Donna Sumption and Andrea Muto

[00:05] DONNA SUMPTION: Hi, my name is Donna sumption. I'm 58 years old. Today is April 22, 2022, and we are in Washington, DC. I'm with Andrea Muto and she is my friend.

[00:21] ANDREA MUTO: I'm Andrea Muto, age 55. Today is April 22, 2022. I'm with Donna sumption. She's my interview partner today, and I'm a friend of hers. So, Donna, let's start off. Where do you live?

[00:38] DONNA SUMPTION: I currently live in Arlington, Virginia. I've lived there almost 30 years.

[00:44] ANDREA MUTO: And do you live by yourself?

[00:46] DONNA SUMPTION: I live with Lucy, my basset hound. Yeah, she's my best friend.

[00:51] ANDREA MUTO: Where do you work, Donna?

[00:53] DONNA SUMPTION: I work for a defense health agency. I'm a contractor and a project manager on an IT system.

[01:01] ANDREA MUTO: Do you live close to work?

[01:03] DONNA SUMPTION: I'm working from home. I have been for several two years now due to Covid and pandemic.

[01:10] ANDREA MUTO: Yeah. Can you tell me, Donna, where were you born and when, what year?

[01:16] DONNA SUMPTION: I was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1963, and I grew up in Randolph, Massachusetts, in a suburb of Boston.

[01:27] ANDREA MUTO: And tell us a little bit about your family, where they were from, and what type of work they did.

[01:36] DONNA SUMPTION: I grew up in a working class family. My mother is a nurse. She is, of course, retired now. And my father has passed away. My father did maintenance and drove a truck for the school department in my town. And, oh, I have one brother. He lives in. Still lives in Randolph. My mother lives in Randolph as well, and she spent her whole life in Randolph. My brother lives close by and has two sons, and they all live in the same neighborhood.

[02:10] ANDREA MUTO: And was your father from Randolph?

[02:13] DONNA SUMPTION: My father was from providence, Rhode Island.

[02:15] ANDREA MUTO: Providence, yeah. You've told me you had some family members who were in the military.

[02:22] DONNA SUMPTION: Yeah, my father was in the navy. He was in the korean war on an aircraft carrier. And he and I are the only combat veterans in the family. I did have an uncle that served in the army. He played basketball for the army. And I had another uncle that was supposed to be in world war two. He went to pilot school, and he didn't graduate in time. The war ended, and it ended before he graduated, so he never really got to perform his duties, I guess.

[02:56] ANDREA MUTO: Did you talk about military service with your father or your father's service? For sure.

[03:01] DONNA SUMPTION: My father had stories, so many stories about serving in the navy. I thought it was like you go on a cruise and you see the world the way he talked about it. I mean, he got to literally go all over the world. And so that's what I thought. We all thought the navy was like and that's our impression of it. He did speak one time the ship was blown up, and that was the harder, I think, very difficult for him. He had a hard time talking about it.

[03:35] ANDREA MUTO: He was on the ship at the time.

[03:37] DONNA SUMPTION: Oh, yeah. And other than that, he loved the navy, and he just got to travel the world.

[03:44] ANDREA MUTO: Was it an accident on the ship?

[03:46] DONNA SUMPTION: Yeah. He said they had a fire and blew up. The engine room blew up or something. It was the USS Bennington was the ship now.

[03:57] ANDREA MUTO: So did you ever talk when you were younger about serving in the military with your dad, about yourself serving in the military?

[04:04] DONNA SUMPTION: No. I mean, not really. My father just would tell me I could do whatever I wanted. He said, if you want to be a football player, then be a football player. And he was, you know, this was the seventies, and he was all about me as a woman doing something that women didn't do normally. He said, you know, he's the one that got me to sign up the first girl in my town to be on a boys baseball team, you know, so he always encouraged me to do whatever I wanted, and it would. If I wanted to do a profession in a man's world, so to speak, that was okay. And that was actually really cool if I did.

[05:01] ANDREA MUTO: So fast forward a little bit to university. University of Vermont.

[05:09] DONNA SUMPTION: Yeah.

[05:10] ANDREA MUTO: Can you tell me how you chose the university of Vermont? Because that's really where the military comes in, doesn't it?

[05:16] DONNA SUMPTION: Yeah. So I went to Uvm because I kind of wanted to be a little bit farther away from home, but not too far that I couldn't drive home. So that was, like, the right distance. I also. I grew up in New England. I loved New England. And, I mean, Vermont's just. It's just beautiful. So I did have an opportunity to go to some schools in this. In the city, in Boston, but I decided I didn't want to be in the city. I wanted to be and something more rural in Burlington. Vermont, is just a beautiful place, pretty cold college town. It snowed every day in the winter. Cause it's in a valley, and it was under zero every day. But you got used to it.

[06:04] ANDREA MUTO: So your ROTC experience at the University of Vermont, and I remember you did mention once in New England, really wasn't kind of a military influence there.

[06:17] DONNA SUMPTION: Yeah. I mean, there's not a lot of military bases in New England. There's not one in Vermont. It's not. A lot of New Englanders don't join the military. I'm not sure why. But. So it's. I didn't have any friends that wanted to be in the military. I really didn't know a lot about it. So the way I decided to join was I, Washington, waiting for a class to start and standing in the hallway, and my parents had told me, well, you know, we're not sure how we're going to be able to afford this the next year because it was an out of state school, and I could have gone to an in state school in Massachusetts for it would have been a lot less expensive. My mother worked for the state, so we had some advantages there. And so, you know, I was like, okay, what am I going to do? And I was standing, looking at this poster, join the army and pay for college. And I said, oh. And I was just standing there looking at this poster, and a gentleman walked by and he said, you want to join the army? And I just said, I don't know. And he said, come with me. And he brought me into the office. That was the army ROTC office. And he said to somebody in another office, military officer, and he said, she wants to join the army. And the next thing I know, I was signing up to go to basic training, and he was giving me my boots. That was what you got? You got your boots so you could break them in. And my first plane flight ever was to go to Fort Knox, Kentucky, in basic training that summer. Wow.

[08:10] ANDREA MUTO: Tell me a little bit about basic training. What was that like for you?

[08:14] DONNA SUMPTION: I had the advantage. I got to go to basic training twice because the first time I dislocated my shoulder, and I asked to go home after that because I wanted to get a scholarship for school. And I didn't think that I would get it because I couldn't perform any of the activities there because of my shoulder. And I wasn't. The healthcare I wasn't getting, I was getting was not that great. So I wanted to go home to my own doctor. So then I went back to school and I asked if I could go again the next summer, and they were all for it. So they put me back on the plane and they went down to Fort Knox. Before I left, my mother was a little bit apprehensive, and she said, we're at Logan airport. And she said, now you can come home anytime you want. And I knew right then I was not coming home. And so I made it through the second time, obviously, and it was a great experience. I mean, we had to do things that, as an 18 year old, you just can't imagine. Some really cool stuff like what we got to fire all the weapons in the military and learn about them. I got to drive a tank. You learn everything that the army does and learn all the combat techniques, and it was just really fun.

[09:40] ANDREA MUTO: How was it then to. And this was in the eighties.

[09:44] DONNA SUMPTION: That was the second time I went in. 83, I think. 82 or 83, yeah.

[09:50] ANDREA MUTO: And so how was it then, especially basic training, all of those experiences as a soldier, being a woman.

[10:01] DONNA SUMPTION: You know, I definitely knew I was in a man's world, so I was like, I did what I had to do to get through it. And some things made me say, huh, this isn't right, but I'm going to do what I have to do. Whenever we went to any, and I went after basic training, I went to advanced camp. So this is true for that as well. So there's three different events, three different trainings that I went to. At the beginning of the training, they would bring all the women into a room. And one of the times we had a drill sergeant that said he had no use for any women there. He didn't know why we were there. And we were just there taking up the place of a man who could do, you know, do a lot more than we could. And then after that, they would bring in a. A female, either NCO or officer that would talk about a time that she had been raped. And this happened three times. So this is, I guess there was standard for them where she had been raped or molested and that we should not go. When we were at Fort Knox, we were the only women on the base, and we should not go. If we went out of the company area, we should have be in a group of five. We should have a man in our group. We should not talk to anybody outside of our company and not wear any revealing clothing. If we did any of that and we got in some sort of trouble, like we were attacked, then we would be sent home because we didn't follow their rules. So once again, I was like, well, I am here to get a scholarship, so I'm gonna. I'm just gonna do that.

[11:53] ANDREA MUTO: Fort Knox sounds a lot like Saudi Arabia a little bit later in your military.

[11:57] DONNA SUMPTION: Yeah. That is ironic, isn't it? Now?

[12:01] ANDREA MUTO: So you were after ROTc commissioned, and you also, later on, you went to airborne school. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[12:12] DONNA SUMPTION: I got to go. So we had a competition at school, and we had to do a physical training test, and the people that got the highest score on the physical training test got to go to airborne school. So I passed the competition, and I was able to go. So it was an honor to go also, as a woman. Not a lot of women would get that opportunity during that time. So I was so excited that I could go. I never really thought about. I mean, it was just so hyped up. I never really thought, like, oh, my God, I'm gonna be jumping out of a plane. Like, I never. I never thought about that. I just wanted to go because it was like, fomo fear of missing out, right? And they said, well, you'll get the patch on your shirt, and anybody, any woman with this patch is, like, gonna go far. So. Okay. So then I went. The training was. It was really tough when we had, when we got in trouble, like, we didn't meet the requirements, maybe we had our pocket unbuttoned or our boots weren't shined properly or something, we would get in trouble, and they would send us to this pit called the gig pit, and it was a mud pit, and you basically had to do exercises. It felt like forever. And you had all your equipment. We had all our equipment on, so it was very heavy. And then.

[13:35] ANDREA MUTO: Were you ever sent there to the gig pit?

[13:37] DONNA SUMPTION: Pretty much every day, yeah, one day they sent all the women, just because they said we were women, we had to go to the gig pit. Women were weaker, so we had to go to the gig pit. And then if you got thirsty and you asked for a drink, they would hit you with the hose to try to drink. And we weren't. I wore contact lenses, and they told us we were not allowed to wear contact lenses, but I didn't want to wear glasses, so I had contacts in, so I would try to squint so my contacts wouldn't pop out and get the drink. That was funny. And then another thing.

[14:15] ANDREA MUTO: Did that help you jump out of the planes later?

[14:18] DONNA SUMPTION: It makes you pay attention. I mean, also, they want to weed out the people. I guess that can't do it or don't really want to. I mean, that's just, that's what the army does, but it does make you pay attention because you don't want to get in trouble any more than you have to. One of the other things they used to do is called break area procedures, and that was when we actually had a break in training, and they would have a stand in this area. And they said, this is the army of that time. They said, smoke them. If you got them. If you don't, you gotta do push ups. And the first time I said, I am not gonna smoke cigarettes. Nobody's gonna make me smoke cigarettes. So 15 minutes. I tried to do push ups, and after that, for brake area procedures, I borrowed a cigarette off of someone. We all did. And we all smoked because we didn't want to have to do push ups for 15 minutes because we had just been doing come from the gig pit or something else that we'd been doing. So I hope that's different now.

[15:25] ANDREA MUTO: I hope so, too. Well, tell me about jumping out of a plane, though. I mean, what'd that feel like?

[15:30] DONNA SUMPTION: It was really scary the first time sitting in the plane. They opened the door and I looked out and I was like, oh, my God, I didn't know we were going to be that high. I mean, everything is just really small. And then you finally, in the plane, it was very, very hot and you're so happy to get out. It's so hot you feel like you're going to throw up. In fact, some people did, but you would finally jump out and the air was so cool and it just felt so good. But then you realize I have to pay attention because you hit the ground in like, I don't know, very fast, a minute or two minutes. And so you have to really pay attention to which way is the wind blowing and you might have to steer your parachute a little and how am I going to land? And sometimes we jump with a weapon, so you had to try to, and a rucksack, which makes you a little heavier, so you have to kick away the weapon and drop the rucksack right before you land. So there's like a lot of things to do in very short amount of time. So you really, you could look around for about 4 seconds. And we, the other thing, when you're up in the air, it's very quiet. There's no sounds. So you could talk to someone, just have a conversation with someone that was really far away and that was cool, too. But then all of a sudden you realize, like, oh, shoot, I have to pay attention because the ground is coming up at me. But, you know, so I did five jumps and I, when I graduated, finally, and on graduation day, they're called black cats. And those were the drill sergeants, but they were called black cats at airborne school. And he pinned my wings on me and he said, 151. That was my number, Charlie. 151. We didn't have names. We had numbers. He said, I didn't think you were going to make it, but you did. And he put the wings on me and I was like, you know, I got my airborne wing.

[17:30] ANDREA MUTO: Wow. Wow, that's wonderful. Well, so, you know, you had, there were a number of. You've talked about a number of different training scenarios you had, you know, as an officer. Right. Just. And they were mostly european scenarios.

[17:48] DONNA SUMPTION: Yeah. So we would. You know, I was in a lot of different types of units, but when we trained, most every unit you were in had a capstone mission, which is what your wartime mission would be. It was always in Europe. So we got to learn a lot about Europe and what we would do if we were to go to war. And it was all about. Everything I learned was about the cold war and all those techniques. We would have tables, and we would move things on the tables. It was fun, but, yeah, that was all my training was based on the cold war and what it would be like in Europe or eastern Europe.

[18:35] ANDREA MUTO: But your combat mission was in Saudi Arabia.

[18:40] DONNA SUMPTION: Our capstone mission was changed at the last minute to the Sinai. Kind of ironic. It was before anything happened, it was changed to the Sinai, and we were supposed to go there, but of course, that was canceled because then shortly after we got called to go to Saudi Arabia, I was in a transportation unit.

[19:06] ANDREA MUTO: And. Yeah, that was your job, was it? Mos.

[19:10] DONNA SUMPTION: My MOS military occupational specialty was actually quartermaster corps, which is supply, food service, graves registration, all logistical things. Transportation is a different branch, but it's very closely related to quartermaster, and it's all about trucks. It's kind of cool. If you like trucks, then I would say do transportation.

[19:33] ANDREA MUTO: So you were actually with the Rhode Island National Guard and then Maine.

[19:42] DONNA SUMPTION: Rhode Island National Guard and then. Yeah, and then in the transportation unit, I was in Maine, and that's the unit that got activated to go to Saudi Arabia.

[19:51] ANDREA MUTO: Right. Can you talk a little bit about going to Saudi Arabia when you left the states? And.

[19:59] DONNA SUMPTION: Yeah, I mean, the big thing that. One of the big themes that we experienced was just chaos. As a military, we didn't. As a country, we hadn't really done anything this large of a logistical effort since World War Two. So it was just the policies and the sops we used were in draft. We were writing the policies and sops as we did this. And so it was just chaos. People running in 20 different directions. A lot of times we didn't know what we were going. What was going to happen when Iraq invaded Kuwait. I remember watching it in the news, and then shortly after, our commander called us and said that they were reviewing our vaccine records and our medical records and, you know, just to be ready in case we had to go somewhere. But it was no big deal. We probably. We might be just going to another part of the country or something, so. Okay. And then I knew it was going to be something when they took away our winter sleeping bags and gave us summer sleeping bags. I knew this is something. And then, like, within days, I got the call that we were gonna be. We weren't told officially where we were going, actually, until we were on the plane, but we knew because, like I said, we got summer sleeping bags, so that tipped us off. Yeah.

[21:46] ANDREA MUTO: And you said you got. You got on the plane, and you got off the plane at midnight.

[21:51] DONNA SUMPTION: Oh, well. So when we left in the desert, we left from Westover Air force base in Massachusetts. That's where we departed. And then we flew around for a while, and we landed in New Jersey, and they said they were refueling or something. So we were like, okay. So we waited a while, and then we got back on the plane, and we flew around for a lot longer time, and we were. And they told us the next place we would land would be in Spain. So we flew around for a while, and then we landed, and we're like, okay, cool, we're in Spain. And we get off the plane, and we say, hola, coma hastas. And the person that was there, air force person, said, you're in New Jersey. We're like, no, not again. So we waited for a longer time because they said the plane was broken and they had to get a new plane and transfer everything. And then they finally got us up in the air, and I actually, a couple of days had gone by, and I remember calling my parents, and they said, are you there? Are you able to call us? And I said, well, we're in New Jersey. I just wanted to let you know. But, yeah, so the next time we took off again, and then we finally did land in Spain. And I knew we were in Spain because they let us go to breakfast, and there was a woman, a spanish woman, mopping the floors and singing in Spanish. So we were all like, okay, we're in Spain. And so then after that, we took off, and then we knew we were going to Saudi Arabia. We looked out the window, and it was just like an ocean of sand. It's just so amazing that there's that much desert. But it was this, you know, and.

[23:39] ANDREA MUTO: You were saying, you know, you got off the plane, you had toothpaste, you had your socks, you had a few things.

[23:44] DONNA SUMPTION: Yes. When we landed in the. It was probably about midnight. We landed in Saudi Arabia, and we had no idea who we were supposed to see. We just got off the plane, and we had. Yeah, we had, like, handbags of stuff that they gave us at Westover, some food and snacks and toothbrush, and that was about it. And we. So we're just standing there at the airport. It was dahran air base. And this guy came up on a moped, and he said, where are you from? And someone said, we're for Maine. We're the 36, 20th transportation detachment. And he said, he looked at us and he said, and then a bus pulled up, and he said, we'll get on that bus. So we got on the bus, and it took us out to the middle of the desert. And they said, no, here and now it's about two in the morning, and there was a tent. There was a whole bunch of tents, and there was one empty tent. They said, we'll get in that tent and sleep there. So, yeah, we all just went in this one tent, and we slept there that night. And then we were there for a couple weeks. And the commander, we were with the 82nd at the time, 82nd Airborne. And this colonel came by and he asked us who we were and why were we here, and nobody really knew anything. And then our commander one day went to the air base. He wanted to find out how could we get mail? And he was walking around the air base, just looking around, and he walked right into the person that was looking for us, our unit. It was this major. And he said, I've been looking for you for weeks. And they said, you're supposed to be at the seaport Daman port. And so our commander came back and he said, I found out where we're supposed to be. So they packed us into a truck, and they moved us all down to the port. And we lived at the end of this pier for a couple months out, just outside in our cots.

[26:06] ANDREA MUTO: Now, this was Desert Storm. So how did you.

[26:10] DONNA SUMPTION: That was at that time. It was called Desert Shield.

[26:12] ANDREA MUTO: Desert Shield.

[26:13] DONNA SUMPTION: We got there pretty early. It started. I think the whole thing started on September 2. This was, like, September. We were activated Labor Day weekend. I. And then we were in Saudi Arabia like, a week later.

[26:29] ANDREA MUTO: How did you find out, like, desert Storm actually was happening? I mean, was there any Scud missiles or what happened?

[26:37] DONNA SUMPTION: So Desert storm was in. Started in January, and we. One night, okay, one night we were. We just got a call, and we were actually, we were listening to the radio, and we heard that the news reporters. The news reporters stayed in a hotel not far from us, like, just a couple miles. And they were reporting that there were missiles being launched in Baghdad or something was going on in Baghdad. And we were like, oh, okay. You know, something's going on. And so then we got a call, and it was from our higher headquarters command, which was the next pier over. And they called and they said, desert Storm has begun. Click. And I said, okay, thanks. And then I. I said, hey, everyone, you know, I worked night shift. There was just me and a few guys. Hey, everyone, Desert Storm has started. We had no idea what Desert Storm was, but then that's when this God started coming.

[28:04] ANDREA MUTO: Yeah. And there was one. Or maybe it was an attack or a false alarm or something like that. I remember you telling me about where you were running with another one.

[28:17] DONNA SUMPTION: Oh, well, that was one night. That was actually quite a really scary night, because we had someone on our team that was a Vietnam vet, and I think he was having a little PTSD. So we were having Scud attacks. And when the Scud attacks first started, we didn't know a lot about them. They were actually pretty ineffective, except for a couple scenarios, but they were pretty ineffective and would just land in the water and not hit anything, or they would get blown up by the patriot missile launchers that were near us. But at this time, we didn't know that they were ineffective. And so we were having some Scud attacks, and we had been told. I had been to an intel briefing on the beginning of the shift, and they said that if we were being attacked, we would know it, because all the power would go out at the port, because the iraqi engineers had designed the port, and so they knew how to do that, and so that's how we would know and that we should. Then it was my job on the pier, our pier, to alert everybody on the pier that we were being attacked. And we had procedures that, you know, we had to do. So we were having an attack, and then the lights went out. And then I tried. We tried to get on our radio. Didn't work. It never worked. And then we tried to call on the phone. The phone didn't work. So I had been told by my supervisor to not tell anyone about that intel briefing. So I was the only one that knew at that point. And so there was another. There was a major there, and he was just a guy I knew that was on the port, too, and he was from Boston. So we became friends, and I told him what was happening because he was the highest ranking person. And he said, okay, I have a 45, and my driver has an m 16. I want you to run out. There was some guys in the middle of the pier screaming, and we wanted them to be quiet. I want you to run out and tell them it's okay and to not to be quiet. And then when you come back, make sure you wave your arms so we don't shoot you. And I just said, okay. And one of the guys on my team, he was in e four, and he said, she's not going anywhere alone. And he stepped up, and so both of us ran out there together, and, boy, did we wave our arms. When we came back, we were, like, doing jumping jacks and jumping all around, not making any noise because we don't want to make a lot of noise, but we just made sure everybody knew who we were.

[31:25] ANDREA MUTO: Well, the desert, Saudi Arabia, desert Storm is quite an experience. When you think back and recollections of that time and as a woman in the military, any regrets that you have or what were your even regrets, but what were your biggest accomplishments as well, the things you're proud of?

[31:47] DONNA SUMPTION: I'm proud of making it through. I had so many challenges, and, you know, I hope I made things better for people after me, but there were so many challenges. You know, we were among the first women were integrated in the military in 76, but by this time, it was 91, several years later. But when I first joined in, 82 women hadn't been integrated. So I feel like I carried my weight, definitely, and I showed that women can do this just as easily as a man can. I'm proud of some of the things I did, you know, some of the physical things I did. I'm proud of the fact that I made it through airborne school. That was just hard. This is really hard. And I'm proud that I also, as an officer in charge of my shift at night, that I brought everyone home safely. That was one of my, you know, you have two things that you need to do when you're in charge. You have to complete your mission and get everyone home safe. And I feel like we did both those things.

[33:11] ANDREA MUTO: And six years in the army, you didn't decide to stay in?

[33:17] DONNA SUMPTION: No. As a woman in the army, I faced a lot of challenges being in Saudi Arabia. I was harassed a lot by one person, and I was tired. I just thought, there has to be a better way to earn money. The army let me down there because they always told us that they would take care of us. And many times the army did take care of me. When I went to Saudi Arabia, they took care of someone, took care of my cat. They tried to take care of everything they could, but in that respect, they didn't take care of me. And I hope it's better now. But I was just tired. I just. I didn't want to do that. I thought, I can earn money or have a professional life a better way and not have it be so hard. So I do regret. Maybe I could have found another unit that wasn't like some of the other places I'd been. Maybe I could have tried harder. But, you know, I was only 27, so what can I say?

[34:31] ANDREA MUTO: And the military, you said before it helped you move along the path that you're on today and where you are.

[34:37] DONNA SUMPTION: Oh, yeah. I mean, I learned so many things. You really learn how to be an adult in some respects. And so I grew up a lot, and I. I love the military for that.

[34:59] ANDREA MUTO: Donna Marie sumption, thank you for your service to this country, to the United States army. We have five more minutes.

[35:09] DONNA SUMPTION: If there is another question. Okay.

[35:14] ANDREA MUTO: Yeah, yeah, yeah. How about this? I think you'd mentioned.

[35:22] DONNA SUMPTION: Okay, well, yes.

[35:24] ANDREA MUTO: That you wanted to talk about a couple of pictures that we have here.

[35:27] DONNA SUMPTION: We brought some pictures, and one of these pictures is of a friend he sent to me. I was really homesick. We had a map of Maine on the wall, and we would color in a piece each day for each day that we were there. And we said when we go home that that would be colored in. And this is a friend from Maine, and he likes to ice fish, and he has one of those ice fishing things, and it's. He wrote on it, I want to be Saddam Hussein's new dentist. And this picture made me laugh so hard. And he was. It just. It was good to receive that we didn't. We didn't. Mail was not easy. I did get a lot of mail from people I didn't know. A lot of people wrote me. We, you know, we got so much support from everybody in the states. And it was nice to get all that mail, but it was really special when I got mail from a friend. And also, this is a card that a friend drew and sent me and a really incredible letter inside. And those are the kinds of things.

[36:57] ANDREA MUTO: That really be all you can be.

[36:59] DONNA SUMPTION: Yeah. One time someone sent us a video of a snowstorm in Maine. In Maine. And we. Hard to believe. I hate cold weather and I hate snow, but we missed Maine so much that. And it was just a video of these people driving around and saying, look at the snow. Look at the snow. And we watched the whole video of just looking at the snow. And so things like that, simple things. My mother, somehow Boston Globe did a thing where they could send us newspapers. And so every once, maybe once or twice a week, I'd get a newspaper, the Boston Globe, and it'd be a couple weeks old, but that was okay because it was like news from home, and I would just read every single page, you know? And so things like that meant so much to me. And some of these other pictures are, like, of the seaport where we worked. And I really liked this. Loved the seaport. And it was just so amazing because the ships were so big. Like, they would be as high as a high rise apartment building. Everything was so massive. And we would go into the ships and look down and see, you know, levels and levels and levels of just trucks. Like 20 levels of trucks.

[38:31] ANDREA MUTO: And those were the trucks that logistics you were taking care of?

[38:34] DONNA SUMPTION: Yeah, we had trucks. We had trucks from all over the world, not just from the states. We had commercial trucks from all over the world. We had egyptian military, we had syrian military trucks. We had Japanese. Every country was represented there, and just parking lots and parking lots of trucks. It was really cool that we were in charge of all these trucks, you know?

[39:01] ANDREA MUTO: Yeah. And so you had requests from people coming in from the field, or how did that work? They came in and they requested equipment from you.

[39:10] DONNA SUMPTION: Yeah. So we were the headquarters unit, and we were in charge of all the trucks. And we would get our priorities from the general, who's in charge of logistics. And so we knew the priorities. So if a unit would come to us and want trucks, they had to be in one of the priorities. Like, were they part of the 82nd? Were they part of the 101st? If they weren't part of the priority units, they would go to the. We would tell them, well, you have to come at the end of the day, and you get whatever's left. There are many days where they would just hear that. They would come day after day and, you know, hope that they could get trucks to move their equipment. And, you know, it was. It was. They would yell at us a lot. Well, we. Because there might be a parking lot of. I remember we had one big parking lot of syrian. They're called hets, heavy equipment trailers. They would haul tanks. We couldn't release them because they were allocated to the 82nd or somebody, and we were not allowed to release them. Now, they didn't use all the trucks, so they would sit there, but we could. They'd say, well, you have trucks over there, and say, we can't give them to you. And they would just yell at us.

[40:37] ANDREA MUTO: Now, you also spent some time in Germany, too, with the army.

[40:45] DONNA SUMPTION: So I went to Germany. I went to Germany. The reason why I went to Germany was because there was this person in our unit that was really harassing me, and I didn't know what to do or who to go to. But one day he asked me some inappropriate questions. And so I had decided there was this colonel there. He was, our battalion commander. He was standing right behind him, and his eyes just got so big. And I said, well, I know this colonel a little because he's from Boston. So I had talked to him about Boston. So I kind of had a rapport with him. I thought, I'm going to go talk to him and tell him to. I don't know what to do. And that night I was told that I was going to Germany the next morning. So I feel like there was a mission that had to be done, and they needed a junior officer, which I was. And it just so happened this resolved the problem, sort of. So we were separated. And, you know, to be honest, I was in Saudi Arabia. I got to go to Germany. I thought, this is great. I got to sleep in a hotel. I got to have a rental car. I had the life.

[42:11] ANDREA MUTO: But you could have done without the harassment, though.

[42:13] DONNA SUMPTION: I could have, but, you know, sometimes you just have to try to do with. Try to make do with what you have. And I didn't have a lot of resources to help me out, so I just. I made do. And I said, all right, I'll go to Germany. Of course, I had to come back, but I had to come back right before the war started, six days before the whole thing started. I came back, and, you know, that person was on my shift for a short time, but then it got very scary because he's the one that had the PTSD issues. And I was scared. I was afraid someone was going to get hurt. So I went to my supervisor, and I told him that I thought this was a problem, and is there any way that he could be on another shift? And he said that, well, you just don't like him because you have a past. You have to try to get along with him. So I said, okay, now be it. This person outranked me. So that was another challenge. So the next day, somebody in my team, not lower rank, went to our supervisor with the same complaints, and they took him off the shift. And actually, I didn't really have any interaction with him after that.

[43:33] ANDREA MUTO: Now, can you just tell us briefly that homecoming once you left Saudi Arabia?

[43:41] DONNA SUMPTION: So when we got on the plane, we went on hawaiian airlines, and we got on the flight, and they gave.

[43:48] ANDREA MUTO: Us lays and from Saudi Arabia on hawaiian airlines.

[43:53] DONNA SUMPTION: And they said, they gave us these pamphlets or these booklets and a pen, and they said, well, when we are wheels up, we're going to let you know. And that means. And then we'll let you know when we're out of saudi airspace. And we want you to write that on the pamphlet. So you remember. And so they told us. They said, we're out of saudi airspace, and everybody just screamed, and we were dancing in the aisles. And we're just so excited to go home finally, because when we went, we went. Initially, they told us we'd be there for 90 days, and every 90 days they'd say, you're going to be here for another 90 days. We had no idea how long we would be there for. And we were there for ten months. And so then we landed in Philadelphia.

[44:43] ANDREA MUTO: Did you write that on your pamphlet when you were out of saudi airspace?

[44:46] DONNA SUMPTION: Yeah. Yeah. And then we landed in Philadelphia and it was five in the morning and there was nobody there, and there was a janitor or something. And he said, did you just come, people just come from Saudi Arabia? And we said, yeah, because we had our brown uniforms on and we said, yeah. And he said, there's nobody here to greet you. And we said, oh, that's okay. We're going on to our other flights and we're moving on. And he said, oh, no, somebody has to be here to greet you. So he made some phone calls. He said, I'm going to get some people down here right away. And he made some phone calls. And there were people there, kids. They came a whole. Just some people from that lived in the area. And they had signs and they had instruments, musical instruments, and they sang songs and played for us, and they had flags and it was just the funniest thing.

[45:46] ANDREA MUTO: Welcome home.

[45:47] DONNA SUMPTION: Yeah. And then after that, we flew on to Worcester, mass. And that's where our families were able to greet us and see us finally.

[45:57] ANDREA MUTO: Welcome home. Yeah. Once again, Donna, thank you. Thank you for your service, the country. We appreciate it. Appreciate your time today telling everyone about your experiences in the US army.

[46:11] DONNA SUMPTION: Thank you. Thanks for doing this.