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  • Transcripts
  • Interviews
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  • Duration: 13 pages
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  • Western Carolina University
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  • HL_MPML_Gallardo_Pyatt_2016-06-02_transcript

Pyatt 1 Subject: Maria Pyatt (Injured Veteran from Iraq War) Interviewer: Chyan Gallardo Location: Southwestern Community College, Sylva NC Date: June 2, 2016 START OF INTERVIEW Chayan Gallardo: The first few questions are about your background. And do you come from a military background? Maria Pyatt: Both my parents served during Vietnam, but my father was drafted. He served just over a year, and then my mom was an Army Corps nurse, and she served, I think, three years. So, they weren’t… I didn’t grow up like, in the military, or a brat, or anything, but both my parents did serve, yes. CG: Okay. What was it like growing up, like, did they, were they more strict, or…? MP: No, I wouldn’t say so. I don’t think my parents had, I don’t think the military had engrained in them, like such a, like a strong sense of discipline, or structured environment like it would if they were like, you know, permanent military. CG: What are some of your childhood memories? MP: Oh gosh. Family vacations. We have a large Italian family that I come from. I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, and so a lot of family vacations were like, not just like me and my parents and my brother. It was like our family plus my dad’s brothers, and all my cousins, and going to like Buffalo, New York, or you know, family reunions and things like that, so… CG: Which one was your favorite out of all of them? MP: I think probably one of the trips, one of the family reunions we had up to Buffalo, New York was one of the best memories that I have. CG: Did your childhood experience, does it in anyway prepare you for the military? MP: I think in some ways. I had a lot of… As a family we went through a lot of things when I was growing up. My father was injured very severely at his job, and we went through like a really rough time during that. It just, you know, the stress and then change, because we lost our house, we lost all our cars, we like, had to move, and like, you know, and then, depending on family, and things like that. That sense of like, “Don’t leave a fallen brother,” kind of thing. So, yeah, I think some of that prepared me for the military as far as lots of change and lots of hardship sometimes. CG: What influenced you to join? MP: I’m sorry? Pyatt 2 CG: What influenced you to join the military? MP: A couple of things. One really, I wasn’t going to go to college after high school. It just wasn’t like, my thing at the time. I just wasn’t ready for it. And I wanted to get out and see the world. And I’ve always, you know, I’ve always had a very high respect for military. I mean, I did learn that from my parents. I was always very proud that my parents served in the military so, it was just that sort of patriotic sense of duty I guess, in some ways. CG: Did anyone at home join up with you, like, any like high school friends or family? MP: No. It was just kind of all on my own. CG: I consider like, the basic questions, I guess. How would you describe your experience at basic training? MP: It was good. I did very well in basic. I prepared though, as far as like training and trying to get physically fit. I ran a lot. I was in the delayed entry program, and so I did the… I joined the delayed entry program in July or August, and then I didn’t ship to basic until November so, I had several months to prep myself and get ready, and I worked with my recruiter to do that. So, I felt confident going in, as far as fitness-wise. And I have always been a little more disciplined. I mean, I can, you know, I’m okay with getting orders barked at me, and taking that kind of thing so, I think I did well. I kind of, I did, I kind of fall into like a natural leader position in basic training, so that was helpful. CG: Was there anything that was like, super hard in the training? MP: Just like the sleep deprivation. And some… and the road marching. That was difficult, but you know, doable. CG: Was it like what they show in the movies? Because there’s tons of movies where they show like training and they go and serve. MP: Yeah, I mean it . . . To some extent, I think the basics are there. Of course, it’s all dramatized in the movies, and the military can tend to be a lot more subtle and boring than the movies are, but it has its moments that are like that, yeah. CG: Okay. Is there any moment where you wanted to toss the towel and just to give up? MP: Oh yeah, several. You know, just… A couple times in basic when it was just like, “This is just not worth it,” or you know, “This is just too hard.” I fractured my leg when I was in basic training, and I just, I was in so much pain towards the end. And I was right almost at the end, and I was working for my drill sergeant to you know, because they were like, “We can recycle you, you know? But you have to go through the whole thing again.” And I was just like… So, it was trying to choose between like, “Suck it up.” You know? “Grow,” you know, my drill sergeant kept telling me like, “Grow some intestinal fortitude.” I was like, “But it hurts.” But so, so yeah, Pyatt 3 so I just pushed through it. It was really hard, but there were a couple times where I was like, “No, I’ll just do it all over again.” Then I was like, “No, no you won’t.” CG: Yeah. How long was the training? MP: Mine was nine weeks. CG: Mm hmm. MP: And then, it was nine weeks of basic, and then I did, mine was eight weeks of my advanced individual training. CG: If you can remember, out of your class, how many people successfully finished [inaudible]? MP: So, we had a co-ed one, and no we were split when we were, you know… So like, the females had their own barracks, rooms and stuff, and then the males had their own, but we were conjoined together as like a battalion and as a unit. And so my numbers are probably skewed in some ways because I can’t ever remember if it was as a total combined, or if it was just like in the females. But I think in the female unit we started out with like fifty. Fifty to sixty females and think we only ended up with less than thirty. CG: Oh wow. MP: Yeah, so... CG: This next is, I called it being an empowering woman. And it said, “Did being a woman affect your service?” Did people like look at you differently, or think you couldn’t do it? MP: I didn’t see that so much. I mean there were probably small instances of that. A couple of times I talked about… I wanted to do some advanced courses when I was in service. When I got to my AIT unit in Fort Lee I wanted to, I wanted to, they were doing airborne recruiting. And so, you could do airborne recruitment, and basically they, you did a separate like PT every morning. You still had to complete your AIT, but at the end of AIT, if you made it through the airborne, like training that they were doing along with that, then you would be shipped to airborne school. And so, I wanted to do that and I got a little hassled, like, throughout that whole thing. But they disqualified me after three weeks because of my leg again. So, they said I couldn’t jump because of the stress fractures I had in my thigh so, I wasn’t able to complete that. But yeah. And then of, you know, and then I think when that happened, then I got it a little harder. It was like, “Oh because you’re weak, you’re a girl,” you know, it’s like, “Whatever. I just don’t drink enough milk. Leave me alone.” But yeah. So, I think that, I didn’t see that too much. CG: Your treatment on the way home. Like, when you got back and people didn’t necessarily know you and they found out you had served, would you feel like there was more of a shock because you are a woman? Pyatt 4 MP: Yes. Yeah. I think in the military, you don’t. They’re used to it because there’s lots of females. I mean, I guess unless you’re like, in the infantry or something like that where it’s pretty much all males. I mean, the regular Army, regular military is pretty used to females. But when you get out and you’re in the civilian population, and civilians look at you like, “Oh you’re a combat, you’re a combat vet? You’re a disabled combat vet? No. What?” You know? And they think, you know, like, “Oh…” But they act like you’re something special when it’s, you don’t feel that way I guess. Yeah. CG: When you were younger, before you entered, were people discouraging you at all? MP: No. And it was never like a planned out thing for me. I just kind of threw it on my parents one day. I was like, “Hey, I’m joining the military. See you.” Like, and my parents were like, “Wait, what?” And, I mean, both of them had served, they were okay with it, you know, didn’t get any real big reaction too much out of it. My mom was like, “Uh?” I joined at kind of an interesting time so, my parents were a little skeptical about that. Because I joined when Kosovo was happening, and right after the war in Bosnia and everything like that. So, that was… So, my parents were a little like, “Yeah, there’s kind of stuff going on.” But they were, they were pretty much okay with it. CG: And then I have some main questions. What are some of your favorite memories while you served? MP: So, one of the funest things that I did when I was, my first three years of service. I served six years. So, my first three years of service I was a water purification specialist, and in that time, my unit got selected to participate in what they call a rodeo. And basically what the rodeo is, it’s like it is units from, or, teams from units all across the different bases across the state and overseas too. And so they bring all these different teams together to compete against each other in a rodeo based on your MOS. And so ours was water purification. So, we had to, we had to show that our team could run all the different equipment, do all the, you know, things that you learn in school that you never really do in the field. But so we trained on all that stuff for like six months. We did training at all different bases across the state. And one of the best things that we did, we went to Fort Story, Virginia, and we camped on the beach for two weeks and did salt water runs where we were purifying salt water. And because we had never done that, even in school we never did that because we weren’t close enough to an area where you could purify salt water. So it’s like, you read about it in a book. And so, doing that was so awesome, because we used to sleep… We had water blivets. They’re like giant water beds, and we would just set those up on the beach, and we’d just run our water you know, through our units and stuff, and it would go in these bags and that’s what we slept on. We just had like, we’d set like a, you know, camouflage tarp, tent thing up over the top of that and that’s what we slept on. So we like slept… CG: That’s pretty cool. MP: …on water beds on the beach for two weeks. It was awesome. CG: That must’ve been cool. Are there any other stories that you want to tell? You can tell as many as you like. Pyatt 5 MP: Well, I… I was stationed in… Well so, I have two other ones that were interesting. So, I was… one of… My first duty station was Fort Carson, Colorado, and I was in the Third Cav. So, it was Brave Rifles. And Cavalry is very different than other battalions in the military because the Cavalry is very like, steeped in tradition. It’s like very… It’s a big thing in the military, is Calvary. And so, the Calvary unit that I was attached to had what they call, you could become part of the Order of the Spur. And to be elected to be part of a Spur Ride, which is how you got into the Order of the Spur is you had to go through a Spur Ride. It’s like a three day long, you know, like, put you through hell kind of thing, you know? And so, the first day was all physical activities. So, running. We had to run ten miles, and we had to, you know, do all these different types of physical stuff. And the way you got selected to even try out for it was you had to have a PT score, a physical training score of 290 or above. Mine, I had the highest, I’m not trying to pat myself on the back, and this was a long time ago. This was when I was nineteen years old so, nineteen, twenty. And I had the highest PT score of any female on our base at the time. So, I was the only female that got selected to go through the Spur Ride that I went through. So, and then you had to have like a high test score. You had to take, like your ASVAB? You kind of had to take that again and score high. And so I done well on that. And then so, I got selected. The first day is nothing but physical activities so, you’re like run, push-ups, sit-ups, you know. It’s like you’re running ten miles and then every five feet they’re like, making you drop and do twenty push-ups, and then get back up and run again. So, it’s a long day. And then the next day is the obstacle and the land nav course. And so, and then, on that day is the day that they select like, a team leader for each team that’s going, because they broke it down into teams. And so they select a team leader and of course they picked me. So, I guess this goes back to the other question of like, female? So, this is probably one of the only times that I ever saw that. It was like, I’m a female and I was the only female, and they gave me hell. And so, they picked me as a team leader so they could stand up and scream at me in my face and, you know, all those kinds of things. So, but, I led my team, we were the first ones to come in. We were the only team to have successfully navigated the navigation course. So, we did the best. And then I got selected that… The next night at the dinner, so they have this like, Spur Dinner, and you get hazed kind of like, where they make fun of you and make you eat, what they told us was dog food, but was actually Coco Pebbles I think or something like, you know, whatever. And so, and that night I got selected as the leader of the Spur. And so, my name is on a plaque in battalion headquarters in Fort Carson as being leader of the Spur for, you know, 1999, I think. So… Yeah. So… And then… So my only other good memory about the military, and this isn’t even particularly military. It is, but it was… My second duty station I was stationed in Germany, which was awesome in general just because I got to travel all over Europe, which was really cool. So, I traveled all over Europe, but at my duty station in Germany I was asked by… We had German officers working on our base because we had two divisions of our unit. The first was like the lead team that went and deployed to Iraq, and the second team had not deployed yet. We were getting ready to get deployed. We had to finish and hold down the base until they got set up, and then we went. And so, when we were getting ready to leave and in training we had German officers come and start pulling guard on our base. So… And I had met with a couple of the German officers and they asked me if I wanted to join them in one of their training activities. And so, my commanding officer said that it was okay, so it was like three of us, I think. It was like, myself and then two other soldiers from my unit that got invited to go and do this, like, German training Pyatt 6 course, which was three days long. So, we camped, and we did field navigation, and we went and shot all their weapons, which was really cool because German weapons are completely different than ours. They have like fully automatic like, machine guns, and it was crazy. So, we did that. And then I think that was one of the highlights of my overseas experience. That was really cool. CG: This is a really broad question, but what all did you do when you served? MP: So, for my first three years I served as a water purification specialist. We did a lot of training. I mean we just, like, in the military you do more like, field training exercises than anything, and then you prep all the rest of the year for your next field training exercise. Field trainings are usually two months in the summertime. And so, I did a lot of that. Like I said, the training that I went to for the rodeo, that was six months long so, travel was all it is. We were constantly traveling to this base or that base to learn different things, and come back and we’d stay a week and then we’d go again. And then, I got out of the service actually, at the end of my three year contract, came back here to Western North Carolina, and I was looking at, going to start college. I was going to try to, you know, I was going to start here, at Southwestern [Community College]. And… So, in the meantime I joined the National Guard. So, I got out in, I got out in 2001, yeah. And this was right before 9/11 and everything. And so then, I actually left here and went back up to where I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, and joined the Guard unit up there. And I got up there, was with the Guard unit, then 9/11 happened, and I got activated. We got activated for 9/11 and we pulled guard duty at BWI airport for three months, I think. And so, that was that. And then I ended up moving back down here again. I left Maryland and came back here to North Carolina, went back with the Guard, the 210 National Guard unit here. They got deployed to Iraq. And I was, at that time, I was in the middle of reclassifying and retraining as a military police officer. And so I was going through the training, but they said because I hadn’t completed my training yet that I could not deploy with them. And I had already trained with them, because I moved back down here… Right after… So, I moved back down here in… Yeah, December, December of 2002. They got activated. They got notification of being activated in like January of 2003. And they were deployable status by April. And so I had trained with them from January to April. And then like, the… and they were, they left I think. They went to Fort Dix, New Jersey like, April 12th, or something like that. And they had told me, like, that you know, I think it was like the first week of April. I thought it was like an April Fool’s joke because I had already trained with them for like three or four months. I had everything done. I had my… I had already like, signed over, what is it, like when you, like have your parents, like that can do everything for you? They manage your money and like all that kind of stuff. My will was done, I had everything done, I was deploying to Iraq. I was ready to go. And they were like, “No, sorry. You can’t go.” Like, “You’re not going to get deployed with them.” And I was like, “I don’t think so.” So, I went back to active duty a week later. So, I went to active duty and then I got stationed in Germany. And then I asked for a deploying unit, and so that’s what they gave me. So when I got, I got to Germany, the end of April, and deployed. I deployed the first week of June. So I’d had the month of May. I got there, did the training with the Germans. Which they wanted me to do anyway because they wanted us ready for deployment anyway. So then, and then we deployed. I don’t remember where I was going with that. CG: Oh, it was just all the stuff you kind of did is what I was asking. Pyatt 7 MP: Yeah. So, once we got into Iraq, we didn’t do our jobs, like, technically what our jobs would have been. All I did ever, when I was over there was we did check points. We did raids of apartment buildings. We pulled a lot of guard duty for other units. We did… I mean all I did, I think the entire time I was there all I did was drive most of the time. I drove the Humvee. I drove our lieutenant around for, I think, eight months that I was there before I got hurt. So, yeah, that was pretty much it. We just drove. We did the tactical check points and some raids every once in a while at night. That was pretty much it. CG: If it’s okay with you, do you mind telling me how you got hurt? MP: So, I was in an IED explosion. We were doing just a… Actually, this was a day that we weren’t doing a Log Packs [logistics packages]. Our Log Packs were our usual runs. We were doing convoys to take different equipment to different places or whatever. And we were just actually going to the BIAP [Baghdad International Airport]. The little base that I was at was in the middle of downtown Baghdad, we were very disconnected from everything else. So, every once in a while, once a month we got to go to the BIAP, because the BIAP was where - Baghdad International Airport - the BIAP had everything you needed. So it had a PX, and coffee, and food, everything that, you know. It was the Air Force base mainly. But we could go to the PX. I needed socks, and underwear, and you know, all kinds of stuff that I hadn’t had in forever. We went to check the mail, because you know, we’re like, finally get… I think I ended up, like, I think I ended up getting like, you know, ten care packages or something because they’d all just been sitting there. Like, they couldn’t make it out to us anyway. But so, but I didn’t get them at that time, I got them later. But we were on our way to the BIAP to just do daily run stuff, and we were in the back of the convoy. So it was just two of us. So there was a front Humvee and our back Humvee, and I wasn’t driving this time, I was in the turret. And I had just sat down, because I had a SAW. I had the bigger machine gun. And so I had just sat down because I was tired and I was like, “I’m sitting down.” Like, it’s fine, because we were getting closer to the BIAP at that point. So, it wasn’t as like, don’t need to be on the gun. So, I went to sit down, and just as I had sat down, I don’t know, like, ten minutes later, the first Humvee went across, and we assumed it was some sort of like, the detonation device, or some kind of wire that they had connected it to or whatever. And so, they went across it first, and then a bus, a civilian bus had cut us off, so we didn’t actually take the brunt of the blast. The bus got the brunt of the blast. The first Humvee made it across without a scratch. And the bus took the brunt of everything, and then we got all the back flack. So, I got thrown out of the vehicle, and just… I don’t remember, I don’t remember like, much of anything. I remember… I remember seeing like this big, like, orange, like, looked like a fireball. This big orange, just light, just… and then… I don’t remember like, the blast, I don’t remember like, getting thrown from the Humvee, because we didn’t have doors on our Humvees. This is like back in… This is early, so this is 2003. This is before we had… We just had sand bags on the floors. We didn’t have doors on the Humvees. Humvees didn’t have seatbelts. So, I flew out the side. I don’t remember any of that. I remember… The only thing I do remember is I remember walking around. I guess I had stood up at some point, and walking around, and I was trying to orient myself because everything was really fuzzy. I couldn’t hear, at all. I could not hear a sound. It was like your ears are plugged, and you’re talking inside your own head. And I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on. And I remember a medic or somebody running up to me and going, “Sit down. Sit down. Sit down.” And I was like… “What?” And they were like, trying to push me down to the ground, and I Pyatt 8 didn’t understand what was going on. I was like, “I’m fine. I’m fine.” And that’s what I think I kept telling them. I was like, “I’m fine. I’m fine.” And then like, they, they were like, “No, no, no. Sit down. Sit down.” So, I think they finally like, just took me… They took me to a Humvee or something, and they took me off. They took me to the MASH unit that was at the BIAP, and I still never understood like what the big deal was because I didn’t… I don’t know if my body was in shock. I didn’t know if I didn’t... I didn’t ever feel like something was wrong. When I got to the MASH unit and my hearing was coming back a little bit, and I was trying to talk to the nurse, and they were like, “Just sit down.” And I was like, “I’m fine.” They were like, “You’re not fine. Look at you.” And I like, they like told me to look down. The entire front of my BDUs, all the way down and chin was just covered in blood. CG: Oh wow. MP: Like, all the way down. And I didn’t know what had happened. So, I’m like panic, I start panicking, and they’re like, “Calm down. Calm down.” They were trying to figure out why I was bleeding too. I’m thinking I am punctured somewhere. I’m like, “You know, I can’t…” I’m like, like trying to figure out what had happened. What they came to find out later is that when I hit the ground, the plates in my armor had broke in half, and it shoved my stomach up into my esophagus. CG: Oh. MP: And so, it broke my two bottom ribs, and my, and the force of my stomach coming up through my esophagus, like split my esophagus at the bottom. So basically, all the blood that I had just puked up, just like, blood all over myself, basically. So, I stayed there in Baghdad for a couple more weeks until… Because they were flying, I mean, and I never, I never complained. And I still never felt terrible. I couldn’t eat, and I was getting weaker and weaker. But they were giving me fluids. They were keeping me okay. And I could move and walk, and I was ambulatory. It wasn’t like it was horrible, you know. They were so busy flying people out at that time they never had a flight that I could get on because they were flying guys that you know, had no legs, no arms. CG: Yeah. MP: And so… And I think that was the hardest part, was like, going through all that. Actually seeing what was going on. So I stayed close to the MASH unit that entire time until I finally flew out. It was funny though because when I finally did fly from Germany…or from Iraq back to Germany, I was on a flight and my flight nurse, she kept telling me, “Why don’t you lay down?” They wanted to put me on one of the gurneys in the middle of the flight. And I wouldn’t let them. I was like, “I’m sitting here.” And they were like, “Just come lay down.” Because it was hard. Because my stomach was just like in pieces practically, like, in my body. And you know, and so it was hard to sit. But so, I didn’t want to lay down because all the guys, and the girls, probably there were a few, that were on the gurneys that were set up in the middle of the air flight were, I mean, some of them had like units attached to them that were like, keeping them alive, and like, you know. And just like these horror things that, you know, like, of guys that just, you know. You could see them all wrapped up and you could tell they don’t have an arm Pyatt 9 anymore, you know. Half their face is burned and missing, and… And I was like, “I’m not... Like, I’m not laying down.” If I have the ability to walk, I’m going to. I’m not going to, I’m not going to do that. And so, my flight nurse, she just, she tended to me. She was like, because I was probably, you know, as white, as white as the walls. I mean, or as the paper, you know. I had been like that with barely any nutrition, or, you know, and dehydrated for three weeks. So… I was, when I got back to Germany and they weighed me I was eighty-eight pounds, so… I wasn’t doing good. My flight nurse knew it too. So that was funny. CG: At any point of any of this were you scared? MP: No, if I was… I was never scared for myself. I was never scared for myself. I knew I was going to be okay. I think what was always hard and is still hard for me to this day is like, is that like, you know, the survivor’s guilt kind of thing out of it. There were… A couple of the guys that were in the vehicle with me got much more injured than I did. And so, that… That’s always hard. It was hard, you know, getting… When we got back to Germany I mean, I was at Landstuhl Army Hospital for two and a half months, almost three months. And, you know, I missed all those… You know, the guys being processed through Landstuhl. Because that was the first stop out of Iraq was Landstuhl Army Hospital, and then the really severely injured got sent on to Walter Reed. And so, you know, I saw, like, that. It was just a constant, you know, it’s always like that constant burden of like, “Why them not me?” Why them in general. So yeah. So, I’ve always had that kind of like deep part of my heart that goes out to a lot of other service members that got really messed up over there, so. CG: Do you regret serving or are you proud of it? MP: I’m very proud of it. I don’t know. I would do it again if I could, if they would let me. “Let me back in. I’ll serve again.” No. Yeah so, no, I’ve wanted to go back in several times, they just… I’m medically chaptered and so, I can’t. CG: My brother served in the Air Force so I love hearing like all kinds of stories that… They all fascinate me, but… MP: The Air Force, the Air Force did us right for sure. Because that was, all the flight nurses and everything it was all Air Force when they flew us back. I love the Air Force. CG: Do you still keep in touch with any of the friends you made there? MP: I have… I have a… On Facebook, thank God for Facebook, only, for this occasion only, really, is that.... So, I’ve got like a group of the girls that I served with. We kind of have like a, you know, just a little chat thing that we have. Any one of us needs each other or whatever, we kind of reach out and do that. I have a couple of the guys that I served with, but I don’t have like a direct connection with them. Some of the girls and us, we tried to stay together to support each other, so… because we’ve all gone through different things. Pyatt 10 CG: Again with the movie thing, but you always see in movies how like they’re all like, getting along when they’re just hanging out, and like playing games, all sorts of just silly, stupid stuff. Is it like that, for real? MP: Oh yeah. CG: It is? MP: Yeah, mm hmm. Oh, I can… I mean, many, many times, during war, and then even when we were doing the field training exercises and stuff. I mean, once you’ve done your job during the day, or whatever, or if you’re not doing night missions or anything like that, you’re sitting in a tent and you’re playing spades, or you’re, you know, bull-crapping with each other, and, you know, telling stories, and you know… Yeah, so, yeah, it’s very much like that. CG: Do you have any stories you want to tell from that? MP: Uh… We… CG: Like pranks or something like that? MP: Oh. That’s… Yeah, I’ve got two probably that are pretty good ones. So, we used to… MREs, so the Meals-Ready-to-Eat, they…So, the MREs have in them, they have a heater packet so that you can heat the little packet of food up. It’s water activated, so you just, you’re supposed to just put the food packet in there, and then, the heat activation, which is just like a bag with these like little, you know, activated, whatever, that makes … And then you pour the water in and you close the bag up so that the air can’t escape, and then it heats the food up. Well, so what we used to do is we used to not put the meal in the bag. We used to just take the heater bag and you drop a couple of drops of the Tabasco Sauce, because you got a little thing of Tabasco Sauce in the MREs too. So, you take the Tabasco Sauce and pour the Tabasco Sauce in there, and then fill the water, fill it with water, and then seal the top of it, and wait until it gets like… And you seal it, you make it tighter than it would normally, so… And then, what you do is you let it blow up, and then you go and you run by the tent that you’re trying to prank, and you throw it in the tent and it explodes. CG: Oh wow. MP: And because of the Tabasco in it, it like, it sets off like this horri-, it’s like a stink bomb. So, we used to do that to each other all the time. CG: Yeah. MP: Oh, there’s probably been many brawls over spades, the card game. And then, there was one time it was a group of our mechanics. So, each unit, we have like, you know, everybody had different jobs, and so our mechanics were a funny bunch anyway. And we were out in Piñon Canyon, Colorado, which is like desert. It’s Southern Colorado, Northern New Mexico, it’s just a flat prairie desert, hot as anything. It was like August. And there’s lots of rattlesnakes out there. Pyatt 11 And they swore up and down, this one guy, one of the mechanics was like, “I know how to eat rattlesnake.” I was like, “Dude, I wouldn’t even.” So, they went out and hunted a rattlesnake, and they cooked it over an open fire, and they all got sick. And it was really funny because we tried to warn them. We’re like, “I don’t think you want to do that,” you know. But yeah, they all got really super sick. CG: When you were stationed at other countries or even here, I saw I think it was on Survivor or something, and I’ve heard about this before where little kids always wanted to follow you around, or like… MP: Mm hmm. CG: …sell stuff. Did that ever happen to you? MP: Oh yes. Especially because I was female too, actually. So, I got interviewed when I was in Iraq by this little girl named, [Faynim], and she was from a wealthy family in Iraq. That… So, we helped guard a water treatment plant. It was called Seven Apples. I don’t know if that was their name or our name that we named it. Whatever. We helped guard Seven Apples Water Treatment Plant, and [Faynim] was the daughter of the man that ran, that owned it or run it or whatever, and she did kind of like a school interview on me, because I was the first female soldier she’d ever met, so. And then, there used to be this little boy named Mohamad. And he lived, his parent’s little hut was right outside the gate of our little base. And his dad was just like a peddler, like he used to come in, his name was Forrest, or that’s what we called him, I don’t know, but… And, but I really think it was, I think his name was some, “Forrest,” or something close to that. CG: Yeah. MP: But so, he used to be allowed to come on base because he always had like provisions. So, he was always selling like Pepsis or, you know, bootleg DVDs and stuff, and you know, all the like… So, they used to let him come on just to you know, peddle his wares and stuff, and so, Mohamad always came with him. And Mohamad used to just come and sit with us like, in our little tent that we had outside when we were doing our guard post and everything. And he used to mess with me so bad, because this little base that we were at, there were Marines there before the Army got there. And I guess the Marines had taught him all the bad things, especially about women. And so, little Mohamad, he was eight, he was this little eight-year-old Iraqi boy, and I used to want to just smack him in the face because he was…because the only words that the Marines had taught him were words that I cannot say to this recorder right here, so. So, that’s what, the things he used to call me. He’d come up and he’d pull my bun at the back of…because I had my hair, my hair was long and I always had it in a bun, and he’d come and he’d pull on my hair, and he’d be like, “You B-I,” you know. And I’m like, “You…what?” you know. There were several times that every…you know, people would see like, “There goes [Commache] chasing Mohamad down the road.” So, yeah, yeah, little kids man. They were too much. CG: I’m going to say you all got along pretty well, then? Pyatt 12 MP: Mm hmm. Yeah, I mean, I got along well with the Iraqi locals and the ones that we hired, you know, to do things for us on base and stuff. We, unfortunately, we did have a couple of bad episodes with people that we trusted originally. We had… And you know, and it’s kind of one of those things, like you don’t know whether to feel bad or not. I mean, you’re putting the rest of us in jeopardy, but I understand sort of why they did it, but… So, I don’t know. CG: You want to talk about what happened? MP: So, we had a translator that worked with us, and… When we used to go out and do our raids and things like that, he always wore a, like he always had his face covered, because he, we understood. I mean, you don’t want to get identified. We don’t want him to get identified. So, he always wore, you know. So, we don’t know like, how… What happened was that somebody had found out that he was working for us as a translator, and went to his house, and put a grenade, or a… the pin wasn’t pulled, but had left a note like attached to it or whatever saying like, “We know what you do. We’re no…” you know, and, “Blah, blah, blah.” Well anyway, he told us about that, and we tried to explain to him like, “Don’t turn on us because, you know, we’ll protect you.” We helped them. We helped him and his family move to a different area, like we got them set up. Like, we were going to protect what was important to us, you know what I mean? And he was important to us, so we weren’t going to let him, you know, be sacrificed or whatever. But so, but he ended up turning on us anyway. And basically was giving the enemy intel about what we were doing. And so we were getting mortared. Our little base was getting mortared constantly, at night. And we never could figure out where it was coming from until finally another… Actually it was a security unit, a privately contracted security unit that caught him over there with the bad guys one time, like giving them intel about where we were. So, yeah, and, you know. So, and that’s unfortunate, but you know, that happens. It happened a lot. CG: Did you do a lot of sight-seeing? MP: I didn’t get to do as much. Some people got to do some really cool stuff over in Iraq. Like, there’s the Ruins of Babylon and stuff over there. I never got to do that, just because I was doing a lot of, I did a… Like I said, I did a lot of running and driving for like our commanding officers and stuff like that. So, I was constantly taking them to, like the big bases. So, it was like… So, the military had taken over a lot of Saddam Hussein’s palaces and used them as headquarters and things like that. And so, I was constantly having to drive him to headquarters and, you know, just do all those things. So, I didn’t get to do as much fun stuff as I would’ve liked. There was a couple of times where I would like drop him off and he’d be like, “Go make yourself busy.” And I’m like, “Okay, cool.” And I’d like, just go running around, you know. I ended up, I went over to… So, the big palace had all these tiny little palaces all around it, probably like ten, you know, all together on this one little section. And so I’d drop him off at the big palace, and then I went just like, I parked my Humvee and I just went walking, and I was like… Because it’s not like it was pretty because it was all stagnant water and it was like mosquitos and disgusting stuff. But like, his palaces were set up on this like, giant lake thing. Like I said, it was nasty. The water was nasty, it’s not like it’s pretty to look at, but still. And all the houses, all the other little houses had like balconies and patios that went out onto the water. I just wanted to go look at it, because it looked cool from far away. You know, so I was like trying to just go up to the houses, but there was this one that I like walked up to, and this big dude, like as soon as I’m walking up like kind Pyatt 13 of the plank-way up to the house, this big, massive Australian man like steps out and was like, “I don’t think you’re supposed to be here.” I was like, “Okay.” And I’m like, started to turn, and as I turned I like look, and there was like this hoard of stuff: furniture, gold plated things, like all this massive amount of like stuff piled up in this one section. And so I’m guessing they were like pillaging, and had it all kind of hidden back there. And so, me like walking that was, he was like, “Go that way.” And I’m like, “Gotcha.” He made me turn around and go the other way. And so, yeah, it was kind of funny. CG: Yeah. Are there any other stories that you’d like to tell that are happy, sad, funny, anything? MP: No, not a whole lot. I think that was pretty much all I’ve got for my storytelling. CG: Is there anything else you’d like to say other than a story? Like maybe tips for me, or…? MP: I mean, just… They always say like, and you’ll learn, in the military they always say like, “Don’t be a volunteer.” Like, “Don’t ever volunteer for anything,” you know. And I completely disagree with that. Some of the best stories that I have and some of the best… hardships or not, you still get good stories out of them. I would say, but… The best things that I’ve experienced in the military were because I spoke up, because I decided that I had a voice for myself. I’ve never been one to be afraid of putting myself out there. And I mean, that’s sort of what going in the military, at least for me, that’s what it was all about, new experiences. You’re never going to learn anything, you’re never going to do anything cool unless you put yourself out there to do it. So, yeah, I mean, you never know what kind of position it’s going to put you in, you know. Make yourself known to your leaders because that helps you become a leader in the end too. That’s my only suggestion. Don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t do something. That’s for sure. CG: Well, thank you for agreeing to do this. MP: Absolutely, no problem. I’m sorry if I’m like Chatty Cathy. CG: No, it’s really okay. I like hearing this stuff, it interests me a lot. END OF INTERVIEW

Maria Pyatt is interviewed by Chyan Gallardo on June 2, 2016, as part of Mountain People, Mountain Lives: A Student Led Oral History Project. Pyatt, a veteran of the Iraq War, discusses her experiences in basic training, the Third Calvary Brave Rifles division, and the Order of the Spur. She relates stories of her job as a water purification specialist, being a woman in the military, and her time served in Germany. She speaks about her time in the National Guard, and getting activated after the September 11 attacks. She talks about her deployment process to Iraq and experiences that led up to her injury from an IED in Baghdad.

• Creator
  • Pyatt, Maria
• Contributor
  • Gallardo, Chyan
• Format
  • Sound recordings
  • Interviews
  • Personal narratives
• Type
  • Sound
• Date
  • Date interview: 2016-06-02;
  • Date: 1980s; 1990s; 2000s (Decade);
  • Date digitized: 2017-06-10
• Extent
  • Duration: 00:51:13 (sound recording)
  • Duration: 13 pages (transcript)
• Subject - Topic
  • Autobiography
  • Basic training (Military education)
  • Iraq War, 2003-2011
  • Pyatt , Maria -- Childhood and youth
  • Pyatt , Maria -- Interviews
  • Veterans
  • Women veterans -- North Carolina, Western -- Interviews
• Location
  • Jackson County (N.C.)
• Source institution
  • Western Carolina University
• Source Collection
  • WCU Oral History Collection - Mountain People, Mountain Lives
• Identifier
  • HL_MPML_Gallardo_Pyatt_2016-06-02_audio
• Repository
  • Western Carolina University Hunter Library