanes afterwards. And of course, there’s a lot of resentment about that, because you know, a lot of guys would like to learn how to fly airplanes, and why should she be the one flying airplanes, you know? I probably fly better than she does, and all this. But they didn’t understand the way the process works is you’re trained based on what your branch needs trained. So the logisticians, for example, would fly the Chinooks and the cranes, and — largely. But there was some attempt to manage people to train in the aircraft that they were actually going to be needed in, [laughs] you know?

SMITH: And had your complement or any — I think you were in the WAC in war.

MURPHY: No.

SMITH: So —

MURPHY: I was in the WAC during WAC training…

SMITH: Right.

MURPHY: …and while I was in the initial Basic course for Military Intelligence. But as soon as we graduated the Basic course, we were authorized and required to wear the insignia of Military Intelligence.

[1:05:00]

Whatever Basic course you finished, you became assigned to that branch, right? So I think this was a surprise to the Women’s Army Corps, or at least, it was not widely known. Because here we are. There’s women in the Signal School, women in the Military Police School, Adjutant General. You know, we’re all over, and we’re graduating about the same time. And we take off our Pallas Athena, which was the insignia of the Women’s Army Corps, and we put on our branch insignia, and you could almost hear the Women’s Army Corps going [gasps]: I didn’t think about that. Because what happens over time? Over time, you don’t have anybody that’s in the Women’s Army Corps.

SMITH: Right.

MURPHY: Well, of course you have the women that predated us, you know, by like a month into WAC training. And they’re still WACs, because they didn’t have the advantage, or disadvantage — but they didn’t have the career path that took them into these basic Army branches. They stayed WACs. And if you were a WAC at that time, regardless of what skill you were doing, you were a WAC. And you’d wear your Pallas Athena. You were in a WAC company, and you try — some of the women told me that, you know, you’d sign into post, you’d go to the company commander, who was the WAC company commander — another woman, of course — and you’d find out what you were going to do. Oh, you’re going to be working in Administration in the Military Police. Okay, off you go to the Military Police. You’re going to be supporting the Signal Corps, you know, in dispatching vehicles. Okay. And they would go off and do that. So from one assignment to the next, and probably several different positions on one assignment, they’d do lots of stuff. You know, they’d — most of it’s clerical. Some of it’s not. But, you know, most of it’s clerical. And that’s how they were helping the Army and doing stuff. And they’d —

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 some of these women had a remarkable collection of skills. [laughs] You know? By the time I met them, when they’re majors and lieutenant colonels, you know, they had done remarkable tasks. But they’re WACs. All the rest of us that are coming through were becoming WACs for a very short period of time, and then becoming whatever our basic branch was. So what about them? You know, are they always going to be old-school? Are they going to be something less, something different, you know?

SMITH: Or is there a plan for them?

MURPHY: Yes. And the Army developed a plan. And so they went back to them, and said: what are you interested in? Or they’d look at their records and see: well, you spent most of your time with MPs, or whatever. And so they got assigned basic branch designations. Some of them went — I think all of them went back to training in that branch, but some of them really had more experience than the level of training they were receiving by the time they got their new branch insignia. A lot of women I met were Military Police. And many of them were very successful, career-wise. General Foote, Evelyn Foote — I think she retired as a major general, but — what was her name?4 I can’t remember.

SMITH: That’s okay. So we’re back to the assignment. You get the RU-21?

MURPHY: Yeah. So after we finish — we did instruments, and then they decided they’d teach us — in Hueys, and then they’d teach us how to fly the Huey. So we had some basic hours doing that. And then they taught us to — some tactical training out in the wilds of Alabama, you know, landing at night, flying at night, you know, different flight training — tactical training. And by then, you graduated from initial entry rotary wing.

SMITH: Tell me about your graduation and —

MURPHY: Well, at the very end, when I was in tactical training, here comes another Standardization pilot, right? [laughs] I’d already finished my course of instruction to speak of. You know, we all know we’re just a couple of weeks away from graduation. So it’s a — we’d had some bad weather days, and we were all cooped up in the room, and we’d all answered more questions than we wanted to, killing time and all this. And then we had this really nice day, and in comes — I want to say four Standardization pilots. And this is something we had not picked up on. You know how when you’re in training, how you can kind of watch the class ahead of you, and you can kind of figure out what’s coming next, if nobody’s told you? You can talk to them, or you can observe what’s going on? Well, we hadn’t seen this before. But anyway, about four of them came in, and we got this load of baloney about how it was a quality control measure. They were going to check and see how much of our instrument training we had retained

[1:10:00] while we’d been in tactical training. So they were going to take us out and essentially give us another instrument check ride to make sure that we weren’t losing the skills. Yeah, maybe. I could see where

4 COL Murphy later recalled that she was referring to Brigadier General Cadoria, another experienced WAC, who was transitioned into the Military Police career field. She was a major or lieutenant colonel when her status changed from WAC to MP. More information on BG Sherian Grace Cadoria is found here: http://www.southerndigest.com/culture/article_d33a3110-bd08-11e4-b1b8-b37198a7c6cc.html.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 that might be possible, you know? It probably served that purpose, anyway. But — so I get assigned to this nice, but quiet — very quiet Standardization pilot. You know, all business. Not rough. Not off- putting. Just business, right? I find out later he’d been a lieutenant colonel during Vietnam. He’d been a warrant officer — went to war, battlefield commissions and all that. He was a lieutenant colonel. Then when the Army draws down, they take all those guys and they make them warrant officers again. You know, they take the rank away, and whatever. So this guy really knows how to fly. He’s a Standardization guy. He used to be a lieutenant colonel. I’m sure the Army had him managing and doing jobs like a lieutenant colonel. But he’s a W-4 when I meet him. So he takes me out to the aircraft. We do the preflight. We get in, and we do an instrument flight, and I’ll tell you what, I learned a lot from that guy. Not in the flying so much as the management of the radios and the clearance and all that business. He was just a machine. I mean, he was just so precise and so — after it was over, I asked to see his notes when he took down the clearance, and stuff. You know: a little more shorthand knowledge, a little more of the — and he was — he was very helpful. But like I said, kind of standoffish, business, whatever. So, some time later — just a couple of days later, I find out that that whole charade was largely because they needed to give me an instrument check ride. So these other three guys got an instrument check ride. They were just ground clutter. Because a couple of months before, when I had taken my instrument check ride, the guy who gave it to me wasn’t qualified to give it to me. Right?

SMITH: [laughs] Oops.

MURPHY: What? [laughs] You know, so the guy who gave it to me was the — I think he was a major. He was a commissioned officer. He was in charge of the instructors. And he was — gave me my check ride. Me only, I guess. And it was interesting in hindsight, because my flight was late in the day, and everybody had gone home. And he’s debriefing me. And the phone rings, and I hear him in there saying: no, she passed, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So this was before I did my orals, right? This was just after I’d flown. So I thought: he’s committing to somebody that I’d passed my instrument exam — my instrument flight. So, oh goody. I must have passed. This — this part’s not going to be hard, you know? [laughs] So I — to put it all together, this guy was the head of the IFEs, the instrument flight instructors. But he himself was not an instrument flight examiner— he was just the commander of them. So when they’re going through the records, checking them all, double-checking them all, you know, they go: whoa. Wrong guy. You know, not an IFE. You know? So he can’t do this. So they stage this charade, and I got my check ride, and all the paperwork was cleared up, and it was all good. But I had the privilege of — I had the privilege later to go to that gentleman’s5 retirement ceremony, and it was really interesting. You know, they — he was a senior officer retiring, and they went through his career, and they talked about everything wonderfully done, and his time in Vietnam, and all this stuff. And I’m sitting there thinking: and he saved Sally’s rear end. [laughs] He got all the paperwork straight, you know?

SMITH: [laughs] That’s funny.

MURPHY: There’s something that’s not written in that report.

SMITH: So you were able to graduate.

5 The Instrument Flight Examiner (IFE) who was a CW4.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

MURPHY: I was able to graduate. And about the same time — it had to have been after that, but like a day or two later, I get snatched out of class. And it was a rainy day, so nobody was doing anything. And I got snatched out of class. A captain came to the door, and he said: I need Lt Woolfolk. And out we go, hop in the car, and we go to the post headquarters. And this is the first time I’m going to meet General Maddox, the head of the school, right?6 And I go in, and he sits me down, and we’re talking. And he’s talking the big picture. He’s talking about how the Army had struggled with the issue of training women in flight — and of course, he was always for it — and that it seems to be working well. It was just not me. Now there’s other women in the program, and it seems to be working. I think the first woman warrant officer candidate actually washed out. I remember there was a woman that Bob Agee — not Bob Agee, Bob Browning — had helped with additional instrument training in the simulator, who just couldn’t get it, who just couldn’t do the instruments. And she had washed out. So they had an experience — in my view, from where I sat, of success and struggles and failure, and “what do you do with the women?” and “how does it work?” And it works just like it works with the men.

[1:15:00]

So he’s talking to me about how this seems to be working and tells me what my expectations should be in getting my first assignment and all this. But we had an interesting discussion, and he was interested about the graduation. They had a dinner at the end — and about the dinner, and about how there would be a few more interviews. And I think he wanted to talk to me to see if I could actually speak, you know, because they were going to turn the Public Affairs people on me.

SMITH: Had they held the press at bay during —

MURPHY: Yes.

SMITH: Okay.

MURPHY: Yes. There had been no — no mention, no press, no photographs I’m aware of, until about this time frame.

SMITH: Okay.

MURPHY: The ones that we looked at earlier, they all come — most of them come from that time frame. And I go: okay, you know, I’m good. But he also talked about — he also talked about something that I absolutely rejected. I think at the time, but certainly soon thereafter. And his comment was about how it was like, all on my shoulders now, right? That you know, things would never be different, that I’m out there, you know, representing Army Aviation, representing all the women in aviation, and all this sort of stuff like that. And I’m sitting there and I’m going: geez, you know, if I can handle my own life, I’m going to be happy, you know? I don’t feel particular pressure now, but by then, I’d been through ups and downs and, you know, fears and setbacks and stuff. And I’m going — no, I don’t think so. I said: how can I take on the responsibility of all these people I don’t know, you know…

6 MG William J. Mddox, Jr. was a combat pilot who served in three wars: WW II, Korea, and Vietnam. He served as the Commanding General of the Army Aviation Center and School at Fort Rucker, AL; he retired in 1977. Accessed Oct 21, 2019, http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/wjmaddox.htm; https://militaryhallofhonor.com/.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

SMITH: Right.

MURPHY: …and what the training experiences does for them and with them. But anyway, it’s kind of interesting. You know, that was probably his personal view that, you know, he needed to say that or whatever. By and large, he was a really good — he was very supportive. He was kind. He was a bit of a ladies’ man, which turned out not to please the Army. But you know, I never had any overtures from him at all, or anybody else, you know? I was never — when I was divorced, I never had a — nobody ever asked me out. Nobody [laughs] you know, poison ivy, you know? [laughs] So you know, that part — but I had a friend who was assigned there in the administrative duties, and she was all — very much in the know about the shenanigans that were going on in the community at that time. But he never made a move on me, and I was really happy for that. But years later, I’m in my first — a year later maybe, two years maybe — I’m in Germany, and I’m struggling with some of the guys there. I don’t fit. I’m the supply officer. I get to fly every once in a while. Open hostility by a few of the warrant officers, you know? And it’s taking forever to get me checked out in the aircraft to fly missions. And the flights get cancelled, weather’s bad, blah, blah, blah. And I go out one day, and the aircraft’s got a flat tire. And so we can’t train. So I go back to the supply room, and I’m doing my supply duties and all that. And I get notified that I’m going to lunch the next day in Heidelberg — where to be, when to be, and all that. And I get there, and there’s General Maddox. And it’s a — some sort of a meeting of senior people in Europe. And he and a bunch of — not a bunch, but maybe four or five people — and I end up having lunch. And he’s asking: how is your flying going? How is your training going? And I said: well, I’m really frustrated, because I can’t get checked out. You know, and he goes: what? And I said: yeah, I’ve had aircraft problems, and weather, and blah, blah, other stuff like that. By the time I left Heidelberg and got back to Ramstein, there had been a phone call made. And he didn’t make it, but he talked — he was this far away from the USAREUR7 commander, right? But I imagine he talked to the aviation officer there in the headquarters. And I never heard much about it. You know, somebody said: well, we got a call, and we’ve got to prioritize getting your training done. And I said: oh, finally. Good. Wonderful. But I can — you know, with the advantage of distance, I can see where that would have been probably an uncomfortable phone call from somebody, because they probably didn’t want to hear that — no, really. You know? [laughs] Bad weather, bad aircraft problems, you know? I mean, we only had six aircraft, you know? So —

SMITH: But just in case there was anything more.

MURPHY: Oh, yeah.

SMITH: The message was clearly relayed.

MURPHY: There was this one guy, who I haven’t seen in years, but we were good friends off and on — Gene Sullivan. He was a captain. He and Ray Springsteen, who was also a captain, were assigned in the unit. And Ray had been one of those Standardization guys. So he didn’t have any problem getting his

[1:20:00]

7 United States Army, Europe.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 check ride done, and you know, all the — he came slightly after I did, I think. But he got all that in. And he was so nice. He was a good guy, good friend, very supportive. And Gene and I — Gene had gotten there, and he’d done his thing, and then me, doing my training. And we didn’t know each other particularly well. And he worked out at the field station, and I worked in the headquarters area. But one day, he came up to me, and he says: I am so glad you got here. Now, that’s the only time I’ve ever heard that, you know? He goes: I am so glad you got here, he said, because I thought they were going to keep training me and training me and training me until I checked out on the aircraft, until you came along. And then they had you to train. [laughs] And I kind of laughed, and it kind of put me into perspective, you know? Gives these guys something to do. It wasn’t just me, you know? Other guys had suffered the same thing. One of the greatest rejections I had experienced, in probably my whole career, was when we got in Germany — the unit I was assigned to, the 330th Army Security Agency Company, the Guardrail unit, was a theater asset. So this little company of six airplanes, a ground station — because it was a signals collection outfit — we had the airplanes at Ramstein, and then up on top of a hill, we had the field station. Then we had the headquarters at Kleber Kaserne. So people were all spread out, so it felt even more like a small company. But this theater-level company didn’t have any higher headquarters to speak of. So when you came in to sign in, you had to go all the way to Augsburg8 to the field station to actually — well, near the field station — to actually sign in and do some paperwork and all that. So I get there, and I don’t remember who, but somebody takes me to the auto — you know, to the bahnhof, to the train station. And they drop me off, and they say: you’re going to Kaiserslautern.9 I mean, you’re going to Augsburg. When you get there, somebody will meet you. Okay. So I get on, and off we go. Get off the train at Augsburg, and I’m looking around. [laughs] There’s nobody there, you know? So I take the taxi, go to the headquarters, I walk up. Oh, yeah. We were expecting you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I do my in-processing. I get back out. I think I spent the night. I leave, I go to the bahnhof, back I go to Kaiserslautern. I had actually called — said: I’m done here. I’m coming back. Oh, good. Somebody will be there to meet you, right? I get to the train station in Kaiserslautern. Nobody there. [laughs] And in Kaiserslautern, I had no idea where I was supposed to go. So I said: well, I’ll just go back to where my room is, you know? So I went back to where my room was, and the next day, they found me. [laughs] And I thought: well, you know, that’s a pretty clear sign.

SMITH: So this is — let’s take a quick break, and then we’ll come back. I do want to — I want to cover your graduation and your family’s reaction to it.

MURPHY: Okay.

SMITH: But I think it’s a good time to take a…

MURPHY: Okay.

SMITH: …five-minute break.

[TAPE PAUSED]

8 Field Station Augsburg was located just north of Augsburg, near the village of Gablingen in Bavaria. Ruth Quinn, “Field Station Augsburg Established, 14 April 1970,” Apr 11, 2014. Accessed Oct 17, 2019, https://www.army.mil/article/123905/field_station_augsburg_established_14_april_1970. 9 A town and train station (banhof) near Ramstein Air Base.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

SMITH: So let’s just jump back to Fort Rucker and graduation. Can you tell me about your family’s reaction to you as an Army aviator?

MURPHY: When I joined the Army, my mom said: when this doesn’t work out, you can always come home. [laughs] So being one of those perverse daughters of a mother with an opinion on everything, I was really happy when I could invite her to come to my graduation in flight school. My father came too, and my sister was there. And it was great fun. It was — I wasn’t married yet, but I was getting married in four days. [laughs] So my husband was there. And so it was nice. It was — they have a standard dinner, dance, graduation ceremony. And all the students and all their friends, a lot of the instructors, are there. And the day before, we’d had our last flight, and it’s a formation flight. You fly over the headquarters, the whole class. And instead of having an instructor and you, it’s two students flying. Never came so close to dying in my life. [laughs] You know?

SMITH: So tell me about that. What happened?

MURPHY: Yeah. So we’re flying. We’re flying, and we’d fly around the designated course. I’m one of several in this flight of —

SMITH: Where were you in the formation? Do you remember?

MURPHY: Two-thirds of the way back, maybe…

SMITH: Okay.

MURPHY: …or something. And we’re flying. And when it comes time to land, they have two pads, and you’re supposed to fly and keep going. You know, you’re supposed to not touch down, but just, you know, across the landing pad and keep taxiing forward, you know? And so we’re supposed to come in like, picture-perfect. Well, of course what happened is some guy slows up.

[1:25:00]

So then the guy behind them slows up, [laughs] the guy behind us slows up. So instead of being this nice, smooth whatever, you’ve got, ugh, people stacking up, right? And I’m in here someplace, you know? The guy behind me — the guy in front of me wasn’t the problem, but he was caught up in it, too. So you end up not spaced out right, and then you end up too vertical, you know, and not at the right angle. And everybody’s pulling pitch to get some altitude, but you know you’ve got somebody behind you, you know? So it was — they always say, you know, it’s hours and hours of boredom, with a few minutes of stark terror, right? Well, that was the stark terror right there. Nothing happened. Nobody got hurt, you know. I don’t think the safety officer had to write a [laughs] report or anything, but that was really frightening. But you do that, and then the next day, you show up for the big dinner. And it’s hard to believe it’s over, you know, after nine months of intense training and all that.

SMITH: And what day was graduation? I’m sorry.

MURPHY: June 4, 1974. Geez. 45 years and a month. So you’ve got all your friends and family around. The WAC sent COL Hayes, I think it was, a lady who popped in and out of my periphery during flight training. I think she had come down every once in a while to check. Very distinguished WAC leader. And there were some newspapers there. I know the Kansas City Star was there and all that, doing articles

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 and interviews, in those two days. But the dinner itself was good, and there’s a guest speaker, and he spoke. We’re all in our blues, and half of us have our stuff on wrong, because you know, we hadn’t been in anything but a flight suit for nine months. And so the comments made about me being there and graduating as the first woman and all that sort of stuff. And one of my classmates I heard say: some of the rest of us graduated from flight school today too, right? And I went: ooh. So when I got up and made my comments, of course, I’d already included in my comments — because of course I had to speak — in my comments, I said, you know: there’s however many other people here too, you know, graduating and all that stuff, and it’s just as exciting. But anyway, so I had to make — I felt obligated to make it a point, because these guys had hung with me, you know? Nobody had ever gotten in my face. I hadn’t had a fight with any of them. To my knowledge, none of them had been talking behind my back. I know in — in some way, I know that a few of them weren’t really all that invested in my success, but they were kind enough not to bring it up, you know? So — but the graduation was nice. The actual graduation itself the next day, Gen Hamilton Howze was our guest speaker.10 He was like the creator the helicopter and combat concepts, the air assaults and all that, out of Fort Hood. Four-star general, retired. And he came and spoke for us. Some of my good friends from the WAC training had come in from Fort Gordon, and several of them were assigned at Rucker, which I thought was kind of strange. But there were three of us there. Mary Jo Carr and some others. And then it was done, you know? So everybody else leaves. I left with Dan and we got married, and then had two, three weeks or something of just doing odd jobs on post. And then I started airplane school.

SMITH: Did you have much interaction with the other women going through training?

MURPHY: No.

SMITH: Okay.

MURPHY: Linda Horan and I met each other, and we’d eat dinner together a couple of times. She invited me over to her house, had a social event or something. But no. Uh-uh. I knew Sue Dunwoody. We’d met for that photo op, and we met a couple of times, but I didn’t really know her. But we knew each other. I met a couple of the warrant officer candidates, the one I mentioned who failed out of instruments, and then Jennie Vallance,11 who I — was the first woman warrant officer pilot. I met her, but once again, it was like, at a graduation.

SMITH: Right.

MURPHY: You know, a ceremonial thing. But I didn’t really know them. But I — I don’t know if this is true, but my sense is that I was there several months before Linda showed up, you know, and —

SMITH: So —

10 General Howze (1908-1998) was a Rough Rider and a 1930 West Point graduate who served as the Director of Army Aviation (1955-58), Commander of XVIII Airborne Corps, and Commander of US Forces Korea. Accessed Oct 29, 2019, https://history.redstone.army.mil/avi-bios.html. 11 The first women completed warrant officer training in 1975. Jennie A. Vallance was the first woman warrant officer aviator, probably earning her wings c. 1975-6. “Army Warrant Officer History,” May 31, 2005. Accessed Oct 17, 2019, https://warrantofficerhistory.org/Hist_of_Army_WO.htm.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

MURPHY: But we talk every once in a while. We lose each other for a decade, and then we find each other. She’s out in Albuquerque. And yeah, we’ll see — we’ll see each other again.

SMITH: Great. So you remain in the Military Intelligence branch after

[1:30:00] graduation, and you start flying the RU-21?

MURPHY: Yes.

SMITH: Is that correct?

MURPHY: Uh huh.

SMITH: So tell me about that transition training, and —

MURPHY: That was very interesting. Everything went from being relatively — in hindsight, relatively slow in a helicopter, to really fast in an airplane. So, you know, when you’re base-to-final12 in a helicopter, you can make more corrections. You can — you have more time to think about it, you know, than you do in an airplane. And all the navigation aids and the avionics are just so much greater than what I had in my helicopter experience. So everything’s moving faster.

SMITH: What was the training like? Did you have to go to a fixed-wing transition, or —

MURPHY: Just down the street.

SMITH: Okay.

MURPHY: Yeah. There was a real airport right down the street, and an Army airfield. And this was interesting. I think I was the only new pilot in the program for the airplane at that time. Most of the men who were there — and they were talking six people maybe, right? And all of them had lots of previous experience. My stick buddy — I can’t remember his name — was a lieutenant colonel, and really nice. I mean, we kept up — when I went to my first assignment in Germany, he wrote me like every six months, and I’d write back. You know, and then we didn’t have anything to say. You know, other than flight school, we had no common ground. But he was just there, and you know, in the sidelines rooting me on, you know? Not overtly. Just keep in touch. But he was really nice. And he came with a family and three kids, and you know, the whole thing, to Fort Rucker. So we’d go and, you know, have beer and chips after flying and stuff like that. But it was funny, because Fort Rucker, home of the aviation, would struggle as much as many people — you know, the Army does, to try to get an airplane, right? So you know, whoever the big muckity-muck is at the post, or at the headquarters, who wants to fly someplace, wants their own airplane to fly someplace. Well, there just aren’t enough of those airplanes to go around, and they were moving them around — once again, everything’s changing, right? So where they used to have airplanes assigned at different posts and stuff, now they’re pooling them all together and making them units. And they’re — you have to request them, and they have to get scheduled, and all this sort of stuff. So at Fort Rucker, there is no way the commanding general of Fort Rucker and the Army’s aviation program isn’t going to fly in his own airplane when he has to go to Washington. So we

12 Turning from the base leg to line up on final approach before landing.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 have like two aircraft set aside for our training, and often, those aircraft were someplace else. [laughs] If you were lucky, you were with them. If you weren’t lucky, you were kind of off, or you did the table talk, you know, part of your — more instruction. But so it was often hard to get the hours you needed to get the airplane, because there was such a demand for those two airplanes to fly someplace. When I was in training, General Maddox had to come up to Washington, D.C., I think it was probably for a — some sort of convention. I don’t think it was Quad-A,13 because they didn’t have all those displays. But all the services were here. And so he decided I needed to go with him. And so his aide called and said, you know: you’re going to be one of the pilots, and we’re going to go up to Washington, and we’ll spend the night, and then we’ll come back. And I go: okay. And he says: you know you’re going to be on display. I said: yeah, okay. Thanks. Well, he didn’t say: you know you’re going to be on display, and so you ought to wear your greens. Women didn’t have trousers then to wear. So you’re going to wear your greens in the aircraft, fly — it was completely impossible for me to fathom flying in an aircraft without all my flight gear.

SMITH: Right.

MURPHY: Right? I mean, the big helmet — not the earphones — none of that was in my experience yet, right? Big helmet. Flight suit. So I show up. They’re all in their greens, you know, and I’m in my flight suit. And they were aghast, you know? I had my uniform with me, in my little overnight bag, but —

SMITH: They hadn’t had — established a protocol for flying this aircraft.

MURPHY: Oh, well, no, but —

SMITH: Outside of the training environment.

MURPHY: Right. Right.

SMITH: Right. Right.

MURPHY: And I, of course, had no experience with the VIP flying yet, or you know, any of that business. So I show up in my flight suit, and the general is obviously annoyed. I’m sure his aide is the one who took the rap. But so we end up — somebody picks us up — a friend of the general’s, somebody out of the aviation office in Washington — and we end up going back to this guy’s apartment. I go in the bathroom. I change into my greens. Out we come. We go to this

[1:35:00] ordeal, and when we get there, they’ve just had that Mayaguez Incident.14 Do you remember that?

13 Army Aviation Association of America. Accessed Oct 17, 2019, http://www.quad-a.org/. 14 On May 12, 1975, days after the fall of Saigon, Khmer Rouge forces seized the SS Mayaguez, a U.S. container vessel, of the coast of Cambodia. When diplomacy failed, U.S. forces were ordered to seize the Mayaguez and recover the crew. The poorly planned recovery attempt—riddled with command, control, and communication errors—failed, and 41 service members lost their lives. David Vergun, “Lessons Learned From 1975 Mayaguez Incident,” Dec 11, 2018. Accessed Oct 17, 2019, https://www.defense.gov/explore/story/Article/1710391/lessons- learned-from-1975-mayaguez-incident/; “1975-The Mayaguez Inicident,” Aug 19, 2013. Accessed Oct 17, 2019, https://www.afhistory.af.mil/FAQs/Fact-Sheets/Article/639660/the-mayaguez-incident/.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

SMITH: Yes.

MURPHY: Yes. And the whole place is full of aviators and military people, and you could feel the oxygen leaving the room. I mean, there must have been — I don’t know, one of those great, big conference centers, right? I mean, there were thousands of people. And when it was announced, you could just feel the oxygen leaving the room. And I can remember General Maddox saying: geez, I’m glad we weren’t involved in that, [laughs] you know? Because as you know, it was a big deal. But so I did my meets-and- greets and talking to people, and whatever we were supposed to accomplish. And then we flew back the next day. But that was part of my flight training, those hours, coming up…

SMITH: Right.

MURPHY: …and back [laughs] in my flight log as part of my training. And I guess it works, because there was an instructor pilot, you know, in the other seat, so —

SMITH: Describe the training. Just — you’ve talked a bit about the instrument, the navigation. How long was the training?

MURPHY: I got — this training was fairly short. It was a couple of months, maybe. Three months, maybe?

SMITH: And what was the mission of — you know, aside from VIP transport, the RU-21 —

MURPHY: Right. What I was being trained for was to go to Europe and fly in the Guardrail unit, the Army Security Agency.15 And we did signals collection and positioning, you know, target acquisition and stuff, flying up and down the inner German border. And we had — on those aircraft, we had two pilots, and we flew on oxygen. We went straight up as fast as that little airplane could go, which wasn’t very fast, and we’d go up to like, 22,000 feet or something like that. And we’d fly back and forth between designated points along the border, while the machinery in the back was collecting all the data and relaying it down to the ground station, where the really smart people, the enlisted people who spoke the languages and understood, you know, the math associated with the positioning and all that business, where they would then collect and send off the intelligence reports about who was where, and all that. But we’d fly — some of the guys probably flew almost every day. I probably flew — out of a seven-day week, I probably flew four times. Almost all my flight time is from that first assignment, you know?

SMITH: And describe the aircraft. This is a Beech 12?

MURPHY: It’s a Beech, and I don’t know its designation, but it’s not the high wing — the high tail. It’s the low tail.

SMITH: Okay.

15 The Guardrail sensors were flown on a modified Beechcraft King Air (RU-21), providing critical aerial intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (AISR). Brandon Pollachek, “Guardrail turns 40, modernization keeps it going,” July 7, 2011. Accessed Oct 17, 2019, https://www.army.mil/article/61251/guardrail_turns_40_modernization_keeps_it_going; https://asc.army.mil/web/portfolio-item/guardrail-common-sensor-grcs/.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

MURPHY: But I had a fellow pilot, John Hart and I — whenever we’d fly together, we’d have to carry extra bags of weight, you know. We’d take a couple extra bags of flight planning, you know, stuff. And we’d put them in the front in the cockpit, because we didn’t weigh enough for the weight and balance. So we’d have to carry them up. It wasn’t a problem, except with him. He was about my size. But it was — we were on oxygen. It was very uncomfortable. It was very cold, because the aircraft didn’t have adequate heating. There was an incident where something happened, and it was written up in Aviation Digest that — well — that the pilot, co-pilot, whoever it was, had their feet in their helmet bag, you know? You put it on like — you’d wear boots, and then you’d put that on, or wrap a blanket around you, or whatever, in order to stay warm enough to fly. Of course, you had the aircraft all trimmed up. It didn’t care if your feet were on the pedals or not. But it was — it being the winter, it was very cold. It was beautiful though, flying on top of the clouds, right? I’d never seen anything so pretty. You can’t take a picture. It doesn’t translate, you know?

SMITH: Yeah.

MURPHY: But just gorgeous.

SMITH: So tell me about your assignment. This is — this is — you talked about Guardrail, and there was Fort Riley after that, or —

MURPHY: Yeah, I left Guardrail, and I went back to Fort Huachuca for the Military Intelligence advanced course. And one of the things I meant to mention was the reason I was still MI is because Aviation wasn’t a branch. The Army had always treated Aviation as a special skill. So like you might have a badge for parachuting, you would have a badge for the fact that you could fly, right? and so you’d be an Infantry officer who was also a pilot. You’d be an MI officer who was also a pilot. But it wasn’t until — oh, I don’t know.

[1:40:00]

SMITH: Whenever it became a separate branch.

MURPHY: Yeah. I was in Germany.

SMITH: So that’s something —

MURPHY: I’d guess my second — yeah, it was in my second tour in Germany that they’d made Aviation a branch. And they sent a letter out, and I got a letter that says: we recommend you ask to be assigned to Aviation branch. And I wrote them back, and I said: after a career of people telling me that there’s no future for women in Aviation, why should I pick Aviation, you know, when half of my assignments — or more than half — were in Intelligence? And they wrote back, and they said: oh, no. But we don’t want it to be that way. We want there to be women in Aviation, and all that business. I said: yeah, okay. I’m game. So we changed branch designation. But at this time, after — when we did guard — when I did Guardrail, I was an Intelligence officer. When I went back to Fort Huachuca for the advanced course, I was an Intelligence officer. And then when I went to Riley, I was an Intelligence officer. I was supposed to go to Fort Hood. I mean, the Army had good intentions. The Army wanted me to go from the advanced course to Fort Hood, where I would fly a Guardrail unit. This was the track that I was supposed to follow, and fly airplanes, and do all this stuff. Well, my husband was assigned at Fort Riley, so I said:

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 could I please go to Fort Riley instead? And they said: let’s see. And they had one assign — they had one opening, and it was the S-2—the battalion intelligence officer—of the Aviation battalion. And so it wasn’t filled, so they sent me there, and I got assigned. And that’s where I stepped off the Aviation track and in more to the Intelligence track. Quite frankly, there wouldn’t have been many more assignments for me anyway, because there was only one lieutenant colonel in each of these Aviation companies. And there’s only like two majors, and then the rest are captains. So there’s going to be — in these MI units, and there were like three of those units in the world at the time, right? So you know, that would have — Fort Hood probably would have been my last flying assignment for MI. So I went into Fort Riley as the S- 2 of the Aviation battalion, which put me back into helicopters.

SMITH: Explain what S-2 is, for —

MURPHY: The S-2 is the Intelligence officer. So you’re supposed to be providing intelligence to your unit to plan around. For Aviation, it would be, you know, air defense issues and stuff like that. You’re also in charge of all the crypto for the avionics. So you inventory and store all the crypto. And then the biggest part of that job is physical security, because you’re also in charge of the security of the airfield, which I have done a number of times, and which I have never felt comfortable in doing, because there’s no protecting an airfield if you don’t have, you know, a lot of people surrounding it, you know? So — but you know — at Riley, the threat was relatively small. You know, in Germany, the threat was relatively large. [laughs] The good news is sometimes you’re such a small entity, nobody really pays any attention to you. [laughs] You know? I’d rather be in charge of a small airfield than a large airfield, you know?

SMITH: Right.

MURPHY: But —

SMITH: Where wildlife is a bigger concern.

MURPHY: Right. I remember we got a survey once from the Military Intelligence people asking all the S- 2s how much time they spent on physical security as opposed to intelligence. And I wrote: I spent 99 percent of time on physical security, you know? Because, you know, there wasn’t a lot of intelligence work to do in Kansas. [laughs]

SMITH: So you mentioned that you were one of two pilots that had reduced weather minimums capability.

MURPHY: Oh, yeah.

SMITH: Explain that.

MURPHY: It’s really interesting. It used to be in the Army that to be a senior aviator — oh, yeah. One of the higher-ranking ones, senior or major — master. Initially, you are an aviator, then meeting certain criteria you become a senior aviator and, finally with more hard-to-obtain experience, a master aviator. At some level, you had to be both rotary-wing and fixed-wing rated. Well, over time, that changed, because there just weren’t going to be that many dual-rated pilots. So I was on the cusp of that. So it was a big deal that I was helicopter- and airplane-rated. But what came with that was all those hours in Germany. I mean, most of it was weather time. You couldn’t get to 22,000 feet without weather, you know? So I show up at Fort Riley, not having flown a helicopter since I graduated from flight school. And

34

MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 it would have been like, what, five years later or something. And so those wonderful instructor warrant officers are going to train me again in how to fly a helicopter. But my records say I’ve got — what I did I have then? A thousand hours of flight time, and 400 hours of weather time, or whatever it was. And the only other guy on the airfield that had that kind of weather time was the instrument flight examiner. So he’d give all these check-rides and stuff, but he couldn’t go anyplace. You know, he —

[1:45:00] in bad weather, he could not fly to Kansas City or Wichita or wherever he needed — somebody needed transportation. But when I showed up, that all changed, because now he had two pilots who have the hours necessary to fly under instrument conditions, with the ability to take off with severely reduced minimums. All pilots by this time were rated to fly instruments, but there were few in tactical helicopter units who had the amount of instrument time permitting very limited visibility take-offs. So it was kind of surreal. It was kind of — at least, to me. I think to others. You know, here I am struggling — doing the S-2 work and struggling to learn how to do helicopters again. But oh, Sally. Hop in this aircraft. We’re going to take off in zero visibility [laughs] and go over to Kansas City. Okay. [laughs] You know? And everybody’s kind of going: but she can’t really fly this. No, but she can fly instruments. You know, if I get it off the ground, she’s okay.

SMITH: So before you ever were re-checked out?

MURPHY: Yeah.

SMITH: Oh, that’s interesting.

MURPHY: Yeah.

SMITH: Because he was an instructor.

MURPHY: Yeah, he was an instructor.

SMITH: An examiner. Gotcha.

MURPHY: He just needed — he just needed somebody to be in the seat…

SMITH: Right.

MURPHY: …pretty much.

SMITH: Wow.

MURPHY: But that was interesting. That was — and I was pregnant then, and that’s when that issue of pregnancy always comes up, right?

SMITH: Right.

MURPHY: So I knew I was pregnant before I told the community, and I didn’t tell anybody. And I went to see the flight — I went to see the flight instructor — the flight surgeon, and he wasn’t there. But it so happened, one of the senior doctors at the hospital was also a flight surgeon. So I went to see him, and I said: what do I do? And he says: oh, I’m grounding you right now, he says, because we don’t know. He

35

MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 says: we don’t have any data. We have no idea what’s going to happen here. And he said — but he was knowledgeable about the civilian aviation women flying, and he made the comment that there was a tendency for premature births if you flew while you were pregnant. And Sean, our son, and I proved that that was true for us. He was six weeks early. But we had all — I had also worked in that headquarters as the S-2, which was essentially a really old ashtray. Everybody was smoking. The windows weren’t open, you know, there was no restrictions. So the whole time he was in gestation, he was getting second-hand smoke. So I tend to think it probably had more to do with that than it had to do with flying. But what do I know? I don’t know. But it’s an issue to me, because I have met some of these women who flew in combat while they knew they were pregnant and non-combat, with no ill effects that I know of. They had flown — and I believe they let them fly a little longer now. But I don’t know what the rules are now. But you know, some of these civilian women fly like they’re driving their car. And much later into their pregnancies.

SMITH: Quite a long time. Right.

MURPHY: You know, so —

SMITH: So you also mentioned REFORGER, that you were involved in that —

MURPHY: Yeah. One of the big adventures — especially if you’re at a certain post, and Fort Riley was one of those — the First Infantry Division was one of those divisions — when we left — when the United States forces left Germany after World War II, there was an intent — I think it was a pledge — that we would be able to come back, should we have to. And so there was this huge exercise developed over the years called “Return of Forces to Germany,” or “REFORGER.” And so periodically, every couple of years, every four years, I don’t know — they would deploy U.S. forces back to Germany. You do this big field exercise, and then you’d return. It would exercise all the logistics restraints, exercise all the planning and the little exercise, you know, was almost coincidental to the logistics burden of the movement. And so if you’re at Fort Riley, you’re going to do REFORGER in those days. And that was really a good assignment. I had moved from my Aviation battalion to the S-2 — into the G-2 office at — at the First Infantry Division Headquarters, when we deployed. So when you go to the Arms room to draw your weapon, I got an M-16 instead of a sidearm. And that was lots of fun, you know? Living with an M-16, day in, day out, for a couple of months, you know, and coming home. And when I came back, I was talking to one of the guys that was at the Aviation battalion, and he says: “oh, you should have come down to us. We had some pistols left over. You could have signed one out.” And I’m going [laughs] — you know, why didn’t I do that? But I ended up at the — in the G-2 because — I was sitting in my office. I was a company commander of the Headquarters company in the Aviation battalion by then. The phone rings, and the phone is an MI — an Aviation assignments officer, who says: “heads up, we want to send you to Korea--” which was an unaccompanied tour—no family allowed. And I go: “Korea? I have virtually a 3-month-old son, right?” They called me sometime before that and said: they’re letting women into the astronaut program. I want you to apply to the astronaut, you know — not flying, but special skills and all that.

SMITH: What year was this?

MURPHY: This was

[1:50:00]

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

1979.

SMITH: Okay.

MURPHY: And they go: we want you to apply. You know, Air Force has got people. Whatever. Army wants to send somebody. You’re it. I said: boy, I’d love to do that, I said, but you know, I’m pregnant. What? You know, once again. No standards. Nobody knows. Nobody cares. For flight school I had the standard 6-year service obligation. Dan and I planned our family to start after that obligation was met. That was our standard. You know. I go, yeah. I’m about eight months pregnant, and I don’t know what that does to your timetable. Well, thanks anyway. Bye. Hangs up.

SMITH: And you were mostly — I’m sorry to interrupt. But you were the S-2, you were staff…

MURPHY: Yes.

SMITH: …and flying, so —

MURPHY: Yes. All rated aviators in an aviation unit are part of the fight roll and are available to fly when called upon.

SMITH: Okay. I just--

MURPHY: When I got up to the G-2—the G-2 is the Intelligence function of a Division, in this case the 1st Infantry Division…

SMITH: Or, G-2. Sorry.

MURPHY: …I didn’t have to fly. I didn’t fly anymore. I couldn’t fly anymore. They — it wasn’t a flying position. But when I’d gotten the phone call from Branch, when I was in the Aviation Battalion, saying: you’re going to Korea, I said: oh, I don’t think so. They go: oh, yeah. And I go: I don’t think so. I said: I can look through my window, and I can see Stan Myers, sitting over there at his desk. You cannot have a conversation with Stan Myers where he doesn’t bring up — he wants to go back to Korea. I said: call Stan. He wants to go. And they go: no, you’re going. And I go: he wants to go. He flies a Huey. I fly a Huey. Take Stan. No, no, no. You’ve got to go. So I hung up the phone, picked it back up, and I called MI Assignments. And I got a woman who was in Assignments there. And I said: here’s the situation. And I don’t want to be eligible to go to Korea for Aviation branch, you know? I’m still an MI officer, right? I go: what can you do for me? She says: oh, we’ve only got 20 vacancies at Fort Riley [laughs] for MI captains. Which one do you want, you know?

SMITH: Fantastic.

MURPHY: And I said: oh, good. You know? She says: I’ll run down the hall. I’ll take care of this. And sure enough, then I end up assigned to the G-2. And it seems — I seem destined to write Standard Operating Procedures for every desk job I ever get. So I go up there, and they’re getting ready to go to REFORGER. And they really don’t have any procedures in place. So my standard approach is to ask everybody who’s been doing the job for a long time how they do their job, document it, organize it, and send it to everybody. So I write this SOP, and then I have to go off to a school while they all deploy. Then I come

37

MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 back from this little school, and then I deploy. So I get there late to REFORGER, and sure enough, they’re using my little SOP. [laughs] They’re putting their reports in on time.

SMITH: Yay.

MURPHY: They’re doing all this other. Well, this proves you don’t have to be there to make thing happen, you know?

SMITH: That’s right.

MURPHY: But that was — that was an interesting situation. We — that’s where I learned how to be a soldier. It’s interesting with —

SMITH: As a G-2, you mean?

MURPHY: Yeah. Well, with being in the 1st Infantry Division. The whole thing. The Aviation piece, and the G-2 piece, deploying to REFORGER. Before that, when I think back, it’s essentially all schools, and then this very rarified assignment in Military Intelligence in Germany. Standalone company, theater asset, you know, very different than the basic Army. But by the time I get to the 1st Infantry Division, I’m up to my earlobes in “you’re in the Army now.” I mean, it’s — you know, PT in the morning. It’s, you know, tactical training, going to the range, firing your weapon, and all that. And I have a story about that, about firing weapons. When we were WACs, and we went to Fort Huachuca in that first assignment to Fort Huachuca, and there’s 15 of us, 9 of us, whatever it was — part of the training is your weapons training. And it was .45s, and it was M-16s, and it was grenade launchers and all this. And we all go, and they’re all scared. What are these women going to do, you know, at the range? Well, you know how when you’re good at something, you kind of go to the front of the line, and when you’re not so good, you kind of hang back? Well, in the front of our line was a woman who’d been a Detroit policewoman. There was a woman who’d grown up on a ranch in Texas, and there was a woman who had somehow learned weapons in her background. So they’re like, in the front. And they all fire, and they all do really well. And all these men are going around going — faculty are going around going: oh, my goodness. Do you think all these women can shoot like that? Well, of course, by the time they got to me, I’d never handled a weapon. I didn’t know how. And that’s the way most of us were, and we had to learn. But they took pictures. And once again, the Stars and Stripes. So they took pictures of us out there with our weapons, and they — the public affairs person sent them off to the Stars and Stripes. The Stars and Stripes shows them. The women in the WAC branch went crazy. First of all, we’re not dressed like WACs. You know, we’re in the fatigues and all this stuff. And secondly, we’re shooting weapons. Because the WACs, by and large, did not

[1:55:00] deal with weapons. There are some women I know — one of the women in my Intelligence class — that’s the other woman who shot well — had been an enlisted woman in Intelligence in SIGINT.16 And so she had been qualified in a pistol as an enlisted woman. She was very good. Linda Holgren. But so they were — the men were pleased, because it looked like the women could shoot or learn how to shoot. The WACs were displeased, because they didn’t want that, because they were afraid that was going to

16 Signals intelligence (SIGINT) analysts examine foreign communications and produce intelligence reports.

38

MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 influence women wanting to come in, because in the old WAC, the perception was women didn’t want to fire. I assumed it’s that they weren’t allowed to fire. But there was a — when they finally integrated women into the other branches, there were several women who left the military because it was becoming something they didn’t want, you know, to be involved in. But anyway, back to Fort Riley. But that’s where I learned — Riley’s where I learned — the First Infantry Division’s where I learned how to be a soldier, because you pitch a pup tent, you know. You tote your bags. When I was going to REFORGER, I had a duffel bag in the front and a duffel bag in the back, and I had my Alice pack — the bookbag — an Alice pack hanging off this arm, and I’m carrying — off this arm, and I’m carrying my M-16 on this arm. And you know, the duffel bags came to here, to here, to here. You’re kind of waddling off to the truck to offload your stuff so it’ll be hauled over to Germany for you. And that was one of the — that was one of the moments I knew that the Army was truly a great organization, because weeks later, I get — come back from school. Weeks later, I get on the plane. I go to Germany. My bags have already gone. I go to Germany, and we go from a big airplane to a little airplane, and then it flies us in. Get in a truck. The truck drives us to the spot where our division’s supposed to be. And I jump off the back of this 2 1/2 ton truck, and right there are my bags. [laughs]

SMITH: Wow.

MURPHY: I mean, I’m going — how can this be, you know? Several weeks later, however many thousands of miles, you know? [laughs] I’m sure it was a coincidence, but I’m going: how can that be? Wonderful organization, the Army. But you know, you live out in the field. You know, you’re miserable. Cold weather soldiering is not for wimps. It’s very difficult. You get very little done. My son, Sean, told me when he was in Iraq — when he was in Afghanistan, when it got really cold, they essentially didn’t do anything, because the bad guys didn’t do anything, and they couldn’t do anything, you know. They were so high up in the mountains, and it was so cold that they had to wait till spring.

SMITH: So next, I think I have the 62nd Aviation Company.

MURPHY: Yes.

SMITH: Yes. So tell me about that. The Royal Coachmen?

MURPHY: Royal Coachmen.

SMITH: Had you been promoted by this time, or —

MURPHY: I’m a major by then.

SMITH: Right. Okay.

MURPHY: We left Riley, and we went back to Germany, and I was in the G-2 there and did some wonderfully challenging, wonderful work. And part of that was I was the briefer for the G-2 for division briefs, doing the Intelligence briefing. And one of the colonels in the room is the brigade aviation commander. And COL Frix.17 And he approaches me one day and chats me up a little bit, and he says:

17 As a colonel, Major General Robert S. Frix commanded the 12th AVN Gp (Combat Aviation Brigade) from 1983- 86. Accessed Oct 29, 2019, http://www.armyaviationmuseum.org/flight-lines-gallery/flight-lines-a-to-g/mg-frix- robert-s/.

39

MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 you know, we’re looking for a company commander. Would you be interested? And I go: oh, yeah. And he said: okay. So the next thing I know, I get a phone call to go interview with the battalion commander. They’ve had an unfortunate death and then movement of the resources they had around, and they ended up with a vacancy, as a major. And so I interviewed for that, and I got this assignment, and it was one of the shortest assignments I’ve ever had, you know? So I come out of the division, and I get there. Once again, I’m being retrained on how to fly an airplane — no, I was flying helicopters there — how to fly helicopters. And it’s the biggest unit I ever commanded. Ten months of command before attending the Armed Forces Staff College. Upon my departure, the company was reorganized into a battalion and the Army transitioned aviation resources once again.

SMITH: And this — this is an Aviation company. So this is — it’s different.

MURPHY: It’s an Aviation company. It’s a real Aviation company. The old-school companies. I had, I think, 38 helicopters. More than half of them were Hueys, and then the others were 58s, and I had two airplanes, and a whole bunch of people. I had arc lights, you know, for lights. Arc lights are very large lights on their own extension supports that are used to light large areas, in this case they were designed to light maintenance facilities when necessary. I had fuel tankers. I had — I mean, it was a lot of equipment and stuff. And I went there, but I ended up being pulled out to go to the Armed Forces Staff College.

SMITH: Congratulations.

MURPHY: Yeah.

SMITH: That’s a big pull-out.

MURPHY: It was nice.

SMITH: Yeah.

MURPHY: It was good, and I’d already done Command and General Staff by correspondence, because I didn’t think I’d get selected, you know? And — but anyway, so I’m in Germany, and I’m learning all this stuff again on how to fly. And then the

[2:00:00]

Baader-Meinhof crowd, the terrorists in Germany, were big then. And that’s when you get back to the aircraft — airfield security. You know, really worry — do you move your aircraft internal, and make them one target, because they’re all together, or do you keep them scattered out toward the fence where you’ve got room, and make them closer to the fence? You know, no good answer. But I really enjoyed that assignment. It was — it was good. But after that, I went back to —

SMITH: Can I back up and just ask about how often did you get to fly?

MURPHY: In many of these assignments, especially if I’m a commander, I can fly as often as I want to, and I regret I didn’t fly more. But I’ll bet — I don’t know. I bet I only flew a couple of times a week. Yeah. I think I probably have — I’d have to check, but I think I probably have something like 1,300 flight hours, and I got 900 of them in my first assignment.

40

MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

SMITH: Wow.

MURPHY: So in the remaining 25 years, I only got those other four. But I actually spent — if you take school out of the equation, I spent half my time in aviation and half my time in intelligence.

SMITH: Right.

MURPHY: The army had — and I hope they’ve fixed it — a bad habit of selecting battalion commanders, or commanders, and putting them in units when they haven’t flown in a long time. So there they are. They’re supposed to be the role model, the leader, the — you know, the guy. But instead, they come in short-handed, because they’re not really qualified in their skill anymore. So once again, those really bright warrant officers end up training the battalion commander, the O-6s or the O-5s, or in my generation, the O-4s that commanded the companies. But so that’s kind of a bad pattern. And plus, they’re only there for a couple of years, and so they’re gone. So I have enough experience peripheral to where bad decisions, aircraft accidents and stuff have happened, which for my purposes, I can track back deliberately to the fact of that policy. You know, if you’re going to put a guy on an Aviation leadership track, then you ought to keep him as close as you can to Aviation and flying. And they didn’t do that for a while. I don’t know if they’re doing it now. Because this was all before it was a branch. So they had to share you with your branch. So maybe now that they own you — lock, stock, and barrel — now you can stay closer to Aviation.

SMITH: Hopefully.

MURPHY: Yeah.

SMITH: Yeah. So after Armed Forces Staff College, you went to Headquarters?

MURPHY: That’s when I went to the Pentagon for the first time.

SMITH: Right.

MURPHY: COL Matt Parelli.18 He’d been a battalion commander in Germany when I was in the G-2, I got to know him. And he calls me on the phone one day, and he says: I want you to come work for me, but it’s a dreadful job. It’s horrible. I hate to even ask you, but you know, you might get a half-day off at Christmas, and you know, you work all the time. A lot of stress, and all this stuff. And I go: well, I’m supposed to go to a Joint assignment. That’s why I went to the Armed Forces Staff College. And he goes: yeah, but, you know — so we worked it around, and I of course gave in. I said: sure. You know, if you can make it happen, I’d be happy to work for you. So I end up in the Pentagon. Once again, my husband has already preceded me. He’s in the Pentagon, and he’s just right down the hall. We’ve had many assignments like that. Which was what troubles me about these couples not being able to be assigned even in the same state. But he was right down the hall. And you’re in this really dreadful working conditions. I mean, it’s not just cubicles. It’s cubicles inside a SCIF,19 where the rat droppings and the

18 Colonel Matt Parelli was a lieutenant colonel when he was the battalion commander, but by the time of the phone call, he was a full colonel. 19 Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, a secure place for classified work.

41

MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 asbestos is dropping in on your desk, you know, overnight. You come in, there’s this little pile of stuff. [laughs] I mean, it was dreadful, dreadful working conditions.

SMITH: Oh, my gosh.

MURPHY: But I show up, and I’m an MI Aviator type, and there are two others there with me. And all three of us flew Guardrail about the same time and know each other. And they’re doing that. And I don’t know what I’m doing. And then I find out I’m doing the Army’s portion of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Program. My goodness. That’s one of those items that ends up on that resume. I have like four items of Earth-shattering things that you did, and that’s one of them.

SMITH: Yes.

MURPHY: And so in the Joint Requirements Council,20 my general was in charge of this council. So he turns to me — General Granrud,21 and he turns to me, and he says: you. You’re my point person. Get the services together. Write a requirements document. The Army has this very elaborate requirements process. I’m sure most it’s forced by Congress, but — where you really detail everything you need. The Air Force, the Navy, the Marines, at that time,

[2:05:00] not so much. You know, big order of magnitude. Big — how much money for how many big things. Not how many people it’s going to be and how many radios it’s going to be, and whether you need a truck for that, or, you know — but the Army’s in all of this detail. So MG Granrud thinks I’m going to go to the Marines and the Navy and the Air Force and say: hey, I need this kind of detail, right? And we need to write the requirements document. The good news is, frankly, the Air Force rep was a guy who’d had my job before I did. He’d been in an exchange program, working on the Army Staff rather than the Air Staff, and he had started the notion of the UAV thing, on the already existing Army development program of the Aquila targeting vehicle. Ken Thurman,22 something like that—I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it wasn’t his notion that got the General interested, or — I think he was probably much more involved in making the whole idea of a family of UAV satisfying not only intelligence and targeting requirement, but other battlefield and longer range applications start. But then, it was time for him to go back to the Air Force. At that time, the Air Force didn’t want to have anything to do with the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle program. They didn’t even want to talk about. They didn’t want to go to meetings about it or anything. But he was a zealot. I mean, he was — Ken was a huge zealot about the whole thing.

SMITH: What year was this, roughly?

MURPHY: Pardon?

SMITH: What year was this?

20 Possibly the Joint Requirements Oversight Council. 21 At the time, he was a Major General. By the time COL Murphy was in Japan, Granrud was a lieutenant general, Commander of IX Corps. LTG Jerome H. “Jerry” Granrud was the U.S. Army Japan (USARJ) Commander from 1992- 1994, https://www.usarj.army.mil/about/formercg/. 22 Maj Ken Thurman, https://www.airforcemag.com/article/1088uav/.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

MURPHY: This would be 1987-88, maybe.

SMITH: Okay.

MURPHY: I don’t know. I’ll give you some dates on this later. [laughs] But anyway, he — he goes back to the Air Force. I get the project. We finally get people to come, and the Navy — thank goodness, the Navy sends a Marine to be their rep. And the Marine sends a Marine to be their rep. So we have the two Marines, the Air Force guy who’s more zealous about this than any of the rest of us, and me. And we sit down over a relatively short period of time. We talk about it. We come up with a little framework. We all go off and get research from our services, and we come back, and we write this document about the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle program. And they’re going to have a tactical and strategic, and we’re going to have, you know, the long-range, and you know, all this stuff. And we write the — I write this document. I give it — I submit it. It goes up through DOD. My general has to brief the Joint —

SMITH: CJCS?

MURPHY: Yeah, the —he’s one of the Joint Requirements Councils people. He has to brief them. This is another opportunity I have to shine in which I don’t. So they have a guy that flips the slides in the back, you know, and it’s a foot down, and a hand here, and all this business. And I’ve got a four-second explanation of how this machine works. So it turns out every time my general wants me to flip a slide, I’m covering one up. [laughs] And then he went no, no, the other. For a year after that, we’d be walking down the hall, and he’d see somebody, and he’d say: this is the woman who was doing the slides [laughs] in the back when I briefed whatever, you know? I go: oh, thanks. Thanks. But so that requirements document went through and it became the Joint Requirements document, the Defense Department’s Requirements document, and it created this whole Joint task force for all these UAVs now, you know? So that was my main contribution there. But when they took that away from me to give it to the Joint development effort, I didn’t have anything to do. So then they said: well, we’ll move you into a different office. And I was traumatized by that. You know, what — my terrible cubby hole here? I have to leave this one? I mean, the one over there’s better, but you know. So I ended up doing a requirements meeting — a weekly meeting with the Chief of Staff.

SMITH: Is this the Review Council?

MURPHY: Yes.

SMITH: Requirements Review Council?

MURPHY: Requirements Review Council. And they’d brought in all the principals on the Army staff to look at equipment priorities. And so it was a mad dash from Monday, when my general would decide what he wanted briefed, to Wednesday, when the briefing was given. I’m going around, you know, cajoling all my cohorts to write papers and do slides on their subjects, and I’m putting it together in the middle of the night on Tuesday night. And then Wednesday morning, I’m still in the same clothes that I wore on Tuesday. And we do the briefing. And then I come back, and I write my notes up. I put it all away, and I walk out to the van. At this point, we’re vanpooling in and out. And so I know where the van key is hidden. And I open up the van, and I lay down, and I go to sleep until the first person shows up to go home. [laughs] So work through the night, every week, get this done.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

SMITH: Welcome to the life.

MURPHY: And then sleep in the van. [laughs]

SMITH: Welcome to the life of a staff officer at the —

MURPHY: I know, I know. And I told — I’ve told people forever. I don’t know what it is. I said: you go to the Pentagon, and you get out of the van or the car, and you start walking as fast as you can to get where you are. Why?

[2:10:00]

You know? You know what’s waiting for you. Why are you in a big hurry to get there? And then you don’t — you don’t really notice it, because everybody else is doing the same thing, you know? And then it — you stay, and you stay, and you stay, and sure enough, Matt Parelli was right. That first Christmas that Dan and I were there, we worked Christmas Eve. I bought all of the Christmas presents for he and my son down at the Concourse on the Pentagon. It’s really hard to shop for a 6-year-old, 8-year-old, whatever he was, you know, on the Concourse at the Pentagon. [laughs

SMITH: Yes, I’m sure. From there, an assistant director of the Army Staff, the Ops Corps? Explain that.

MURPHY: Yeah, they had — they had — it was a very small organization. And they had seven officers — were majors at the time. The Iron Majors. That’s, you know, we’re all — in the Pentagon, Iron Majors. And the seven of us represented all of the sections of the Army staff. So they were referred to as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. We had Snow White — was the lieutenant colonel, but he may have been a colonel. I think a colonel. And then seven of us, and I had the DCSOPS.23 But some people had like, the budget office, the adjutant general’s office, you know, they’d have several of the major sections to work. But ops being ops, I had DCSOPS, and I did that job for a year or two. The plan was to do that job for a year or two. The plan was to do that job and then leave, because you’d been selected for battalion command. And it was a wonderful job. And it had been known in the past to create senior officers. You’d always have general officers coming in saying: oh, you’re the Dwarf. You’re the Ops Dwarf. Oh, I used to have that job. And all this stuff. So you had some expectations that, you know, you had risen to this height, and it would be important, and that, you know, life was going to be good, and a good career, and all that. It was a great job because you sat in all the meetings. I sat in the meetings as we were drawing down the Army, and they were trying to decide on the number that they’d offer to Congress for the size. Of course, it got much smaller than that. I was in the meeting when they created the Special Operations Command, separate — with Program Nine funds—insider speak for their own source of funding separate from the Army’s oversight and direction. I was in the meeting when we were getting ready to go to war in — in the Middle East, the — Southwest Asia is what they were calling it at the time. Both the draw down and planning for severe draw down at the same time is not optimal. Some soldiers actually got notified of being released due to the drawdown while deployed in combat until someone stopped that.

SMITH: For Desert Storm?

23 Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

MURPHY: Yeah, for Desert Storm.

SMITH: Right.

MURPHY: At the same time, we’re working on drawing down the Army.

SMITH: Right, which is —

MURPHY: You know, and I’m going — you know, it’s a nexus here, and I’m going: what? You know. But anyway — but it was interesting. It was watching, and then you also have to go out and be influential to get things done and spend a lot of time. I can remember sitting in the Requirements Review Council, and also there’s a “Dwarf” sitting in there, and they’re all important people. And I’m sitting there going: I’m the only woman in here. This is really interesting. I wonder when there’ll be a woman sitting at the table, right? There should be a woman at the table, you know? Just idly thinking both. Then, the war comes, and I’m now in the war room, which is silly — but I’m in the Army’s war room, because the Army doesn’t conduct the war. The combatant commanders run the war. But you know, tell the Chief of Staff of the Army that, because he wants to know where everybody’s going. And rightfully so. I mean, he facilitates getting it all done. But so we’re doing the — like you’re in the field, briefings every morning. And everybody’s doing stuff, and I’m in there, taking notes, making things happen. Leaving, spreading the word. Doing what I do. And some days, it’s just me and a handful of people. Some days, it is so crowded with general officers that you can’t see straight. And I’m sitting on the step because there’s no place to sit, because there’s so many senior officers in there, and I’m taking notes, right? Well, I’m sitting there with a group like that, and they’re talking about combat, and they’re deploying people. And see, this is still the cusp about, “will women deploy or not?” When the Army deployed women to the Falklands — no. That wasn’t it. When the women were deployed early, when I was at Fort Riley — no, later. But when the women were first deployed in my history, many of them were rejected. They were company commanders leading MP24 companies or whatever. They were the S1s of their units.25 They were the S3s of their units, or whatever. And they’d be all lined up ready to go to war to get on their aircraft to be transported down to some island someplace — the Caribbean. I don’t remember.

SMITH: Oh, Grenada? Grenada, for the —

MURPHY: Yes, for Grenada.

SMITH: Right.

MURPHY: And they were lined up, getting ready to go. And somebody’s standing there, going: you, out of line. You, out of line.

SMITH: Wow.

MURPHY: Taking these women out,

[2:15:00]

24 Military Police. 25 The S1 is the administrative, manpower, and personnel officer; the S3 is the operations officer.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 you know, and of course as we know, some of them were like the only maintenance person for that particular system, and some of them were, you know — and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. That was when the Army realized: we have gone far enough now that we’ve got to be all in, right? I used to teach — at that time frame, I was teaching classes about prisoner of war handling, and stuff like that. And the men would always say: oh, well, you know, you guys can’t go. You know, you might be captured, you know? And I go: yeah. And you might be captured. Oh, yeah, but you guys would be raped. And I said: you don’t think you’re going to be raped? [laughs] You guys need to think about this for a minute, you know? And they’re all going: oh, no. Women won’t deploy. And sure enough, this is within a couple of months, these women are being — and then of course, most if not all of them, I believe, were then sent. But they came — they’re company commanders — and they come late, because you know, the bureaucracy had pulled them out.

SMITH: Right.

MURPHY: So then I flash forward to this sitting on the stoop during the desert war, and I’m sitting there, and I’m watching all this stuff happen. And they had some really — the public affairs people, I tell you what. They must have drug in all those marketing people from Chicago that are in the Reserves. [laughs] Because they had the best — I can’t say psychological operations, because we don’t do psychological operations. But it was just as close to that as you could get, about informing the American public and presenting a case that makes people patriotic and enthusiastic about what you’re going. It was amazing. I remember one of those films, they were talking about how a farmer in Minnesota had been called up. He’d been called up often before, and he was off — already deployed, but not to worry. His wife was running the farm, and there’s this big span of prairie outbuildings, barns, and a house, fences, animals. And they said — they say her neighbors are helping her some, and they have six kids or whatever. And they pan out on his wife, and she’s like 8 months pregnant, right? And you’re going — and the whole group, I mean, there’s maybe three women in the room, but this whole group of men go: oh! [laughs] There was this huge groan, you know? And I thought it was so wonderful, because it’s so easy to think about the military piece without thinking about the homestead, about what the impact is on the people left in the States. But there were a number of stories like that. There was a lady at the table, a senior lady — she was the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations, Logistics, and — ILE. Experimentation, maybe? I don’t know. But anyway, and her name was Livingstone. And she’s sitting in this meeting one day, and they’re talking about logistics and stuff like that. And they’re talking about — I forget what they called them, but they’re the packs that went with your rations that provided you comfort items and all that business. And in this room of maybe 100 men, senior officers, this lovely woman asks: what are you doing about tampons? You know, and it was like they all melted, you know? Not a peep. They weren’t even breathing. You’re bringing up a subject I know nothing about. [laughs] I don’t want to talk about this.

SMITH: And had not thought about.

MURPHY: Had not thought about. Had assumed, maybe, if they’d thought about it at all, they’d assume somebody was taking care of it. And they said well, well, you know, we need to do this, and then they had a little conversation about it and all that. Well, I flash forward to my personal experiences, talking to people who deployed. And many of the women tell me it was not a problem, because the stress level was so high, that their periods just vanished, you know, for like nine months, you know, eight months,

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 however long they were deployed. Whoop, not a problem, you know? The men I talked to said they’d get these comfort packets, and they’d have tampons in them, and they loved it, because they’d stick them in their combat vests, and then when somebody got shot, they took a tampon, and they plugged it in the hole.

SMITH: Oh, my gosh.

MURPHY: Right? And I’m going — see, we’re not such a burden. [laughs] The most taboo subject about women in the military: pregnancy and menstruation, right? And here we take the tampon and we turn it into an emergency bandaid, you know? You kind of go, huh. Pretty good. Pretty good thinking.

SMITH: Wow.

MURPHY: But anyway, sitting in those meetings as a “Dwarf,” we’re very instructional. And I’m sitting there thinking: I’ve got a pretty good chance for battalion command, and I’m just waiting. And I’m also — Dan and I are also having conversations about the only way we’re going to get out of this building is to get promoted out or to retire. That’s it, you know? There’s no getting out of this place. So we’re fantasizing about me coming up on a battalion command list, and it doesn’t happen. We get the list before everybody else does, because we’re the “Dwarfs.”

SMITH: Right.

MURPHY: It floats around, it goes in to the Personnel person, and everybody, you know — where I sit, there’s three of us. Two of us, if we back up at the same time, we can’t get out, you know, because we’re so

[2:20:00] tight together. And all of us are majors or very junior lieutenant colonels, and most of us are hoping to come out on the battalion command list. So when the list comes in, it’s shopped around so you can look and all this, before it’s announced. And I came in one day, and the list is sitting on my desk. And nobody’s making eye contact. [laughs] And I kind of go, hmm, you know? So I look at the list. I go to Aviation, and I go, hmm. You know, there’s like 10 names. I go, hmm? Wait a minute. Hmm? No Murphy. Mmm? M? A, B, C. No Murphy. [laughs] I go, ah! You know, this guy’s selected. He didn’t even want to go. That guy’s selected. [laughs] You know, it’s like, oh! So I call Dan. We go out in the hall, and I go: that’s it. I’m not selected. I said: we’re going to have to retire to get out of this building. And a couple weeks later, the phone rings, and I think Dan got a call first. But I got a — see, they’re working together, trying to keep us good. This is the early days, right? They’re working on a husband-wife thing. But when my call comes, it’s Aviation branch, and they said: we want you to command the unit in Japan. 78th Aviation Battalion’s Provisional. It’s really a detachment. Army doesn’t recognize it as a battalion, but everybody in Theater thinks it’s a battalion, so it counts as battalion time. What do you think? And then I said: sure. Do I get to leave the building? You know. [laughs] So they send me back to Aviation training, back down to Fort Rucker to learn how to fly an airplane again. Well, it’s been 20 years since I’ve flown an airplane, and they think that taking me and putting me in — and most of that training’s simulator training, which I hate. I can’t — you know, there’s no motion. There’s — but anyway, no airplane time at all. Just simulator time. And I don’t do very well, and I’m not real pleased with it. I’m not real confident when I leave. It’s a two-week course or something.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

SMITH: Fixed, or rotary?

MURPHY: Fixed wing.

SMITH: Okay.

MURPHY: Because I — the Aviation assignment in Japan has two airplanes, and I’m supposed to fly one of those. And then it had five Hueys and three Blackhawks. And so I go through the Flight Safety26 training down at Fort Rucker for a refresher on the airplane. And it was funny. In that class, there’s a woman I met years ago on REFORGER, who was one of the first warrant officer women pilots. And there’s also a man, who’s going to be in Japan with me. Brand new guy, you know. Had just left flying OH-58s off battleships or something, you know, for the Desert War. And he’s getting trained in airplanes, and we’re going to Japan. So I get to Japan, and they say: well, you’re supposed to fly airplanes. And I’m going: okay. One of the instructor — the instructor there, one of the IPs, is a guy I flew with in — or I commanded in Germany with the 78th. No, with the 65th Aviation. And you know, so we knew each other. CW4 Jimmy Spearman. And he was willing to train me again and all that business. But I’ll tell you. The requirements of command would not allow me to do that. I mean, my predecessor had done that, and I’m sure the guy behind me did that. But I just — because if you flew the airplane, you were gone, and you were gone for days. And you know, you’d be in Korea, or you’d be down south in the Japanese islands, someplace else, or something.

SMITH: Is this the Beech as well? Beechcraft again?

MURPHY: Yes.

SMITH: Okay.

MURPHY: Yes. It’s the U-21…

SMITH: U-21.

MURPHY: …at that time.

SMITH: Okay.

MURPHY: No, it’s not. It’s the T-tail, the C-12.27

SMITH: Okay.

MURPHY: So that just didn’t make sense to me, you know, to be gone. Plus, in a little bitty post like that, if you’re somebody — a commander of a battalion, a brigade command, or something like that — you’re on every panel, committee, everything, that exists, you know? And you could easily leave and not attend, and send somebody else in your organization, but you still wouldn’t have the same influence, you know, that — and I thought that was important. But what was most important was I had — if I had 30 officers, which I probably did, I had two captains and an XO. One of the captains was maintenance,

26 A private company that provides training to military and civilian flight crew. 27 The U-21 Ute was unpressurized as opposed to the pressurized C-12 Huron; both craft were twin-engine turboprop Beechcraft (Super) King Air variants.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 and one was ops. And then I had probably 20 warrant officers, right? And they’re all senior people, you know? I mean, we were a self-sustaining aviation unit in Japan with no support except for back to Hawaii was our higher headquarters, although they thought we should get help from Korea, who didn’t want to have anything to do with us, because we weren’t assigned subordinate to them. But you know, there was — it was — you’re out there kind of on your own, so when a crisis developed, you were out there on your own

[2:25:00] pretty much. And so, you know, there were enough of those normal, personal problems with soldiers and stuff like that, that I just really wasn’t comfortable being gone as much as I was.

SMITH: Right.

MURPHY: So I flew the Huey. I loved it. Many of the warrant officers I flew with loved it. They’d flown it a lot. But almost all of them were Blackhawk pilots by that time. And they really preferred the Blackhawk. I mean, it’s more advanced in every way — even the Huey.

SMITH: Did you get some time in the Blackhawk, or —

MURPHY: No.

SMITH: No?

MURPHY: In fact, I rode in it like three times. I didn’t have any reason to be in it. But they were really nice machines. I had another woman pilot assigned in my unit.

SMITH: Nice.

MURPHY: And she had flown Blackhawks. And I think she’d flown Hueys in her training, because she was rated in Hueys. But she didn’t have much experience, I don’t think. And she flew Blackhawks, and then she flew airplanes in a Guardrail unit. She later flew for the Golden Knights. Now, last time I heard, she was a corporate pilot — a commercial airline pilot. But boy, I tell you what, she did not like it when she had to fly in the Huey. Especially — I flew with her once when the weather was bad. To me, it was just a normal IFR flight in the Huey, but to her, it just scared the hell out of her. I mean, it really –she didn’t like —

SMITH: Because of the instrumentation?

MURPHY: She talked to me about it when it was over, and I — you know, we talked about it. But it was just — she wasn’t comfortable with it, because she didn’t have enough experience. And it was kind of like, you know, you move something really high-tech, and you move down…

SMITH: Right.

MURPHY: …to low-tech, and you’re in your most stressful situation. I mean, I understood it, you know? But it was —

SMITH: The difference in the instrumentation and what was available…

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

MURPHY: Right.

SMITH: …for navigation.

MURPHY: Yeah. And the aircraft we, like — we Huey people always like to harass the Blackhawk people because you’re not flying the aircraft, you know, because there’s so much more happening, and there’s all this assist to — you’re hover stabilized, hovering and all this stuff. You know, so it’s harder, you know, and you have less comfort, and you have less time in it, you know, so —

SMITH: In the Huey.

MURPHY: In the Huey.

SMITH: It’s harder. Right. Interesting.

MURPHY: Well, I would say the Huey’s harder to fly physically, and because of the lack of navigation. But the Blackhawks, or the airplanes I do have experience with are harder to fly because there’s more to do.

SMITH: Harder.

MURPHY: Because there’s more avionics. There’s more radios. There’s more technology, you know, and because you’re moving faster.

SMITH: Harder to employ.

MURPHY: Yeah.

SMITH: Harder -yeah. So from Camp Zam—

MURPHY: Zama.

SMITH: Zama. I want to make sure I say that correctly. Then it’s back to the Pentagon. [laughs]

MURPHY: Back to the Pentagon. I got a — because the battalion there was not a battalion and was a detachment, you could go and you could have a three-year assignment. Your contemporaries, who were in battalion command, had a two-year assignment. So my contemporaries were finishing their battalion commands and moving to their next assignment at the two-year mark. And I get this phone call, and they say: you want to move? And I go: why would I want to move, you know? There’s a golf course out the — down the street. I love my unit. You know, what — what? You know. It’s the first time I’ve thought of not doing three years. And they said: well, your contemporaries are moving, and you know, so you could move. And I found out later there was this guy that was really politicking for that assignment, right? And so he was working the contacts. And I called one of my MI senior officer contacts, and I said: what’s this about? You know? And he goes: I only have one question for you. What’s the best job you ever had? Staff, or command? And I said: command. He said: why would you volunteer to leave early? I said: thank you. [laughs] So we stayed that extra year.

SMITH: [laughs] Good.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

MURPHY: So we stayed, and then it finally got time to leave. My husband had been selected on the list of “it’s time for you to retire,” in one of the draw-downs at that point, about three months before we left. And I had been contacted by MI again, saying: what do you want to do? And I said — they said: we’re sending you back to Washington. What do you want to do? I said: I don’t know. What have you got? And they said: oh, we’ve got 25,000 empty MI assignments [laughs] in Washington, whatever the number was. I said — I told them: give me your top five. So they sent me a note, and the top five included being an expert at DIA on the Japanese military. Well, I didn’t know anything about the Japanese military. They were on that side of the fence. I was on this side of the fence. We met at cocktail parties. We met at dances and Japanese festivals. I knew nothing about the Japanese military that I didn’t read in the paper. No insight at all, right? I said: I don’t think I want to do that. And then there was one that was a team chief for the — what was the watch then,

[2:30:00] the J-2, DIA overnight, 24-hour watch. And I said: oh, I’d like that. I’ve never done shift work. I’ll try that. So Dan came back and retired, and I went to work in the Pentagon again. And I really loved that assignment. It was really good. We rotated. And because we had so many civilians on our rotation, we in the military had time off like I’ve never had time off before. You worked like, four-day weeks, and you know, it would rotate. So sometimes it would buck up, and you’d have like six days off instead because of your shift. I’d go: wow, if I had known this earlier, I would have always asked for shift work. But it was interesting, you know? Crises would come up, and you’d stand up teams, and once again, they didn’t have an SOP, so I got chosen to write an SOP, which was great work, you know? It turned out pretty well. We started classes, you know, to train people who were coming in, and things you think would have been in place for 40 years, you know, just handoff stuff and all that. Found some computers that hadn’t probably been turned off since they’d been installed, because nobody wanted to pass along the password, you know? You’re kind of going: oh, this is one of the most secure facilities in the Pentagon, but really, you know, don’t you think you ought to sign off of your computer?

SMITH: Is this the National Military Intelligence Center?

MURPHY: Yeah. Yeah. National Military Joint Intelligence Center.

SMITH: Joint Intelligence Center.

MURPHY: It’s been morphed into something else now. But it was a good assignment. I had two wonderful majors, Air Force majors, working for me. Really good guys. Got everything done. They had been navigators — I think navigators, or systems guys, on B-52s. So they had this much knowledge of Intelligence, but boy, could they get stuff done, you know? And that — in the job we had, that was really wonderful. But I enjoyed that assignment. And then Major General Pat Hughes,28 who was the J-2 there at the time, and later the director of DIA as a lieutenant general, we got to know each other, because we were briefing and, you know, interrelated and getting the work done. And he called all of us Army

28 LTG Patrick Hughes, before serving as the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) from 1996-99, served as the J-2 on the Joint Staff; he retired from the Army on Oct 1, 1999. Accessed Oct 21, 2019, https://www.ikn.army.mil/apps/MIHOF/biographies/Hughes,%20Patrick.pdf; https://www.dia.mil/About/History/Directors-of-DIA/.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 majors in, all of us Army officers in, and God love him, he apologized to all of us. And we’re going — and he says: I have been following the Army’s guidelines to evaluate you and rank you in order. You’re supposed to have this pyramid of people and of their performance, and you have very few, maybe one at the top. And then the average, you’d have average, right? It’s supposed to be — and they briefly — they brief raters in about how they have to do that, and all this stuff. And very late in the game, in that generation of efficiency report, he finds out he’s like the only guy doing that. Everybody else is inflating reports, grouping people together, and all that business. So he’s taking some of the finest officers that Intel has to offer, who have been screened and selected to go into the business that he’s doing there in the Pentagon on the Joint Staff, and he’s rating them. And he says: I’m sorry. He says: I asked them if I could do it over again, and I can’t change the record.

SMITH: And you’re a lieutenant colonel at this point?

MURPHY: Yes.

SMITH: Yes.

MURPHY: And he says: and I can’t redo it. I can’t put a letter to amend it. I’ve asked them. It’s just what it is. And I’ve ruined some of you completely. And a real standup thing to do, but you know, we knew that was happening, but for — have a senior rater — an officer that senior admit it was amazing. So I’m waiting for the O-6 list to come out, and the captains — the colonels list, and I’m waiting. And I’m thinking: well, this isn’t a good sign. [laughs] Yeah. But the list comes out. Or, it’s coming out. It’s being processed. And one of my colonel friends, who is the deputy director of Intelligence, one of the five or six of us — I ended up in that job, too — but one of the five or six of us that were the representative of the J-2 when he wasn’t there, overnight or when he was out of town on the watch. He goes over to talk about his assignment, and he notices that on the lieutenant colonels list, my name is not on the lieutenant colonels list of the people they’re managing. So being an Intelligence officer, he figures I must be on the O-6 list [laughs] of people that they’re managing. So he goes over to the O-6 office, and he looks, and sure enough, you know, there’s my list — my name. So he comes back. He says: I’ve got a secret. Don’t tell anybody I — you know, but you know, he told me I’d been selected for colonel. In the meantime, from the time he told me and from the time the list came out, General Hughes came up and said something about the efficiency report thing again. And he apologized

[2:35:00] for not rating me as highly as he regarded me, and all this stuff. And I said: oh, that’s okay, sir. If I don’t come out on the O-6 list, I said, you can rate me at the bottom of the pile and, you know, skew the rating. Give somebody else a top rating, you know, all this stuff. Because if I don’t come out on the list, I’m done. You know, there’s no recovery, you know? And he kind of looked at me, and he says: oh, I hadn’t thought about that, you know? I said: seriously, you know? Of course, I’d already been told I’m probably making colonel. I don’t know if I would have been that brave if somebody hadn’t whispered in my lil’ ear that they had insider information. But sure enough, I came out on the colonel’s list, and then I couldn’t move. I couldn’t go to the War College, because I was there in that assignment, and it was supposed to be a three-year assignment. I got it cut down to two, I think. Whatever. But I ended up going late. So I get to the war college after this, and all my contemporaries are very young, especially the Air Force.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

SMITH: What year is that, at the War College? I should have that. That’s okay. I’ll look it up later.

MURPHY: Yeah. Late ʼ90s, 1996-97.

SMITH: Okay.

MURPHY: And so I get there, and there’s all these really young people. And then I noticed that my Army comrades, of course, have been there two years before, because I stayed in Japan, and then I went to the Pentagon again. And I’m looking around going: hmm. This doesn’t look very promising. [laughs] And of course, they’re talking about what life will be like when you go to the Pentagon to work, or what life will be like when — and I’ve done all this stuff, you know?

SMITH: Twice.

MURPHY: Just by happenstance, I’d had those assignments.

SMITH: Right.

MURPHY: And you know, I’m not smarter than any of the rest of them, but I had a lieutenant colonel Field Artillery guy that was sitting next to me who looked he was 12 years old, you know, Army guy. And he’d spent like all of his career at Fort Bragg, and he really knew Fort Bragg. But you know, he hadn’t really been overseas. He hadn’t been in the Pentagon, you know. And I’m sure he was a general officer before he retired, but I’m kind of looking around going: hmm, I’m kind of the old lady of the group here. So I got more realistic expectations of what was going to happen when I got out. So I did the War College, and that was okay. I did it the right way, though. I left my family here in Washington, and I commuted back and forth on the weekends, because I wouldn’t want to do that. I wouldn’t want to take my family to Carlisle, just because they’re only there for a year, and you know, the kids are in high school or whatever, and they don’t fit, and then they get there and they don’t fit when they leave. And a lot of the kids were coming back with their families from overseas, and some of them were National Merit Scholar finalists and stuff like that, some of these children. And they had absolutely no structure for it the — you know, there was no counselors, you know, working on their behalf. There was no information coming on when the testing would occur—it was nothing happening. I felt so sorry for those kids, you know? And the parents, they were almost catatonic with the thought that that one move, you know, had altered the course of their family plan.

SMITH: How did you find out about that? Through peers, like ahead of time? Were you asking to find out what the support was?

MURPHY: Why I didn’t take my family?

SMITH: Right.

MURPHY: Well, my husband had retired, as we mentioned before, and he had gotten a job, and he was working as a defense contractor. And so that’s probably the major reason we did that. And then also, I knew a lot of people who had done the “leave your family here.” Because you know, if you’re in Washington, you’re just close enough that you can do that. And then I got there, and I found out a lot of the guys from Bragg were doing the same thing. They’d go home to Fort Bragg on the weekend, and then drive up early Monday morning. And you know, it worked out, rather than disrupting the whole

53

MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 family. But War College was interesting. I enjoyed it. It’s a nice break. For me, it would have been nice earlier, but I was busy doing other stuff earlier. Then, they assigned me back. I can remember talking to my Assignments officer, who had worked for my husband when we were in Japan, the MI officer who was working my file for my next assignment. And she and I decided I really ought to be nominated to be the recruiting brigade commander in Baltimore, because that would be a position that would potentially lead to consideration for general officer. But that didn’t happen, because I was needed back in the Pentagon. So I ended up in the Pentagon. Somebody had asked if I’d take over a project, which was fine. And I ended up working on the Army Intelligence Master Plan, which a bunch of really smart people — General Keith Alexander,29 who used to command

[2:40:00]

NSA and others, had put together — when he was a captain and I was a major, and it essentially allowed the Army to plan — no, not the Army. Allowed the Intelligence to plan for the systems they needed and the — just all the nuts and bolts, the logistics and the operations, you know, of Army Intelligence. And it was more robust when he was building it than it was when I had it, but it was still there. So it was hanging on by your fingers for budget and recognition and staffing and all that. So I ended up there, and I inherited three wonderful majors. I had a major major, a minor major, and a middle major. And they were all smart people. They’d all been out to Monterey for special schooling of one type or another. They were all — both Signal officers, Intelligence officers, and computer geeks, and they were just wonderful. They were really wonderful people to be assigned. And we worked real hard, and with all the bureaucracy and — that’s when the computer killed me. When you get all those emails over the night about stuff you’re supposed to do from people you’ve never heard of.

SMITH: Right. [laughs]

MURPHY: You know, there’s no filtering of who can task you to do what and all that. So there were a couple of projects that came up. We — one of the other colonels had been reassigned someplace else, so they just gave me his job, too. So now I was the futures — the Chief of Army — of Intel Futures for planning and budget planning and all that, and then also the work I had been doing. And one job was at the Five Corners? Is that what it’s called? Skyline?30 And then…

SMITH: Seven.

MURPHY: …the other one was over Crystal City, and then —

SMITH: Seven Corners.

MURPHY: Yeah, Seven Corners.

SMITH: Yeah.

MURPHY: Skyline, I think, is the building complex.

29 GEN Keith Alexander was the first (and only) MI Corps four-star general; he retired in 2014. During the 1990s, he lead the Army Intelligence Initiatives Group, which he expanded while serving as the J-2 on the Joint Staff. Accessed Oct 21, 2019, https://www.ikn.army.mil/apps/MIHOF/biographies/Alexander,%20Keith.pdf. 30 COL Murphy is referring to office buildings located in several Northern Virginia cities.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

SMITH: Right.

MURPHY: And then one was over in Crystal City. Those were my two offices. And then of course, whenever you had to go see the boss, you had to go into the Pentagon. So I felt like I was spending my entire life on the road, getting nothing done, being beat up on the computer. And all of a sudden one day, it occurred to me: I think I’m done. Well, we’ll see. Then the phone rings. And it’s Aviation branch. And Aviation branch has decided it’s time I made that Korea assignment. [laughs] So they wanted to send me to Korea. So now, instead of having a couple-of-month-old child, I have a husband who’s retired and a defense contractor, a son that’s in high school, and I’m already pretty much done. I’m pretty much finished with this experiment. And he says: you’re going to Korea. And I said: nah, I’m not going to Korea. And he said: well, you’re not going to fly, but you’re a — one of the high-level — I don’t remember which — headquarters, and there are assignments that are made for Combat-Arms officers, but it doesn’t designate which one. So it could be an Infantry officer, or an Armor, Field Artillery, Aviation, right? And we’ve decided that you need to go do that. And I’m thinking: really? With all my combat experience, right? I mean, this is after the desert wars. [laughs] This is after, you know, lots of stuff. I was a general support pilot. It was way before they decided that women could be S-3s in Aviation battalions, or they could fly gunships or any of that business. And I’m looking at this void, saying: if I go, I’m probably not going to know anything about what they’re going to ask me. You know, ranges of this and that. You can learn that, but you know, the feel of having experience in combat something would probably be helpful to be the combat officer assigned to this headquarters. And my husband was here. He wasn’t going. My son wasn’t going. And I said: nah, I think I’m done. They said: no, I think you need to go. I’ve already — I’d already talked. I had friends that were Assignments officers, and one of the ways they get rid of colonels, of course, is they offer you something they know that you won’t take. And so that was probably part of the purpose, you know? It was time to, you know, refresh the force and all that. And I’m kind of going: yeah, this might be the signal. So I go talk to my boss, who is Lieutenant General Claudia Kennedy, the G-2.31 And she and I had met off and on in the last decade or so. And we got to be really good friends. And now, I’m working for her, which was fine. And we’re talking, and I told her. I said: I think I’m almost done. And I said: and this Aviation thing come up in Korea, and I don’t want to go. And she’d got a phone call from a fellah who was the defense attaché for Dublin, right? And he’s talking to her. And she says: oh, that was just him. And you know, we’re talking, and he’s doing a great job,

[2:45:00] you know, helping them with their counter-narcotics programs. And he really loves it, but he’s got to come back. And I said: boy, that’s the job Dan always wanted. My husband is Irish Irish, right? His mother didn’t see a shamrock she didn’t like. And I said: he would have always loved to have been the attaché. Well, he’s retired by now. And she’s spent some time with him. She knows him. She holds his opinions in high regard. And the next thing I know, she’s vetting me to be the attaché in Dublin, you know? And I went home to Dan, and I said: hey, we might get to go to Dublin after all, you know? And he goes: what? I’m not going to Dublin, you know. He’s in this job, whatever. He says: nah, I don’t think

31 LTG Claudia J. Kennedy served in the WAC and the Army from 1969-2000. She was the first woman in any service to attain three-star rank (1997). Accessed Oct 21, 2019, https://1997- 2001.state.gov/www/picw/acwbio_kennedy.html.

55

MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 so. And I said: you know, you’re right. You know, we’re done. You know, because we’ve had the conversation about how washed out I was, and about how the Korea thing had come up, you know. And I said: yeah, you’re right. You know. So I went back, and I said: I’m sorry. She said: but I’ve already, you know, got it in process. I’ve already talked — and I said: well, I wish you’d asked me first, [laughs] because we’re leaving. So that’s how I came around to retiring.

SMITH: So were you a Congressional liaison at any point?

MURPHY: No.

SMITH: That was —

MURPHY: But for Claudia, for General Kennedy, I was her Congressional liaison…

SMITH: Okay. Specifically for her.

MURPHY: …person, but I didn’t have the job in the Congressional liaison office. But yeah, I did that. It was only a couple of events.

SMITH: So it was really a family decision to retire, and this is…

MURPHY: Yeah.

SMITH: 1999?

MURPHY: Right.

SMITH: So —

MURPHY: Yup.

SMITH: How was your —

MURPHY: My husband had always been — has always been my best friend and supporter. I mean, I’d been married before, so I know what not-quite-clicking was. And this was light years from that. This was really clicking. This was — same sense of humor, same choices. We go to a restaurant. We pick the same food, you know. We just know each other so long. We’ve been married now for 45 years. And the Army was thoughtful enough to assign us to where — normally, we were in the same hallway. Certainly in the same building, you know, where we were. So that was really nice. We got a lot of work done for the Army just by driving back and forth to work, you know? Because I’d be in like the G-2 ops, and he’d be in the MI Brigade 3 shop or something.32 So often, we’d have work that related to each other, and we could — you know, there wasn’t any squabbling about it. you know, we’d just get it done. But he was a part of what encouraged me to apply for flight school, and he — in the early days, when I was struggling with the Standardization officer, and all this stuff, and I’m weepy and unhappy and throwing my hairbrush in the sink in the bathroom because I’m frustrated, you just can’t be proficient at doing your hairdo when you don’t do your hairdo, right? So in goes the brush. No, what’s really bothering you? You

32 The S-3 or G-3 offices are operations. In a Military Intelligence unit, the G-3 controls all assets in the performance of its missions.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 know? And I’d tell him all this stuff. And then, you know, sometimes, the message was: if you can’t take the heat, get out of the fire. And sometimes, the message was: you can do this. You know, sometimes it was: ignore it. He’s really good at ignoring things, you know, professionally and personally. You know, if it’s just not interesting to him, or he thinks it’s a diversion or something like that — so he’d try to teach me the things to ignore. It’s a great skill.

SMITH: It is.

MURPHY: I wish mine was better.

SMITH: It is. So you mentioned he’s your — he has been your best supporter. What other people are in your support network, or how would you describe your support network over the years?

MURPHY: My sister. But we had — especially during the early years, we had a — she was busy with her life, I was busy with my life, and we didn’t really talk with each other very much. Now, we live like five blocks away from each other when I’m in Florida. But just — you know, at times when you need to talk to somebody you could absolutely trust, you know. And in those days, it was telephone and letters, you know?

SMITH: Right.

MURPHY: So she was very helpful. Some people were helpful by not being helpful. You know, the people who tell you you can’t do something or, “You’re reaching too far. Don’t do it,” you know, that’s helpful in many ways. What my husband and I never had was a real mentor. You know, like…

SMITH: That was my next question.

MURPHY: …many people have a mentor that will massage your assignments and make sure you get the right experiences and stuff. And neither one of us ever had that, but we had really good short-term — or shorter-term relationships with senior officers and counterparts and stuff like that. When I was in Germany in the G-2, and then went to the Aviation assignment, I went to the airfield just at the time General Powell came in to take over the Corps. But before him, there was a General Wetzel— yes.33 And strangely enough, he was one of the best leaders I’d ever seen. I found out later that he had just survived cancer, and so this was his final swan song assignment.

SMITH: General Wetzel?

MURPHY: Yeah.

SMITH: Or —

MURPHY: Wetzel. Yeah. And he — I have to assume he came to that with knowledge that there’s more to life than your career. And he was so patient. He was so kind. He’d come in and start talking to the

33 General Colin Powell took command of Fifth (V) U.S. Corps in Germany in 1986; LTG Robert Lewis (Sam) Wetzel preceded Powell, 1984-1986. “V Corps History,” 2003. LTG Wetzel was the cancer survivor mentioned. Accessed Oct 21, 2019, https://usarmygermany.com/Sont.htm?https&&&usarmygermany.com/Units/Corps/USAREUR_VCorps.htm; https://www.army.mil/article/17108/retired_general_officer_leads_veterans_cause.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 privates and have them explain what they were doing, and all this stuff. And he was just very helpful. I mean, we ended up to where — like, on Fridays, we’d meet at the officers’ club and have beer with him. And if somebody would come up and say something to Dan, he’d have that person that Dan knew, that he didn’t know, sit down and join us and stuff, you know? There was a couple of Field Artillery colonels that were in that group, and we’d all spend time talking with each other, just like regular people, and that was really nice. And what was interesting about General Wetzel was he was— when he was recovering from his cancer surgery, he was the guy that came up with the Direct Combat Coding System34 that the Army used for nearly all of my career, that excluded women from combat assignments. So when I found that out, I really wanted to dislike him a lot. You know, I — you know — years, you’d say: I wish I knew that S.O.B. who came up with this, right? Well, now I knew him, and I liked him, right? So I’ve often thought that he was given an assignment, and that was probably the best solution for all of us that could have come out of it. You know, how do you code positions where we don’t want women, and how do you draw those lines, you know, and make it sound like it’s right, you know? So that was kind of interesting, to meet somebody that I’d villainized for decades, to find out he’s really a nice guy, and you know, really liked women in the Army.

SMITH: Right.

MURPHY: You know, he promoted women and, you know, encouraged them, but —

SMITH: Tell me about ʼ93 and the — not necessarily ʼ93 for you — for the Army, but the change in the combat exclusion policy, and just how that impacted you. You were still in staff positions at the Pentagon.

MURPHY: Yeah.

SMITH: But what did — what were your feelings about those changes?

MURPHY: I had — being in the Pentagon, you meet a lot of people. And a lot of them are senior officers. It was always a surprise to my War College classmates, because I knew all the speakers that came — almost all the speakers — all the Army speakers that came — because we were all living in the same headquarters. But you also meet contemporaries. And there was this group of women contemporaries who all had the same goals and the same — it wasn’t really a rear-guard action or anything. It was just somebody who felt the way you did and wanted it to be the way — there was a woman, Doreen Steklasa, who — we’d been in WAC training together, and then years later, we’re “Dwarfs” together. We’d had a couple of assignments close to each other in between. But she was the lady who actually was in charge of the uniform regulation about, you know, how you wear your hair, and all that, for women, right? But you know, she was just as interested in the Army opening all the doors as anybody is. And so I was kind of plugged in on the side, as these things were coming up in the Grenada incident.35

34 The Army implemented the Direct Combat Probability Coding system in May 1981 to temporarily level off women accessions and review policies and programs regarding the effect of women on combat effectiveness and force readiness. Richard Hooker, “ Affirmative Action and Combat Exclusion: Gender Roles in the US Army,” Parameters, Dec 1989, 37. Accessed Jan 20, 2020, https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a528506.pdf, 35 Operation Urgent Fury, the U.S. invasion of Grenada, took place from Oct 25-Nov 2, 1983; forces rescued 599 Americans and 121 citizens of other nations following a bloody coup.”Operation Urgent Fury,” Jeffrey J. Clarke, CMH Pub 70-114-1. Accessed Oct 21, 2019, https://history.army.mil. Mike Markowitz, “Ugent Fury: U.S. Special

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

There was a lady captain, who — her unit, her — it wasn’t a company, but her — the group of people she was with. She was, I think, the commander of the company — came under fire, and they returned fire, and they had a firefight. And after it was over, somebody said: oh, my gosh. Combat Infantry badge, you know? And they said: oh. She should — is this possible? Met all the criteria. So put the paperwork in. Paperwork got all the way up to the Chief of Staff of the Army. Chief of Staff of the Army has a fit. Chief — I’m the “Dwarf.” I’m a “Dwarf” outside, right? Chief of Army has a fit. Chief of Army throws the paper back to Doreen Steklasa, and says: over my dead body. Not happening. Ya-dee-na-da-da. Right? And we go: eh, this isn’t right. Not right. Not right, you know? So you go down the hall to the Assistant Secretary of Manpower and Reserve Affairs, which is a lady — who was later forced out of her job by Rush Limbaugh, and people calling. [laughs] What was her name? I can’t remember. But anyway, she has influence, you know? She’s a somebody. And she took that up, and she made a big — I think we lost the issue. I don’t know if the woman — and certainly not contemporaneously did she get the Combat Infantry badge.

[2:55:00]

But you know, it was just — in my view, in the view of many, it was just blatant sexism. Just blatant. You know, if you didn’t know that she was a woman, you would have given it to her in a moment.

SMITH: Exactly.

MURPHY: At the same time, all these women are graduating from West Point. Ugh. So hard. I’d met some of them, because they’d done internships in the Pentagon as some of their summer stuff. But boy, what those women went through, I don’t know. I don’t think it was — I know of no physical abuse, but the stress and the mental abuse on those women was tremendous. I don’t know from where it came. I don’t know — I mean, there wasn’t a lot of press and all that for them. And there were a bunch of them: seven, eight, I think, in the first class or something like that. But for the first several classes, the stress was so huge. They actually did a study. I don’t know the results of the study, but they did a study years later, when these women should have been captains, majors, to see what had happened in their career path, and you know, why they hadn’t been more successful than, as a group, they had been. And I don’t know the results of what they determined, but —

SMITH: What were some of the things — excuse me — that they shared with you, without naming anyone?

MURPHY: These are women who were 18 to 22 years old, right? And you’d see them, and they’d have a mass of hairpins and clips and stuff, holding their hair back, like they didn’t have any hair, right? And it seems like a trivial thing, but I asked one of them. I said: what’s with the hair, you know? Just cut it. You know, or let it grow out, you know, long enough. You know, you’ll never have enough time off to let it grow out so you can get it long enough to be in a bun or a braid or something like that. But what’s with this, you know? I mean, it looked horrible and disturbing. And she said: oh, well, they’re very critical about our hair. You know, it has to be not in our way, and all this stuff like that. And somehow, she had conditioned herself — or she had been conditioned — to the fact that that meant her hair had to be

Operations Forces in Grenada, 1983,” Defense Media Network, June 3, 2013. Accessed Oct 21, 2019, https://www.defensemedianetwork.com.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 virtually plastered to her head. Which, of course, is not true. And I thought: geez, what kind of pressure must you be under to turn yourself into looking like this, because somebody’s criticizing you? But you know, you think about the process of standing at review, and you’ve got classmen and upper classmen, and upper upper classmen, and upper upper classmen, and some faculty, and some cadre, and some — whatever. And it’s all what you’re doing wrong, how you don’t fit. The last class at West Point that graduated without women engraved their class ring with a — some sort of acronym that celebrated the fact that they didn’t have women. And so it was a tough culture to crack. You know, I think about going to flight school. But women have flown. I mean, you know, so that wasn’t the question. And there was enough pushback on that, and everything else, you know. All the other women I knew at the time, doing new things. You know, there, everybody got pushback. But I think at West Point — and I don’t know. I’d guess the same thing was probably true at the Navy. I don’t know so much about the Air Force. It has a different culture. I mean, I’m sure there was plenty. But it has a — in my mind, a little more of a corporate culture than the big he-man, war-fighter cultures of the Army and the Navy. At least, that’s been my experience. So since you didn’t have a woman who was a General Washington, or a woman who was an Omar Bradley, or a woman who was any number of other people, then I think it was probably pretty tough for those women. In fact, when I was in Japan, there was this really crazy colonel my husband worked for. Thought he’d like his daughter to apply for West Point. He was a West Point graduate. His father was a West Point graduate. And he thought she should go. And I grabbed him by the shirt. I actually grabbed him by the arm. He was talking to me, and he was kind of ahead. And I grabbed him by the arm, turned him around in the parking lot, and had a very long conversation with him about how I did not think his daughter should apply to go to West Point — about the stress. She was already showing some stress elements in high school that I was aware of. It is Camp Zama. It’s as big as this room, you know, so you know, I said: no. I — and this would have been 10 years later or something.

[3:00:00]

SMITH: So I wanted to ask you too, COL Murphy. What kind of advice would you give yourself before you went to flight training, like, hindsight advice would you give yourself or someone who’s headed to flight training, particularly a woman?

MURPHY: I don’t know. I’m pretty happy with the way all that turned out. I think it can’t hurt to have more friends. I felt somewhat isolated, and I chose to be more separate in many ways. So I think it would be better if you didn’t feel that way, to reach out, and make friends, even if they’re not in flight school with you or something like that. As I mentioned, I had several friends who’d been in WAC training and MI Basic course with me, who were the first assignments at Fort Rucker. One of them was this wonderfully energetic and strange woman, Jo Carol Terry. If I was of substandard height, she was really of substandard height. But then, she wasn’t trying to fly, either. But she was an Intelligence officer, but she’d been assigned to the Protocol office there at Fort Rucker. So — and she was a perfect person for it. Great personality, all this. Very outgoing. And then Mary Jo Carr, who was just the opposite. Mary Jo Carr was very insulated and quiet, and lots of individual activities. Quite the athlete. And I don’t really remember what her assignment was. But it was, you know, some staff job, something. And it was very helpful, especially Mary Jo — I mean, Jo Carol. It was especially helpful, you know, just somebody to relax with, you know, sit in the BOQ and have a beer with, and let your hair down, and talk about things that weren’t serious. So that was helpful. But I think more of that would help. I am always surprised. I’ll

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 see an article or an Aviation Digest or a newspaper article about a woman pilot, especially the Army ones, and they’re always asked the question about: how hard is it being a woman? Blah, blah, blah, blah. And their answers are my answers. If you go back and you compare the literature, at least 20 years ago, the literature on what these women would say, it was the same thing I was saying at the time. So I think the — the equipment may change, the culture may change, and all that. But the individual pressures on the women — you know, the men are helping, but there’s still something, you know. I think — I think sometimes things don’t change that much.

SMITH: You gave a speech at the Army Aviation Association. I’m going to mess the —

MURPHY: Oh, yeah—of America. Quad-A.

SMITH: Quad-A. Quad-A, their 35th anniversary. And I don’t know. Was that the same time that you met COL [Laura] Richardson, or…

MURPHY: No.

SMITH: …was that separate? No?

MURPHY: It was about the same time.

SMITH: So a speech there, and also you were celebrated by the Army and then COL Richardson, Laura Richardson, at the time that you — and what was that like, to be celebrated by the Army so many years later?

MURPHY: Oh, it’s funny you ask. It — my impression, having talked to my counterparts in the Air Force and the Navy, who were the first of their services, is that the Army took a very different approach. They probably didn’t realize they were taking an approach at all. But when I’d bump into my Navy counterparts or my Air Force counterparts, they would talk about some gathering of women pilots, or women in aviation, or whatever, that they were going to that symposium. They were going to that meeting. They were going, you know, to participate in these things. And I want— I’d stand there, and they’d ask why I’d never went, or whatever. I just kind of was amazed, because you know, it never occurred to me. I didn’t know they were going on. The Army certainly wasn’t looking to send me. That’s a long way in saying: the Army just let me be me. The Army just let me be a soldier. I didn’t have to go represent women, which is what, I think, General Maddox was getting at, when he said, you know, the weight of the world was mine, sort of — was that now, I’d have to carry all this stuff. Well, it never materialized. There were a couple of things, when I was at Rucker, in between schedules and stuff, where I’d go places and meet people, sitting in a symposium. But after I left Rucker, that never happened again, you know? I was just me. Nobody made a big deal about it when I got my senior wings. Nobody made a big deal about it when I got promoted to whatever. You know,

[3:05:00] it was just normal stuff. And in hindsight, I think that was perfect for me. You know, it may not have been perfect for the other ladies who were having their experiences. But I got to get up every day and go to work, and do the best I could, and not be interrupted. I think in most cultures — but I don’t know that — in the cultures I’ve been in, if you’re constantly singled out, and you’re given special privileges to travel or go places and meet people and do stuff, then when you come back, the people that you work

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 with and around kind of wonder why you’re so special, or you know, why you’re treated differently or whatever. And I had a long conversation when I was in the G-2 at the 1st Infantry Division. The G-2 at the time was Lieutenant Colonel Moon,36 and he was doing some efficiency reports. And he asked me why one of the women was such a poor officer. I didn’t know her, you know. I guess we’re all supposed to know each other. But you know, I was kind of dumbstruck. I didn’t answer. And he says: you know, it just seems like, blah, blah, blah. And it occurred to me then, and then when I talked to other people — at that time, this would have been the ʼ80s — people tended to put women in either the “better than norm” category or the “worse than norm.” There was no space in the middle to just be “good enough,” right? You were either inferior, or you were just really wonderful, right? And so I’ve shared that with lots of people when they’ve stumbled around. I’ve shared that with women, women who have come to me and — the age-old complaint is: I’m not getting the consideration I deserve. I want to be the S-3, but they’re not even considering me. I want this. I want that. How do I get these assignments? And stuff like that. And often, it has to do with the efficiency report, about why they didn’t get this block checked. They got that block instead. Of course, I don’t know. I don’t know this person. I don’t know the commanders. I don’t know the history. But I often mention that sometimes, we’re just average. That’s why there’s an average. I’m not saying that you’re not the best person in his unit. I’m saying that he has decided you’re not the best person in your unit, either because he’s failed to realize your potential, or else he has considered your potential, and he doesn’t think it stacks up, you know? And we can’t — just because we’re first, just because we’re “only,” just because — something that distinguishes us, does not necessarily mean that the other person’s going to appreciate it. I like — I’ve gone through life thinking that for every perk I get for my notoriety, there’s a slap out there someplace, you know, that it kind of balances its way out, you know? I remember when I didn’t make the battalion command list. I ended up down at Rucker, going to Japan. And I — one of the men there was one of the men that I loathed the most. I’d always disliked him. Army Aviation. He was a colonel then. Really didn’t like him. Never liked him. Never liked the people he hung out with. Just didn’t like him, you know? And he snidely says to me on a break — he says: well, you know, we wanted to put you in a command slot, but we just couldn’t. We had so many officers who had completely exemplary top-block ratings. And I thought: oh, he was on the board. I’m sure he didn’t like me, either. Not only was he on the board, but he’s comfortable enough to give me a little slap that he thinks, you know, there’s no repercussion, right? And so all I did was I turned to him and I said: well, you know, sir, with people — with you and people like you, I figure the second block’s the highest I was ever going to get anyway. And he just kind of — you know, and we didn’t talk to each other again after that. But sometimes, life’s just not fair, you know? Sometimes, you know, I — I didn’t plan to be in flight school on that first day. It’s just the way things played out. I could have easily been Mary Jo and been, you know, delayed for a while. Sometimes I know I get credit that I don’t deserve, but other hand--other times I don’t really know what a person’s thinking. In the early days, when I was in the Army, everybody wore their feeling about women in the Army on their sleeve. And so you’d know, you know? You’d know a guy who thought it was fine and was happy to work with you, and you’d know the guy who didn’t. And then all of a sudden, it became unpopular, unacceptable, unwise, to let your true feelings show, if you were going to be critical. The thing about WAC — is it okay to say if you’re a WAC if you were a WAC? The point is it is accurate and not a slam to identify members who served as WACs as WAC. The Army pretty much forbade the use referring to women in general

36 LTC John K. Moon.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 because it became a put down – something less than a soldier. Why — when I’m asked that question, I always say: yeah, because I was a WAC. What the problem was, was when you weren’t a WAC, when you were a woman in the Army, when you were a woman officer or a woman sergeant, and they’d refer to you as a WAC, it was a put-down.

[3:10:00]

It was a — segregating you out of the population you rightfully belonged in. But if you were a WAC, then I think almost all of us were proud of being a WAC. It was just one of those millions of things in my life that’s faded away as time has changed, [laughs] you know? But I forgot what the rest of the question was.

SMITH: No, that was it. And then I was going to ask you about advice you would give…

MURPHY: Oh, advice.

SMITH: …about flying, too. Like, what —

MURPHY: Well, I am not the best pilot. One, I didn’t have the opportunity to stay with it. I think when I was really good, when I was flying every day, every other day, you know, and all that, I was pretty good. But then I flew less and less, and I was less good, and then, you know, I’ve met lots of people who were — I’m in awe of women that I meet that have so much more credentials and so much more experience, and they do so much. So it feels kind of funny to give people advice on flying, other than to say: study hard. If you love it, you’ll do it anyway. If you’re doing it, and you don’t quite love it, but you’re in it, then study harder, you know? There’s all kinds of stuff now. I mean, I can’t imagine what it would have been like to have, you know, simulators and even a computer, you know, to study that. I know one of the guys in my flight class jerry-rigged a broomstick with probably a beer can on the end that he could pretend to adjust the power, and something else, and he’d sit at home in a chair, and he’d practice. My imagination is not that good, you know? I can put it all together, but then I wouldn’t know what to do, you know? I’m not — I can’t get that outside of myself to do that. But I think flying — this will get me thrown out of the aviator pool — but I think flying is pretty much like anything else in life. If you love it, you’ll probably be good at it. If you’re not intended to do it, if you don’t have the aptitude for it, don’t fight it. Do something else. And you know, just live every day that you can, as best as you can. Get up every day, and go do the best job you can, and you’ll be recognized for it. Or, you won’t be recognized for it, but you’ll know you did the best you can. You’ll know it inside, that you did the best that you could.

SMITH: Absolutely. Well, we’re coming to the end of our interview time. Is there anything else that you’d like to share about your career, or about —

MURPHY: Seems like we’ve talked about all of it. [laughs]

SMITH: [laughs] It does. I just want to make sure you have an opportunity to — I’ve asked all my questions, I think.

MURPHY: No, I can’t think of anything else. So Laura got selected for general officer. Do you know where she is?

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

SMITH: I know she was the Deputy FORSCOM Commander and, let’s see, in March of this year, she transferred command. And I think she’s Commander U.S. Army North.37

MURPHY: Oh, wow.

SMITH: It’s a big deal.

MURPHY: Yeesh, big deal.

SMITH: Yeah.

MURPHY: I saw a little article in a magazine about the first Army — no. The first woman commander of a division or something, and it was a lady out in California of all places, in the National Guard or something like that. And I thought, whew. Look what — look what’s happening when I’m living my little retired life down in Florida. Yeah, that’s really wonderful. When I think about doing these articles or giving a speech or something, I always want to talk about context, because you and I are old enough to know. You’ll see a conversation on TV, and people are talking about something they have absolutely no idea about. People being critical of our Founding Fathers because some of them had slaves. Well, go back and put yourself in that historical context, you know, and where would you have found the leadership of people who didn’t have slaves, you know, because of the population. You know, things change over time. You know, norms and — I mean, right or wrong, when you judge it at the time, or you judge it later, it’s kind of irrelevant, because you live in your time. So I start — especially when I talk with — to young groups is — my context was women who were just now really being readily accepted into going to college. Some of their mothers may have, but most of them didn’t. You know? And so we were the beginning. It was the ʼ60s, so it was the beginning of women expecting to go to college, people expecting their women to go to college which of course led, over a period of time, to people expecting those women then to have careers and make their own livelihood or something. And before that, that wasn’t the case. There’s also something to be said about the birth control pill.

[3:15:00]

Because I was just at the leading — at least in my mind, I was just at the leading edge of that generation that had availability of reliable birth control. So what were the opportunities for women in their lives before that? I mean, why are there so few outstanding women actresses who have a long career? Motherhood, families, all of that, you know, adds to the amount of time you have to do other things with your life. So when you have — then you have control over your body with the birth control function, and you have an education, well, you know, what’s to stop us? But young people today don’t get that. They don’t get why it’s such a big deal. Their mother’s a doctor, you know? Their dad’s a nurse. You know, so they don’t really appreciate that we’re all born into a time frame that allows us opportunities. Some of us are perceived to “break through the ceiling” and make these things happen. Well, I didn’t break through the ceiling and make things — I was successful, which was fortunate. It took some effort, which I get credit for. But those men up at the Aviation offices had decided they’d work with the women in the WAC office in order to open candidacy to women to go to flight school, are the ones that kicked the door open. Then the question is: who chooses to go through? And so I applied, and

37 LTG Laura J. Richardson is the Commanding General, U.S. Army North. Accessed Oct 21, 2019, https://www.arnorth.army.mil/Leaders/Documents/Commanding-General.pdf.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 a couple of my friends applied. A couple of us went on, and some of us lost interest, you know? So often, I get questions that want me to badmouth men, you know: what’s the worst thing anybody ever said to you, or did to you, or, you know, how bad was it, really? And in hindsight — and this is a lot of hindsight, you know — it’s been 45 years since I graduated from flight school. There’s hardly a memory in my head about being treated badly. And I could say that true at the time, too. I was asked once by a senior Army officer when they were looking into abuse in the recruiting — enlistment training business. A group of us were asked if we felt like we had been discriminated against. We’re all sitting in the War College. We’re all pretty successful. So you have to take discrimination lightly if you’ve worked through it. But nonetheless, some of the women had some horrible stories. But my answer to him was: I never felt individually discriminated against. Nudged, pushed, pushed back on, yeah. Okay, you know? Yeah. Okay. Insulted? Yeah. But never really discriminated against. But we were all institutionally discriminated against, because the policies and the rules at the time selected what you could do based on your gender, you know? I can more readily accept being excluded because of my height than my gender, you know? So I cannot say enough about the men in my background who have helped me be what I can be, because everybody from the flight instructors I’ve mentioned and others, whose name I can’t remember, to bosses and coworkers and all that. I have the unenviable position of not working with women. You know, I bet you — I mean, there might be an enlisted woman over here, over there, on the flight line, or whatever. But actually in my work group, I probably didn’t — until Germany, with that assignment, where I had a couple of women assigned at the 78th — no. At the 65th Aviation, the Coachmen, in my unit. I had a couple of women there, who I found did not socialize with each other. They didn’t particularly care for each other. They were very different personalities. But watching it as a social scientist from afar, I think a lot of it is, you couldn’t afford to bond, because you really wanted to bond with the larger group of the men. So if they’d been drawn to each other because they had great personalities together, common interests, that would have been different. But they didn’t have that, so there was virtually no relationship between those women at the time. But you know, then I go to Japan, and I have woman pilot assigned to me. And I just had — because of where I am in the timeline, there just wasn’t an opportunity to work with a lot of different women. So then, I retire. I step down. I start doing some speaking. I visit some people — even before I retired, some of that. And I meet these young women — a lot of the pilots — but I meet these young women that have done everything that I used to dream that women would be able to do. The deploying to combat, the being expected to be in leadership positions —

[3:20:00] test pilots, instructor pilots, IFEs.38 You know, all of these exalted positions that make the industry work. And it’s kind of like, you know, you wake up one day, and you’re starting something. And then you wake up the next day, and it’s done. [laughs] You kind of go, how’d this happen?

SMITH: How’d that happen? Right. [laughs]

MURPHY: It was only — well, let me think. 30 years. It was only 30 years. We were in a meeting once, right before I retired. General Kennedy had gotten a bunch of the senior women, the movers and shakers that all seemed to get together and grouse and form organizations and stuff. And we got

38 Instrument Flight Examiners.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 together, and she had the then-Secretary of the Army. I think it was Secretary West.39 But — and he was talking to us, and boy, like feeding raw chicken, you know, to a wild animal. I tell you what. So all these women are unencumbered, you know? Almost all — not all the filters, but most of the filters are off. And all the questions boiled down to something like: why is it taking so long? You know. Why hasn’t the Army changed this policy or that policy, and all that. And it occurred to me then. He gave the basic answers everybody does: well, you know, it’s a big organization, and you know, it takes time for organizational change, and you know — but it occurred to me at that time that it was a short period of time in his perspective, in the history of the Army and, you know, what’s going to play out here in the decades to come. But it was a long history for those of us who started at this end, at the beginning, and we thought we’d achieved things that were not permitted yet. And so to us, it had been a long time. It had been 25 years. It had been 30 years. And why hasn’t this changed yet? So I tell young women that if you’re going to join a male-dominated organization, whether it’s the military or something in industry or wherever, realize it’s a male-dominated industry. The fact that you have joined it and you wish that it was different will not make it different. You can influence it, and you will, just by being there and just being yourself. You’ll influence it, but you won’t change it. It won’t turn into the organization that you think you want. And quite frankly, if you turned it into the organization you thought you wanted, you wouldn’t like it when it was done, because you joined it because of what it was. So I celebrate every little news article about women going to Ranger School and women being in Special Operations, and you know, all the other stuff that’s happening. I’m really happy it’s happening. I wish them all the best of luck, and I cannot imagine how difficult some of those trials are. I’m certainly not — I never was physically capable of doing those — many of those tasks. You asked me a question earlier about — I don’t know. Was it advice? I feel like I skipped over one completely. I probably skipped over a lot of the questions you asked.

SMITH: No, but I think I might have asked about command advice for a woman entering her first command.

MURPHY: Oh, okay.

SMITH: Or career/life balance, but I feel like you’ve answered the career/life balance. You’ve answered the flying — flight school advice. I think it was the — maybe the advice you would give yourself before going to flight school.

MURPHY: Oh, yeah.

SMITH: I don’t know if you’ve finished that part.

MURPHY: Yeah, I did — yeah.

SMITH: And then we’ll close.

39 Togo Dennis West, Jr. served as Secretary of the Army from 1993-7. William Bell, “Secretaries of War and Secretaries of the Army: Portraits & Biographical Sketches,” Center of Military History, 1992 (updated Mar 13, 2001), https://history.army.mil/books/Sw-SA/West.htm; “Togo D. West Jr., Clinton appointee who investigated Army abuses and led veterans affairs, dies at 75,” Washington Post, Obituaries, Mar 11, 2018, https://washingtonpost.com.

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019

MURPHY: I think it’s better, you know, not to have that perspective. [laughs] Yeah. I’m glad I didn’t know. If I had known, I’d probably — I mean, I’m sure I would have done it anyway. People, even today, will — my husband wears a Huey baseball cap, so people will stop him — especially down where we live in Florida, where it’s all retirees, and probably 80 percent of them are military, with military experience. They’ll stop him and thank him for his service. And every once in a while, somebody will thank me for my service, and I’ll try to say something like: well, thank you very much. There’s nothing I would have rather have done. I enjoyed every minute of it. And they’re shocked, you know? Because I think they expect it all to be a huge burden and sacrifice. I didn’t find it to be a burden and sacrifice, and a lot of that’s because I served during the Cold War. I didn’t serve during the Desert Wars, you know? That would have been harder. I think sometimes too much introspection is a bad thing. I know for me, it is, you know? I tend to diminish myself or diminish achievements or whatever, if I think about it too long.

[3:25:00]

I’m a big advocate of “get up every day and do the best you can.” I don’t think you have to kick all the doors down. I think you have to take advantage of opportunities as they present themselves, and if you’re paying attention, I think there’s a lot more opportunities that present themselves than you think of. I don’t know anybody personally who I admire who got ahead in life by diminishing others, you know, whether that’s — I mean, I’ve known — we all know, in our lives, in the military lives, counterparts who, in company command, put all the others down, who had to show off in the monthly reviews or whatever, and make them seem like he was so much better than everybody else. And in my personal experience, I haven’t — I’ve probably only known three or four of those people who got even near what they wanted to get. But you know, going to work every day, helping people out when you can — sometimes you’ve got the answer to their problem. There was an old joke in the Pentagon — I think it’s true — about several officers working in the same place, and they — these works would come in, the tasks would come in, and this one guy was working hard every night, working after-hours and all this. And the other guys were getting up and going home. And when they finally got to this guy was all worn down, and he just thought he was incapable. He was a sub-performer. So he asked him. He says: how do you get ahead so fast? I mean, how do you get to go home so soon, and why am I — you know. And three of the guys admitted that the way they got ahead was they took some of their tasks and they wrote “task to Bob,” right, and they’d throw them in their outbox. And they’d do only the things they wanted to, and the hard things, they’d say “task to Bob.” And somebody said: well, who’s Bob? And they said: we don’t know. We just figure if it goes out there, they’ll assign it to somebody else. And this poor guy, of course, was Bob. [laughs] So he was getting all these tasks. So rather than benefiting at someone else’s displeasure, maybe — you know, if everybody helps out, they’ll do better. I like to think that, in my life — especially today, it’s easier to be nice to everybody, you know? You’re retired, you know. I watch people come into restaurants and bars where my husband and I go, and they’ll come in all angry and fed up, and being mean to all the younger people that are servers, and stuff like that. And I just shake my head. Sometimes I’ll say it to them. I mean, what are they going to do? You know, I’m 70 years old. But they — I’ll say: what are you all riled up about? And they’ll go: oh, the service is slow. You know, I didn’t like this, whatever. And they’ll rant and rave. And I’ll go: you’re in the Villages. You’re retired. What can possibly be wrong? If you don’t like your food, send it back. You know, what do you have to do that is so important that you’re going to harass this young server for, because you know, you’re waiting, what, five minutes? So I try to embarrass them into the fact that you can slow down. We do that a lot

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MWAOHI Interviewee: Colonel Sally Murphy, United States Army (Retired) By: Monica Smith Date: July 23, 2019 with the snowbirds that come down, because they come down, and they bring their pressures and their cultures with them. And so I can name regions of the country that I think I’ve got pretty well identified. But they’ll come down and be grumpy and snap their fingers at people for service and stuff like that. And I’ll go: are you from New York? And they’ll go: yeah, how can you tell? And I says: well, you act like you’re from New York. [laughs] What do you mean? I said: you’re in the Villages. Relax. Take a deep breath. Get up. Enjoy your time. How long are you staying? You know, just relax. And I’d like to think that I would have known that lesson years ago, you know, the — how to decompress, how not to work all those hours in the Pentagon. You know, some of it’s important. You know, some of it, you have to do. But some of it, you can’t — you can’t work at a surge level all the time.

SMITH: Yeah.

MURPHY: I mean, you’ve got to have a little humor and lax, and relaxation.

SMITH: Yeah. And on the nice note, I think that’s a great place to close.

MURPHY: Good.

SMITH: COL Sally Murphy, it’s been my pleasure and honor to interview you. I want to thank you so much on behalf of the Smithsonian for recording your oral history and thank you for your service to this nation.

MURPHY: Well, thank you. Thank you for your service. Yeah. Well, if you want a real — from top-to- bottom, the dates and all that, it’s in those videos — those speeches I gave…

SMITH: Okay.

[3:29:36]

[END]

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