A-J Remembers: New Orleans woman enlisted in the U.S. Navy

Wilma Coon was born in New Orleans, attended girls' schools, and was brought up to be a proper young lady who would marry the proper young man from a proper family.

Then World War II came.

"At that time it was strictly patriotism," she remembers from her residence now at Mackenzie House in Lubbock.

"I went into the Navy in 1943. The girls had to be 20 years old, and I was sworn in on my 20th birthday," she said of her pioneering service in the WAVES - Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service.

Not every woman enjoyed what was seen then as a new world for the nation's military. Wilma, who was discovering the America beyond the horizons of New Orleans, was not one of those:

"I'm surprised they paid me to do it. For every bad time we had, we had two laughs."

It was an eye-opener for someone who had lived a relatively sheltered life.

"I grew up there. My girlfriend - my best friend - was from Lockport, N.Y. Her life upbringing was so different from mine - it was an education. And one of the young men that I dated one time in the Navy was a coal miner's son from Pennsylvania. Where would I have ever met someone like that?"

There were no routine sexual harassment charges in the military's response to enlisted women in that day.

"I don't think they really knew what to do with us, but they treated us like ladies. They had strict rules - for the men - about associating with us. And if they even touched us, they would jump on them about that.

"It was a good place for young girls to be."

She remembers that patriotism was the prevailing spirit in a nation united in a way that hasn't seemed possible since Vietnam.

"All the boys were lined up around the block to go in. It was quite a different attitude about serving," she said.

"We had four weeks of boot camp, as they called it in the Navy. They taught you how to march and how to salute, taught you the Navy way.

"From there, I went to Sampson Navy Hospital, which was training ground for the Hospital Corps. You learned how to do everything the Navy Way - everything in duplicate and triplicate. Then, I went to a regular hospital to start serving - the Brooklyn Navy Hospital in Brooklyn.

"I was seeing the North!"

Specifically, she was serving as a bedside nurse for the Navy, and for a time was thinking of working toward a medical doctor's degree.

"Then, I went to Lido Beach on Long Island. They had taken over a summer resort hotel, and it had become receiving barracks. Boys came in there from overseas while they cut their orders to go home; and the ones came in to go out, and were there until they went out.

"We had a small sick bay with maybe 30 beds. These were for boys going in who mostly had what they called 'cat' fever. It was like a flu. I remember one boy's mother wrote to one of the young doctors and asked him what cat fever was, so excited that her son had this strange disease. And the doctor wrote back and said, 'If you give them two APCs (aspirin, phenacetin and caffeine) every four hours and they get better, that's cat fever.'"

As a Navy nurse there was a time of ideal duty, and it was at a mountaintop facility outside Honolulu.

"It was one of the most beautiful hospitals I have ever seen. It was on the mountaintop. That was in 1945 when the war ended. Every ward came out and you had a ward over here and a ward over there, and there was space in between them. At the back all the way across was a screened-in porch, so the ambulatory patients could sit out there if they wanted to. And it overlooked the harbor so you saw the ships going out.

"It was beautiful."

She remembers, "There was a Japanese plane that had been shot down, and they had stripped it. There was nothing left but just the body of the plane. They had stripped it, studying it, or doing what they do with those."

She served briefly on board a ship, the USS Rescue. "I thought that was the most beautiful ship I had ever seen. I look back on it, though, and from what I've seen today, the ships were so small then. We thought they were big, but they were small."

She also knew the skipper of the submarine USS Boarfish and, along with a WAVES friend, was invited aboard for lunch.

"Talk about cozy - I don't know how they could live like that - but submariners are a special breed of men. Their bunks, they had a man sleeping here, and a torpedo right there; then another man up here, and another torpedo. They couldn't even sit up in bed because of the torpedoes. They had to sort of go in sideways."

Following the war, she entered medical school, but after a time in school at Memphis, Tennessee, then two years in Washington University, she could see not only how difficult it was going to be, but that it was still mostly a "good old boy's club," and she left that possibility for life as a wife and mother.

A highlight for 2014 rekindled her memories of the 1940s and World War II. She was one of the honorees of the South Plains Honor Flight.

"I had been to Washington, and I had taken tours, but I had never seen Washington that way. I can't tell you how much I enjoyed it."

Although she is now dependent upon a wheelchair, she found that wasn't an obstacle to taking the flight. Everything had been thought of by the organizers, given the contributions of supporters across the South Plains to provide for each passenger.

She remembers, "They had school buses of children - the little girls wanted pictures with me, and the little boys would come over and say thank you for your service, and shake hands with me. Everybody welcomed us."

She remembers another thing also, and pauses to control her voice but is unable to keep back tears when relating it.

"The biggest honor I had ... they asked me to do the presentation of the wreath. There were four of us that presented the wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier."

Most of all, Wilma is a patriot. She waits again for control of an unsteady voice, with tears that can't be restrained, before expressing how she feels to be an American:

"Every morning when I wake up ... and every night before I go to sleep ... I thank God that I was born in the United States."

ray.westbrook@lubbockonline.com

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