Crawford’s Army journey brought her to West Berlin
When Susan Crawford wanted to make a change in her life, she did what any junior pipe organ major at Ohio’s Wittenberg University would have done in 1975.
She joined the U.S. Army. “I saw a newspaper ad,” she said. “‘Want to spend your summer in the Appalachian foothills, learning leadership? Call your Army recruiter.’
“I’d become quite disenchanted with my potential opportunities to teach music. Lots of male choral directors were pretty dismissive of women — and here’s the Army, asking for women,” she said. “It was interesting to me, so I called.”
Crawford said the Army flew her and a few fellow travelers to Anniston, Alabama, where they trained for four weeks at Fort McClellan. She said the training was more like “playing Army” because the Army didn’t want to lose the recruits.
“The last couple of days is the selection process,” she said. “A couple of Army professionals on one side, you on the other, and they determine whether you’re suitable.”
Having passed muster, Crawford went home to Ohio and formally enlisted. She said she graduated from Wittenberg, was commissioned as a second lieutenant and returned to Fort McClellan, where the next round of training bore little resemblance to the last.
“It was basic training,” she said. “We were issued uniforms, took an intro to rifle course, learned military etiquette, that kind of thing.”
Her training complete, Crawford said, she and her peers were asked to list their preferences for duties and locations. She said intelligence and overseas were her top choices, and she got them both.
She said she was assigned to Okinawa, Japan, but first had to undergo specialized training at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, and Fort Devins, Massachusetts.
“In March 1977, I flew to Okinawa,” she said, adding that in addition to supervising soldiers monitoring radio communications, she served as an officer in charge of the motor pool, mess and mail room.
“I had the advantage of being an officer,” she said, “but every now and then there was something funny. One time the Army assembled a panel of officers, including me, to talk to
“I had the advantage of being an officer, but every now and then there was something funny. One time the Army assembled a panel of officers, including me, to talk to Japanese cadets. The guys got questions related to the work. I was asked what my ideal husband would look like.”
— SUSAN CRAWFORD, VETERAN
Japanese cadets. The guys got questions related to the work. I was asked what my ideal husband would look like.”
Crawford said after 18 months at Okinawa, she was transferred to what was then West Germany and served in an intelligence collection unit, where the information gleaned was used to support infantry and other operations.
“You needed to know where the bad guys were,” she said. “Back then, the biggest world threat was the Soviets, and Berlin was still walled in half.”
Crawford said she stayed in West Germany until 1982. Her professional and personal lives intersected on Valentine’s Day 1981, when she was out with friends in West Berlin and met a Scottish civilian, she said.
“His name was Iain, and he was just a regular guy,” she recalled.
They hit it off, she said, returned to the United States together and were married in 1982. Their daughter, Fiona, was born in 1990.
Crawford said 1983 was a big year — she received the Army Commendation Medal, was promoted to captain and was stationed at Fort Meade, Maryland, where she went to work for the National Security Agency.
“That was great, very interesting from the start,” she said. “Collecting analysis, putting it together and making reports.”
A career highlight, Crawford said, came when she stood in an auditorium at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and conducted a presentation for a group of intelligence professionals from around the world, known then and now as Five Eyes.
She said she stood down from the Army in 1987 but didn’t sit down. She went to George Washington University on the GI Bill, earning a master’s degree in national security policies, then worked in and around Washington, D.C., mostly as a defense contractor. She said she, Iain and Fiona left Washington in 1994, when she took a job in Knoxville with the Tennessee Valley Authority. She lost Iain in 2005, moved to Chattanooga in 2010 and retired from the TVA in 2017.
“The work was interesting,” Crawford, now 69, said of her 12 years in the Army. “The people were interesting. I became blood brother to a mechanic in the motor pool at Karlsruhe (Germany) who was known to be kind of a rough character. And the places I got to live — I spent a Christmas in Vienna one year.
“There’s hardly anything I’d change.”