“Tell your husband, thank you for his service.” I have heard this countless times, sometimes when I was still wearing my uniform. I guess his service was more important than mine.
“Ma’am, you can’t park there. It’s a veteran parking spot. Not a spouse parking spot.” I was seven months pregnant and had parked in a Veterans Only parking spot at the hardware store. The woman who stopped me to tell me I could not park there followed me into the store until I flashed my veteran ID card at her. She never apologized, just huffed and walked away.
“Do you know your sponsor Social Security Number (SSN) for your appointment?” “Yes, my SSN is…” “No, ma’am, I don’t need your SSN. I need your sponsor’s.” “I am the sponsor.” “No, I need…” This conversation continued for several minutes before they understood that I was indeed my own sponsor. I am part of a dual military couple. My husband and I met in the military. When we got married we had to schedule an appointment for my last name change and because it was my name changing, I scheduled the appointment. We were both in uniform but it was still assumed that I was a dependent and the appointment was under his SSN. Now married, I no longer had the autonomy to represent myself. I actually stopped wearing my wedding ring to appointments to avoid the repetitive song and dance surrounding my identification. It became both funnier and more frustrating when my husband got out of the military first, and he became the dependent. He came home complaining constantly about employees struggling to find him in the system because they were not looking for him up as a spouse but still as a service member. His service was constantly validated at the expense of my own. Since getting out of the military, the experience has continued. Transitioning back to the civilian world was a nightmare. Women veterans are part of a unique subset of the veteran community: a subset that involves constantly defending your service while being invalidated or ignored by both civilians and your fellow veterans—a community of invisible service. No one told me how hard it would be to leave the military and join two communities that did not see me. Even now I often feel like I have to justify my service to my peers, that if I do not tell people that I am a veteran then people will never consider other women and their service. I consider how my family will remember my service and how to pass on my family history of military service without being eclipsed by it.
According to the 2019 Gender and Veterans Demographics provided by the Department of Labor, two million women living in the United States are veterans. We make up 10 percent of the military population and 1.5 percent of the total United States population. The median age of women veterans is 51, 14 years younger than the median age of our male counterparts. By 2043, women are projected to make up 16.3 percent of all living veterans. Women have served in every war as everything from nurses, typists, codebreakers and pilots to most recently as official members of combat arms positions across the branches in 2016. If we have done so much for our communities and contributed consistently across military history, why is our service so invisible? In part I blame the media. Veterans in the media fit a certain stereotype: white, southern or inner city, straight, religious for some reason and very male. Women are relegated to the roles of wives and girlfriends or anomalies that will not last long in this masculine landscape. Similarly, issues of patriarchy and revisionist history obscure female contribution here in the same way that they do in every other aspect of society. I could probably write for days about how women in the military are often representative of larger societal experiences and hardships, but I will not throw my soapbox of ideology at you all today. Instead, this year for Veterans Day I would like to challenge who you visualize as a veteran. Imagine yourself, from a different lifetime, imagine your friends, your mom or aunt or grandmother. Consider the act of invisible service and whose stories are missing from your understanding of the veteran community. You would be surprised where you might find us.