Parachuting Old Man River

Former Naval Administrator recalls serving during Vietnam

BY: Bill Moakley

Pat Lee loved just about everything about the five years she spent in the U.S. Navy. However, there was one notable exception.

“I didn’t like the language,” she laughed recently on a beautiful afternoon in the courtyard of the Norman Veterans Center. “They used some bad language and I was raised differently than that.”

A native of Great Bend, Kansas, Lee grew up in a railroad family and her father’s position with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad took her to towns across Kansas, including Newton, Elwood, Dodge City and Topeka, among others.

As a young lady, Lee was also familiar with Oklahoma. She and her family regularly jumped on the train and traveled south through Oklahoma to Purcell, a busy Santa Fe stop. From there, they’d pile in Lee’s grandfather’s pickup and head to his farm in Konawa.

Lee was a member of the Newton High School class of 1969 and headed off to train as a Navy Combat Hospital Corpsman. However, Navy personnel noticed her high scores on military tests and placed her in Naval Yeoman school in Bay Ridge, Maryland.

“I was hoping to be a corpsman, but with my scores they trained me to be an administrator of a Naval office.” Lee recalled.

Her first assignment out of school was at Naval Support Activity Mid-South in Millington, Tennessee.

“I processed the paperwork for where people were going,” Lee explained. “I also processed paperwork for ribbons and awards for soldiers coming back from the war.”

The “war,” of course was the Vietnam War, by then raging through Southeast Asia. In addition to ensuring soldiers got to where they belonged, or received their hard-earned honors, Lee was in for a bit of surprise in Tennessee. All personnel on a U.S. Naval base were required to learn how to parachute, regardless of what their responsibilities were. So, into the skies she headed.

“I had to go up above 3,500 and jump out and they pushed me off into the Mississippi River,” Lee explained with a laugh. “I was real scared the first time. I jumped four times. I remember them all. I got my parachute wings for it.”

For all the “fun” of parachuting into Old Man River, Lee recalled the somber side of being associated with what was generally, in the opinions of Americans, an unpopular war. She saw soldiers mistreated and denigrated. Such treatment even came up upon return to her childhood home.

“When I went back to my hometown, we marched down the street in a parade and we had eggs thrown at us,” Lee recalled. “They didn’t like us at all. If you wore a uniform back then, it was bad. You got treated badly.”

Lee also served at the Navy Outlying Field at Imperial Beach, California.

“That was an extra-nice duty station with the beaches,” Lee remembered. “I got to see the ocean a lot while I was there.”

Lee has one son, Dustin, who was a longtime stage manager for the Oklahoma City-based rock group, The Flaming Lips. She retired from the Navy after five years. She continued to serve as a ward clerk for the Veterans Administration Hospital in Oklahoma City before retiring. -19SM