Stevie started her working career with Beneficial Finance. She moved on to McDonnell Douglas working as a secretary. At McDonnell Douglas, she was talking to the guys at work and they suggested the Air National Guard or the Marine Reserves. “To start with, I never heard of the Air National Guard” Stevie said. A short time later, Stevie enlisted in the Guard on 18-JUL 1972 at the age of 22.
“When I first got in nobody ever said anything about qualifying for weapons until about the fifth year when I got in the medics when I changed jobs. So we’re at summer camp and they said you have to fire the M-16. I say, okay and I went out there and I froze. The noise, is what really gets me, and tears ran down my face.” They went, “Oh my god.” “So the CATM instructor (Combat Arms Training and Maintenance) said, okay, you’re fine. Whether or not this was right, I passed, and I went on. And they never, ever asked me to fire a weapon again until I was in 13 years.”
Want to know more about Stevie’s career, click on the pdf.