Sisters-in-arms: black women veterans played a major role in the armed services

Ebony, March, 1994 by Karima A. Haynes

Dr. Doris 1. (Lucki) Allen had been waiting more Man 40 years for this day, ever since she enlisted in the U.S. Army in October 1950, through the Korean War and a three-year tour of duty in Vietnam. It was the day when, at long last, women war veterans would receive the recognition they so rightly deserved and so desperately sought.

The retired psychologist has flown across the country from her home in Oakland, Calif., to Washington, D.C., so she could be present at the Veteran's Day dedication of a memorial honoring women Vietnam veterans. The bronze monument, depicting two service-women - one Black and one White - aiding a wounded soldier is a testament to the courage and sacrifice of an women who served in the armed forces.

Hoping to beat the crowd, Allen and her Army buddy, Bernice Boyd, got to the memorial in the early morning on that November day. They found a spot close to the memorial just behind the ropes cordoning off the monument. "I had a really good view," Allen recalls. "But then [event coordinators] came along and put up a fence. And when they did that, my frustration just killed me. It was almost like, Here we go again.' I felt like they were shutting us out. I felt like they never wanted to believe that women were in combat or anywhere close to the fighting, so we didn't deserve to be honored."

Disgusted and disappointed, Allen walked away from he memorial and the throng of veterans and news media it had attracted. But the following day, when the crush of veterans and journalists were gone, she returned to the memorial. This time, however, she was not overcome with feelings of rejection, but with feelings of affirmation. "Here, finally, all the women who served in so many wars and in so many places were now validated," Allen thought as she stood before the sculpture. "Women like Harriet Tubman, the 300,000 women who served in World War II and those who served in Korea and Vietnam. People will finally know that we hurt, too, that we care and that we're back."

Like thousands of her Black sister-in-arms who have served in every military conflict from the Civil War to Desert Storm, Allen suffered the racist and sexist attitudes of a White maledominated military. She endured the racial slights and the sexist jokes throughout her military career, which included service as a military newspaper editor in Japan from 1951 to 1953 during the Korean War, and as an intelligence officer with the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion in Vietnam from 1967 to 1970. At long last, the career military woman had received the moment of recognition she had been waiting for:

Sarah Bewley of Newark, N.J., is another Black Army veteran who sought recognition and comfort at the base of the memorial on that chilly day last November. By going to the statue, she hoped to better understand the contradictory feelings of pain and pride that still linger in her soul even though two decades have passed since she served in Cambodia. "I was over-whelmed at the memorial," Bewley recalls. "I had a lot of mixed feelings - there were the women I hadn't seen in 18 to 20 years, the military pomp and circumstance and the news media coverage. There were so many things to deal with."

Still, Bewley felt a certain peace wash over her as she gazed at the memorial. "The monument says something different to each individual woman," she says softly. "You have to have been there in the service to know what it is saying to you. It is a private sanctuary; a private peacefulness. After all this time. It's about time."

But for some Black women veterans, like retired Army Sgt. Maj. Grendel A. Howard of Nottoway County, Va., the memorial was the last place they wanted to be on Veterans Day, or any other day for that matter. "Going to the memorial never appealed to me," says Howard, who enlisted after the Korean War and served three years in Vietnam before retiring in 1985. "Things like that generate had feelings. There is no need to regurgitate bad memories. When I left the Army, I left the Army."

Howard says she "refused to get emotionally involved in the military because her hopes had been raised and dashed so many times. Instead, she viewed the military as a job and a means to reach her financial goals of building a house in rural Virginia, saving enough for retirement and maintaining her health insurance after she left the military. "I volunteered to go to Vietnam," Howard says. " wanted to go because I would make more money because of hazardous duty pay and wouldn't have to pay income taxes. I stayed there for three tours, save $17,000, got promoted twice and came back to the States."

Economics aside, Howard considers Vietnam to be the best years of her military service. "War creates an intense camaraderie among people - mostly because everybody is scared to death," she says with a laugh. "And, of course, Vietnam was a war with no battle lines. Everybody was subject to be blown up no matter where you were, so that kept the adrenaline pumping. You were on a constant high."