M. K. (Trina) Baldwin

Seag:

Hello. This is Morgan Seag. Today is March 15, 2018. It is my pleasure to be interviewing Commander M K Baldwin, who is a retired commander in the Civil Engineer Corps in the US Navy and the first and only female winter-over Officer in Charge with Naval Support Force Antarctica. Thank you so much for being here.

Baldwin:

Oh, thanks. It’s my pleasure.

Seag:

Great. So, can we start at the beginning? What is your given name?

Baldwin:

M K Baldwin. I go by Trina.

Seag:

Where were you born?

Baldwin:

Charlotte, North Carolina.

Seag:

Can you tell me about your upbringing? What were your parents like?

Baldwin:

I lived in the normal family of two parents, an older brother, a brick house with a yard, and a dog. But I also grew up in a family that—we weren’t hand-to-mouth and we never went hungry, but we definitely clipped coupons and shopped sales and watched what we spent money on and we recycled.

Seag:

What did your parents do?

Baldwin:

At the time, my father was working as…Well, in my young childhood my father was working as a draftsman/budding engineer in Charlotte, North Carolina, and by the time I was about eight, that’s when he went into business for himself because he had passed his professional engineer’s license up in Raleigh, North Carolina and become a registered engineer. So, he began his own firm working primarily in the textile industry, though they dabbled a little bit in the chemical industries. But as a mechanical engineering firm, it was Baldwin Engineering Associates, PA. Mom helped in the business. She did drawings and she ran the business side of things. Then by the time I was nine years old, they added another engineer, Martha Jean Robinson, also a PE, to the mix.

So, my brother and I got to learn to draw with the drawing machines. This is before CAD and any of that. I’ll show you later what some of those drawing machines looked like. We got to play on the textile equipment and learn to do all sorts of handyman things because some of our work was truly hands-on. By the time my brother and I were 12 and 13, we moved to Clemson, South Carolina because the textile industry was going downhill. There was a recession going on, and the consulting business was drying up. So, we came to Clemson where my father, Don Baldwin, PE, and what would become known as my second mom, Jean Robinson, PE, got jobs at Phillips Fibers over in Seneca. Since we were here at Clemson, my mom Sue Baldwin, went back to school in mechanical engineering and graduated in 1978 as the fifth female to graduate in mechanical engineering. Four years later she passed and obtained her PE license as well.

Seag:

So, at what point in your childhood did you begin to think, “Oh, maybe I also will be an engineer?”

Baldwin:

[Chuckling] What point didn’t I think I was going to be an engineer?! When you grow up and three meals a day are surrounded by three adults talking engineering stuff, it kind of comes naturally. Oh, by the way, there are all the engines, car engines they rebuilt and everything else. Oh yeah, there was some house construction going on. Yeah, very hands-on. It was kind of obvious, though admittedly I did explore medicine and the ministry for a brief period of time, but then went to the fallback position of “Oh, I’ll just go be an engineer.”

Seag:

What kind of schools did you go to when you were young?

Baldwin:

Went to St. Gabriel’s Catholic School in Charlotte and then Carmel Academy, which is a private school, for a couple of years. Once we moved here to Clemson, I went to the local junior high and high school. Then when I decided I was going into engineering, my choices were limited in the state of South Carolina for in-state tuition. If I wanted to go in mechanical engineering, there was one school, Clemson. The other school, Citadel, did not allow women, and USC (University of South Carolina) did not have a very strong, or even at all, engineering program. So basically if you wanted to go into engineering, you went to Clemson.

Seag:

So, you went to Clemson.

Baldwin:

So, I went to Clemson.

Seag:

What was your experience there like?

Baldwin:

I lived in the dorms. That was part of the deal that my parents had with both my brother and I, that if we chose to go to Clemson…because the deal was they would pay for tuition(for in-state tuition) to the school of our choice if we chose a major that they agreed would result in us being able to obtain a job with a living wage. So that ruled out English. That ruled out biology. There were no master’s degrees being offered here. This is “You get a BS and you get a job.” But they would pay in-state tuition, and we also had to maintain a certain grade average and not get in trouble with the law and not get anybody pregnant or get pregnant, which to me seemed like perfectly rational rules and limitations. They who pay the bills write the rules. They said if we went to Clemson, we had to live in the dorms and act like regular students. We couldn’t come home and do our laundry.

So, it was great! I lived in the dorms. My brother lived in the dorms. We ate in the dining hall. We did the full student life—my brother, a little more full student life than I did. But I played on the flag football team. We both had part-time jobs with the university police department doing parking tickets and directing traffic. It’s great. Hey, it paid minimum wage. For a while we actually both drove school buses. Back then in South Carolina, if you were 16 you could drive a school bus, so my last two years of high school and my first year of college I actually drove a school bus in this area. So, a very normal college life except that by the time I came through, they went, “How many more Baldwins are there?” because my mom had just been through in the late ‘70s, my brother was coming through and I was coming through. It was like, “Mmm. There are a lot of Baldwins coming through Clemson, all in mechanical engineering.”

Seag:

[Laughs] At what point did you begin to think about naval work? Can you tell that story?

Baldwin:

There was a van parked outside of Johnstone for Navy recruiting. That was in the fall of my senior year. You know, you’re doing all the interviews and all that stuff, and so I stopped in to see what they had to offer and got talking to them. They said, “Oh, you need to sit down and take the officer qualifying test.” “Yeah, okay. Whatever.” So, I took it and I took all their stuff and they all of a sudden were very interested in me. I got talking to them, but it turned out that I didn’t have the GPA for nuke. They were actually there to recruit for nuke, and at the time nuclear was limited to men, except for teaching jobs. They had a few slots that they allowed for female instructors at their nuclear school. Fortunately, my GPA wasn’t high enough, so I couldn’t go nuke, but the recruiter that was there knew about the Civil Engineer Corps and he said, “Well, you need to investigate the Civil Engineer Corps. Here’s the guy’s name and number. Give him a call.”

So when he came around a couple weeks or months later, I got up with him and talked to him, and I had the grades for that. So, I decided that I was interested, but you have a lot of hoops to jump through. They have their recruiting timeframes and stuff like that. I missed the original cutoff because I didn’t want to miss college to go down to the Military Entrancing and Processing Station in Columbia to go through the two-day entrancing and processing. That’s when they do all the medical and the fingerprints and all that stuff to see if you’re qualified to come in.

I didn’t want to miss school, so I had to wait till Christmas break. Well, that put me into the next fiscal year of applying. But in the end, it’s probably just as well. It gave me time to get offers from General Electric and Duke Power to go to work for them. In the end, though, I decided that I was going Navy, and when I told both Duke Power and General Electric that I was turning them down to go in the Navy Civil Engineer Corps, both of them gave me their business card and said, “Call us when you get out. We’ll hire you.” So at that point I kind of knew I had done the right thing, even though my parents were sorely disappointed in my choice because they paid for me to go to college and I went to work for $12,800 a year, which was about half of what Duke Power was offering me. They actually made me do a budget to see if I could live on $12,800 a year. It turns out I can, and I did, but it was just kind of…They were just disappointed that as a kid with an engineering degree I was taking such a pay cut. But hey, it was only a four-year commitment. I figured if I didn’t like it after four years, I can go to work for Duke or GE and everything would be cool.

Seag:

A lot of people say they joined the Navy to see the world.

Baldwin:

Ha!

Seag:

Was that part of it for you?

Baldwin:

No. Not at all. It was not even any consideration—to the extent that when the detailer told me…I was in Officer Indoctrination School up in Newport, Rhode Island. The detailer officially gave me five choices of where he was thinking about sending me and what the jobs were. In reality, it wasn’t a choice because when I went back to meet with him the next day to tell him what my preferences were, he said, “Oh, I’m sending you to Guam.” After I got up from talking to him, I immediately found a pay phone, called home, and said, “What’s Guam? Where’s Guam? Where am I going?” and of course my parents berated my lack of history, World War II history, and not knowing that Guam is an island and big in the Pacific World War II history.

So, I learned about seeing the world, and you know, in retrospect, it was probably the best thing I ever did because I did Guam. I did Sicily. I did Okinawa. I did DC. I learned more about world history because I was physically there. I went to Gela. I saw where our Army landed from Africa. I went all over Guam. I saw the gunning placements. I saw where the Japanese had headed out. I went to Okinawa. I saw Iwo Jima. I saw where Ernie Pyle was killed and the memorial to him. I saw the cliffs where they were throwing their babies off. It is very real when you go and you see these places, but it wasn’t something that I set out to do. I just happened to end up going to these places.

Seag:

Can you describe what your officer training was like?

Baldwin:

Knife and fork school, thankfully. You know, get fitted out in your uniforms, which—oh, by the way, they don’t give you your uniforms. You’d better bring your checkbook with you, and they are not cheap, especially if you don’t fit the average size and you have to go get uniforms made because they don’t fit. Yeah, it was an expensive hobby.

Seag:

Did they have female uniforms?

Baldwin:

Yes, but that was where the fitting became an issue because they don’t like to split uniforms. So, in my case, I think I was a size 14 jacket and a size 12 skirt, and oh, if you wanted trousers, you had to buy those special. The women’s trousers for the Navy Blue uniform, what we call dress blue, has no pockets and it buttons on the side and it has a little zipper. They didn’t even have trousers for the white dress uniform. Now the summer whites, the short sleeve version and stuff like that, they did have trousers. Khakis, they had trousers, and the same with the winter blues. But yes, you had to buy those extra because the uniform allowance was for the skirt and the shirt, not for the trousers.

Seag:

So what else did they teach you at knife and fork school?

Baldwin:

We went through a lot of leadership management type courses. We had to be able to pass the third-class swim test, which includes jumping off the high…I don’t know how high it was. I’m nearsighted. When I take off my glasses or my contacts, as the case were, and they tell me to jump, I can’t see that. So, it was a good thing that we went alphabetically and I was number two, so all I had to do was follow the guy in front to me. And drown-proofing, what a miserable experience. We learned to march and I learned that I don’t swing my arms when I walk. Therefore, I had to learn to swing my arms because it looks odd to have a penguin out there where everybody else is marching and swinging their arms and one oddball with their arms straight by their side. It was not natural to me, but I had to learn to do it. Let’s see. Leadership management education training. I’m sure we did some other stuff, too, but I don’t—

Seag:

How did you adapt to the regimen and hierarchies in military life?

Baldwin:

Not too bad. I’m kind of into black and white and following the rules, but if I was told to do something and it didn’t make sense, then I tended to want to ask why, and that doesn’t go over real well. I think I got some of that out of my system at officer school. Some of it I didn’t. Some of it I learned to be very respectful when asking why.

Seag:

And how did your first assignment come about?

Baldwin:

Well, as I said, the detailer says, “Okay, here are your five choices.” One was New Jersey. One was Port Hueneme. One was Guam, and I don’t…Oh, I think Charleston may have been one of them. I don’t remember what the other one was. He said, “Think about this and come talk to me.” It really wasn’t…I don’t remember it being about what type of assignment because in the Civil Engineer Corps we can have construction management, facilities management, or Seabees. We call them ROICC, Public Works, and Seabees, and then there’s staff. But when you’re an ensign, you’re not worried about staff tours. You’re not going there. So, I don’t remember him asking, “Did you want to go to construction management or did you want to go to public works?” It was just, “Here are your locations. Take a pick,” and as I said a minute ago, it wasn’t a pick! I walked in the second day and he said, “You’re going to Guam.” I was like, “But, but, but…” But I didn’t—There’s no point in arguing. I mean, okay, so I’m going to Guam.

Seag:

How was it in the end?

Baldwin:

I loved it. It turns out I like warm weather. I like islands surrounded by a lot of water, and I ended up working for a wonderful command. I was doing construction management. They paired me up with a civilian who was street-smart in terms of construction. He wasn’t as well educated, but he had worked his way up through the ranks, more hands-on, to supervisory to stuff like that. So, they paired me with him and we turned out to have a great time because I could write the letters to the contractors and he could point out the nitnoids in what was wrong. Between the two of us, we made an incredible team. Had a great time together.

Back then we had $35 million in contracts between us, which was a huge amount back then! Now I just go, “Oh, you could build a building for $35 million, not have about ten projects.” We were mostly up at the Air Force. We were at the northern end of the island, so once a week we took the day away from the office and went to see all of our construction sites at the northern end of the island. So, I learned from him because he could point stuff out on the construction site, and then he could learn from me about the paperwork and tracking things.

It just was a great time. I love the…Yeah, it’s a little humid, but I love warm sun. The water was wonderful. The water is always bathtub warm or warmer, and it’s clear. It’s beautiful out there. So, I learned to deep sea fish. I learned to windsurf. It’s sort of like sailing, but you’re on a surfboard. I don’t know if they even do that anymore. There were a bunch of other singles who were in their twenties and we all lived in the barracks together and we had a blast. Every Saturday night we cooked out on the grill, and we just did stuff and had a good time. It was better than college. Hey, and we got paid for it, too!

Seag:

So often I’ll ask about what it was like working in such a male-dominated environment for the first time, but of course you’re coming out of a mechanical engineering department. So, can you describe what the comparison was like or if it mattered to you to have been in such a minority?

Baldwin:

It did on that first duty station because many of the contractors were Japanese or Korean, and their acceptance of women is much, much lower than even in the United States, especially back then in the ‘80s. So, one of the things that we did is that often I would let my partner Manny do the talking because he was the guy, and deal with it. He was less threatening. He looked older. I mean, I was 21 when I got there, and I didn’t look like I was old enough to be out of high school. So, the last thing the elder Japanese want is a high school girl telling them what they’re going to do. So, you learn to play to the strengths of the partnership, and I don’t know if that’s why my boss assigned me or not, but it turned out to be really great.

But when we were briefing the Air Force General, I briefed, not the civilian. It wasn’t a big problem, though the General did ask my Captain why he wasn’t coming up to do the briefings, and my captain said, “Well, is she giving you the information you need?” “Yes.” “Is she polite and respectful?” “Yes.” “Is there anything missing?” “Well, no.” “Then she’ll be briefing you.” So, in many respects I was fortunate to have a Captain that believed that as long as you could do the job, then it was yours to do, regardless or rank or gender.

Seag:

At that point did you have long-term career ambitions?

Baldwin:

No. It was just one tour at a time. I was still looking at the four years and, okay, how is it going? Where am I going to be? The one time I visited home, my parents were like, “When are you getting out?” I said, “I’ve got to do four years.”

Seag:

So how long were you in Guam?

Baldwin:

15 months, plus an extra month on the beginning because when you finish school…Well, I finished up Officer Indoctrination School at Thanksgiving, and my class for the Civil Engineer Corps Officer School out in California wouldn’t class up until early January. So, I had over a month and I didn’t want to take all that as vacation time because that would put me in the hole for vacation. They had no problem with sending me out to my duty station in Guam, and so I went on out to Guam. I got to learn the lay of the land and visit. You know, I learned where the barracks were. I learned…

You know, I got all that indoctrination, and then I went to the Civil Engineer Corps Officer School, also known as CECOS, in Port Hueneme. Class actually meant a lot more to me when they started talking about construction management because I could compare it to what I had just seen for the last month of “Oh! Well, but, but, but…” I’m sure that some of the other people in the class were a little irritated at me because I was always asking questions. I mean the instructors were also Civil Engineer Corps officers who had been in the field, and I think for them it was okay that they actually had somebody who wasn’t asleep in the class. I mean come on. Classes get boring. But when you have somebody that you can actually have a conversation and ask real questions, “Well, what about this and what about…” that it was better for them. But my classmates probably weren’t real thrilled. [In an exasperated tone] “Hurry up. Get on with it!”

Seag:

Can you tell me a little bit about your next tour in Sicily?

Baldwin:

So, when it came time to do the next tour, I had done construction management, so I knew I needed to do public works, and again, sticking with the “Hey, I like islands in warm places,” they offered me a couple of options. I actually was interested in going to Edzell, Scotland, but it turned out not to be an option and I don’t even remember why. But the bottom…It came down to two options. There was a job up in Naples, Italy and the job there at Naval Air Station Sigonella in Sicily.

So, I asked about, well, what was life like? Okay. Well, Naples is a big, dirty city. It smells of sulfur because of the volcano. Oh, okay. What about Sicily? You’re out in the fields. It’s surrounded by geep and eucalyptus trees. Oh, okay! I’ll go for the one in Sicily, then. There was some discussion about whether or not I should really take that job, but my CO felt very confident in my abilities, and of course I felt very confident in my abilities that I could handle whatever was going to be tossed at me.

Seag:

What kind of question was there?

Baldwin:

Well, apparently they knew that the CO of the unit I was going to didn’t have any use for women, and they knew that that might be a problem. But again, my CO felt very confident that I would be able to handle it, at least from an engineering standpoint. We didn’t sit down and discuss the fact that this was a guy who didn’t like women. Nobody told me what the problem was in advance, so off I went to Sicily to work for a command where the CO—well, he was an OIC to start with and then it became a command—where he had no use for women in uniform or women in any career. He firmly believed that they should be barefoot in the kitchen and pregnant, and that didn’t go over real well for me.

At that point I was 22 and definitely very active in sports, very enthused about my job and new adventures and what life was like. I ran into the big glass door. It wasn’t even a glass ceiling. It was…So I was in a wardroom where I was the youngest by 21 years. I was the only female. I was the only single person, so I had nothing in common with anyone else in the wardroom that would be my peer group. So, I ended up having to find friends elsewhere, which was down the road at the other end of the air station where the Public Works people were. More of my kind! More engineers, and they actually…One of my classmates ended up being there. One of the guys that I had met in Guam, he was there as the Officer in Charge of Construction. So, I at least knew some people and I was accepted as an engineer down there and it was okay.

But in my own command, it was a little bit rough because it was a communications command and I wasn’t a communicator. So, I actually lived out—well, not lived, but my office was in a building, a butler building, a metal building in the parking lot. So was the Supply Corps Officer. So, we were out…We weren’t in the main building where the CO and the XO and the Command Master Chief and all that. We were outcasts in the parking lot.

Seag:

And that was because of sex segregation?

Baldwin:

No. Actually, that had to do with the fact that we weren’t communicators. [Laughs] So, it had nothing to do with gender. Now he didn’t like me because I was a female, but out in the parking lot was because we weren’t communicators.

Seag:

So, what was your work like there?

Baldwin:

Basically, everything of a physical plant that…So leaky roofs. The building needed painting. The grass needed cutting. The antenna wires needed straightening. All the generators needed to run. The batteries needed to be checked. The incinerator had a problem. Oh, the air conditioning is out. Oh, the sewer lines—oh, they became my problem, too. The skipper’s car was my problem. Anything that was wrong was my problem. [Laughs] And oh, by the way, we were on an Italian base. So domani is the word of the day. It means tomorrow. Dopodomani means many tomorrows (or never). [Laughs] So the answer out of the Italians was, “Domani.”

Seag:

You said you were enthused about the job. Does that mean you enjoyed the work?

Baldwin:

Yes and no. Once I figured out how to do it, and because we were a detachment to the Naval Communications Area Master Station Mediterranean out of Naples, once I learned who the key players were in Naples and I learned how to work Public Works because we were a reimbursable customer…The air station itself is not reimbursable. But I’d bring my own money because it comes through COMNAVTELCOM. So, if I need work done, all I have to do is wave the green under their nose and they go, “Oh, how can we help you, ma’am?” So, after I’d been there a year and had learned how to work the system, it was great.

I still had the problems with the CO. As I told you earlier, even though I did a great job and I figured out how to get us money, how to write the requests for money to get new vehicles and a new building and a shredder instead of an incinerator because of the environmental aspects of it, once I learned how to do all this stuff, man, I was doing great! But my CO, I could never do anything right in his eyes. It was always wrong. If the power went out—and in Italy, the power goes out a lot—that’s why we had the generators. Well, the generators were hooked up so that within 15 seconds the generators would pick up the load of the station. The CO would sit there with his stopwatch and if it didn’t come up within 15 seconds, heads were rolling and it was my head. So, you know, there was no way to win on that one.

Seag:

So how did this combination of factors, both doing really well at the job and encountering this glass door, as you described it, impact your next assignment?

Baldwin:

Well, originally I was told I wouldn’t have a next assignment because they were looking at the grades that I was getting, which were not bad. If you go on an A to F scale, I had mostly A’s but some B’s. But this was in the drawdowns. This was 1988. The Navy was going down to a 300-ship navy and they were telling people to go home. So, anything less than absolutely perfect was your ticket to go home. So, the detailers basically…On their trip out there, they said, “Thank you for your service. You’ve done your four years. You can plan on going home,” and I said, “Hey, wait a minute. This isn’t fair. I walked on water in my first tour and I’m still treading water pretty well over here. You need to give me a third tour.”

So, I called my first CO. I called the O-6 up in Naples and I called the O-6 in DC at COMNAVTELCOM—they were all Civil Engineer Corps officers—and said, “Look. I’m not getting a fair deal. Give me a third tour. That way you’ll know whether or not I did a good job like my first tour or if I’m really that bad according to this CO.” So, I got a third tour and I knew that was a make or break tour. No problem. Survived that one without any…But it was, you have to understand the political of, okay, the Cold War was ending, and we were drawing down from a 600-ship to a 300-ship navy. People were going home. You didn’t have to have much. So, if I had wanted to get out and go home, I could have, but my first tour was so great. I loved what I was doing. I loved the people I was with. I loved where I was. The second tour wasn’t too bad. I liked Sicily. Sicily is a really neat place. I did a Motogiro around the entire island of Sicily, and it was phenomenal. I would love to go back to Sicily just to see the area. But the command climate was horrible, and so I knew I really needed a third shot to see whether or not this was something I wanted to continue or not. Hey, another two years—no problem.

So, I went to Gulfport, Mississippi and worked at the Naval Construction Training Center there in Gulfport. I was assigned as the Operations Officer, and that meant I was third in command: CO, XO, and Operations. As a result, all of the instructors, which were Seabees—a few civilians, mostly Seabees, enlisted—so I had 140 people working for me in the school staff, and then I would have about 200 students at any given time, up to 1,000 in a year going through.

At that time, what they did was they made A school, which is your initial technical training. A school was a continuation of boot camp, so we got them out of their barracks at 4 in the morning. We marched them to PT. We marched them to the galley, the dining hall. We marched them back. They marched everywhere, and it was like boot camp. We had eyes on those kids from before dawn to after dusk.

So, some of my instructors were in charge of the boot camp sort of aspect of it, and then I had the instructors who were in the schoolroom. The schoolroom includes the field because, hey, if you’re a Seabee, you’ve got to learn to climb the power pole or you’ve got to learn to drive the front-end loader or you’ve got to learn to repair the dump truck. So, there is actual class time, but a lot of it is what you would call in a normal college “lab time,” where you’re physically in the shop doing the work. You’re learning to weld. You’re learning to lay concrete block. You’re learning to place concrete.

That was cool because I actually went out, and I told my instructors, “You’ve got to teach me the same thing that you teach these kids. If you can teach me that, then I’ll know whether or not you’re a good instructor.” It was fun for me because I got to see what they were doing. I got to watch them. God, there was paperwork everywhere, but it was nice that once a week or two I would go out to one of my schools and I would observe. That way I got to know who they were, I got to see how they were teaching, because you have to do evaluations on everybody that works for you. You have to decide whether or not they’re good enough to stand for promotion or to get an award, and then when it’s time for them to move to their next duty station, to either fight for what they want or to just say, “Detailer said…and you’re going…” So, it was a very interesting experience. Great.

In Sicily I only had a couple of guys working for me. I only had five people working for me. So you go from five people under your staff to 140-plus under your staff—the magnitude is incredible. But it was a great learning experience. And as the third in command, anytime the CO or XO were gone, I fleeted up to become the XO, and so I learned about having to do Captain’s Mast and Court Martials and all the fun things that come with having immature people. Hey, come on, the kids were 17 to 25 years old and they’re going to get in trouble. No matter how much you try and keep them out of trouble, somebody’s going to do something they shouldn’t have done and they’re going to have to come up. Sometimes you treat them gently and sometimes you just throw the whole book at them. A lot of it depends on their attitude and how they address you, and if they start back-sassing you, then you go ahead and throw the book at them. But that gave me the idea that, “Okay, I want to try some more of this. I want to do some more. I want to be an Officer in Charge.”

Seag:

And I guess you had managed to prove yourself, that you were as excellent as your first tour had suggested.

Baldwin:

Yes, so there wasn’t a question about going on the next tour. It was the question of what location, and when I told the detailer, “Okay. I want to be an Officer in Charge and I want to be on an island.” Well, there were three islands—Hawaii, Philippines, and McMurdo.

Seag:

Why did you say an island?

Baldwin:

Well, actually most of the overseas places feel like islands anyway, but I like the island. I really like the warm blue water. It turned out to be something that I enjoyed—not that I swam with the sharks or anything, but man, I enjoyed deep sea fishing. And I did some deep Gulf fishing, so to speak, in Gulfport. There we caught black-tipped sharks, and that’s good eating, too. So, I decided, “Hey, yeah. I like these warm environments.”

So, I asked for Hawaii. I didn’t get it. I was the wrong gender. So, I asked for the Philippines, another nice warm place to be, and I ended up not getting that. That’s when the detailer said, “So you’re going to McMurdo,” and I’m like, “Um, let me think about that.” She said, “I’ll give you three days.” So once again, those O-6s that I called before, I called them all back again. I said, “Hey, guys. They’re…” Actually, it’s sir. “The detailer is talking to me about Naval Support Force Antarctica, Winter-over detachment, OIC.” “Yes. You should go.” All three of them. It was like, “But…” “Yes, you should go.” Okay. If I trust you guys, then I trust you guys.

So, what I did negotiate was that I negotiated grad school as my follow-on, and I got that in writing up front. It’s like, “Okay…” because she said, “Well, you haven’t screened for grad school.” I said, “I know that you can administratively screen me, so if you want me to go to Antarctica, then you will screen me for grad school and I’ll get admitted.” She said, “Okay.”

I had taken my GREs when I was a senior at Clemson, so I already had that part of it. I looked at the schools. The Civil Engineer Corps offers you certain schools. Usually it’s where Navy ROTC is and where they have a strong engineering background. Georgia Tech was one of those schools, so I applied to Georgia Tech. I applied only to Georgia Tech. [Laughs] I got admitted. So, I went off to Antarctica. I got my letter of admission, I think after I had already headed down to the ice, but I already knew I was going to Georgia Tech.

Seag:

So, let’s circle back just for a second to Hawaii, which we took a very quick sprint through the fact that you were the wrong gender to work in Hawaii. Why would that have been different than working somewhere else?

Baldwin:

The unit was there to support wartime efforts, so it was, I believe, a CBU. So, if the balloon went up—and that’s Cold War terminology—if the balloon went up, then that unit would go wherever the front was along with the NMCB (the Naval Mobile Construction Battalion). So, as a result, they could not have a woman as their Officer in Charge, and in fact I assume it was an all-male unit. I didn’t go ask if there were enlisted women. I assume that there weren’t.

Seag:

So, when you were offered McMurdo and you said that the COs were supportive and suggested that you should take the assignment, why did they say that you should take it?

Baldwin:

Because in their day, when they were younger, that was the crème de la crème. People competed to get that job. You got to be an OIC in a remote, austere environment with a bunch of Seabees. Back then, there were more than 100 Seabees assigned to that unit. It was a big deal to go down there, and they thought of it in those terms of, “Hey, that’s still a big deal to go to Antarctica.” It wasn’t as big. I only had, I believe, 15 Seabees of my 62. The rest were fleet rates and it wasn’t such a big deal. It had gone from being an O-6 billet down to an O-3 billet. But still, it was an Officer in Charge billet of a remote area.

Seag:

What was your preparation like? Did you do any training?

Baldwin:

I went out to Port Hueneme and met the summer support crew because they were still in home-port. That was August timeframe. I went to a lot of the meetings where I learned about the logistics schedule for Antarctica because there’s only one ship a year, and most of the materials—food, fuel, supplies, construction materials—everything comes once a year via ship. Now there are airplanes that come in the summer, but by and large they’re people or science exploration stuff or food, freshies—vegetables, fruit, eggs, milk! You know, all those wonderful things that you wouldn’t send by ship.

So, I learned not just the money side of it, but having to prepare the ships and having to prepare the orders in time for the ship because the ship goes from Port Hueneme, which really is a port. Then it goes to Littleton right outside of Christchurch, and then it goes on down. It’s a long timeline to go from when you need to have the supplies ordered from the US versus what they can pick up in New Zealand to get to Antarctica. Then of course that has to be set up with the Coast Guard icebreaker to go down there and open the channel to get in there.

So, you have to plan projects for renovation. At this point the Navy was just doing maintenance and renovation. The contractor was doing the new construction on the Science and Engineering Technology Center (the SETC). But it still comes down on the same ship, and so the contractor was involved with us in these logistics planning meetings. But I was surprised. You’re talking three years out, and then the funding, of course, is another year behind that. So, in order to make all this stuff happen, it can’t be, “Oh, whoops. We measured wrong. We need a different twidget to come down there.” That just doesn’t happen.

Seag:

So, what aspect of these conversations fell under your purview or under your responsibilities as Officer in Charge? Were you being trained in this sort of thing for context or were you going to be involved in the ordering?

Baldwin:

Context, so that I would have some idea of what was happening and what needed to be done because in the winter is when the bulk of the minor maintenance and the ordering and stuff of, “Okay. Well, we need to rehab this building,” and the Seabees that are down there go into that building and figure out…They do what’s called the material takeoff and they figure out how much labor, how much 2x4s, plywood, whatever is needed, and they build the bill of materials as well as the number of labor hours that go with it, so that two years from now they can finally do that maintenance project.

So since those winter guys would be under my purview, part of that was just making sure I understood how long that logistics chain was and what the criticality of getting the ship in and getting the ship out was because the winter guys are the ones who build the ice pier, were also the ones that open up the runways and everything else. So, a lot of that stuff is critical. It really helps, especially for me, to understand the bigger picture of why are we doing this? What is the timeframe? What does the schedule look like? And they did. They had all these schedules, and by having been in the construction management world, I understood what we would call the long pole of the tent—where you have slack lines, where it’s absolutely critical that you meet that deadline or else the rest of the schedule is out the window. So all that stuff I already understood, and of course I’m seeing this about helicopters and ships and aircraft and which type of aircraft and how you load people and how you get food and at what levels and how to predict, okay, well, if our population curve is going to go like this, what’s our food curve that has to match it? Do we have enough storage room for that food?

Because the first time I went to Antarctica, I was there at WinFly. I walked by a building and I said, “Why are there air conditioners on that building? It’s freezing here!” They said, “Oh, that’s our cold storage. Those aren’t air conditioners. Those are freezer units.” Because of the sun in the summer, you have quite a heat load. So, while the air temperature may be 32 or 20 or whatever, the building itself is absorbing the heat of the sun, and so the interior temperature may well be above zero, which is the optimal cold storage freezer temperature. So, you have refrigeration units and air conditioners in Antarctica! I never would have thought that, but you know, once you got down there and somebody said, “Oh. Well, the sun is up.” Of course, in August when I was there, the sun was up for two or three hours, so it wasn’t as evident as when I was there in December and the sun is up 24 hours and there’s a stream of water going down the middle of McMurdo. I think we called that the Pee River—not because it was urine, but just…I’m not sure how they came up with “Pee.” At any rate, the ice was melting. We had a problem with the transition between Ross Island and getting out to Williams Air Field past the…It’s called the Transition, but it is the transition between ice and land—because it was all melted and slushy and you couldn’t drive over it anymore. That’s all because of the solar gain. White is not always white. If it’s not pure white, it absorbs, and as soon as it starts to get any moisture, then it’s no longer pure white and it actually starts melting faster.

Seag:

So, you were down at WinFly for a short period of training.

Baldwin:

Four days.

Seag:

Can you describe what it was like going down and landing the first time?

Baldwin:

Oh, bag drag in Christchurch, New Zealand. 70 pounds was all you were allowed to carry and you’re just wondering how you’re going to fit all your stuff. I was fortunate to go down at WinFly because I could take some stuff and leave it down there, unlike most of the people who travel and 70 pounds is all they get. But your expeditionary winter weather gear is over and above the 70 pounds, so you end up with two 70-pound duffel bags, one with your personal stuff and one with your essential clothing.

So bag drag was kind of cool, except that we stayed in The Duck, the inn across the road from the air field, and you knew that you had a showtime of like 2 in the morning because McMurdo actually operates on Christchurch, New Zealand time. If you think about being at the Pole, every way is whatever time you want it to be, and so out of convenience—And oh, by the way, every way is north. So, you make some arbitrary decisions about which way is north and what time it is, and in this case we used Christchurch time because we flew in and out of Christchurch.

So, in order to land at McMurdo, an eight-hour flight away, during the window of daylight at noon, you had to back up the eight hours plus the two hours of getting ready. There was no TSA or any of that, but you still have to get on the C-130 in your clunky gear and they have to check your name off and all that. When they’re flying at that time, no fewer than two aircraft in the air at any time. One is considered a SAR bird, and so they always have three birds available—two in the air, one on the ground ready to go. So, you have to have three crews ready.

They do a 12-hour forecast and at the time I didn’t understand this. Having lived through it, then I understood what was happening. The poor Aerographer’s Mates, the weather guessers on the ground in McMurdo, are trying to make a prediction for 15 hours out what the weather will be in McMurdo. There were three weather stations on a continent the size of the US and France put together, and they’re trying to predict the winds and the ceiling and the snow and the temperature. It’s like, “Oh my god. It’s a crapshoot.”

So, 15 hours out there’s this go, no-go and then you’re told about the time you think you’re going to bed at 10:00, “Okay, you’ve got bag drag at 2 a. m.” So, you get up at 1 a. m. You get your stuff and you pack up. You check out of your hotel room. You go across the way. You line up. You get on the very comfortable, luxurious [sarcastic tone] web seating of the C-130 with the yellow foamy earplugs in. You’re wearing six layers of clothes and you get yourself ready for your eight-hour ride. There was no on-board entertainment.

So, I’m kind of drifting off to sleep after we’ve taken off. I’m back there and everything’s cool. Then all of a sudden I feel the plane change and I’m going, “Huh? This ain’t right. Why am I leaning over? Anybody else know what’s going on?” “Yeah, we’re turning around.” “We’re what?” “Yeah, we’re turning around. They decided the weather is too bad. We can’t make it.” “Okay. So, another…” “We’ll be back home at Christchurch in three hours.” “Okay, let’s catch some more zzzs.” Meanwhile, the CO who was on the other plane got to continue on and we went back. So, a different bird was launched to be their SAR bird, so again, two planes made it and one didn’t. My plane went back to Christchurch.

So, you know, you’ve had a little bit of sleep and your eyes, you’re kind of trying to poke them open as you go. You get your bag and you walk back across to the hotel. They say, “What room were you in? Okay. We haven’t even bothered to clean it up,” because they’re used to the drill. “Here you go. Here’s your room.” You go back to your room and you go blat on your bed and sleep until you get ready to do it all over again. So, on the second day I actually made it all the way—only eight more hours of flying on a C-130 [laughs].

Having left Gulfport in August when it’s 95°F and 95 degrees humidity, a couple of weeks in Port Hueneme, maybe about 13 days, and I go skipping on down to Antarctica. I open the door to the plane and it’s -56F. The first breath goes through the balaclava, which isn’t too bad. The second breath, it goes right through at -56 and 5% humidity and you start going [gasps] “Where am I?” Your lungs have shrunken into the size of a kitchen sponge and everything is white, the rotor wash and the exhaust of the airplanes, because they don’t turn the planes off. That’s one thing about WinFly is they don’t shut down the propellers and they don’t shut down the engines because you’re there…That plane is there about 45 minutes, long enough to get all of you newbies off and put whatever old guys on that they have to, and that plane heads back to Christchurch after refueling. It’s called a hot refuel.

So, with the rotor wash and a little bit of blowing snow and it’s barely light and the whole place is white, except for the people who are wearing these funny olive drab green uniforms. Everybody’s wearing olive drab green uniforms except the civilians who are in red parkas and the Kiwis who are in blue parkas. You don’t know anybody from anybody because they’re all wearing balaclavas.

They point you to this Delta, which now reminds me of something out of Star Wars because the wheels are over six feet in diameter. They’ve got expanded metal steps, and you’re wearing bunny boots. They say, “Climb on up into this!” You get in there, and because people are breathing, all the windows are fogged up. You’re sitting sideways to the direction of travel, and while they have six-foot diameter wheels, they’re filled with lots of air. It begins to be a very bumpy ride and because you don’t know where you’re going, all you’re doing is you feel like you’re sitting on…Well, it is a wooden seat, it is a big slab of wood, and you’re bumping along sideways going, “What did I get into?”

And what was really cool is there was somebody out there saying, “Welcome to Antarctica. You can get back on the plane.” I learned that bottom line is if you get down there and you realize this ain’t your thing, you can get back on the plane and go home. No harm, no foul. They have time to replace you. I never thought of going back home. It was like, “When is this going to stop?” Then you get off at Hill Cargo and you pick up your luggage and they walk you over to Building 155 and say, “Okay, you’re staying here.”

Immediately, by the second day I was there, I was sick and of course they didn’t like me because I was sick, and I was bringing them germs as well. But I’m trying to learn everything I can from the incumbent Officer in Charge as well as all the other people about how things work, how to get around, what the job is like, what aviation is like. And oh my god, what do I need to bring back for when I come back for a year?

It was a whirlwind of three days of just, how much can your brain absorb or how many notes can you write? That’s when we had the old steno pads and clicker ballpoint pens made in black, and you wrote notes like a man going crazy. It was just phenomenal. Then you get back on a plane, and of course by then my ears were plugged and a C-130 is just not really good for traveling with your ears plugged. So, I got to Port Hueneme and I was even sicker for a few days. But I survived it and I learned what I needed to bring back and I took mail for people and you know, you help your buddies out down there.

Seag:

And so then it was a couple months later in October of 1990 that you arrived with Mainbody for the start of your tenure as the Officer in Charge.

Baldwin:

Yes, but the Officer in Charge during summer is…I won’t say useless because your job is there to learn, but you have no clout. Nobody gives a rat’s ass who you are. You’re just another of the bevy of Lieutenants that are wandering around there doing their jobs. They all know what their jobs are, and you’re there and it’s like, well, they don’t really have an engineering job because they won’t let me get near Public Works. I’m over in aviation ops, which I know nothing about, but I’m learning a whole lot about. So that’s when you go around and you visit supply and you visit GSK and you visit the fuelies and you learn how the whole station operates in anticipation of someday in February when the CO leaves and says, “Have a good winter! It’s all yours now!” [Laughs]

Seag:

So, it sounds like you did a lot of absorbing and observing that summer. Can you describe what the community was like in your observation?

Baldwin:

I think the civilian contractors even outnumbered the military in the summer. They definitely did in the winter. There was a little bit of interaction between the military and the civilian, but not much. The civilians kind of had their own world, and of course the military has its own world. The population at McMurdo in the summer is over 1,000 people, and people are always coming and going, whether they’re going to field camps or South Pole or they’re heading back north. There’s always influx and new germs and new people and people getting ready to go and bag dragging. There’s always stuff going on, and because the sun is up, there’s actually operations going on 24 hours a day.

So as part of the aviation duty, we stood a 24-hour watch and we were responsible for working with the Aerographer’s Mates as well as the traffic controllers about what was going on at the air field and whether or not the weather was good enough to fly. If the weather wasn’t good enough to fly, then we flew Sundays. So, there were all sorts of things that had to happen there.

Then by December we were getting ready for the ships to come in, so we were already anticipating the arrival of the icebreaker and then the two supply ships. One is a fuel resupply and the other is the standard resupply with the big crates on it. Once January hits, then it’s offload and onload season down at the ice pier, and I ended up spending my life down at the ice pier with the ship operations going on. Then all of a sudden February is here and it’s like, “Whoops! We’re all packing up to leave. Hope you’re ready!” [Laughs]

Seag:

Did you feel any connection to the scientific mission of Deep Freeze?

Baldwin:

A little bit of it. They actually had…Every now and then on a Sunday they would hold kind of a show and tell. The beakers would talk about what they were doing, and the coolest one was when I got to go down to the aquarium and see some of the huge starfish and the Antarctic cod and things like that. They could talk about what they were studying and why they were doing it, and I actually got a feel for why we were there, what science we were supporting, whether it was the gamma rays hitting the Earth or how a penguin feeds her chicks. It was really fascinating. Was there enough of that? Probably not. I as a geek would have enjoyed having more of that. I probably would have liked to have been able to go out on some of their missions. I heard so much about the Dry Valleys. The only time I was at the Dry Valleys was flying over in a helicopter, but that’s more than some people. Some people never get out to the Dry Valleys.

Seag:

Do you think that the average member of the science support, civilian support community or the Navy community felt connected to the scientific mission?

Baldwin:

No. No. I don’t think so. I mean it was a job and you’re kind of in your own community and in your own little world. There’s enough to do activity-wise. You’re working nine hours a day. You work a 54-hour work week to begin with, and so you stay busy. Then there are the recreational things of…It’s called Captain’s Cup sports. So, there was Captain’s Cup darts. They really tried to have a golf tournament. They had flag football (because on Thanksgiving you’ve got to have football). So, there were various things of that nature that people were doing out there, and so I’m not sure that many of them were really looking at what it was of…You know, why are we here? What is the science support? But there were a few geeks like myself that really thought this was cool.

Seag:

Would you like to pause for a minute?

Baldwin:

No. That was just reminding me that it’s now 4:00.

Seag:

What time would you like to wrap up?

Baldwin:

If we’re going to go by and meet my parents, we should be wrapping up and you can keep asking whatever questions.

Seag:

That would be great. Okay. Can I take five more minutes here?

Baldwin:

Sure.

Seag:

Okay. So we have yet to get to the actual winter itself, and I think one of the…I mean there are a lot of really interesting aspects of your work down there, and of course one of the superlatives, or one of the “firsts,” is that you’re the first and now the only female Officer in Charge for [the winter]…[Break in recording]. Did you feel that that—Was that a significant part of your experience?

Baldwin:

No. It wasn’t. It really didn’t dawn on me. Nobody at Naval Support Force Antarctica made a big deal of “I was the first woman” or anything. It was just, “This is the OIC.” Now there may have been behind the scenes that they weren’t telling me about of “Oh my god! We’re going to have a woman down here! Oh!” But in terms of making any announcements, there was no press release. There was nothing. It was…I was just another Officer in Charge.

Seag:

Did it present any particular challenges or pressures to you to have been the first? Did you feel any extra pressure to succeed?

Baldwin:

No, no more than I would have in any other job that I did, whether it was Guam, Sicily, Gulfport. It was just, hey, I’m driven to succeed. I’m going to do everything I can. The issues were more on a one-on-one basis or like…The construction community of civilians were more hesitant to have a female, but they didn’t work for me so it really wasn’t a big deal except during emergencies. Fortunately, there were enough people that I had worked with like on the search and rescue team, the fire department—because the civilians were allowed to be part of the search and rescue team, volunteer fire department because we only had five Damage Control firemen there. So we needed more people as—if we were to have a fire, which we actually did and it was a good thing that we had 11 (I think it was 11) civilian volunteers, or military and civilian volunteers, to augment our five firemen because it becomes a big deal.

So, they participated, and the ones that I worked with that kind of meshed in with the military community, I didn’t have a problem with. It was more of the guys that stayed to their own. They were in their own community that had nothing to do with the scientists and nothing to do with the military. They were what I perceived as being more male chauvinists. Other times when I was put in charge, it wasn’t an issue and I had the backing of the station manager. He was there to support me, and he did his job.

Seag:

You mentioned that the ratio of men to women on station was about 11:1. Do you think that the other women who were in such a minority on station had an experience similar to yours? Or do you think gender played a greater role in their experience?

Baldwin:

I’m not sure. I think the ones who had been there multiple years, gender wasn’t an issue for them because they were old Antarctic hands and they knew what to expect. I think if anything it was the newbies who had never been there before and they suddenly met the attitudes. Some of them teamed up with people who had been there before or they teamed up with some of the military who seemed to have less of a gender issue and hung around. I know one woman started dating one of our guys and is now married to him. [Phone call]

Seag:

So, in the car I will ask you about the job itself. [Break in recording]

Seag:

Okay, and we’re back. This is Morgan Seag with M K Baldwin again. We took a break. The cows got loose and now we’re back. The next question that I wanted to ask you was what kind of responsibilities you had over the winter in 1991.

Baldwin:

The winter was ‘90-’91, although actually you’re correct. It was all in 1991 because it starts in February and ends in October. Basically, everything for the logistics. So, I had the galley, the kitchen, the dining hall, whatever you want to call it: those guys all worked for me, including the 11 Kiwi contractors that helped out with the kitchen. They also did the bathrooms and stuff like that for the general spaces, so they were always mopping the floors and doing things like that. They were food prep people.

I was also responsible for the fueling station, so I had one petty officer who was responsible for the fuels. I had a dozen or so Seabees that were down there that were doing repair and maintenance on various buildings, but my Seabees were also responsible for preparing the ice pier and then the ice runway, as well as maintaining the transition between the land and the ice out to Williams Field.

I also had electronics technicians and radiomen, and they were responsible for our communications, which back then were high-frequency transmissions. We did have some satellite data, but it’s not like right now where you just pick up the phone and talk to anybody anywhere in the world. Our communications were very staticky and often your voice was distorted. So, once a week or so I would have a call back to home port and talk to the CO and the XO and some of the various department heads about what was going on. It was a difficult call just because the voice quality was so bad.

In addition to that I had a couple of Aerographers who were doing the weather because even though it’s winter, we still have parties out on the ice doing some stuff. Most of its contained there, in McMurdo, but even within McMurdo we want to know, “Is it going to be -45 today or are we going to have a nice warm spring day of only 20 degrees?” (That’s Fahrenheit.)

We also want to know about wind conditions. We set weather conditions 1, 2, and 3 depending on the conditions outside, and that limits how much you can be outside. In condition 1, you really aren’t supposed to be outside at all, and that has to do with both the temperature and the wind, and the visibility. When it’s that bad, they actually can string up ropes so that you can get between the dormitories and the dining hall.

I also was responsible for the doc, and he was also trained to work as a dentist. And the three Corpsmen. I also had all of the supply functions. In addition to the cooks, we also had actual supply people counting parts for whatever equipment we needed.

I also was responsible for the cash that was left in Antarctica over the winter. We did cash business at the ship store, so there was always a certain amount of cash floating in and out, but we weren’t being paid in cash or anything like that. So, we were responsible for checking up on cash.

Food stores were huge because you have more than a year’s worth of food down there at any given time so that if for some reason the ship can’t come in, you can survive the following winter before the next ship is able to get in. Well, part of that goes into inventory. Part of the work involves inventorying the food, and there are all sorts of little committees that set up the menus. The menus run on like a two-week cycle, and you do surveys to find out what people want to eat and what gets thrown away.

Morale, Welfare, and Recreation—they worked for me as well. So, anything that you would think of in running a little town, that was under my purview. The heavy shop for the guys who took care of the dozers and the Deltas and the Hagglunds and stuff like that, they were not mine. That had been transferred to the contractor, and the new construction on the SETC [Science, Engineering and Technology Center] building, that was all belonging to the contractor.

Seag:

What parts of the job did you like?

Baldwin:

I liked going around and seeing what my guys were doing—and I say guys generically, guys and gals—and seeing what they were doing, how they were doing their job. That was also back in the days where we had preventive maintenance scheduled (PMS). So, every now and then I had to go check and have my guys show me how they did the preventive maintenance on the equipment. Handheld radios so that when you went out to a science camp you had contact back with Byrd Field Center and stuff like that. All that stuff was fixed up and repaired and made fully operational again over the winter, and so every now and then I’d go see what the guys were working on and play with the radios. I would go down to the galley and help cook at least once a week, and I learned that I don’t want to be a short order cook. Oh my god, that’s hard work.

Seag:

Did you help them cook to boost morale, to create a sense of community or did they need the help?

Baldwin:

No, they didn’t need the help. One of the things that I enjoyed doing was—I love lamb, and it turns out that my cooks hate lamb. Lamb was on the menu because it comes out of New Zealand. We had a lot of lamb, and so when they cooked lamb, then I would go down that afternoon and I was in charge of cutting up all of the cooked lamb. So, it would take a couple of hours with the slicer and sit there and slice lamb for the meal. I did try the short order cook once, and that was my first and my last time of being a short order cook because I discovered that is hard work!

I worked with the night baker some. Some of that was just out of fun. I enjoyed him. He had his girlfriend come in. She was a civilian. He’d turn up the tunes in the kitchen because it was all ours. When I say all ours, the three of us were in there because there are no baked goods other than what gets made down there. It goes stale in 24 hours, so the night baker was always baking bread and rolls and pies and cookies and all that stuff. I enjoyed baking cookies, so I learned how to make chocolate chip cookies in the tub that’s two feet in diameter. Oh my god, that was a lot of work, but it was fun. And yes, that improved morale. My guys…My other cooks liked it that I would come and do the lamb. Yeah, sort of morale part of it was just, “Hey, I want to see what you’re doing and how you’re doing it and keep an eye and make sure that there are no roaches or anything going in the food.” Just kidding about that. But no, I did stuff to see what my guys were doing, see what they were working on.

Now I had to go count drugs every now and then. I had to count money every now and then. I had to go inventory supplies and food and stuff. Some of that was required and some of it was just, “Hey, I’m interested. I want to know what you do and how you do it.” I spent a lot of time with the Aerographers because I really wanted to understand how they were able to forecast the weather down there when it’s dark out—we didn’t have quite the same satellite coverage as we have now—and to learn the differences of the different satellites. I also went down to the ice pier to see what my guys were doing on the ice pier and how they were building it and what they were doing. So yeah, it was just—I am inquisitive by nature, and so I enjoyed going and seeing what they did.

Seag:

Was there anything that you found especially challenging about the job or anything you flat out didn’t like?

Baldwin:

The thing that is most challenging, and I suspect this is true across all leadership roles—it’s extremely lonely. You don’t have any peers. If you’re stateside, you have peers. There are other COs that you can call up and talk to. You can talk about the hardships and how would you have handled this and how would I have…But when you’re down there with no communications, there’s nobody to talk to. There’s nobody that it’s acceptable to vent your frustrations to. So, it makes it a very emotionally difficult at times and very isolated job from that aspect.

For example, when the fire was happening, one of the firefighters would not take orders from the Fire Chief. The Fire Chief came to me and said, “Please order him inside for safety. He’s been out in the…” We called it condition 1. I don’t know that it was actually -85, but with the winds it was a condition 1 and there’s only a certain amount of time you can be outside without running the risk of frostbite or other damage. I was headed out to tell him, “From a safety aspect I’m ordering you inside and you will not go back out until my docs have checked you over and determined that you’re fit to go back outside.” He was on his way in, and when I told him that, he said, “You can’t order me like that.” I looked at my watch and the Chief that was standing beside me and I said, “Make a note, Chief. He’s up on charges.”

Seag:

Was this an enlisted person?

Baldwin:

Yes. Because as an Officer in Charge, I have the authority to give a direct order, and especially when it comes to protecting the safety and health of my troops. For a troop to tell me that I can’t give him that order is failure to follow an order, disrespectful. He was a very charismatic guy. A lot of people liked him, and therefore a lot of people refused to acknowledge my existence. You know, “Good morning,” “Good evening,” or “Get the hell out of my way,” while that process was taking place that I had to take him to Captain’s Mast for failure to follow orders.

Seag:

Why did he respond to you in that way?

Baldwin:

He thought he knew better, the same reason he told his Fire Chief, “I’m not going to do it.” He also told a Senior Chief that and a Chief Petty Officer that. So, he decided that he knew what was good for him and he wasn’t going to take orders.

Seag:

So, during this isolating experience of the winter, was there anybody who you were on a similar level to at NSF or among the civilian contractors who you—

Baldwin:

Sure. John Cannon and Art Brown. John Cannon was the manager for the civilian contractor and Art Brown was the station manager from National Science Foundation. But we had little in common, both men being over 50 and wizened old men and me being a female and 26. Not a whole lot in common.

Seag:

And neither of them have military experience, I expect?

Baldwin:

Not that I’m aware of.

Seag:

How did you handle the challenges?

Baldwin:

In what respect?

Seag:

How did you cope with the loneliness?

Baldwin:

I actually had a friend that I emailed back and forth. He was a Lieutenant Commander that I knew. We emailed some, and the rest of the stuff I spent time writing, journaling, so to speak, just to at least get it out of my system.

Seag:

What else did you do in your free time—if you had any free time? [Laughter]

Baldwin:

I love to run down there. It’s very peaceful, and the most remarkable memory is running through the Aurora Australis. It came down to the ground. It was in the gap between Ob Hill and the T-site. I realized something was odd because it was kind of lit up and it’s not…That’s like the darkest place. It was kind of weird lighting, and then I turned around and looked back and I realized, “Oh, I just ran through a shimmer curtain of an aurora! How cool!” [Laughs]

Seag:

Wow. Wow.

Baldwin:

So, it was fun. We had guys who had odd shifts. Like my weather guessers were on odd shifts and stuff, and we had a phone tree so that when they saw an aurora they called the two of their phone tree who called the two on their—and so—we were all in our windows, or even outside, to look at the auroras. It was cool. They come in so many shapes and variations and colors. And of course, I didn’t have a camera that could capture any of it. Other than that, I did bake cookies. I really enjoyed going down and baking cookies. While I was staying at the Captain’s hut, I had a stove and refrigerator. During airdrop, all my friends sent me pounds of chocolate. Some of it was Swiss chocolate, some of it was Nestlé’s morsels so I could make chocolate chip cookies, but I probably got twenty pounds of chocolate at airdrop.

Seag:

Was that from friends in the US?

Baldwin:

Actually, the Swiss chocolate came from some people I met from Switzerland. They had come down on one of the cruise ships. This was right at the end of summer, and they were out there, and NSF set up a kind of little exchange party. Some of us went out to the ship and had dinner, and some of the ship’s people came in and had dinner in the galley. So, I sat there with a couple from Switzerland, and you know—they spoke English, and I don’t speak Swiss [laughs], no question about it—but it was an interesting conversation. So, they knew when airdrop was and stuff like that, so I got a package at airdrop with Swiss chocolate. That was so cool. It was totally unexpected. They remembered me and sent me chocolate. But yeah, otherwise it was all from friends in the US.

Seag:

Did you get outside of station at all?

Baldwin:

Yeah! I actually hiked to Castle Rock in the middle of the winter, in the middle of the night.

Seag:

By yourself?

Baldwin:

No, no. There were probably five or six of us. It was a full moon night, and once you get up outside of McMurdo Station, up on the actual glacial portion of it, it’s all white. And of course there’s no noise. As soon as you get out of the town, you realize how quiet it is. You don’t hear the generators running anymore. All you hear is the wind, and the creaking and the groaning of the ice. It was so cool, because you didn’t need a flashlight to see. You’re following the red flags, or in this case red and green flags, hoping not to find any black flags—

Seag:

Because black flags mean crevasses.

Baldwin:

Yes. Yeah. So red, right, returning, so actually going out you’re doing the green flags. Coming back you’re hoping to find the red flags to come back. It was really neat. We actually climbed up the back side of Castle Rock. So, we actually got to sit up on the rock and you know, we took our hero shots and all that. It was cool. And then we came back. But we didn’t leave McMurdo Station until like 8pm at night and we got back well after midnight. So, it was the middle of the winter, the middle of the night. It was full moon. That was a cool trip.

Seag:

Who did you go with?

Baldwin:

I think they were mostly civilians. They were some of the guys that I hung out with who were a little older than most of the civilians. They were probably in their 40s. They were more my contemporary in terms of mental, intellectual capacity. We could talk intellectual stuff. It wasn’t “who’s winning what sports” or anything. It was just an interesting group of men. Most of them had been to the ice multiple times. They were just—they all drank coffee after dinner, and I’m sitting there drinking my water, but—it was an odd—probably looked pretty odd, but I enjoyed hanging around with those guys.

Seag:

Did you have any female friends? Or was that—

Baldwin:

Yeah, my friend Val that came down just before the winter began, we were friends. But we ended up not doing a whole lot together, because at first she was on the weird schedule of doing clean-up janitorial work (she was a general apprentice), and then once she started working in the utilities shop she continued to have a strange schedule. But we’d catch some movies together and stuff like that. But not a whole lot. She had a different circle of friends as well. So, not a whole bunch of women friends.

I really didn’t feel comfortable hanging out with my enlisted. I mean it’s one thing to work with them side-by-side doing stuff, but it would never have been okay for me to go drinking with them. It never would’ve been okay for me to go watch a movie in one of their rooms. That’s not okay.

Seag:

What were the holidays like?

Baldwin:

They tried to make a big deal of many of the holidays. In fact, a couple of my Seabees, one of them was a trained blaster and had grown up in a family that did fireworks. He knew far enough in advance that he was going to Antarctica, that he put in all the appropriate permits for the shipping. He shipped real fireworks down there. And so on July 4th, we had a real fireworks show. Now, it was colder than [chuckles], but you could watch fireworks at noon! And—oh!—my guys figured out how to get two pigs airdropped. You know, in the middle of the winter you have airdrop, and that’s when you get freshies and stuff like that. They had two pigs airdropped. So, we had pigs in space. Of course they broke their legs in the landing, but hey, we didn’t care, we put them on a spit.

Seag:

They were alive?

Baldwin:

No, no, no, no. [Laughter]. They were cooked in the heavy shop. We had roast pig! For July 4th!

Seag:

Did you celebrate Midwinter’s day?

Baldwin:

Yeah. That was more of a big deal with the New Zealanders than—I don’t remember it being all that big with the US. I mean, the Kiwis went swimming on Midwinter’s. Kiwis went swimming on sunset and sunrise. Some of them did it on all three! Some of them did it more than once! Once is enough.

Seag:

Do you have any other particularly strong memories of events from the season?

Baldwin:

Well, the two big events that separate out year from just about any other year was the fire and the midwinter medical evacuation, the medevac. I don’t know when and if they had had any other fires down there. I didn’t research that one to find out what the history on that was. But our medevac was like the first in 23 years that had happened. So, there wasn’t a whole lot of passed-down information on “how do you do a midwinter medevac?” It was—we talked to home port and the summer support crew, and our guys. Basically, we set out the timeline of what we needed to do to have the skiway ready. And of course, the birds—well, it becomes an international event because we were getting a New Zealander out. He wasn’t from the U.S., he was from the New Zealand Antarctic Program. So, it had to go up through the diplomatic chain of command and then go from State Department to DoD, to send three birds from Point Mugu trans-pac’ing all the way down to Christchurch and then fly to Antarctica. So, it’s a big deal when you do a medevac when the planes aren’t sitting up in Christchurch. You’re putting a lot of people’s lives at risk to rescue a person. Not to mention the cost. I have no idea what it cost.

But it was—I won’t say it was clockwork or easy or anything like that, but it—when you look back at it and realize what a miracle that we pulled off, 96 hours from the time that we knew there was gonna be a medevac to the time the plane touched down. Did a hot turn, we loaded the three patients on, and then they left. The weather was perfect. We couldn’t have asked for any better weather. We had nearly a full moon. We had perfect conditions coming in.

Our guys—my Seabees—had made the runway longer than it needed to be. They were happy! This was the Equipment Operators: they were just excited that they could be out there doing something real, something important. Instead of the 7,000 foot runway that they told us they needed, my guys went ahead and did a 10,000 foot runway. I mean, they were just, “woohoo!” But that meant getting the fuel lines out there and warming up the traffic control tower and the TACAN and putting the lights out, the whole bit. It’s a lot of work to get the airfield ready for incoming flights.

Seag:

Can you explain what’s so risky about it?

Baldwin:

Well, for a C-130 it’s an eight-hour flight. A C-130 doesn’t carry enough fuel to go eight hours and then go eight hours back. So, there is a PSR: a point of safe return, depending on the wind conditions and how the aircraft is performing. But usually we consider that it’s about four hours out. Well, you’re trying to predict the weather 16 hours out, 15 hours out, whether or not they are going to be able to come in and land with good, clear skies. Because it’s at night, they are flying instrument flight rules, but there is still an aspect of it that’s visual flight rules. And so you don’t want low clouds. You want a certain ceiling, like a mile ceiling, and three miles of visibility before you even think about bringing an aircraft in. Especially in that circumstance, because if they come in and then they can’t get back out because the weather has socked in on them, guess what—you now have aviators spending the rest of the winter. It’s not a good situation. They don’t pack for spending the winter when they’re doing this.

What they do is a double crew, because it’s a 16-hour flight. So, they actually have two flight crews on the same aircraft. So, each aircraft has two flight crews because of the hours they’re allowed to fly or not fly. They put fuel in the wing tanks as well, which actually makes them a little top- and forward-heavy for taking off, but it allows them a little bit of extra range in case they run into headwinds going back. Typically, the winds are headwinds coming down to Antarctica and are tailwinds going home to Christchurch. So usually it’s more of a problem to get there than it is to leave. So, it’s just risky to fly into a place like that at night. This was before night vision goggles were in effect; this was before we had much in terms of good satellites. We only really had three satellites passing over Antarctica at any time. So, our data was very limited, and you’re doing your best to predict whether or not they can get there twelve hours later, and then get home safely before any other weather pops up. The weather is extremely changeable. It comes in from the pass between Black Island and White Island. That’s where your Herbies come from.

Seag:

That’s an amazing accomplishment.

Baldwin:

Yeah. And you know, it was just fabulous, and especially to hear eight hours later when they said, “we’ve touched down in New Zealand.” Just, “phew.”

Seag:

Was the whole community invested?

Baldwin:

Very much. Everybody was looking out for everybody. It really brought the whole community together in terms of, okay, there were people hauling coffee and hot chocolate out to the guys who were working the airfield trying to get it ready. Everybody wanted a piece of the action. Then at night, or whenever they could, they were also writing letters, because having a plane come in means that we can send mail out! Woohoo, the post office is now open! [Laughter].

Seag:

So, I think, do we have about 15 minutes left?

Baldwin:

Yeah.

Seag:

Alright. In that case, I’m gonna skip to the end of Deep Freeze and ask how you felt about leaving.

Baldwin:

Bittersweet. I mean, it’s kinda neat that you’re done with your tour, and in this case I was looking forward to going to grad school. But at the same time, it is a very special program. It’s tough to say goodbye to all your friends that you’ve made down there. There is, let’s just call it a little bit of an adrenaline that you’re down there and making a difference. You know that you’re gonna come back and nobody else is gonna have any clue what you just did.

Seag:

And why did you not return?

Baldwin:

Well, typically for the Navy you only go once. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Though I volunteered to do a second winter. That was the Catch-22 that says, if you’re crazy enough to volunteer then you’re too crazy to stay.

Seag:

So instead you went to grad school and got your Master’s in Mechanical Engineering, and then continued your career until retiring from the Navy. Are there any career highlights before your retirement that you’d like to highlight?

Baldwin:

My next tour was in Okinawa, Japan, where I was the Resident Officer-In-Charge of Construction. So, whereas in Guam I had been in charge of a few projects, now I was in charge of an entire office on the island of Okinawa. That was fun. I enjoyed that. And then from there, I went to Washington, D.C., working for the Commandant of the Marine Corps. Down in the bowels, trust me. Actually, the Commandant’s wife knew who I was more than the Commandant did because one of my first jobs was repair or replace the greenhouse at the Commandant’s residence. And the Commandant’s residence is on the register of historic places. In fact, all of the Marine Barracks at 8th and I is on the register. But the house is as well. That limits what you can and cannot do. And oh, by the way, it’s surrounded by this 12-foot-tall brick wall. So, it’s not like you can just go in there. So yeah, so I got to meet the Commandant’s wife because she had specific directions about the greenhouse. I don’t think the Commandant ever knew who I was.

But it was an interesting job. I learned so much in that job. I worked on the BRAC relocations of two air stations out in California. One of those relocations was a political hot potato, and we ended up going through the SECDEF’s office all the way up to the White House. So, I got to spend the day before Thanksgiving sitting outside the Chief of Staff’s office while the turkeys were being pardoned next door. Meanwhile, we were talking about a BRAC relocation in California. Kind of an interesting juxtaposition.

Seag:

At what point did you earn the rank of Commander?

Baldwin:

After my tour with the SECDEF I was—in my last year of the tour at Secretary of Defense I was working for energy and installations. That’s when the selection board met and I was picked up for O-5. I was put on the rank July 1st of 2000. That was the time that I also left SECDEF to go out to California to work at SouthWest Div, where I had six construction offices across Southern California and Arizona. And that was a great challenge. I enjoyed that job as well. I traveled out to the various bases a good bit. And okay, so I was introduced to the dry cold in Antarctica, well I got to meet the dry heat of the southwest of the USA.

Seag:

So, in 2011, you retired from full-time work to do, it sounds like, almost full-time volunteer work. You’ve worked for FEMA, and you do science education/outreach work. Can you describe the kinds of things you’ve been up to since you retired from the Navy?

Baldwin:

After the Navy, Hurricane Katrina hit. I contacted some people about volunteering down in the Gulfport region, because that area was hit pretty hard. But it took about a month before I got a call from one of my previous bosses, and he said, “Hey, we need you. We’re doing a contract for FEMA, so we need you to come out here and do some work.” So, a day later, I deployed to Anniston, Alabama, and worked on a FEMA long-term shelter. After that I relocated to Austin, Texas, where I was the manager for a bunch of FEMA task orders in the state of Texas that the Company I was working for had. I did that for another five or six months. Then I did three more FEMA tours, doing post-disaster engineering work. Then I did some other Navy work, with civilian contractor, and finally went back to work for the Navy as a civilian engineer up in D. C.

January 2011 is when I said, “Eh, you know, this working for money, I got better things to do with my life. Money isn’t the end-all.” Because by then I had already gotten involved with FIRST LEGO League, which is one of the family of programs within FIRST that tries to get kids involved in STEM fields. With LEGO League, they use LEGOs to get the kids into robotics. That’s 9-14; that is an appealing age. I recognize that if we don’t get the kids in early, 9-14, we’re not going to get them. And that’s especially true with women. If we haven’t convinced girls that science and math are okay by the time they’ve hit 12 years old, they’re not gonna come in. Because by then, they will have already been turned off, either by the other boys or just by society in general.

So, if you can convince the girls that are 9-12 that they can kick ass and beat the boys, oh man, you’ve got ‘em hooked for life. So I feel that part of what I need to do to give back is to make sure the girls know that there are role models out there that they can follow, and that they can do as well. Now, I can’t be biased, and I can’t cheer for the girls’ teams and not for the boys’ teams. But FIRST actually makes a very concerted effort to make sure that the referees and the judges are pretty well balanced in gender, so that the teams see both genders as judges and as referees.

Seag:

It would be remiss for me to not mention that you have received an impressive number and range of decorations and honors and awards throughout your career. I can see by the [laughs]—by your face that you are perhaps humbler than I am allowing you to be.

Baldwin:

They’re only representations of the work that I did. I’m more proud of what I did to earn them than the fact that I’ve got them. You saw the house; you saw that there’s no “I love me” walls in my house. I don’t put it up for people to come see. If you ask me about it, I’m happy to tell you about what I did and what was neat about it, and what I loved about it, and why I’m passionate about it. But I’m not gonna walk up to you and say, “Hey, look at my rack of ribbons. I’m somebody.” I’m not. I just did what needed to be done.

Seag:

I think that’s sort of a lovely note to end on. You’ve had such an interesting and varied career, and I really appreciate you talking to me about it.

Baldwin:

Well thanks. It was definitely fun to talk.

[End of Recording]