Recruiting Drive : Retired General Leads Campaign to Raise Funds, Find Veterans for Monument That Records History of Women in the Military

Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Wilma Vaught calls them “America’s best-kept military secret”--the estimated 1.8 million women who, since the Revolutionary War, have served in the armed forces.

“Every time there was a crisis, they turned to us,” says one of the nation’s most decorated women. “But it wasn’t until Operation Desert Storm that women in the service really got recognized.”

Vaught, who served 28 years and received 13 decorations before retiring in 1985, calls the lack of recognition “a major gap in American history.”

As president of the Women in Military Service Memorial Foundation, authorized by Congress in 1988 to construct a lasting memorial to women veterans, she is charged with filling that gap. Working from an office suite in Arlington, Va., with a staff of 10 and a national volunteer network, Vaught is trying to raise the initial $15 million needed to begin the memorial project.

She’s not only knocking on corporate doors for donations--she is also scouring the country for names. The project she’s spearheading will be a new kind of memorial--not a statue, nor a fountain nor an eternal flame. Rather, it will be a high-tech register where visitors can call up the name of a veteran and, on a computer screen, see her photograph, read her biography and, most importantly, share the reminiscences of her military experience.

The register will form the heart of the Memorial Theater, to be built at the unfinished main gateway to Arlington National Cemetery. Surrounding the computer register in the Memorial Theater will be 14 multimedia presentations chronicling the history of women’s service.

“It’s not just another memorial,” says Carla Corbin, architectural project director. “It’s writing a chapter of our history for everyone to read. And it has a future--it has to do with providing role models for little girls, and for little boys, about what women can do.”

Vaught says the group is trying “to register as many as possible of the women who have served. Their experiences are an integral part of a history that has never been documented.”

The project depends on public response. Working by word of mouth and an (800) informational telephone number, the nonprofit foundation so far has registered 60,000 women and raised about $3 million. The suggested registration donation is $25, but payment is not mandatory--getting registrations is the foundation’s top priority.

After three years of laying the groundwork, the foundation will get what Vaught calls “a major leap” today at a kickoff reception in the Mansfield Room of the Capitol. The event will introduce the National Tribute Committee--a high-powered assortment of legislators, celebrities, military, government officials and legislators. The outcome, sponsors hope, will be an organization in every state to publicize the new effort.

Now that the memorial is finally under way (“It’s about 200 years too late, but we are getting there,” said the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Mary Rose Oakar (D-Ohio), when it was signed in 1988.), there is an underlying sense of urgency.

“There are still a few World War I veterans living, and we need to locate them as soon as possible,” Vaught says.

The foundation is recruiting in three categories:

* There are 1.2 million living women veterans, and while the Department of Veterans Affairs provides state breakdowns in numbers (California leads the nation with 147,000), the names and addresses are protected by privacy laws.

* There are 425,000 women on active duty and in the National Guard and Reserve. Those names are available through the Freedom of Information Act.

* There are no statistics on the number of woman veterans who have died. The project sponsors have set an educated guess at 200,000 and are relying on descendants to provide information.

Vaught’s calendar is packed with speaking engagements, during which she stresses that “women in combat is not a new idea. . . . What really gets amusing is to realize that all the way back to 1898, when Spanish-American War troops were dying right and left of typhoid fever, they recruited 1,500 women to go on contract and serve. They were in uniform--the Army Nurses Corps.”

And in every U.S. military activity since, women have been recruited in national emergencies and sent home afterward. Gradually, their participation has been expanded from the traditional roles of nurses, clerks and supply administrators.

World War II, says Vaught, helped open up aviation for women: “Even though they were not in the military, the Women Airforce Service Pilots were flying planes of all kinds. They were in Burma, in China, they qualified for the GI bill and got educations. There were women teaching aerial gunnery, working on the Manhattan Project, women intelligence analysts . . . .”

Still, the progress was not linear. The 1950s and ‘60s saw shrinking roles. The Pentagon’s official attitude was that military women could only fill jobs “in conformance with the present cultural pattern of utilizing women’s services in this country.” And the issue of women being drafted fueled debates about the ill-fated equal rights amendment throughout the 1970s.

Vaught says it was the volunteer army that elevated women’s military status: “The volunteer army had quotas to fill, so women were recruited and introduced into non-traditional fields. What saved the all-volunteer concept was the ability to get women to come in. We went from 50,000 to 150,000 in all services.”

In fact, legislation freeing women from restricted military roles has passed the House of Representatives and is on its way to the Senate.

As the registration forms roll into her office, combining brisk official biographies with intensely personal experiences, Vaught has become an authority on the ambivalent relationship between the U.S. military and women. Her public talks are threaded with poignant first-person accounts of groundbreaking activity by women in the military:

* Eleanor Reilly was a Washington college student who enlisted “immediately” when World War I was declared: “I served at the New London (Conn.) submarine base as secretary to the commandant. I was sometimes called upon to use my language skills to interrogate German prisoners brought in. In the community’s World War I victory celebration, three other women veterans and I were denied permission to march in the parade, so we staged our own parade on the sidewalk as the official parade went up Main Street.”

* Elinore Bott Boyle of Lake Wilson, Minn., was a nurse in a World War II paraplegic ward: “You had to be sympathetic, stern, loving and forgiving, all in one package. . . . I’ll never forget them. V-J Day came and shortly thereafter our overseas orders for the South Pacific were cancelled and the order for all married nurses to be discharged came. This was an unhappy moment for me, as I loved the service and wanted to stay in. But that chance was not given me.”

* Elaine Demott Boone of Boston arrived at Annapolis in 1955 as the first woman physical therapy technician. Her rank was Hospital Man 3rd Class, U.S. Navy: “It was a great surprise to them when I turned up a woman, as my orders went through with the initial E . . . I had been assigned a bunk in the men’s quarters. After much ado, I was given a room in the attic of the hospital.”

* And from the Civil War diary of Clarissa Hobbs, who accompanied her husband to battle and enrolled as a nurse so she could work with him in the hospital: “Though I was recognized as nurse of Iowa 112th, so far there had been no arrangement made for nurses, so I never got my $13 per month . . . But the hospital work never felt burdensome, even when there was only a board with a blanket for mattress. . . . It was a work for love of native land and humanity.”

These experiences are the key to the memorial’s strength, says Corbin, who joined the staff in 1988 as adviser for the design competition.

“I was involved in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and a lot of its excitement was the excellence of the design and the depth of the cause. It wasn’t just another urban furnishing, and for me this memorial has the same quality.

“It began having meaning for me when I realized that what women had done in the military advanced the cause of all professional women. And nobody realizes it: You look around the country, and every little town square has its statue of a general and a horse. There is nothing that says women were there.”

When completed--supporters are aiming for the late 1990s--the memorial will correct that problem gracefully. In a city besieged with plans for, and controversy about, new memorials that often require bites of Washington’s disappearing parklands, the Women in Military Service Memorial gets high marks for its flexibility. It utilizes and enhances an existing historic structure, the Hemicycle, a 1932 retaining wall at the entrance to Arlington Cemetery.

The award-winning design (from 135 entries in a national competition) by Marion Gail Weiss and Michael Manfred of New York, locates the memorial building behind the wall. Its upper terrace is lit by a crown of glass spires that will glow softly in the night sky below the eternal flame of the John F. Kennedy grave site, and, still higher, the facade of the Custis-Lee mansion. Although there have been some fears that the new project might dominate the setting, Corbin says the sight will be “magical” and points out that three major commissions are reviewing each step of the design process.

“It is a women’s memorial, but it has to remain first the gateway to Arlington,” she says. “It’s very important to recognize our place in the urban design and not upset that balance.”

But the livelier debate over the new memorial centers--as did the decade of debate on the equal rights amendment--on the essential question of women’s roles. Although its national sponsors include four past Presidents and nine past secretaries of defense, the service women’s memorial project has its critics.

The Persian Gulf War and the unexpected sight of young mothers in battle garb kissing their families goodby has touched off anxiety across the spectrum. After championing equal opportunity for women in all segments of society, feminists are having second thoughts. Excluded historically from money and power, women have shaped values that should preserve civilization, not destroy it, they maintain, and to join the battle is to deny those values.

And many conservatives continue their vocal opposition to women going to war. Only last week on Cable News Network’s “Crossfire,” Vaught faced that opposition.

Eagle Forum founder and devoted anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly deplored a military system that “sends mothers of little babies into combat.” And co-host Patrick Buchanan invoked the U.S. tradition that “a man who lets his women do the fighting for him is considered a coward . . . women and children first is part of our national conscience.”

Vaught remains undaunted:

“The official position of military service is that the service people don’t want war. If you want to do something about that, you have to be within. And women have been there--it’s time to acknowledge them.”

HOW TO REGISTER

For a $25 donation, past or present service women can register themselves, or be registered by a friend or relative, in the Women in Military Service Memorial. Although donations go toward fund-raising, the nonprofit memorial foundation emphasizes that registration is a priority and that all service women who apply will be registered regardless of payment. For information, contact: Women in Military Service Memorial, Department 560, Washington, D.C. 20042-0560; (800) 222-2294.