Wayne Pulford
Era: Persian Gulf
Military Branch: Air Force
Interview with Wayne Pulford
Veterans’ Memorial Hall Oral History Program
Duluth, Minnesota
October 2, 2015
This program is a part of the St. Louis County Historical Society
(c) October 2, 2015 by the St. Louis County Historical Society
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Veterans’ Memorial Hall Oral History Program
Interview with Wayne Pulford
Duluth, Minnesota
October 2, 2015
Annette Port, Interviewer
Wayne Pullford: WP
Annette Port: AP
Track 1
00:00
AP: Prior to the military you were in college?
WP: Yes.
AP: What made you decide to join?
WP: Money. I needed a job, you know. [laughs] I picked a career field—I basically looked at what had the longest schools, figuring I’d actually learn something. I picked a radar school and that was like eight months long. First it was like a clerk or an MP or SP? was maybe like half the time.
AP: How old were you when you enlisted?
WP: I was twenty-five or twenty-six.
AP: You had enough college and wanted to get out into the real world?
WP: Yeah.
AP: Why did you choose the Air force?
WP: I guess I felt they were more educated and generally they are. [laughs] I guess I just didn’t want to be like a “ground pounder”.
AP: So the Army was out?
WP: The Navy, I didn’t want to be out in some damn boat out in the middle of nowhere, even though I had a nephew who did the Navy. [laughs] I told him you grew up in the middle of the continent and you’re going for the Navy? [laughs]
AP: That’s kind of a culture shock, I would guess. [both laugh]
WP: I think it was kind of for the education and for low fighting you keep your feet on the ground.
AP: Was 1987 when you joined?
WP: It was ΚΎ83.
AP: Okay, so you were in the military for a while before you went to Germany?
WP: Yeah, I was nine years 7 ½ months in the Air Force. So the first three years I was stationed up in Northern Michigan, Calumet, and Keweenaw Peninsula, right above Lake Gratiot. I was there for three years and then I went to Germany for about three years. Then I went to Eglin Air Force Base. I was there for about 2 ½ years.
AP: You were a little bit older when you enlisted than some of them. You went to boot camp. How did that go?
WP: It kind of went pretty good. We had a good sense of humor, the flight we had. You know you, I think probably the reason is somebody would say something and we’d tease them and joke about it. [both laugh] We had a good group of guys. The last episode of MASH was on while we were in boot camp. They allowed everybody to stay up and watch it. [laughs]
AP: That’s a cool memory. So after Michigan then you went to Germany. What did you do in Michigan?
WP: I was a radar tech. That’s when you first come out of tech school. They called you a “pinger”, you are like a level 3 and then you get on the job training. They sent me back to England a couple more times for additional training, and then you get your level 5 training.
AP: So did you guide any airplanes?
WP: No, I worked on the radar itself. There was this big old honking radar. [laughs] Actually I dug this out (his pictures). This is pretty much Desert Storm stuff. I got some pictures of our radar dome. It’s a geodesic dome. I think it was my second year, for Halloween we stuck black trash bags in the triangles and stuff. Then we turned on the heat lamps and it looked like a jack-o-lantern and it’s like staring down over our site. [both laugh]
AP: Clever.
WP: Yes, it was pretty cool. The antenna would easily be the width of this house, or bigger. It was probably about 45 feet wide, and about two stories tall.
AP: Wow!
WP: Yeah, it was just huge.
AP: I bet it just changed a lot. Weren’t satellites around then?
WP: Yeah. First when I was in Desert Storm we pretty much used AWACS [airborne early warning and control].
AP: AWACS being?
WP: Oh, that’s radar that’s on a plane and they fly around and give the—.
AP: So when you were in Peru doing the drug monitoring, were you in the military then?
WP: Yeah. Basically I didn’t spend a winter in Florida. I either went to Desert Storm or Peru, so I didn’t know what a winter was like.
AP: Then you came back to Minnesota and found out. [both laugh] Your special training sounds pretty darn interesting. What was the worst thing that you can think of that you had to do?
WP: Gosh, I don’t know.
AP: Sounds like you guys were pretty clever and had a lot of fun, but there must have been something.
WP: We had some deployment exercises, training deployments that were pretty dead. When I was stationed in Germany, they usually kind of rotate people around, pretty much. What happened was we had a gas attack, and we were all at the same place. I was in this fox hole for like two hours and I just couldn’t move. It wasn’t that cold out, but I was freezing, totally freezing. [laughs] Finally, it got done and I watched for about five minutes and I was fine. That was probably one of the worst.
AP: When you went to Germany, was that the first time for you to be in another country?
WP: Actually I went to Ireland before that. I also went to Canada on a canoe trip once. We went up into Quantico, but we really didn’t see anybody. It was the first time I went to a country where they didn’t speak English. You get to parts of England and you wonder if they speak English too. [laughs]
AP: How were you treated by the Germans as an American military person?
WP: I was stationed at _________? which is about 8 kilometers from Hamel, location of the Pied Piper story, not too far from Hanover. We were in northern Germany in the British sector and they actually treated us pretty good. We got paid well. The British, French and Germans don’t get paid nearly as well as the Americans did. We were a good boost to the economy in the area. If you went down south in the American sector, they dislike the Germans, no, the Americans. Especially the Army and in some ways I don’t blame them, because there were bar fights and stuff like that. We were just a small group and didn’t have that. I had friends who would go to a ________? house and they thought like we were Brits and we’d say “No,” “Americanish”, and then they’d let us in, but they wouldn’t let us in if we were Brits. The Brits got into fights often.
AP: So then after Germany you went to Saudi Arabia?
WP: I went to Fort Walton Beach, Eglin Air Force Base, which was the unit I was at. Eglin stretches across three different counties; it’s a huge Air Force base.
AP: That’s in Florida?
WP: Yeah, near the panhandle of Florida.
AP: I think I’ve been past there.
WP: They have like ten airstrips or airports, you know, or more. I was stationed there and that’s when I went to Saudi Arabia from there.
AP: Didn’t President Bush start deployment to Saudi Arabia on August 8th, 1990?
WP: Yeah.
AP: So were you in the first—?
WP: No, I came from my unit and we were ticked off that we weren’t, because they actually sent another unit that was in Florida, first. We were ticked off because we were actually rated higher. However, someone had wanted to promote that commander for that unit, so they sent them first. [laughs] We didn’t go over until December.
Track 1
11:25
AP: That was a short little war.
WP: Yeah, it was.
AP: While you were in Saudi, what were your duties in radar?
WP: I actually did security and such. I’d be out on the berms, and when they announced the war, I was on top of the berm. Then at midnight—we were at KKMC [King Khalid Military City] which wasn’t on the map at that time. It is now. It was basically like a huge supply depot that the Saudis had built so that we could move in there, set up our camp and such. They had tents there already and such. We could go in there, grab tents, set them up and move in.
AP: Did you have any idea, I mean that was twenty-five years ago, that the Middle East would be like it is now? Or any kind of sense how radicalized they’d be?
WP: No. Being on security, we worked with some of the better ones. One of the things that impressed me was how they were really impressed by us. If they felt threatened by Saddam Hussein invading Kuwait, Roosevelt said, that if you ever need help, we’d be there. It’s just as he said, we kept our word, were there and helped them. That really impressed them.
AP: Must mean you all feel pretty good too, that we honored our commitments?
WP: Yeah. It was interesting going in there. I’ve got one story that’s kind of crude though. [laughs]
AP: That’s all right, crude stories are part of the picture don’t you think?
WP: We had one guy in our unit that was a parachute repairman. Basically, he sewed. The latrines we set up were for like ten men in tents. They had the commodes and at the end they had the urinals. They didn’t have like any flaps in front of you, just these flaps kind of in between us. So the first time I went into the bathroom, I got settled in and I swear my whole shop walked in. I said, “That’s enough.” They say, “Hi Wayne.” “Hi Joe.” “Hi Wayne.” I’m like, “That’s enough.” [both laugh] When our parachute repairman showed up, the first thing he did was make curtains for all the commodes. [both laugh]
AP: I’m sure privacy was an issue in many respects.
WP: Yeah. Another reason I like the Air Force, we have a ten man tent, that’s what we put in there, ten people. The Army puts in twenty and there are just ten positions and you do bunk beds and such. My little brother, Brian, he was in the Army, he went through West Point.
AP: Impressive!
WP: Well, actually he just joined the Army. His test scores were so good, they said, “We want to send you to school.” They sent him to a prep school to get ready for West Point and he could actually have gone to the Air Force Academy or West Point, but his math scores weren’t quite good enough, so he ended up going to West Point. Anyway he was over there as well, and he came to visit to me. He flew helicopters. He was a Captain, I believe, at the time. He was walking around looking and he didn’t have a tent. These guys slept outside with the camels and everything else. [laughs] So he went in and sees he has a cot with blankets and stuff, and then we go into our chow hall where we had a soft serve ice cream machine. I think maybe twice we got ice cream. He says, “You got ice cream machines?” The first thing I told him, “You should have studied more and got into the Air Force Academy.” [laughs]
AP: That’s interesting there’s such a disparagement between the branches of the service, don’t you think?
WP: One the one hand, I was really happy that the Army was in front of me. A lot of it is like good teasing, and ribbing that we like to give each other.
AP: I mean in terms of accoutrements of your position. You were in a ten man tent and your brother was a captain in the Army sleeping outside. Just didn’t seem quite right.
WP: You’ll see that sometimes in big companies, one division is totally different than another. The culture is completely different. Actually I remember one of the wardens that I worked for, he had mentioned that federal prisons— they came to realize when they opened and when I joined the Bureau [Bureau of Prisons] we went from about 85,000 inmates to 215,00 inmates. So we had some growth. The Bureau came to realize that when they open up an institution, the culture is very important to set. Once you set it, it’s very difficult to change it.
AP: That’s very true. I’m finding that out in my work too. People do not like change.
WP: Yes. There’s this one institution where everybody just like stabs each other in the back. They tried in many ways to change the culture of that institution.
AP: I don’t know how you change the culture of an institution unless you can start over.
WP: I think it’s just a very slow process that you have to do, bit by bit.
AP: Culture is what makes us who and what we are, so we hold those values pretty strongly.
WP: Yeah. You look at in our times how much things have changed. When I was in college, I remember there was this first ever national case where they charged a husband with rape. How could a husband rape his wife? Now, nobody thinks twice about it, because rape is violence. You know and think about gay marriage, how quick that changed in our culture. So, it can change, it just takes a lot of work and time.
AP: It’s an interesting world we live in.
WP: Now there are gays in the military.
AP: And women.
WP: Yes, women in combat. I’ve been for women in combat for a while because, our radar unit, like in Germany, if there’s a war, we are supposed to go right off the Fulda Gap, which is the main through fare that the Soviet Army— when you are going through and it’s fifteen miles from the East German border—well fräulein. [laughs] A T-72 tank can go like 45 miles an hour, and we’re twenty minutes away. That’s basically the front line, in a very short period of time. We had women in our unit. We already had women who are going to be in combat and stuff. I had no problem with that. And gays in the military— again, when I was in Saudi, you have open gang showers and stuff. I showered with a gay guy. [laughs] Just statistics, I didn’t know it at the time. Actually when you think about it and you go back to high school and stuff, we just had gang latrines and stuff. So, okay, get over it and move on.
AP: So the military is pretty selective of the culture they come from?
WP: Yes, for a lot of people. The military is more conservative in many ways, very black and white. When I joined the Bureau of Prisons, I also joined the union [Bureau of Prisons Union]. That’s probably why we have a lot of ex-military people. I tell people there’s a lot of grey out there in that world, so things are not nearly as black and white as people like to think they are.
AP: How about in the prisons: black and white or grey?
WP: Lots of grey. Lot of times its how you present things. If somebody presents in a bad way, you’re like, wait a minute, you know. This is really what the person—and you explain it a different way.
AP: Would you ever want to go back to the Middle East?
WP: Oh, yeah. It’s kind of, well, you wonder about the safety of going back there, some of the countries and such. I suppose I’d go back to Saudi Arabia.
AP: Is Dubai in Saudi Arabia?
WP: No. It’s another country. It’s right on the Persian Gulf Coast, filthy rich with oil. [laughs] They have a smaller population and a lot of oil.
AP: Do you think the Persian Gulf War was successful in its objectives? As a member of the military did you know what their objectives were?
WP: It was basically to free Kuwait and kind of push back Sadamm Hussein, so that he wouldn’t be as much of a threat as he was. So I think basically, we did. In some ways I felt maybe we should have gone farther, at the time. It was like a hundred hour war, basically four days. I think somewhere it was done, “Oh that’s a nice round number”. Why not do a hundred-twenty or two-forty. [laughs]
AP: You mean that was an in and out deal?
WP: Yeah. Actually you know, we had great leaders. Gosh I can’t think of his name right now, Schwarzkopf. He had a great plan. I remember reading his book and he talked about—we had our command post and I’d go in and see our forces, the Saudis, the Brits the French, and “Belgics”. You saw all these Egyptians, you see all these armies in front of us, because we were 40 miles from the border. So between us and the border— and I read Schwarzkopf’s books and there was all these people there who had no fuel or water. [laughs] If he attacked in December, when I was there, we would’ve had to retreat.
AP: Because you didn’t have those basic things that you needed?
WP: Yes, to hold them off. We did a big psych. [laughs]
AP: And it worked?
WP: Yeah, and it worked, beautifully.
AP: Do you belong to any of the VA organizations?
WP: Yes, but I’m not real active, like the American Legion, the VFW [Veterans of Foreign War], and the DAV [Disabled American Veteran].
AP: Do you ever go down to those MACV [Minnesota Assistant Council for Veterans] conventions?
WP: Yes, I went to the last big one down at the deck. I just went to that out of curiosity. I got a VA loan for this house, and I’m also a disabled vet. I haven’t really been active in the organizations too much. They do have that MACV housing down in West Duluth, and I have a brick on that I paid for, to help out. I felt well, I’m fortunate. I got a good job, and health insurance. So I try to help out the other veterans.
AP: Do you think our vets are appropriately treated when they come home. Or that they get the services they need in general?
WP: I guess I’m not sure about that. I’ve gotten good treatment and stuff, I think the VA’s been overwhelmed by all the newer vets coming in. Actually you can kind of blame the Army. I hear the Air Force and Navy aren’t so bad, but the Army will discharge guys and not even give them a disability or ranking at all, or a very low disability ranking when they should really have a higher one. There’s actually much more work for the VA to figure out what’s wrong here. There was a Washington Post story I read probably about five or six years ago, where this guy had some really serious disability. He was in the Army. His mother was a colonel in the Marine Corp, and she just couldn’t believe how he was being treated. The Army just kind of dumped him and got rid of him.
AP: I think sometimes how you are able to access the help that you need—has to do with how knowledgeable you are about the process. There’s a lot of paperwork with everything.
WP: Yeah, and you have to be kind of tenacious. You got to really push it, because at Sandstone, we had one guy who got fired within his first year and he was a veteran. I told him he could talk to Frank. He is very good with vets. He even went to one of those meetings and stuff, but you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. He had to follow through on stuff himself, and he didn’t follow through on some of the stuff.
AP: It’s hard doing that. Motivated and tenacious are really good words, like a bulldog.
WP: Actually, there’s one interesting story. Stars and Stripes is a really good newspaper. When I was in Germany and Saudi Arabia, we got it again. Actually when I was in Germany, there was a general that got into trouble for trying to kill a story. So, I mean it’s a very good paper, well written articles and stuff. They do a lot of the AP [United Press], UPI [United Press International] stories. When I was in Saudi Arabia, they did a story about conscientious objectors that was interesting. Earlier in the year, at the time, if I just went up to my commander and said, “I’m sick of this, I want out.” I could be out in a couple of months. But if I came up and said, “Hey, I just converted and became a Quaker (or whatever, I’m a pacifist, a conscientious objector)”, and they would drag their feet.
Track 1
30:00
They had guys in April or May who said, “I’m a conscientious objector” and the war didn’t start until August and they were still in the military in August. So what do you do with them? What’s the fair thing to do with these guys? Do you take them to war? [laughs] They’ve been dragging their feet and that’s the only reason why they are still in the military.
AP: Dilemmas. Have you been happy that you joined the Air Force when you did and had those experiences?
WP: Yeah, I think so. You meet a lot of people from all over the country. I met guys from Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the deep South. I had one friend who was from the deep South and his accent—he did not have that real hick accent. He said he worked real hard to get rid of it. [laughs] I was surprised. I said, “Really, you are from there, deep Alabama?”
AP: So your experience in the military changed your world view, or enhanced it.
WP: Yes.
AP: Any other effects it had on your life? It gave you a career.
WP: Yeah, it gave me a career. It can expand your view of people like when I was in tech school, I had a friend out in Palo Alto, California, and he talked about his really tough neighborhood. If you refused to talk to somebody who insulted you and got in their face, they would beat you up, or whatever. He talked about the gangs, and I thought more like gangs from New York City. I was on the East Coast, and never thought about what it was like there for him in California. You met people from Chicago, New York, and other big cities, and also the smaller countryside. When I was in Germany we had a guy who was from Puerto Rico and I swear his English actually got worse the longer we were there because he just hung out with other Puerto Ricans who spoke Spanish all the time. There were other Puerto Ricans who spoke beautiful English. [laugh] They learn.
AP: So, the lessons learned?
WP: There is kind of more than one way of doing things. That’s what we learned from others. You’d have someone come in from another radar shop and he asks, “Well, have you tried doing this?” In Germany we trained out this pulse transformer, and there’s a certain sound that it makes “eeeee”, “urrrrr” [mimicking the sound]. So we turned it on and heard “errrrr”, and oh my God, something’s gone wrong, this is not the sound. So we were trying to figure it out and somebody came over from a sister radar unit who was dropping something off and we said, “Hey, we are having this problem, the radar just sounds funny.” He asked, “Well, what have you done with it?” We said, “We changed out the transformer.” He said, “It’s loose, just tighten up the bolts on it.” It didn’t quite give the “eeee” “urrrr”. My boss told us that 90% of trouble shooting is seeing something like it before. It kind of leads you to where you think the problem is. It’s that 10% that really gets you. You really don’t have a clue. [laughs] In Germany we had a lightning strike once and it doesn’t just blow out the stove. It will blow out the stove and leave the microwave alone, and do the dishwasher across the aisle. [laughs] It travels by the path of least resistance and you just don’t realize what that is.
AP: So to find that out you have to get struck by lightning?
WP: Yes. We had like five different things broken in the radar. Where do you start? Okay, we got this fixed and this is wrong now. I think it took us about a week to finally fix everything.
AP: Any final thoughts here? Advice you’d give to somebody now, going into the military, or the Air Force, I guess?
WP: Take the longest school you can get. [laughs] I still think that’s good advice.
AP: It really prepares you for a career in the military and civilian life, as well.
WP: Matter of fact, in tech school, we had one guy who just wasn’t getting the electronics at all and how it worked and stuff. He finally ended up flunking out. I thought at the time, I’d hire him, because he was a really hard worker. He really did try. He really wanted to be a rec specialist, and that’s what he ended up getting. [laughs] Which is good to hear. So, some people get it, and if you don’t, you need to move on to something else that will work for you.
AP: Do you think you have a little added respect from people in general, because you were in the military?
WP: Ah, yeah, I think there’s some.
AP: I always feel like we all owe a huge debt to all in the military. Whether you serve in combat or war time or peace time, it doesn’t really matter. You did it. So, thank you.
WP: Well, thank you.
end of transcript
Track 1
37:19
Transcribed by Helen Hase
