129th Rescue Wing holds inaugural Women Veterans Day event

Story and photos by Staff Sgt. Crystal Housman
129th Rescue Wing Public Affairs

June 12, 2022

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – The California Air National Guard’s 129th Rescue Wing celebrated its female service members during a first-of-its-kind Women Veterans Day event, June 3, at Moffett Air National Guard Base.

Held during the wing’s monthly drill, the event included an official ceremony with a keynote address by Virginia Wimmer, who serves as the state’s deputy secretary for women veterans affairs at the California Department of Veterans Affairs.

“For us, we don’t take celebrating veterans – specifically our women and other underrepresented veterans – we don’t take that to be a one day ritual,” Wimmer said. “We look for any time of the year, day, month or hour to celebrate veterans, specifically our women veterans.”

Women Veterans Day, which is sometimes called the Women Veterans Recognition Day, is observed June 12 to commemorate the 1948 signing of the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act which allowed women to serve as permanent, full-time members of the U.S. military. Though the date is not recognized nationally, a number of states recognize the contribution of women veterans through local legislation, proclamations, or special events.

Wimmer, an Air Force veteran with 26 years of service, regaled the audience with stories of women who served in the military long before they were allowed to.

“Women have played a significant role in every single conflict, since the inception of our country, during the American Revolution, wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters fought on the battlefield right along the side of their husbands and fathers and brothers,” Wimmer said.

Many women served as nurses, prepared food, or mended clothes, she said, but others yearned for a chance to fight and filled more untraditional roles.

“They weren’t allowed to serve in combat roles, so many disguised themselves as men and boys so they could participate in the war,” Wimmer said.

She told the crowd about other women who served, marking milestones in every major conflict to preset, and placed special emphasis on recounting the story of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion’s service in World War II.

The segregated Black female Women’s Army Corps battalion was sent overseas as to help the U.S. Army straighten out a backlog of millions of pieces of mail headed to deployed U.S. service members. The Army struggled to fill postal billets, so letters stacked up while troops’ morale went down, she said.

Members of the Six Triple Eight – the battalion’s nickname – devised their own system to clear the backlog and route mail to troops on the line. In some cases, the mail was years overdue, Wimmer said, but the women of the 6888th found a way to get them delivered.

“This is the ingenuity and the revolutionary thinking of women,” she said.

The event was organized by Air Force veteran Carolann Wunderlin, who serves as the wing’s Airman and Family Readiness Program Manager, in collaboration with U.S. Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Jennifer Bush, senior enlisted leader of the 129th Force Support Flight.

Their goal was simple: celebrate women’s service and create an opportunity for women in the wing to network and talk candidly.

“I know from having served that when you go into the world and you run into another sister veteran, there’s something about that connection that brings you back,” Wunderlin said. “The time to start connecting though is now instead of when you’re out because it’s harder to make a connection.”

In addition to a formal ceremony to mark Women’s Veterans Day, the event included an afternoon workshop for female service members.

“Too many women Airmen and veterans are used to working alone out of self preservation,” Wunderlin said, “but we don’t have to be in a vacuum. We’re better at developing our careers and we are better personally when we’re networking."

According to the 2022 Portrait of Women in the Services report published by the Department of Defense Office for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, in fiscal year 2021 almost one in every five National Guard service members were women. In just the Air National Guard, the number is slightly higher at 21.8%.

At the 129th, the numbers are on par for officers, with females comprising 20% of the wing's officer corps. The wing's enlisted corps – which includes battlefield Airmen in pararescue jobs prohibited for women until 2015 – is lower with a demographic breakdown of 83% male and 17% female.

A women’s panel featuring Wunderlin, Wimmer, California Air National Guard Military Personnel Management Officer and lead personnelist Lt. Col. Nicole Farnham, and Chief Master Sgt. Sally Ford, senior enlisted leader of the 129th Security Forces Squadron, fostered conversation about transition planning, working in male-dominated career fields, the cross-road of gender and language, inclusion, and other topics.

“We are paving the way for those who don’t have a moment, let alone a whole day,” Farnham said, “those voiceless souls who are different and they’re told they’re never going to be good enough that they don’t belong here. That’s what today is. It’s inclusion.”

Removing barriers is important to Airman 1st Class Alehandra Bustos, a 129th Operations Group Airman who served on the event committee and helped plan the facilities.

“If we are trying to be inclusive and we are trying to be diverse, we shouldn’t be letting gender be a barrier,” she said. “At the end of the day, if we get deployed and our lives are on the line, it doesn’t matter if there’s a male or female standing next to you.

For Bustos, the opportunity to meet and talk candidly with other women in the wing, without rank or chains of command, was beneficial.

“I think having spaces to talk about issues and openly communicate allows for so much more camaraderie and you get your eyes opened to so many aspects of military life that you don’t normally get in your little bubble, especially in the Guard because we show up, do our jobs and go home,” Bustos said. “We don’t have that same sense of community.”

She is proud of the wing for prioritizing its female service members and hosting the California Air National Guard’s first Women’s Veterans Day event and hopes other units follow suit.

“I hope that us being the first ones to follow through with this means that the rest of the state and hopefully the country will follow through and create something like this,” Bustos said.

Wimmer’s goal is for every subsection of a veteran to be represented.

“We didn’t have a seat at the table. We didn’t have a voice in the process, but now we do,” Wimmer said. “That’s why we needed this.”