She Saw Myths Shot Down in the Army

Jeane Westin wanted to be a soldier when she learned about the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps during World War II. She went to the recruiting office to enlist when she was 13. “They were very kind and told me they would let me know if the age was ever lowered that much,” she said. Eight years later, she hadn’t changed her mind. During the Korean War, over her parents’ objections, she went back to that same recruiting office and joined the Army.

A cryptography specialist, she re-enlisted, served six years and made sergeant. She then went to college--on the GI Bill--and became a journalist. She did not, however, serve in the war. Despite the WAAC’s fine record in World War II, at the time of the Korean conflict there were only 11,000 women in the armed forces, and none were allowed to go to Korea, she said.

Nevertheless, her relatively short time in the service made an enormous impression, and she has written her first novel, “Love and Glory,” (Simon & Schuster, $17.95) about a group of WACs, the nation’s first women military personnel, who served during World War II. The book has been reprinted in England, Sweden, Israel and Italy and will be made into a CBS-TV miniseries.

Chose World War II

She chose the World War II setting for the novel, over the time she herself had been in the service, because, “That was the time I really wanted to be involved. I was born too late. As a country and as a people, then (during World War II) we were feeling like we felt week before last (when the space shuttle Challenger exploded).” She had written only nonfiction before, but chose the novel form for this story. “There are truths you can get at in fiction, things out of the experience that women carried away from the military. (As a result of the Women’s Army Corps) we found out that the old myth of women not being able to get along, like and support each other was a myth. Women discovered so much about themselves.

“I had been young, pampered, mothered,” Westin said. “The Army was the first time I had any responsibility. In the Army it (responsibility) is instant. . . . There are high expectations from the first. An interesting thing, looking back, is how much I loved it.”

On a larger scale, Westin thinks military service has provided enormous opportunities both as a vehicle for young women to discover their own competence and as a means of improving the image of women as workers and citizens. Significant numbers of women are involved. There are currently about 100,000 women in the armed forces and 1 million women veterans, Westin said. As one of the characters concludes at the end of her book, “. . . thousands of women had learned there was nothing they couldn’t learn, from firing an ack-ack gun to changing a truck tire, from courage and discipline to decisiveness and self-reliance. And for all time the girl babies soon to be born would kill the false dragon that women could not rely on one another. . . . The WACs won’t be a footnote to history. We’ll change history.”

Further and Faster

In Westin’s view, the military has advanced women further and faster than the civilian sector. When she was in the Army in the early 1950s, the military afforded opportunities for non-traditional work not found elsewhere. Some women she met were seeking adventure or to get away from home. The Army had just been integrated, and some of the women in her training group were minorities who at that time would have had little opportunity for comparable training and jobs in the civilian sector. “The Army is responsive,” she said. “It moves a lot faster than civilian life. It can. It’s autocratic. Things aren’t done by committee. If a general says do it, it’s done by nightfall.”

Her opinion is confirmed by a recent Rand Corp. study that said the role of the armed forces in women’s advancement “can hardly be overstated.” That report said that while only 3% of women work in “male” jobs in the civilian sector, one in three women in the military hold down such jobs. Not only are these women trained in these jobs, but their success has changed the image of women and proved to civilian employers that women can do “men’s work.”

Westin sees a disappointing aspect in the incorporation of women into the regular Army when the Women’s Army Corps was abolished in 1977. “Now I see a company, and the women are invisible, wearing camouflage, carrying guns. We don’t know they’re there. We tend to forget them. They’re hidden as far as their accomplishments and history.” However, she said, in the women’s corps, women were “second-class soldiers. We had more to prove in the military. We couldn’t carry a rifle and fight for our country. There was a lot of overcompensation. It was a joke that WAAC companies marched better than the men.”

Women still are barred from combat, but Westin thinks this issue is now a “peacetime argument based on our national repugnance (to sending women to die). Last week we saw it again, the reaction to the Challenger when women died. You never have real parity until absolute equality of access is based on ability. But it’s something to chew over in peacetime. If war comes, when the need is there, 10% of the military force is women and the point will dissipate.” When women are needed to fight, Westin thinks, then they will be sent to fight.

Not Like Character

Westin is not quite like the character in her novel who spoke of thousands of women and their daughters “killing the false dragon” of stereotypes about women. She says she has never forgotten her mother’s face when she stood on the train platform to see Westin off to the Army, and that is how she thought her own face looked recently when she learned that her daughter, Cara, 23, had faced death in her non-traditional job.

Cara Westin, one of 16 women officers in the 600-member Sacramento Police Department, was awarded a bronze medal for bravery. She had faced a man on drugs, who was shielding himself with a baby and threatening to kill her with a shotgun, and persuaded him to surrender.

Like her mother, who signed her Army enlistment form only after months of pleading, Jeane Westin said police work is “not what I’d have chosen for my daughter. I’m a non-traditional mom, but I wanted her to go to college and go to dances, academic, safe, traditional things.

“I’m not immune to cultural myths and imperatives. When I see my daughter walk in with her gun and handcuffs and bulletproof vest that covers her womanliness, I never fail to feel this catch and wish she was dressed to go to a dance instead of this vision of her as the protector rather than the protected.”

But, she says, “We have to keep seeing this, keep seeing that it is a fact that women are strong, dedicated, competent. That will get rid of some of the myths. When my daughter accepted her medal, some people who saw it on the TV news lost a little piece of that belief that women can’t be police officers.”