A New Voice Is Heard on Veterans Day

Violet Cowden can still recall when she was another face in the crowd at Veterans Day observances.

Although she had flown fighter planes during World War II, Cowden was among 1,074 female Air Force pilots who were denied recognition of their war service because of their gender.

But it was Cowden’s turn Monday to regale a small crowd of veterans with war stories when she gave the keynote address during the eighth annual Veterans Day program at El Toro Memorial Park here.

“We’re so happy that our women pilots have finally gotten the recognition they deserve,” the 80-year-old Huntington Beach resident said. “An airplane doesn’t know what [gender] is flying it.”

The Lake Forest program was among several countywide observances. Throughout the day, hundreds of people filed past the “moving wall,” a traveling replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at Knott’s Berry Farm Independence Hall, a park spokesman said. Earlier in the morning, the Orange County chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America hosted a pancake breakfast for some of the county’s 73,000 Vietnam War veterans.

On a hillside in El Toro Memorial Park, Cowden told a crowd of about 150 people about “an often forgotten part of our history.” She told the crowd how she left her teaching job in her small town of Spearfish, S.D., to join the other 1,073 women in the Women Air Force Service Pilot program.

Cowden and other female pilots tested planes, ferried top-secret weapons and delivered aircraft and towing targets through the sky to provide antiaircraft gunnery practice for male troops.

“Like many men, we too had a desire to serve our country and help in the war effort,” Cowden said.

But the WASPs, as the female pilots were called, remained an unrecognized part of the war effort, serving without benefit of military rank or insurance on their lives. Families of the 38 female pilots who died in the line of duty had to depend on donations collected by colleagues of their dead relatives.

Cowden recounted how the female pilots won a two-year bureaucratic battle for veterans’ benefits in 1979--two years after a congressional bill was approved.

Cowden, president of the Women’s Air Force Service Pilots, travels to schools, colleges and military bases to speak about her wartime experiences.

Several people who listened to her Monday said they were moved by her address.

“It’s a courageous thing they did to help our country,” said Jeremiah Williams, a Laguna Niguel eighth-grader who attended the program with his father, Brett, a Marine Corps veteran.

Their recognition is “long overdue,” said Gary Fortas, a Vietnam veteran from Mission Viejo.