PHOTO: Ana Beatriz Cholo (left) and Colleen Kelly aboard the USS Simon Lake in 1989 head to France from Scotland. Cholo family photo.
In harm's way: Ana joins the Navy, c. 1987
By Ana Beatriz Cholo, Tribune staff reporter
*My story was published on Oct. 14, 2001 in the Chicago Tribune shortly after I came to work there. I was motivated by a sexist remark I noticed in a column written by a female colleague. She wrote: "We have prepared ourselves for sending our husbands and sons and brothers off to battle." Anyway, I came across an excellent New York Times story about how women in the military have been fighting in combat - heroically and quietly - in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.
By Ana Beatriz Cholo, Tribune staff reporter
*My story was published on Oct. 14, 2001 in the Chicago Tribune shortly after I came to work there. I was motivated by a sexist remark I noticed in a column written by a female colleague. She wrote: "We have prepared ourselves for sending our husbands and sons and brothers off to battle." Anyway, I came across an excellent New York Times story about how women in the military have been fighting in combat - heroically and quietly - in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.
Fourteen years ago, I enlisted in the Navy. Patriotism is not why I joined. That came slowly and later.
I was a 17-year-old high school graduate working as a phone operator at a hotel near Disneyland. I loved going to rock concerts and hanging out in L.A. on the weekends. Sheltered but still a little wild, I was neither particularly motivated nor armed with the kind of academic resume that would even get me into a state college.
I halfheartedly enrolled in community college and told everyone I was a film major (actually I was enrolled in History of Film 101). But the hassle from my parents was becoming unbearable and at the time, I was not disciplined enough for higher education. Freedom was being anywhere but home.
For that, I turned to the Navy.
It was on Monday, Sept. 28, 1987, that this self-professed pacifist walked into a recruiting office.
My first choice was the Air Force, but when I showed up, the air boys were out to lunch, according to the sailors dutifully manning their desks.
Two days later, I was sworn in. Three months later, I was showering with dozens of strange women in Orlando, learning the finer points of spit-shining boots and properly tucking in "hospital corners" during boot camp.
A newspaper columnist practically invited me to write this story on behalf of women in the military when she recently wrote, "We have prepared ourselves for sending our husbands and sons and brothers off to battle."
That struck me as odd.
More than 203,000 women serve on active duty and about 147,000 in the reserves. That is about 15 percent of the armed forces.
Since the Revolutionary War, women, as nurses, spies, pilots, cooks or disguised soldiers, have participated in every war this country has been involved in. But regardless of whether women worked on the front lines or behind them, there is little distinction between getting killed when someone pulls a
trigger and getting killed while carrying ammunition.
This circle of sisters has grown and proved to be a formidable force. These sisters have joined their brothers, and their differences have shaped the military. As a sailor recently said, "The infusion of outlooks gives us the balance we need to make the very best decisions about actions that can save or
end lives, countries, cultures and ideals."
In a letter to a newspaper in Virginia, the executive officer of the USS Cole responded to criticism that women aboard his ship did little to save their ship or shipmates in the wake of the terrorist bombing that killed 17 sailors and wounded 39 last year in Yemen.
Lt. Cmdr. Chris Peterschmidt mentioned Petty Officer 1st Class Margaret Lopez, who was hurt in the attack but thought to help another sailor escape through a crack in the hull. Ignoring her injuries and the fuel-slicked waters, she struggled back into the ship to search for more survivors. Then there's Lt.
Cmdr. Deborah Courtney, the ship's chief engineer, who worked non-stop for almost four days to stave off further disaster amid the tinderbox of water, fuel and live electric cables. And when they needed to man a .50-caliber machine gun on the flight deck, the XO did not hesitate to turn to the ship's best shot,
Gunner's Mate 2nd Class Jennifer Long.
Peterschmidt said: "It didn't cross my mind that the first person I ordered to such an exposed position was a woman. And by the speed with which she raced to man that dangerous post, it obviously didn't cross her mind either."
"The country could not go to war without women," said retired Air Force Capt. Barbara Wilson, who enlisted in 1949, a year after the service was opened to women volunteers in peacetime. A feminist even before the word was invented, Wilson now keeps busy on the Internet as perhaps the most vocal proponent of women serving in the armed forces.
Wilson said she is not talking only about female or male pilots who seem to get a good chunk of the glory.
"We're talking about all the jobs that people are doing," she said in an interview. "The top gun cannot go out there without his ground crew."
On a visit to Bosnia-Herzegovina last year, retired Brig. Gen. Wilma Vaught, president of the board of directors for the Women's Memorial and one of the most highly decorated women in the military, noticed female military police guarding the perimeter of the joint forces compound. When she commented to the Air Force unit commander that the women must be scared, he replied, "They aren't any more scared than the 19-year-old males assigned to do the job."
Vaught, pleased with his answer, said she has always that, to be considered full citizens, women must "share in the cost of citizenship, and a part of that cost is service to your country."
- - -
Enlisting for me was an unusual act partly because my parents emigrated from Latin America before I was born and nobody in my family, much less a woman, had served in the military anywhere.
I still laugh at the memory of our company commander arranging us in a circle to listen to Lee Greenwood's twangy country anthem, "God Bless the USA," as we held hands. Country music wasn't my thing then.
Today, although the line "And I won't forget the men who died, who gave that right to me" still gives me pause, I listen to the rest of the song with tears in my eyes.
After boot camp, I was ordained a storekeeper and I learned my "rate," or job, at a technical school in Meridian, Miss. After a couple of weeks of leave in California (which, by the way, didn't seem so bad now), I was shipped off to the USS Simon Lake (since decommissioned) in Scotland.
My work consisted mostly of physical labor. We pushed, pulled and dragged heavy crates, every assortment of boxes and 50-gallon drums of flammable, mysterious substances up ladders. We delivered them to storerooms deep in the bowels of the ship. The work was usually done with a minimum of complaining from men or women.
To complain meant you were weak, and women had to prove they had a right to be in this New Navy that allowed women the pleasure of serving on ships. Regardless of the physiological differences between a man and a woman, we had to literally pull more than our weight.
With grudging reluctance, I would awaken at 3 a.m. and bundle up in an orange marshmallow of a suit for my watch. Peering into the darkness of the cold, wet, windy Scottish night, I could not fathom that enemies unseen would venture forth from the loch nestled in the quiet solitude of the lower Highlands.
The four years of military experience were overwhelming and significant. We worked hard and we played hard.
It is difficult to explain to civilians what it's really like to live on a ship. As I walked around the passageways, I knew that the life I was living was strange, yet exciting. It didn't get any less so when I wore a hardhat and greens and drove a forklift in Puerto Rico as a part of the Public Works Department ran by the Seabees, a construction unit in the Navy.
By all means, I was not the perfect sailor.
Not even close.
I was the one who opened her mouth one too many times and ended up washing pots and pans (enormous ones) in the galley during the first few months of duty.
The good ones wake before reveille to iron their dungarees. They stay up late at night to shine their shoes before an early-morning inspection, and they study earnestly for their advancement exams.
They are perhaps like "Tracy," the electronics, communications and information systems officer aboard the USS Milius, a destroyer now sailing in perilous waters. She was also wild at 18, and family and friends wondered how this "free spirit" could conform to a military lifestyle. She went in as an enlisted sailor in 1983 and now is a respected officer.
"Twenty years ago, our culture wasn't ready to have Mommy on a warship," she wrote in an e-mail sent from her ship. "Today, Mommy is an integral part of one of the most powerful warships to sail."
She goes on to say that, even though she serves with intense pride, she fervently wishes for peace.
"I'm not a warmonger. I'm not a pacifist. I'm a Wife, a Mother, a Sailor and an American. I love my family, my life, and the ideals and freedoms I have vowed to protect. I'm just like a whole bunch of other women and men out there getting ready to fight."
Some are just in the beginning stages of an experience that will change them in ways unimaginable--like mine did.
- - -
On Sept. 11, 2001, Aviation Recruits "Donna May," 23, and "Amy Lynn," 18, were in their fifth week of Navy boot camp at Great Lakes Naval Training Center. It was service week, when recruits get a taste of what it's like to work on a Navy base.
The women were looking forward to the end of boot camp. They were anxious to learn their trade and join the fleet of sailors stationed in all parts of the world.
But when a radio news bulletin about the attacks interrupted their work on that fateful Tuesday, their feelings began to change.
They, like many others, had joined mostly for the travel, training and college money, maybe a tinge of patriotism. Now, they were dealing with the normal feelings soldiers and sailors have when faced with war--a resolve to do what they have signed up to do, with an undercurrent of fear and excitement.
With the threat of military action, some of these women's shipmates balked at the thought of actually becoming involved in battle. For many, their only experience with conflict had been violent video games and a shady memory of CNN footage of missiles being fired over Iraq a decade ago, when they were barely in grade school.
Amy Lynn, who will attend three weeks of aviation school after boot camp, likely will eat her Thanksgiving chow on a ship. The sailor from Texas also joked about how she may be scrubbing decks, an unglamorous but necessary housekeeping duty for sailors. Her tone, however, becomes serious when she speaks of the responsibility she feels.
"We know our job, we've been trained just as well as the men," said Amy Lynn, speaking for all women in the military at the beginning of her eighth week of training.
She added. "I don't want you to feel no worse if a female dies."
- - -
After 20 years of women serving on ships, and most recently on combat ships, the passageways have been cleared by the older generations that suffered through harassment and ignorance. The younger women will not confront the same level of discrimination, thanks to the fallout from Tailhook and subsequent sex-related scandals.
Nowadays, equality and tolerance must be preached in boot camp, and gender classifications, at least in the Navy, have been replaced with simply "shipmate."
They do not abide by the outdated adage of "just as mother is what a woman is, soldier is what a man is." Some men never fight, and some women never have babies.
Donna May, the other "boot camp," was born in the Philippines and raised in California. She is intensely patriotic and comes from a family that holds high expectations for her. Although cautious and soft-spoken by nature, she says she is ready for whatever comes.
"I could say that I'm scared because of the future," the serious young woman said. "You don't know. . . . It's unknown as far as what I am going to do. If it comes to that, like I have to fight, it's a belief that I have to serve my country in order to preserve freedom because who else is going to do it? Not everybody is willing."
My own limited contact with war helped spawn my patriotic feelings.
During the gulf war, I joined the crowd and put in my request chit to ship out to the gulf. But apparently they did not need the sailors who were desperate to leave the beautiful island paradise of Puerto Rico in order to see some action. So we stayed and worked on our tans and took scuba-diving lessons.
I did not want war, but once we got involved in it, I figuratively spat at those who did not support the troops. No more Vietnam, I thought. The soldiers, sailors and airmen who served with me did not personally declare war, but once our government did, we were left with no choice but to defend and support our country's decision.
I studied American history, so I am not blind to the mistakes the United States has made and perhaps continues to make regarding foreign and domestic policies. But to an extent, I am willing to look past some of the collective errors the leaders of this country have made because of our high ideals.
We are not a perfect country but we're a damn good one. It's also not a perfect military but it has gotten better.
- - -
Even though gulf war veteran Pamela Waterson was medically discharged after post-traumatic stress disorder hindered her work performance, she would have stayed in if she had been given the option. The 32-year-old Army sergeant's father was in the Army, her mother was in the Marines and her brothers and
sisters also followed into the service. During Desert Storm she was in Jubail, Saudi Arabia, loading and unloading tanks, vehicles and ammunition from ships and operating cranes and forklifts.
"During the war, you didn't have to be on the front lines to experience something deadly," Waterson said. One night, during guard duty, a Scud missile blew up over the pier and fell into the water close by.
In October 1990, "Gianna" left her 6-year-old son in the care of his father and left for the gulf. Her unit, made up mostly of female soldiers, drove large, unwieldy fuel trucks in the desert, staying close behind the tanks. They were always on the move. Their unit was shot at several times.
"I remember watching bullets hit the sand on either side of me," she said from the small mountain town of Overgaard, Ariz. "You're in a whole other world when it's that close to you. I'm just so terrified to go back. At the time I was there, I wasn't scared."
But now, at 41, she is a little older and wiser and much more conscious of her own mortality.
She worries about her 16-year-old son. She worries that, as a reservist, she might be seeing the desert again. If the call comes, however, she will go, she said. Without hesitation.
It is this inner resolve that many have gained from their experiences. It is what the Navy tapped inside of me. It gave me the strength to go on to college and graduate from a major university with two degrees. It is what the military, difficulties and all, is capable of giving women now as they face a greater
challenge than I faced.
The stories are begging to be told.
If you have a female vet in your community, ask her about her story.
More likely than not, it is worth telling.
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS (color): Ana Beatriz Cholo (right) with her mother, Nancy B. Cholo, after boot camp in Orlando in March 1988.
I was a 17-year-old high school graduate working as a phone operator at a hotel near Disneyland. I loved going to rock concerts and hanging out in L.A. on the weekends. Sheltered but still a little wild, I was neither particularly motivated nor armed with the kind of academic resume that would even get me into a state college.
I halfheartedly enrolled in community college and told everyone I was a film major (actually I was enrolled in History of Film 101). But the hassle from my parents was becoming unbearable and at the time, I was not disciplined enough for higher education. Freedom was being anywhere but home.
For that, I turned to the Navy.
It was on Monday, Sept. 28, 1987, that this self-professed pacifist walked into a recruiting office.
My first choice was the Air Force, but when I showed up, the air boys were out to lunch, according to the sailors dutifully manning their desks.
Two days later, I was sworn in. Three months later, I was showering with dozens of strange women in Orlando, learning the finer points of spit-shining boots and properly tucking in "hospital corners" during boot camp.
A newspaper columnist practically invited me to write this story on behalf of women in the military when she recently wrote, "We have prepared ourselves for sending our husbands and sons and brothers off to battle."
That struck me as odd.
More than 203,000 women serve on active duty and about 147,000 in the reserves. That is about 15 percent of the armed forces.
Since the Revolutionary War, women, as nurses, spies, pilots, cooks or disguised soldiers, have participated in every war this country has been involved in. But regardless of whether women worked on the front lines or behind them, there is little distinction between getting killed when someone pulls a
trigger and getting killed while carrying ammunition.
This circle of sisters has grown and proved to be a formidable force. These sisters have joined their brothers, and their differences have shaped the military. As a sailor recently said, "The infusion of outlooks gives us the balance we need to make the very best decisions about actions that can save or
end lives, countries, cultures and ideals."
In a letter to a newspaper in Virginia, the executive officer of the USS Cole responded to criticism that women aboard his ship did little to save their ship or shipmates in the wake of the terrorist bombing that killed 17 sailors and wounded 39 last year in Yemen.
Lt. Cmdr. Chris Peterschmidt mentioned Petty Officer 1st Class Margaret Lopez, who was hurt in the attack but thought to help another sailor escape through a crack in the hull. Ignoring her injuries and the fuel-slicked waters, she struggled back into the ship to search for more survivors. Then there's Lt.
Cmdr. Deborah Courtney, the ship's chief engineer, who worked non-stop for almost four days to stave off further disaster amid the tinderbox of water, fuel and live electric cables. And when they needed to man a .50-caliber machine gun on the flight deck, the XO did not hesitate to turn to the ship's best shot,
Gunner's Mate 2nd Class Jennifer Long.
Peterschmidt said: "It didn't cross my mind that the first person I ordered to such an exposed position was a woman. And by the speed with which she raced to man that dangerous post, it obviously didn't cross her mind either."
"The country could not go to war without women," said retired Air Force Capt. Barbara Wilson, who enlisted in 1949, a year after the service was opened to women volunteers in peacetime. A feminist even before the word was invented, Wilson now keeps busy on the Internet as perhaps the most vocal proponent of women serving in the armed forces.
Wilson said she is not talking only about female or male pilots who seem to get a good chunk of the glory.
"We're talking about all the jobs that people are doing," she said in an interview. "The top gun cannot go out there without his ground crew."
On a visit to Bosnia-Herzegovina last year, retired Brig. Gen. Wilma Vaught, president of the board of directors for the Women's Memorial and one of the most highly decorated women in the military, noticed female military police guarding the perimeter of the joint forces compound. When she commented to the Air Force unit commander that the women must be scared, he replied, "They aren't any more scared than the 19-year-old males assigned to do the job."
Vaught, pleased with his answer, said she has always that, to be considered full citizens, women must "share in the cost of citizenship, and a part of that cost is service to your country."
- - -
Enlisting for me was an unusual act partly because my parents emigrated from Latin America before I was born and nobody in my family, much less a woman, had served in the military anywhere.
I still laugh at the memory of our company commander arranging us in a circle to listen to Lee Greenwood's twangy country anthem, "God Bless the USA," as we held hands. Country music wasn't my thing then.
Today, although the line "And I won't forget the men who died, who gave that right to me" still gives me pause, I listen to the rest of the song with tears in my eyes.
After boot camp, I was ordained a storekeeper and I learned my "rate," or job, at a technical school in Meridian, Miss. After a couple of weeks of leave in California (which, by the way, didn't seem so bad now), I was shipped off to the USS Simon Lake (since decommissioned) in Scotland.
My work consisted mostly of physical labor. We pushed, pulled and dragged heavy crates, every assortment of boxes and 50-gallon drums of flammable, mysterious substances up ladders. We delivered them to storerooms deep in the bowels of the ship. The work was usually done with a minimum of complaining from men or women.
To complain meant you were weak, and women had to prove they had a right to be in this New Navy that allowed women the pleasure of serving on ships. Regardless of the physiological differences between a man and a woman, we had to literally pull more than our weight.
With grudging reluctance, I would awaken at 3 a.m. and bundle up in an orange marshmallow of a suit for my watch. Peering into the darkness of the cold, wet, windy Scottish night, I could not fathom that enemies unseen would venture forth from the loch nestled in the quiet solitude of the lower Highlands.
The four years of military experience were overwhelming and significant. We worked hard and we played hard.
It is difficult to explain to civilians what it's really like to live on a ship. As I walked around the passageways, I knew that the life I was living was strange, yet exciting. It didn't get any less so when I wore a hardhat and greens and drove a forklift in Puerto Rico as a part of the Public Works Department ran by the Seabees, a construction unit in the Navy.
By all means, I was not the perfect sailor.
Not even close.
I was the one who opened her mouth one too many times and ended up washing pots and pans (enormous ones) in the galley during the first few months of duty.
The good ones wake before reveille to iron their dungarees. They stay up late at night to shine their shoes before an early-morning inspection, and they study earnestly for their advancement exams.
They are perhaps like "Tracy," the electronics, communications and information systems officer aboard the USS Milius, a destroyer now sailing in perilous waters. She was also wild at 18, and family and friends wondered how this "free spirit" could conform to a military lifestyle. She went in as an enlisted sailor in 1983 and now is a respected officer.
"Twenty years ago, our culture wasn't ready to have Mommy on a warship," she wrote in an e-mail sent from her ship. "Today, Mommy is an integral part of one of the most powerful warships to sail."
She goes on to say that, even though she serves with intense pride, she fervently wishes for peace.
"I'm not a warmonger. I'm not a pacifist. I'm a Wife, a Mother, a Sailor and an American. I love my family, my life, and the ideals and freedoms I have vowed to protect. I'm just like a whole bunch of other women and men out there getting ready to fight."
Some are just in the beginning stages of an experience that will change them in ways unimaginable--like mine did.
- - -
On Sept. 11, 2001, Aviation Recruits "Donna May," 23, and "Amy Lynn," 18, were in their fifth week of Navy boot camp at Great Lakes Naval Training Center. It was service week, when recruits get a taste of what it's like to work on a Navy base.
The women were looking forward to the end of boot camp. They were anxious to learn their trade and join the fleet of sailors stationed in all parts of the world.
But when a radio news bulletin about the attacks interrupted their work on that fateful Tuesday, their feelings began to change.
They, like many others, had joined mostly for the travel, training and college money, maybe a tinge of patriotism. Now, they were dealing with the normal feelings soldiers and sailors have when faced with war--a resolve to do what they have signed up to do, with an undercurrent of fear and excitement.
With the threat of military action, some of these women's shipmates balked at the thought of actually becoming involved in battle. For many, their only experience with conflict had been violent video games and a shady memory of CNN footage of missiles being fired over Iraq a decade ago, when they were barely in grade school.
Amy Lynn, who will attend three weeks of aviation school after boot camp, likely will eat her Thanksgiving chow on a ship. The sailor from Texas also joked about how she may be scrubbing decks, an unglamorous but necessary housekeeping duty for sailors. Her tone, however, becomes serious when she speaks of the responsibility she feels.
"We know our job, we've been trained just as well as the men," said Amy Lynn, speaking for all women in the military at the beginning of her eighth week of training.
She added. "I don't want you to feel no worse if a female dies."
- - -
After 20 years of women serving on ships, and most recently on combat ships, the passageways have been cleared by the older generations that suffered through harassment and ignorance. The younger women will not confront the same level of discrimination, thanks to the fallout from Tailhook and subsequent sex-related scandals.
Nowadays, equality and tolerance must be preached in boot camp, and gender classifications, at least in the Navy, have been replaced with simply "shipmate."
They do not abide by the outdated adage of "just as mother is what a woman is, soldier is what a man is." Some men never fight, and some women never have babies.
Donna May, the other "boot camp," was born in the Philippines and raised in California. She is intensely patriotic and comes from a family that holds high expectations for her. Although cautious and soft-spoken by nature, she says she is ready for whatever comes.
"I could say that I'm scared because of the future," the serious young woman said. "You don't know. . . . It's unknown as far as what I am going to do. If it comes to that, like I have to fight, it's a belief that I have to serve my country in order to preserve freedom because who else is going to do it? Not everybody is willing."
My own limited contact with war helped spawn my patriotic feelings.
During the gulf war, I joined the crowd and put in my request chit to ship out to the gulf. But apparently they did not need the sailors who were desperate to leave the beautiful island paradise of Puerto Rico in order to see some action. So we stayed and worked on our tans and took scuba-diving lessons.
I did not want war, but once we got involved in it, I figuratively spat at those who did not support the troops. No more Vietnam, I thought. The soldiers, sailors and airmen who served with me did not personally declare war, but once our government did, we were left with no choice but to defend and support our country's decision.
I studied American history, so I am not blind to the mistakes the United States has made and perhaps continues to make regarding foreign and domestic policies. But to an extent, I am willing to look past some of the collective errors the leaders of this country have made because of our high ideals.
We are not a perfect country but we're a damn good one. It's also not a perfect military but it has gotten better.
- - -
Even though gulf war veteran Pamela Waterson was medically discharged after post-traumatic stress disorder hindered her work performance, she would have stayed in if she had been given the option. The 32-year-old Army sergeant's father was in the Army, her mother was in the Marines and her brothers and
sisters also followed into the service. During Desert Storm she was in Jubail, Saudi Arabia, loading and unloading tanks, vehicles and ammunition from ships and operating cranes and forklifts.
"During the war, you didn't have to be on the front lines to experience something deadly," Waterson said. One night, during guard duty, a Scud missile blew up over the pier and fell into the water close by.
In October 1990, "Gianna" left her 6-year-old son in the care of his father and left for the gulf. Her unit, made up mostly of female soldiers, drove large, unwieldy fuel trucks in the desert, staying close behind the tanks. They were always on the move. Their unit was shot at several times.
"I remember watching bullets hit the sand on either side of me," she said from the small mountain town of Overgaard, Ariz. "You're in a whole other world when it's that close to you. I'm just so terrified to go back. At the time I was there, I wasn't scared."
But now, at 41, she is a little older and wiser and much more conscious of her own mortality.
She worries about her 16-year-old son. She worries that, as a reservist, she might be seeing the desert again. If the call comes, however, she will go, she said. Without hesitation.
It is this inner resolve that many have gained from their experiences. It is what the Navy tapped inside of me. It gave me the strength to go on to college and graduate from a major university with two degrees. It is what the military, difficulties and all, is capable of giving women now as they face a greater
challenge than I faced.
The stories are begging to be told.
If you have a female vet in your community, ask her about her story.
More likely than not, it is worth telling.
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS (color): Ana Beatriz Cholo (right) with her mother, Nancy B. Cholo, after boot camp in Orlando in March 1988.
Copyright 2001 The Chicago Tribune
All Rights Reserved
