INTERVIEWER:   Good morning, Miss Brister.  I’m going to start off by asking you where were you on December 7, what were you doing when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, what were you doing, why were you doing it, why were you doing it and what happened after that?

BRISTER:   I was at what we called the Lounge, kind of a day room at Beaver College at the Wyncote Campus outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  It was a Sunday as we all know.  There were several students there, what they call resident students, and my being a day student I had just come up and said I was going to study, but actually what I was probably going to do was play some bridge, play cards.  The radio was running in the corner of the room.

The room was not large, about the size of a classroom, and it was just going on like it does on a Sunday morning when the announcement came.  Of course it electrified everybody, the 11 or 12 people that were in there, most of whom dashed out to the phones.  I went home and decided and checked with my parents and said that I thought I’d like to go join the work force at a defense factory because I wasn’t doing very well at school, just try to do something to make up for it.

So I did.  They had a firm called H.W. Butterworth downtown Philadelphia, which had been manufacturing machinery for textiles, making textiles much as it is done in this state.  It was a great industry.  It had been converted for making mounts for 50-caliber antiaircraft guns which were then much in demand on the Alaska front because the Japanese were threatening that area continually and we had very thin lines of forces.  The guns were important.

First I was a clerk, what they called production control.  Then I got into some of the manufacturing cause that interested me and we were having trouble with turning out the parts, which were called racks to pass inspection.  So we had to put some pressure there and they sent me to that department.  I worked there.  Finally I got to work directly as an assistant to the president in going around and checking on quality control.

INTERVIEWER:   Were you living at home at that time?

BRISTER:   Yes, I was living at home.  I got to work by subway and trolley car.

INTERVIEWER:   And you must have been all of the age of what, 22?

BRISTER:   I was 20, I guess.  This was January of 1942 when I started.  It was in May of that year that the first women’s Army auxiliary corps was formed.  In fact, today is the 15th of May, this is the day that it was announced.  Oveta Culp Hobby from Texas was designated by President Roosevelt to form a women’s corps whose slogan was “We relieve a man for duty.”  Well, that looked like where the action was and I would have liked to have gone right in.

At the same time, the defense factories that were working on vital defense matters had the privilege of declaring somebody essential, which they did routinely almost, they could hold you off for one year from joining the Armed Forces, man or woman.  There was a one-year deferment before they would have to release you.  So I told my employer that I would like to do that and I was released May the following year.

I went right in.  I enlisted.  It was still called the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps then.  The officers were second and third officers.  They weren’t called lieutenants or captains.  We had males to train the enlistees and the enlistees, the age group was like this, you’d have mothers and grandmothers and the 21 year olds.  You had to be 21 to join, 18 these days I think, but it was 21 then.

INTERVIEWER:   Where did you do your training?

BRISTER:   So I enlisted and was sent to Fort Oglethorpe for basic training in Georgia.

INTERVIEWER:   Was it essentially basic training?

BRISTER:   Not like what other interviewees have described to you.  We certainly didn't go under live fire, but we learned defense against chemical warfare.  We learned how to use gas masks and that sort of thing.  We marched and drilled, which was learning discipline, which is important.  It was only six weeks.  At the end of that, I applied for OCS and was admitted there.

At that time it was a 90-day course, 90-day wonders we called it, men and women.  By September of that year, it had become the Women’s Army Corps and you were now private, corporal, sergeant and so forth and lieutenant.  So graduated in September as a lieutenant in the Women’s Army Corps.  Instead of WAAC, now it’s just WAC.

INTERVIEWER:   And where did you take your OCS?

BRISTER:   At Fort Oglethorpe also.  They had an OCS class there.  They were pretty much leaving for Des Moines which was the first big training area as well as Daytona Beach for the WAAC.  Oglethorpe was a later training center.

INTERVIEWER:   And did you graduate as an officer and a lady…the males would be an officer and a gentleman by an act of Congress.

BRISTER:   Yes, you were expected to be a lady, very much so, an example to the enlisted personnel.  Your word was your word of honor.  It had that definite feeling about it.  We had the original uniforms including the rubber raincoats, which were the men’s at first and boots.  We had fatigue dresses and we had OD uniforms.

INTERVIEWER:   OD stands for?

BRISTER:   Olive drab.  We had an insignia, which was not like the men’s army at first.  It was distinctive.  It was an eagle, but in different colors and that kind of thing until we actually became part of the Army.  That simplified supply and quartermaster duties of course if they could make things the same for both sexes as far as equipment was concerned.

INTERVIEWER:   Well congratulations Lieutenant Brister.  What happened after OCS?

BRISTER:   First assignment was as a basic training officer right there at Fort Oglethorpe.  I wanted to go overseas of course.  That seemed to be everybody’s goal, but I knew I didn't have a chance right away. 

INTERVIEWER:   Why did you know you didn't have a chance right away?

BRISTER:   Because everybody else was volunteering ahead of me.  The war of course still being on although Eisenhower had women WAC battalions to do a lot of the clerical and signal corps work, there just weren’t that many places where they could use women and not endanger them in line of fire battle.

INTERVIEWER:   I meant to ask you earlier, during basic training and OCS, did you have any weapons training?

BRISTER:   No, just at the end of OCS learned to fire a .45 automatic pistol.  I think a .38 also or maybe that was later when I got into intelligence work.  Just a .45, I guess the nearest thing used in combat would be going through the gas chambers with gas mask training. 

INTERVIEWER:   Well so here you are now training other WAC’s, is that correct?

BRISTER:   Yes, I think they decided that they would move me up on the priority list to go overseas.  They all said you can take a promotion to go, but in my last basic training company that I was with as an instructor and a training officer, on Mother’s Day of the company’s arrival…they come in, not all at once, you have to wait maybe a week before you get enough people to make the company, new women volunteers, and then the issuing of uniforms was spotty.  Long story short, it was Mother’s Day, Sunday, I remember this so well, and there’s about 10 or 12 kind of straggly looking young women down there at the barracks who were at a loss as to what to do. 

It was hot, they weren’t ready to go to other places on the post and so forth without their uniforms.  So I said, “Alright, maybe you would like to have a hike through the Chickamauga Park or a little walk”.  So we took off about 12 of them.  One girl, who was overweight, had a huge, horrible looking white bread sandwich with carrots and raisins.  I have to mention that now because it became important.  She insisted on taking it along.

So we walked where I knew where the paths were and so forth through the park. It’s a beautiful park where I had gone horseback riding a lot on my off duty days.  We got ready to come on back and I thought we’d take a wide circle.  Long story short, I wasn’t on the right path and we weren’t getting home.  Meantime a dog, and it was from the post, joined us and thought that’s okay, we’ll follow him.

He just liked to walk and we were getting deeper and deeper into the woods.  It got late enough that I knew we weren’t going to get out.  They knew.  There were people there over twice my age. 

INTERVIEWER:   And you were lost.

BRISTER:   I was lost and I was second lieutenant.  They didn't have good clothing on either.  See they were getting scratched up with briar patches.  It was starting to be ugly undergrowth in those forests.  So we stopped and said let’s stay here, it’s near water.  There was a little creek running by. 

We set up people to watch and others to sleep and so forth and we stayed all night because maybe in the morning we could find our way out.  This is where the sandwich comes in because that’s all there was to eat.  She shared it with everybody as much as she could.

INTERVIEWER:   It must have been about a mouthful a person. 

BRISTER:   Yes, it was a fat sandwich.  She’d been at it a little bit on the walk, but there were enough for the people that really were hungry.  Now some of them could do without.

INTERVIEWER:   Don’t let us dangle there.  How did you get out of the Georgia woods?

BRISTER:   They slept, we had guards.  We taught some things that we were going to learn anyway.  We set up guards and others could sleep and kind of leaned into each other to keep warm.  It got chilly as night fell.  Daybreak finally came.  We started winding and we were headed right and finally we could see, after about 15-20 minutes, a highway out there.

We walked out to the highway.  Here comes a convoy of three MP guards, military police, two big trucks and a medical Red Cross, a search party out on the highway.

INTERVIEWER:   Looking for you?

BRISTER:   Yes, well yes, we were AWOL.  They better know somebody was missing.  So then I was disciplined and taught how to have a guard to get to the post-exchange from then on.  It was pretty much of a farce.  Let’s see, it wasn’t too long before I did get my overseas orders.

INTERVIEWER:   Well take us overseas.  Where did you go?

BRISTER:   The lost platoon that was known as.  We went over in convoy.  We had some of the training that Marjorie was talking about, the rope net, getting onto a ship by rope ladder kind of thing outside, several kinds of things like that, emergency training.  We went in convoy.  It was just before D-Day, I mean just before VE Day, which was later in May.

We were in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in convoy when the war was declared over.  We continued in convoy and landed in LeHavre, which was kind of a staging area for troops coming in and now starting to go back cause our ship pulled up into the dock.  There was another ship, the first GI’s to be rotated back right next to where we docked.  One of them said, “You’ll be sorry” (laughter). 

Then we came off with full gear, gas masks, duffle bags and they were going home.  We had to stay there for about three or four days.  Then we went to Versailles, which had been Eisenhower’s headquarters, but now he set up in Frankfort, Germany.  We were flown into just fields, it wasn’t an air strip or an airport for them to land.  It was like a meadow.

We got off there with our baggage and then buses came and got us and took us to a big tent compound in the center of Frankfort surrounded by barbed wire where the IG _____ building was with his headquarters, but also some civilians were in this, having been screened.  They could live in some of the ruined buildings, the station hospital.  Some military were there.  There were some British, French, it was a liaison type thing, type personnel.

INTERVIEWER:   Russian?

BRISTER:   No, not any Russian that I ever saw.  At a party though I met Marshall Zukov.  Eisenhower had him in for a little party there in September of that year.

INTERVIEWER:   How did you get into the party?

BRISTER:   Well it was pretty easy if you were a WAC then because it was still all male territory.  In fact, also Frankfort was en route for the troops being rotated out and heading home.  They had to come through.  I was assigned to Special Services which meant sports, anything that was just not straight get your job done, kind of morale section.  Well the combat units who came through, this was the first they had seen any American women.

As I said there were 2000 members of that battalion, the women’s battalion, but it also included some British and some French troops, not for a very long period.  So they would come and say would you like to come to a party where we have a dance while we’re waiting to get our turn to get on the ships.  This became so frequent, I would come into my office in the morning, there’d be three or four, 10-12 officers lined up outside the office to see if they could make these arrangements.

They’d bring gifts.  They’d bring parachute cloth and cameras, German money, just anything they could think of and give it to me.  I had a big warehouse, a big section that looked like a warehouse.  German officers’ captured equipment, which we used, these huge great overcoats lined and wonderful wool.  We cut them up and made little kids’ clothing for the displaced person camp people. 

INTERVIEWER:   Who did the tailoring?

BRISTER:   There were DP’s, displaced persons, all the way from Lithuania, Latvia and those countries, Poland, women mostly who had been slave labor which amounted to with the Germans and hadn’t yet found a way to get back home.  We had a battery of these women up on the second floor with sewing machines.  They were making towels for the mess hall; we kept them busy.

But then they said okay we have Christmas coming and we had these displaced children so we put up barrels, GI oil barrels is what they were, by the PX and the mess halls and the GI’s would give their rations, put anything they could in.  We kept it there for a couple of weeks before Christmas.  We made the little coats and we made Christmas stockings out of parachute cloth, camouflage cloth. 

The mess hall came up with 2000 number 10 cans of grapefruit juice, vitamin C being the most lacking element in diet.  We took a whole string of 2-1/2 ton GI trucks and we went to those camps.  The people were all out there lined up.  It just….it was something.

INTERVIEWER:   You know, the total chaos, displaced persons, wounded persons, returning to homes that had been destroyed.

BRISTER:   I don’t think there was a United Nations then, but UNRRA was trying to get this people…

INTERVIEWER:   It stood for United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Authority or something like that.

BRISTER:   Yes and they would work, of course, most of the camps or a whole lot of the camps were around big cities, Frankfort being one, Munich, and trying to get them to return home.

INTERVIEWER:   Did you have any interaction with German nationals, military or civilian?

BRISTER:   Limited.  There were some that would be screened and were hired as civilian employees by us, especially Special Services, for men and women who did work like art work, posters.  Our WAC detachment started a little what we called the Elbow Room, a little place to go have beer in the corner of one of the barracks.  The commanding officer let us turn it over into a little café for night.  The girls could go there with their dates and so forth.

INTERVIEWER: Only for military personnel?

BRISTER:   Yes.  There was very little interaction.  There were putzkas, as we called them, cleaning women, which immediately makes me think of the places we lived, the billets.  They had been just evacuated I think less than 24 hours before we got in there from that airplane.  In fact, the glue was still wet on the posters on the doors.  When you got into the house, I remember seeing the father who had lived there, a brown shirt, a general civil aide corps, I know that’s not the official name.

Like a night watchman for air raids and so forth.  He was thrown down the cellar steps as was one of the youngest boys.  There’s also a case of May wine, fresh grapes in the kitchen.  All these books, he was an avid record keeper.  He had copies of every letter he had sent to his boys on the front.  He had two sons who were killed in Stalingrad.  I was fascinated by his record keeping.

Then the program martial wanted to clear out the billets from anything like that that was left.  They wanted to haul it and throw it away.  I kept as much as I could after I saw what they were doing.  A copy of Mein Kampf, a senior officer took that home.  I got his correspondence and as much as I could get of his personal. He was a fanatic.  He had ration books that were stacked up like this.

Long story short on the correspondence and personal items, after the war, I mean after I was out of the Army, I took them home with me.  I kept them; I didn't want them to get looted by somebody else.  I wrote back to the military government, the civilian German government setting up, the Studgart I believe…

INTERVIEWER:   About year would that be?

BRISTER:   This would be 1947 because I’m back in the States.  They found him, they traced him and I sent it and he got that much back which may be all that he had left of his sons who were killed.  He was by then very, very elderly and I think the mother had died. 

They replaced their beds, their furniture.  They had only started their gardens out back.  They didn't have much.  They had an apple tree.

INTERVIEWER:   And you are now a first lieutenant?

BRISTER:   Yes, I was promoted to first lieutenant.  Eisenhower went home in September after we put on a football game for him.  The WACs were the cheerleaders.  I stayed.  I was kept on in Frankfort until December when I found there was an intelligence school working on de-Nazification down in the Bavarian part of the country. 

I wondered if I could get transferred down there and get out of the Social Services stuff because it was getting kind of make due, we were too flighty.  They had a job for the adjutant down there which is my chief administrator admin officer.  So they let me go and I was sent down there.  I guess I got there in January and I stayed there until the following December and then went to school on the GI Bill.

But on the ship home, the British ship taking us home, the George Washington, which was a ship captured by our troops in World War I in 1917, still taking troops back and forth.  There was a USO troop going home at the same time which one member, whose name is Lynn Mayberry, she was a comic member of this troop, was a very good friend of Marlena Dietrich’s.  As a matter of fact, she said she was supposed to check in with Marlena in New York when she got off the ship because she, Marlena, wanted her to get this big convertible driven back to Hollywood.

I decided that the University of Southern California would be pretty good and you couldn't get into school because all the GI’s were home.  Most of them had come home already that were dying to get back in school.  All the colleges were closed, just overflowing with tents and barracks.  But the same gal, Lynn, had a friend who was a registrar at the University of Southern California so she said, yeah, I think you could get in.

So my parents let me go and of course I’m also 22 or 23 now, really didn't have to get too much permission.  I drove with them in the Packard convertible.

INTERVIEWER:   In the Packard convertible across the United States of America?

BRISTER:   She was an awesome woman. 

INTERVIEWER:   Marlena Dietrich is in the vehicle?

BRISTER:  No, no, we’re taking her car back for her.  She’s still got a big romance going up in New York.

INTERVIEWER:   Just the two of you were in the car?

BRISTER:   No, as a matter of fact, two fellows who were also in show business, George and ... I forget their names, they came along too so we had baggage and three USO’ers and me. 

INTERVIEWER:   Before the days of interstate highway and Holiday Inn.

BRISTER:   Yes, it’s funny; we did all right though.  This was January so we took the southern route and she was an excellent driver.  George drove some.

INTERVIEWER:   So you end up in California, end up in school.  Now you were going to finish, what, your Bachelor’s degree?

BRISTER:   Yes, I changed majors from psychology to journalism and finished out the semester.  I did not get a degree.  So I was without a degree when a couple years later I was back in service and eventually got through what they call a Foreign Area Specialist Training Program, Russian, where I had two years of study with native Russian speakers and people who fled the Soviet Union and who got hired by us to teach native background history, geography, military stuff.

Before we went there, we were first trained at Columbia University or Cornell.  I was one of the ones that went to Columbia.

INTERVIEWER:   Let me interrupt.  We’re going to fast-forward.  You went to school, got out of school, but eventually returned to the military; several years later?

BRISTER:   Yes, that’s when they made it part of the regular service.  I forget what they called it, reserve troops or what, but they became permanent, as did the WAVE’s follow suit.  They needed people to staff under that new designation.

INTERVIEWER:   So you re-upped when?

BRISTER:   They said will you come back and I said yes and I was going to go to Fort Meade, but I decided I really didn't want to stay with anything administrative anymore.  Then I started working toward the Russian training. I knew they hadn’t taken any women in it before for one thing.  It was a select group.  It took me three or four years to go on other jobs.  I went on recruiting for instance since I worked at the station hospital at West Point.  I think that was it before I got the language training.  I was the first woman to go through the Russian language class.

INTERVIEWER:   But what year did you reenlist?

INTERVIEWER:   The Korean War had just started.

BRISTER:   Yes, that’s another thing that brought this bulge on to get more women back into the service cause most of them had gone home.

INTERVIEWER:   Did you go back as 1st lieutenant?

BRISTER:   Captain.  They had what they called hip pocket promotion when I left the service the first time.  I got made captain in the reserves so I never got to wear the bars until I came back.

INTERVIEWER:   So you’re back in the military.  You spent several years in a variety of other posts, camps and stations, but then you end up in Russian language training.  Where did you start off?

BRISTER:   Well there’s a program called the Foreign Area Specialists Training Program.  Everything has a paren after, it can be Venezuela, it can be India, it can be the Soviet Union.  The State Department goes, the CIA goes, Navy, there were Marines in my class eventually.  The future ambassador and it turns out the last ambassador of the Soviet Union from our country, Jack Matlock, was in my class that took this training.

INTERVIEWER:   And where was it held?

BRISTER:   ______ for two years.  For those other countries I mentioned, you go to the country and lived there so you’d come out fluent in language for one thing and you also know an awful lot about your social order, the structure of the country and just everything.  You couldn't do that in the western Soviet Union, although we did, what they call, exchanging spies.  They sent some of their people over and we were sending some of our people over for limited lengths of time. 

You went to Kiev, Leningrad, and Moscow under Kruschev.  He first went to Vienna and turned his back and went home.  It was that kind of harassing kind of period when we harassed each other.  He used entrance things like that as a tool of pressure.

INTERVIEWER:   What did you do after your training?

BRISTER:   I went to the Pentagon to Army Intelligence section on the USSR which was where we had very highly classified material which was the start of the electronic sources, satellite and also the Kennedy assassination was in there.  It got to really the beginning of Vietnam because they were deposing the head of the Cambodia government and was starting ... the underbelly of the far-east was starting to create a lot of problems. 

The Soviets were still not our enemy certainly, but at cross-purposes.

INTERVIEWER:   Just as an aside, was Arlington Hall still in operation?

BRISTER:   Yes, not as such though because a defense intelligence agency was formed and they took over Arlington Hall stations territory and moved out of the Pentagon.  It’s performance kind of thing was fueled out to some of the other units, DIA and CIA.  DIA was new.  I was with the USSR branch.  As you can imagine, the Army intelligence at that level, Department of Army level, had many areas of specialization, the far east being one say, the Soviet Union only one, but probably the largest branch within the division.

The Secretary of Defense was MacNamara at that time.  ___ Taylor then I believe was quite a figurehead especially for the White House briefings.  It got very political there for a while so I decided I better put up or shut up and stay for another 10 or so years or leave.  I left.  I resigned, retired, cause I had just over 21 years. 

INTERVIEWER:   Well you know that all sounds very glamorous to the outsider, the Pentagon, spook activity and so forth, was it really glamorous?

BRISTER:   It’s just grit.  My first assignment was to go through huge bags of captured documents which had come out by tunnel from east Berlin, snuck out of there by tunnel into west Berlin before the Russians discovered we were doing it.  That was my first assignment when I got to the Pentagon.  I found one thing in there that was valuable and it took me three months to go through all those things. 

INTERVIEWER:   So you speak Russian?

BRISTER:   Yes, you saw two intensive years with association and instruction in the language, association with the native speakers and native professors so you better know it. 

INTERVIEWER:   Again as an aside, is Russian ... as in our country, would there be accent differences?

BRISTER:   That’s an interesting point.  Russian is and I recommend this to all college students or anybody where you have to take language, take Russian, it’s the simplest language to learn there is because it was restructured totally by a group of orthodox priests, very intelligent men, who said this is too complicated.  Half of our laws of grammar don’t make sense.  We’re using six or eight different versions of the alphabet.  Let’s do it over. 

It was 2000 years ago that they sat down and rewrote the language.  Even English I’m sure at some point was simple.  It didn't have all your o’s all pronounced differently.  Everything has simple rules of grammar.  You decline something this way.  You do your adjectives this way.  Everything is pretty…the only thing is which sets you off in the first place, is that you have to learn the alphabet. 

You can do that in 15 minutes when you get down to it really.  It’s not all that different from Greek for one thing and everybody knows the delta phi’s.  It isn’t that bad in other words.  And then the simplicity of the grammar, the syntax and the writing just makes it a walkover. 

INTERVIEWER:   I read a report a couple of years ago.  Some scholars do scholarly things, they gave a number to the Oxford dictionary or something that we use, no the largest dictionary and it was something like a half a million words used in the English language.  But in the Russian language, I think it was something like 200,000.  It had a very, very reduced vocabulary.

BRISTER:   That’s right.

INTERVIEWER:   And you say the grammar is….

BRISTER:   Simple.  Still another advantage especially to an American, they told me in Moscow, in France, if you try to speak French, they’ll walk away from you, Germany – they’re very patient, Moscow – they stand and listen to you.  They love it because it sounds so good, something about the American mouth or the way our voice comes out fits their language and it makes them think we’re very educated.  They think they’re talking to a very well educated person so they just love listening to you.

INTERVIEWER:   Let me return to you.  After you retired from the military, what paths did your life take?

BRISTER:   Well first thing I did was found a like-minded friend.  In fact, at retirement ceremony at Fort Myer, Virginia, we bought the first truck camper on the road, one that was together instead of pulling a trailer.  This was in 1964.  They had just brought out…you get a pickup truck and you put a box inside the back of it and that becomes a truck camper. 

Long story short, we took a trip across the United States taking our time.  We closed out our affairs in Fort Myer, Arlington, where we both had been stationed.  It was another WAC officer who had also retired.  So I had a job waiting for me out in California in a think tank because they were still doing a lot of studies for the military using people who had been in the Soviet world, but I didn't have to be there right away.

So we started out in September and went to work in June in the think tank.  All the national parks and everything were just wonderful.

INTERVIEWER:   And in the think tank, were you doing essentially what you were doing in the military?

BRISTER:   Essentially what I was doing, exactly.  Not exactly the same, but very much the same.  However, there were several retired military intelligence officers there already, some civilians, very gifted and talented people and they did good work.  It did make you think, the kind of money that was being put out to contract this kind of work, they were using the intelligence community, was being done at much less cost when we were still in uniform.  That always bothered me a little bit.

INTERVIEWER:   Was it mostly language types that were in this?

BRISTER:   No, about half and half.  Military members there of the tank, the corporation was named Sylvania, it wasn’t Rand, mostly were, mostly had the language and then they had some specialty like signal communications, supplies, so forth.

INTERVIEWER:   Any math people?

BRISTER:   Yeah and then the civilian ones were university types, very, very good.  I didn't stay long, just about a year and a half.  I had a neck problem, had to have a couple of vertebrae fused, I think from pouring over stuff for so long.  For whatever reason, that plus I could not in my judgment write good enough reports to justify my staying there.

These men were doing it much better than I was.  I couldn't get the lingo.  It’s almost a jargon that goes into these studies and you get into easily or you don’t.  You keep on writing like you’ve always written.  I was not satisfying myself and I’m sure not them.  I left after a year and a half.  I started working with remedial math with school children.  I got as far away as I could.

INTERVIEWER:   And how many years did you do that?

BRISTER:   A couple of years while I was still in California.  Then I started, went onto various different things since then, did some painting.

INTERVIEWER:   You mentioned El Paso.  What were you doing in El Paso?

BRISTER:   In El Paso, I was just visiting.  I lived in San Antonio for over 10 years on and off. 

INTERVIEWER:   Were you employed there?

BRISTER:   No, no.

INTERVIEWER:   So you never returned really to the Russian language part of …

BRISTER:   No, there have been contacts off and on since like just here recently, a group of Russians came in for something associated with the senior center and art groups and I got into that just to help with the language thing.  The part about the Russian being known, you can do something every now and then.  No, I never did specialize in it again.

INTERVIEWER:   Miss Brister, has anybody ever told you you’ve had an exciting and interesting life?

BRISTER:   Yes, they had, especially since I’ve gotten here at this retirement community.  We compare life stories and it is different from most of them.  Of course, I don’t have a family.  That is, I didn't marry and have children.  I aborted two marriages you might say, two chances, and you have to feel fulfilled in some other way and I suppose I do.  I certainly miss having had a family.

INTERVIEWER:   As I’ve told the other interviewees, you’ll never be a day older than you are today.  Through the miracle of videotape, you’ll always remain the same.  I always think that ex-President Kennedy is about 40, well he’d be in his 80’s now.  So you’ll never be a day older.  With this exciting life, would you sort of reflect a little bit for the students who are going to see this, what has all this wonderful life, interesting life, early into the military, exciting military career, post military career, everything that you’ve seen in that sweep of history, could you reflect a little bit, what did it teach?

BRISTER:   I think primarily it teaches you to pay attention sooner if you can to your country and what your country is about, what its policies are and how they interact with the other countries of the world and how you form in your work and awareness of these aspects of living will make you want to push things one way or the other.  Maybe a different kind of approach to the problems that still face us all on this planet.

INTERVIEWER:   Isn’t it curious, I read in the newspaper this morning that Russia is now a member of NATO.

BRISTER:   They actually are?  I knew they had agreed on a cooperative effort there that was very close to that.  I didn't know they had actually become a member.

INTERVIEWER:   Haven’t you seen the wheel of life go all the way around?

BRISTER:   Yes, we have.  If you have an 8 in front of your numbers, you’ve seen at least three or four cycles that were pretty exciting and pretty meaningful. 

INTERVIEWER:   Would you do it again?

BRISTER:   Yes.

INTERVIEWER:   Great.