Pioneering military women recognized on groundbreaking Washington D.C. Honor Flight
Apr. 22—Pioneering female veterans from Colorado gathered Friday around bronze Vietnam nurses and their patient in Washington, D.C. — a frozen moment of loss representing years of conflict many of the travelers lived.
Vietnam War-era nurse Rosey Dudden, 81, was one of three who laid a wreath at the foot of the Vietnam Women's Memorial along the National Mall as her fellow travelers and veterans saluted.
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"It was for all the women there that wish they could have done more to save lives," said Dudden, one of the nurses on the trip.
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The groundbreaking group — including women who manned missiles, trained troops, and translated Vietnamese — traveled together to Washington this week on a trip dedicated to recognizing their contributions.
Many served during Vietnam, when the country was enmeshed in a slow, bloody conflict that took a heavy toll on trauma nurses. At the same time the military was ever so slowly opening up new career fields for women, to those willing to incrementally push the Department of Defense toward equal opportunity for women, a decades-long process.
"In an environment where no one wants you there, it's really tough," said Linda Aldrich, one of the first female missileers.
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"The goal was to make sure we failed, and instead we succeeded."
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Southern Colorado Honor Flight set aside the trip for female veterans because, in the past, they have been hesitant to sign up for trips honoring those who served during the World War II, Korean and Vietnam eras since they didn't serve in combat roles, said Barbara Harris, a board member. It was first for the group, but probably will be held again, she said.
The absence of direct combat doesn't mean women were sheltered from the wreckage of war.
Dudden, a labor and delivery nurse in the Army, was sent to Vietnam weeks after getting married to serve in a field hospital for a year, where she would see overwhelming "rushes" of wounded that she likened to a movie scene.
"You did what you could. We tried to make them as comfortable as we could," she said, about the year she served from 1965 to 1966.
When she returned home to Denver, two hotels refused her and her husband because she was in her uniform, a memory that brought tears to her eyes on Friday.
Still, she tried to pick up a civilian life, despite bringing back a case of malaria and post-traumatic stress disorder that gave her nightmares and led her to withdraw from her family, including six children, for a time before she sought help from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Professionally, she went on to work as a hospice nurse for about 12 years.
"I felt like I could work with people and they could have a choice in how they died. That it wasn't life just grabbed from them in an instant," she said.
Those who survived in field hospitals where Dudden worked could be taken out for additional care on C-130s to Saigon or elsewhere. Dudden's fellow Honor Flight traveler, Air Force veteran Mary Littlejohn, worked on those planes with a team of five that could care for 30 people at a time, stacked six high on litters.
Littlejohn volunteered to go to Vietnam and described it as a tremendous learning experience she carried through her career. But just as important was learning to interact with her patients, she said.
"To be able to interact with these guys coming off the field, just let them know, you know: 'We're here for you.' ... Was as important as changing the dressing," she said.
Honor Flight
Southern Colorado Honor Flight is nonprofit that organizes free trips for veterans from the World War II, Korean and Vietnam eras to visit Washington D.C. This was the group's 16th flight. The group has a waitlist of 110 veterans and is hoping to organize a trip for 50 veterans in the fall. For more info or to apply visit honorflightsoco.net.
As the group toured the war memorials and other sights, Friday and Saturday, strangers, including an entire group of firefighters, stopped to thank them and the star of those thanks was Madeleine Bobbitt, a World War II veteran, who last visited the nation's capital in 1939.
Bobbitt was a tiny bit too short to enlist but stretched that extra half-inch to enlist in the Navy WAVES, short for Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, aimed at freeing up men for other duties.
Now 100, Bobbitt trained as an aviation machinist before she was sent to Oklahoma where she worked in administration and the Navy trained "all the little boys that thought they could be pirates," she said.
In Oklahoma, she met her husband, who also served in the Navy and survived the sinking of the USS Yorktown during the battle of Midway.
She noted her parents met during World War I and all her siblings served, demonstrating a propensity for military service that is fading as several military branches, including the Navy, struggle to recruit.
"They just don't want to serve today," she said.
Bobbitt, was apparently taken aback by all the recognition, including a standing ovation at the Military Women's Memorial by her fellow travelers that seemed to choke her up.
Several women on the trip described Bobbitt and other women of her era as helping to make their own service in new fields possible.
Army veteran Cindy Anderson, one of the early female drill sergeants, joined the Women's Army Corps, first created during WWII, right before the Army started integrating more roles in 1973.
At the time, basic training was still segregated and so she had to attend make-up class, but was not qualified on an M-16, the weapon her platoon would be issued.
When she showed up as the first woman in an all-male signal corps unit, dedicated to communications, she didn't have fatigues and wasn't qualified on her weapon.
The next week, her platoon sergeant took her out to qualify on an M-16.
"He said, 'Well you did all right with that. ... you just shot expert.'
"I was raised on a farm," Anderson recalled telling him.
She went on to train women and men together in basic training as a drill sergeant.
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"I would say the most challenging part of that program was getting higher-ranking enlisted personnel and officers to accept the fact that women can do these things," she said.
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Underscoring Anderson's point, Chief Master Sergeant JoAnne Bass, the first woman to serve as the highest ranking noncommissioned officer in the Air Force, met the Colorado veterans at the Air Force Memorial on Saturday to thank them and presented Bobbitt with her coin, a sign of honor and respect.
A volunteer on the trip, Cindy Norman, one of the early female graduates of the Air Force Academy who served for 20 years, noted that the progress toward equality took an intergenerational effort represented by those on the trip.
"We stand on their shoulders because they were there first and they helped boost us up and we are helping today's generation," she said.
