Elizabeth Hedler: Today is August 18, 2010. My name is Elizabeth Hedler, and I will be interviewing Megan Gupko, and I probably pronounced that wrong, but we’ll get to that. Ohio National Guard Civilian Employee and wife of Andy, Andrew, of the Ohio National Guard. This interview is being conducted at the Ohio Historical Center in Columbus, Ohio as part of an oral history project by the Ohio Historical Society to preserve the stories and experiences of servicemen and their family members for future generations. Doesn’t that sound important? I’m going to try not to be too big with my papers, but they’re my guiding questions, so. And we start with, for the record, would you say and spell your full name.
Megan Gupko: Do you want middle too?
H: Sure.
G: Megan, M-E-G-A-N, Elizabeth, E-L-I-Z-A-B-E-T-H, and you said my last name correctly; it’s Gupko, G-U-P-K-O.
H: I feel better now. So tell me about yourself, where you were born, raised—
G: I was born in Columbus, Ohio. I was raised in Columbus, Ohio. I went to school in Worthington. Just outside of Columbus my whole life. And then I went to Ohio University after that in Athens, Ohio. I pretty much lived in Ohio my whole life, except for a short time when we lived in Alabama for military duty, then we moved back to Ohio. So I’ve been here pretty much the whole time.
H: How did you meet your husband?
G: I met my husband at college on a white water rafting camping trip. He was in a business fraternity for Aviation, and my roommate also was in the same fraternity, and so we all went together, and that’s where I met him.
H: His name is Andrew.
G: Andrew, but he goes by Andy.
H: You’ve told me this, but he was not in the military before you got married?
G: Actually, he was in the military.
H: When you met him?
G: He was. Yeah, he was already in the military. I met him October of 2003, and he’d already joined. He joined officially October 2001, right after 9/11 [September 11, 2001] when he was seventeen; his parents signed the papers. So I’ve known him almost his entire military career, including when he was enlisted and all the way through Officer Candidate School in his promotion to become an officer, so a long time.
H: And this is more of a question for him, but I’ll ask anyways. He was motivated by 9/11 [September 11, 2001] to join?
G: That was part of it. Yeah, definitely. That was kind of, I think, the last push, but the Guard offers money incentive to go to school, and so that was his way to go to school and get it paid for college education. He’s the oldest of four kids, and he wanted to do that. And that wasn’t something that his family or my family paid for.
H: Do you have siblings yourself? I forgot to ask you that.
G: I do. I have one younger sister. Not that much younger—she’s 27.
H: Is your family still in the Columbus area then?
G: Yes, my whole family is. Well, actually, my dad just recently moved away because of the economy. He got hired up in Youngstown. My mother lives here, and my sister lives about five minutes from me; she’s a professor at OSU [Ohio State University].
H: That must be helpful in its way.
G: That’s right. OSU [Ohio State Univerisity] tickets [football].
H: Maybe if you just said, “I’m having them here when he’s not.” My family lives in Maine, so I find it’s always kind of nice to have people slightly closer for that.
G: Yes, I have a whole support system here with my family, which is different than some of the military families that I work with. I have his family is not too far in Cleveland, and my entire immediate really here in Columbus. When we lived in Alabama, obviously, I didn’t have any of those people, but he wasn’t deployed at that time; we were there for school, so he was there the whole time with me.
H: Let me follow that into a—hang on, sorry, I have a two-prong thing where one side leads me into what you do and one side leads me into how you experience it when he is deployed.
G: Yes, they’re two separate things.
H: Tell me about when he left to get deployed to Iraq. Was that the first time he’d been away, or—
G: Mhmm. That’s his first military deployment, or a Title 10 deployment, to go outside of the country. It’s not the first time he’s been away for the military. For trainings, when he went to Officer Candidate School, he was gone for three months, I think, then. Every summer when they go to annual training, they’re gone roughly two weeks, but if they’re in a deployment status, which they have been almost the whole time that I’ve known him, they go three weeks instead of two. He’s been to other trainings leading up to the deployment, roughly three weeks at a time. And then, he’s also gone to training for his civilian job now too, so I’ve got both ends of it. And then his flight school—when we were in Alabama—the beginning three months and the end three months, I couldn’t be there. I had to handle the moving and my own job, so altogether since June of 2007, he’s been gone 20 months. I’d have to sit and do a lot more adding to add up the whole time we’ve been together how many weeks and time. Over half the time I’ve known him—I’ve known him for seven years—he’s been gone for something or other.
H: What do you find different about it when it is a Title 10—did you say—deployment? When he’s out of the country—when you know he’s in Iraq as opposed to somewhere in here, somewhere else for a training course; what kinds of differences does it have for you?
G: For us, the biggest thing is communication. That may not be the same answer all families would give you. I have a benefit that the entire time that he was gone to Iraq, I worked full time for the Ohio National Guard, so even in my civilian status, I wouldn’t say I wasn’t worried about him, obviously there’s always concerns, but I had a little bit more access and support system as far as military personnel there with me. I worked for the same brigade that his unit is in, so I kind of trusted that if something happened, I would know about it relatively quickly. So I didn’t have that much of a concern in that aspect. Communication is definitely more difficult when they’re gone to Iraq.
H: Is part of that the time zone? Is there a time difference? There must be.
G: There is. I’m trying to remember—maybe eight hours, could be a little bit more. It’s roughly exactly opposite from us. He happened to be on nightshift when he was in Iraq, so it worked perfectly for me, and I have a DSN [Defense switched network] line—so a government phone line. So there’s a benefit for us there also because he could call direct from Iraq to me without a charge because it’s from one government line to the next. So there was extra added benefit that I had there as well. The other families don’t necessarily experience. The waiting, for a lot of the soldiers, they have to wait in line to call on an open phone and use a calling card to call home, and my husband didn’t have to do that. So I was very lucky in that aspect. But the internet is very touch and go, and it was for him, so a lot of the new programs that people use—Skype—and they talk about using that. Ours never worked the entire deployment. The sound would work sometimes, but the picture would cut out, so we didn’t really see each other at all. And Andy wasn’t much of a letter writer, so I didn’t get actual letters in the mail; I got lots of emails. And mostly, those kind of become less personal and more about “Did you pay this bill?” and “Did you call my mom for her birthday?” and things like that.
H: More business
G: Yes, exactly. About running the family and how we’re going to do that. And less kind of, in the historical aspect, some letters that you see
in the past that people write, love letters and things like that—not so much on email.
H: Well one of my concerns, I was going to encourage you to print them out, so at least we have that record, and now that I’m hearing kind of, it’s not as—
G: They’re not as exciting as you think they would be.
H: What kind of different responsibilities do you take on when he’s away—deployment, non-deployed—are there things that you do that you wouldn’t normally do?
G: Definitely. In my house, I don’t pay the bills, so that’s a huge undertaking to take over. Andy’s really good about setting things up for me so that it’s as easy as possible, so I was really lucky. Nowadays, we have automatic bill pay, and you can set up your payments so that you’re on a payment plan so you don’t have a fluctuating gas bill or electric bill. So he pretty much set everything up for me ahead of time; I just had to manage it. Unlike before, never logged into my bank account; I never really had to. He managed all that for me. So having to do a lot more of that sort of thing. Checking up to make sure bills were paid when they’d come in the mail, checking the—I never checked the mail. I don’t have a need to really. If it’s a personal letter or card, he’ll give it to me, so doing that. Just maintenance on the house and the cars. Making sure that they get the oil changed and washing the cars. Mowing the lawn was probably my biggest frustration because I never really had to do that before. Maintaining the whole outside of the house as well as the inside. And just really doing absolutely everything. I think sometimes we have a tendency to think that we all are doing absolutely everything in our own families, but when somebody’s gone, you realize you really aren’t. There’s an extra person there to help you, remember to pick this up at the store, or send this card, and you have to be a lot better at management skills when you’re by yourself. And things tend to break when they’re gone. I think it’s just the way the world works. Whenever he’s gone, a major appliance seems to break. So I had my fair share of those also and trying to figure how I'm going to get that fixed on a budget.
H: This is going to be your first child, which we can’t quite see.
G: Yes, this is our first child.
H: October, I believe.
G: October 6, yes. We are fortunate that we got pregnant about a month after he got back from Iraq. So this is our Iraq deployment present. So during the deployment, I had no children, so I didn’t have that added stress. We just have two dogs, so --.
H: Dogs take time too.
G: That’s right. And I had to do all the work with them as well with him gone. Even little adjustments in the way we do things, like he always did all the grooming for the dogs at our house, and that wasn’t possible for me when he was gone. Time wise, and also because they’re just—we have big dogs. German Shepherd, one of them, and so she doesn’t like to take baths and makes a huge mess, so I had to go in search of a groomer and somebody who could do that for a reasonable price. So same thing with the cars. I didn’t have time to wash the cars and do everything else that I’m responsible for, so finding companies that will sweep out and wash the cars for me on a regular basis and making appointments and just taking them in. Just a little bit lifestyle change.
H: Those extra things. I have a question coming that we got from World War II I believe. How do you deal with hardships when Andy is away, and I'm thinking emergencies that come up? Those, you know, the water heater explodes in the middle of the night. You kind of dealt with that.
G: And my water heater did actually explode while he was gone. That was one of the things that broke, along with a toilet and a refrigerator. Most of the time, because my family lives here in Columbus, and my dad actually lived here at the time he was gone, I call them. Or my friends—because I'm really actively involved in the family readiness groups with the units, I know a lot of the spouses, and so we kind of lean on each other to solve some of those problems even if it’s just a quick resolution, like learning how to shut off the water valve so that it doesn’t continue to leak in your house. But it definitely is a stressor; I wouldn’t say it isn’t. And there’s definitely some that are tears shed over some things that probably normally wouldn’t be, like your water heater blowing up and soaking your entire hallway. And some frustration too in setting up people to come kind of fix those sorts of things. Because when you are running the whole household and working fulltime yourself, even though you might have, like in my case “My entire hallway’s soaked,” I didn’t have time to be off work and wait for somebody to come fix it, so it did sit there for two, three days until the family got a little bit upset with me, and so did Andy because it can cause permanent damage to the house, but physically to be everywhere at once, it’s pretty impossible. So sometimes, for me, ignoring whatever it is, especially if it’s not something that has to be fixed right away. For us—I'm trying to think—it was in the early spring when the water heater broke, so I wasn’t too worried—I didn’t need super hot water. I think that’s one thing—it’s hard to explain as a military spouse because I've always been one; he’s always been in the military, so you just deal with it because you have to. And there is nobody else really who’s going to come in and fix it for you. So a lot of times, you don’t stop to think about how hard that might be because I don’t have another experience other than that one.
H: I was going to actually—one of my questions was what effect does the deployment or his absences have on your physical or mental health. It sounds like one of the things you’re doing to maintain mental health is kind of, “Okay, I can’t deal with that now”; knowing what to put off.
G: For sure. You have to prioritize everything. It always comes to a head at some point in time, which for me, like I said, my friends and family and I have a huge support network. I talk to them regularly, and so, in conversation, they start to pick up that maybe things aren’t going so well. All the stuff is broken, and the house is not clean, and I'm supposed to take something for a potluck, and that’s not done yet, so I tend to have the benefit of people saying, “Oh, well I’ll just stop on by and vacuum your house.” And I really did have family and friends who did that for me. And my father who said, “Okay, well I just need you to go to the store and pay for the water heater; I’ll install it.” And my whole family has access to my house, which may be a little bit different than families that are not military families. My family has all keys to my house and garage door openers and access to the alarm system because of the fact that he’s gone. Sometimes somebody has to get in the house to help with things like that, so.
H: Why don’t we go with your job ‘cause I think your job is an important part of the story as well particularly. So tell me about it. Tell me about what you do.
G: I am a Family Readiness Support Assistant for the Ohio National Guard, so I’m a civilian employee—I’m actually the only civilian employee on the Army side of the base. My job is to do administrative assistance for Family Readiness Groups. So every unit in the Army—whether that’s National Guard, Reserve, or Active Duty—has a Family Readiness Group, which is run by volunteers. My job is to help train them and mentor them so that they can provide camaraderie and support for the other families in the unit. And that’s really their main purpose, as well as the education. I maintained phone trees for them so that they can use an automated call system to send out a message to all the families. In some cases, I’ve written scripts for them for their messages, I’ve advised them on what to put out to the families—what they can say and what they probably shouldn’t say, brainstormed ideas for their monthly meetings and deployment. When they're not deployed, we call it steady state. And that’s quarterly. And so I do the training for all that, and I manage those units and those ______ and kind of help guide their commanders as well. So for me, I work for one of the brigades in the state, and I have about—right now—22 hundred soldiers in that brigade and 20 units, so I have 20 separate volunteer groups that I work with, including my husband’s. And each one of those has four volunteers statutory or main volunteers for their group. A Military Liaison is one, who’s kind of a go between the unit as well as their commander. And those are the main people that I work with. My husband is also a Military Liaison for his unit, so I work with him as well.
H: Well that would seem to make it simpler.
G: Yeah.
H: Or if not simpler, at least, yeah. Beats coordinating with someone you never met before, say.
G: That’s right.
H: Although I imagine you coordinate with—you know.
G: My volunteers that I work with and all my commanders, all the way up to—we work with Battalion commanders; I have three Battalions in my brigade as well as I work for my brigade commander and state family programs. I’ve met all of them. I know all of them personally, and I know we have each others’ cell phone numbers and people volunteer especially if they have a problem—family members having an issue, calls them, will send me a text message or place a phone call, even after hours. So that was another big thing that happened during the deployment I would say is I got a lot of work—overtime, after hours talking to the volunteers because there would be an issue, or they would have a concern about a family member or need guidance on how to help them. And so all I do is kind of steer them in the right direction so that they know what to do.
H: You led me again to my next question. Tell me about a normal day’s work. To the extent that it exists because I know there are no normal days.
G: A normal day for me—it’s probably not as exciting as it sounds like it would be. For me, I work at a military base, so—
H: At Rickenbacker, yeah.
G: I do, I work at Rickenbacker. That’s where our brigade headquarters is stationed, so that’s where my office happens to be. I probably spend a good hour to two hours on email just answering questions because I work with volunteers who have fulltime jobs themselves, a lot of those emails come in in the middle of the night when I’m not at work, so in the morning, I get a bunch of them, and I start answering questions and giving advice, and that can take, sometimes all day. It depends on what the question is, or sometimes it’s a quick answer, and I get through that. After that, I spend a lot of time updating phone trees. The way we do it in the brigade that I work for is I maintain those phone trees for them. It does vary a little bit from brigade to brigade. But if they have a phone number change maybe a family member’s called and said, “I’m not getting the phone calls,” I’ll look into why that is. Maybe we have an old cell phone number. That takes some time too, and updating mailing labels so they can send out their newsletters to their families. And then I spend a good deal of time on the telephone as well, talking to volunteers, sometimes it’s just a friendly chat, especially since some of them also are deployed spouses, so sometimes they just want to talk to someone who knows what that’s like because they're the leader for their families, they need somebody else sometimes to lean on themselves. We’re giving them guidance, and then there’s always sometimes some meetings about big events that the Ohio National Guard puts on, which I actually don’t put on any of those events. I just sit in those meetings as an adviser. I'm the person who says, “Don’t forget when you cater your meals to have macaroni and cheese ‘cause not all children like whatever the adult food is,” so all those little itty bitty details behind the scenes.
H: I have another question about the least typical day. The most exciting or challenging task you’ve done as part of this. What was one of the—challenging, it’s probably the year they were deployed, but don’t let me lead you.
G: Yeah, actually, you would think that it would have been most challenging when they were deployed, but probably not because it kept me so busy. Because, including my husband’s unit, five of the units were deployed all at the same time. Plus I had a couple other units in my brigade deployed. I had so many groups gone, and that’s when the leaders and the rear detachment officers, the people who run the unit that’s left in the rear that didn’t go forward on the deployment, spend most of their time talking to me, so I was extremely busy. So while you would think that would be very challenging, it was actually really good for me to keep me that busy. Gosh, the most challenging. That’s a really good question. I think for me, and whenever we have a wounded inaction soldier, and we’ve been fortunate; we haven’t had any killed in action, KIAs, but we have had some wounded within our brigade. I think those are always challenging days for me because it’s not my job to talk to the families. I talk to volunteers, and I advise, and I train them, but we have other people who work for family programs that talk directly with those families. So I do a lot of what my state family program’s boss calls “quarterbacking”: I send messages back and forth between people and make sure that the loop is closed, and everybody knows what’s going on, so those are very challenging days sometimes because trying to make sure that you don’t forget anybody, and you haven’t left anybody out that the information is pertinent to, and also making sure you don’t release information to people who shouldn’t have it.
H: What’s your favorite part of the job? What’s your favorite thing?
G: My favorite thing. For me, my favorite thing is honestly getting the camaraderie with those other spouses or parents. I have a lot of parents that also volunteer. I enjoy that the most because I feel like I can make a difference in their lives, and in turn, they're making a difference in all the families’ lives in their unit. So I kind of feel like, in some way, I've been able to reach out to a lot more people than any one person really should ever probably be able to do, which is really nice. I like that.
H: Can you give me an idea of the kind of things a Family Readiness Group does? The volunteers who do run it, other than a newsletter, what kinds of activities do they do?
G: Oh my gosh, they are responsible for so many things.
H: They’re probably all different things.
G: My job—yeah—my job can’t exist without them, so our volunteers are really, really important. They do things just like you would have at your regular office. A party—they have a holiday party, and they have a family picnic in the summer. And they do a number of different types of meetings or events throughout the year. It varies by unit because that particular volunteer group gets to make their own choices, and sometimes it’s based on what the unit’s going through, so if they're a deployed group, they might have speakers come in to talk about the Red Cross and how the Red Cross works and how you utilize the Red Cross, should you ever have to get a message to your service member. Or they’ll have different groups come in and talk about Operation Home Front or other volunteer core that served just to help military families. And then other times, they just do fun events: canoe trips and Easter egg hunts and you name it; they're doing it, just like you would have at your office really. And then they also have the newsletters and the emails that they send out to family members, and the automated calls that they send out to let the family members know when a meeting or event is coming up to make sure that they're invited, so they kind of keep close the loop; they do all that education camaraderie.
H: Almost like a way of creating community.
G: It is. It is, and it’s a link to the community. And we have fulltime employees that help them do that as well who bridge that gap to the community because we have such a wide community that wants to help the military. And our National Guard families and service members have a unique position because we are not active duty where we don’t all live on the same military base, and you can’t just walk out your front door and say, “Hey did you hear from your husband or your wife today,” and “Hey when you talk to them next, can you tell them—I haven’t heard from mine in a while—please send me an email.” We don’t have those kinds of links because we’re so dispersed throughout the state, and in some cases, different states. So we rely heavily on that Family Readiness Group to keep everybody in the loop and feel like a community together.
H: Thank you. That’s clearing it up for me. I started with no idea what a Family Readiness Group might be. I was wondering—I’m changing directions here a little now. I had asked you what effects Andy’s time away has been having on you. Do you see any effect it’s had on him, particularly the deployment to Iraq?
G: Sure. Sure, when I train—and I actually have a training this weekend—I always say this, but it is also true. When your service member goes away, and they come back, you're never going to go back to normal or what you think is normal; you're going to have a new normal. And that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. People change over time, and in the course of a year, no matter what, the difference is when you're apart you notice some of those changes a lot more when you come together and try to bring everything back together again. I like to tease that it doesn’t always have to be bad because my husband came home and started cleaning and doing things that he never did before like that without being asked, and so that was really nice. And I think for him he’s just less of a—he’s still a jokester; he always has been, but he’s just even more grown up than he was before and more focused on family before he was even before that, so we’ve had some positive changes.
H: Well that’s nice, particularly the cleaning.
G: Particularly the cleaning; you’ll have to ask him the same question.
H: True. And I’m moving into some—you’d said in your bio form you’re a fourth generation military spouse, so—
G: I am.
H: So your father was in the military as well, or—
G: My father was in the navy.
H: Navy.
G: Yep. He was in the navy, active duty, and then the reservist before I was born—actually I think maybe a little bit after I was born, so I don’t have a recollection much of it, but my mother was married to him at the time that he was serving. He served during Vietnam War, but not in Vietnam. He was on a ship instead, so as my dad, my grandfathers—both of them on both sides of the family served in World War II; my dad’s side also served in Korea, and my great-grandfathers all served in World War I. And I don’t have any Gulf War Veterans in my family. We skipped that one.
H: If the question is too intrusive, feel free to tell me that, but do you think that that influenced you when you met Andy in saying “this is the guy?” If it hits the boundary, let me know.
G: No, that’s okay. I think to a certain extent, it influences you, but I think it more has to do with the way you’re raised, and so I think that while you can find similar personalities that are not in the military, you tend to go toward things you’re familiar with and you know. And so when you get a military personality and some of the structure and things that go along with it, and that’s what you're used to dealing with and you know—I found my husband, and he’s also very structured and plans things out, and we really think things through, and we have a big plan before we do things. We don’t just go on a whim, so I think that’s part of just the military personality, so it works.
H: I can see that. That makes sense, yeah. You obviously didn’t go out looking for a guy in uniform then.
G: I didn’t, but he looks good in a uniform.
H: That goes with my next question was about your perception of the military—Navy, Army, Air Force, Marines, National Guard—what has it been, and how has it changed over time. You dealt with some of that, but I'm going to ask it anyways.
G: That is also a good question. I don’t know that my perception has changed at all. I always had a respect for the military, and along with that, I think for the political system in the United States and just our country—before I did this, I taught Social Studies, so I’ve already had that kind of background and an interest in it, so my attitudes toward the military haven’t changed. I'm still a huge supporter. Even after the deployment, I still am a huge supporter and support my husband in his furthering his career in the military. I would say the main thing that changed is, really, I have a much better understanding now of what it’s like to be a family member obviously even though I'm fourth generation military wife. My dad was out when I was either very young or just before I was born, so I don’t remember him doing much with the military or with the navy, so it’s different when you live it.
H: And this one again—how do you feel about the antiwar protests? People say, “We shouldn’t be over there.” “We shouldn’t be in Iraq.” “Everybody should come home.” What’s your—
G: For me, our country is founded on freedom of speech, so they have every right to go ahead and protest or say what they want to about the political system or the war or our interaction or involvement with other countries. If they didn’t have that, then you know, we wouldn’t have the military or what some of our military members are fighting for—which is their ability to be able to say what they want. I think it’s important to always remember—and so far, I haven’t really experienced any groups or people that have forgotten—that the service members and the soldiers are not always the people that are behind those choices. They're doing their job just like the rest of us go to work every single day. So it’s important to support them and their families even if you don’t necessarily agree with everything going on.
H: That was a follow up I had in my head—have you been, not so much with your family or with the brigade but interactions with the general public. What kinds of reactions do you get -- when you say “Oh yeah, my husband’s in the Guard”, “My husband’s overseas”?
G: Yeah, I always have very positive interaction with the general public. Actually, complete strangers will come up to you. We do have our military t-shirts and things like that, and I do have a big purse that is made out of his uniform, so people know, and we’ve had complete strangers walk up to us and talk to you for hours in the grocery store just about being in the military, and they want to tell you—a lot of times they want to tell you their story or somebody that they know that’s in the military too because I think just like our families are trying to find a link to each other, they want to find a link to other military families also—somebody else who has a similar experience to theirs that they can share that with. So I have not experienced anything bad at all actually. So I have been very fortunate.
H: Is there anything you’d like to say to the soldiers that you don’t get a chance to say in your regular job for posterity in a sense. I'm not expressing it well.
G: You know, I think that for the service members and their families alike, there’s more people out there that can relate to your situation and who support you and care about you and want to help you than you always think do. And, you know, they hold a special place in my heart, but I think also, as far as the American people go, in theirs because I think as a whole, American people do love their military, and they recognize that they're just everyday people trying to do their job.
H: I have a question that goes do you trust and support America’s civilian and military leaders, which I now realize is actually two separate questions—the military leaders versus the civilian leaders. And perhaps even in regards to the policy or not being in Iraq or Afghanistan. What are your opinions? If you’d rather not say, you don’t have to.
G: Yeah, you know, I trust that the system in the United States works, and that when we vote—with the exception of the electoral college and all those little tidbits—for the most part, it’s a majority rule. And so I trust that the majority of the public is going to make a decision for the best. I think that’s probably about all I’ll say on that.
H: Fair enough. Fair enough. And yeah, the electoral college is a weird little system.
G: That’s an extra added thing right in there.
H: Weirdness. Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you’d like to say? We’re heading toward the end of what I had to ask. Is there anything I left?
G: That’s a good question. You covered a lot of good stuff. No, I mean, you kind of covered everything what it’s like to be a spouse and work, which I do have a unique job, so—
H: True. You do. Thank you for coming in and talking to us about it today.
G: Thank you.
