THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 18, 1994 TAG: 9412140408
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 87 lines
JOSETTE DERMODY WINGO remembers well-meaning Monsignor O'Callaghan at the altar rail, asking prayers before Mass for the fighting forces of World War II:
``To be sure,'' intoned the priest, ``I don't know what our beloved country is coming to when we send our young ladies off to war.''
As if we were any the less bereft in sending our young gentlemen; but Father was already way behind the times.
``My face flamed,'' Wingo recalls. ``Doesn't he know that this is 1944? And hasn't he ever heard of Joan of Arc?''
Or, at least, of Specialist (G) Second Class Josette Dermody, U.S. Navy Women's Reserve - Wingo's military designation at the time. Service Number 766 73 28. Oerlikon ring gunsight instructor, Armed Guard Center, Treasure Island, Calif.
She was a Wave.
Now she's a septuagenarian grandparent with a master's degree in education who writes stories. One of the best is her autobiography, Mother Was a Gunner's Mate (Naval Institute Press, 246 pp., $24.95). It's the salty account of a sensitive, high-spirited individual who quit her job as a file clerk for Meekin Brothers Plumbing and Heating in Detroit to serve Uncle Sam in wartime.
Which she did: ``No combat. No Purple Heart.'' But plenty of pluck, determination and, ultimately, an honorable discharge.
Just like a lot of other guys.
Oh, the coffee that they give us
They say is mighty fine -
Good for cuts and bruises
And tastes like iodine!
Wingo's genial memoir is not a feminist diatribe about why women should have the same right to die in battle that men do; still, it does raise the question of equality between the sexes. Wingo didn't set out to be a pioneer, but she got the same pay and benefits that men earned, and she succeeded in nontraditional work. Those were important precedents.
``We Waves never faint at shots,'' she observes, ``point of honor, because we know the guys often keel right over when they get theirs.''
And while the men hung Betty Hutton, the women boosted beefcake.
Indeed, Wingo's training experiences will seem very familiar to many men who found themselves, if not under the same barracks, in the same boat. Some of the old phrases still resonate: Be kind to your fine-feathered friends, for a duck may be somebody's mother.
You'll be sor-ree.
Rotsa ruck!
In the gunsheds every morning we pore over the papers, trying to read between the lines and make mental maps of where people we know are. Brothers, fiances, buddies, cousins, sisters' husbands, the gap-toothed fat boy who carried our books in the second grade, ex-lovers, each of us has somebody there to make our heart stop when the papers report such and such division is surrounded. Each of us confronts the fear differently, but we each try to present an air of confidence and serenity - we are the best and we are going to win in the long run.
It just seems to be taking a long, long time, and it's harder than we ever thought it was going to be.
Wingo's gracefully written, even comradely book takes on the proportions of an extended letter to a friend. By the end of it, she has come, chronologically and emotionally, of age. And her sex is no longer an issue; Wingo has simply become somebody we have come to know and admire.
In the course of things, she shares what she has learned about love and death and ambiguity, lessons rooted in a particular time but true for all time.
I don't understand about the Germans. Lots of them are even Catholic. I wish I could say, ``Explain that one to me, please God, if being Catholic is supposed to make people better.''
I'd never have the nerve. I don't think God likes questions much. Certainly Monsignor O'Callaghan never did.
In training, on leave, on parade, Wingo becomes a little bit of all of us, cast into the maelstrom by human events and making the best of it.
Pacem in terris, everybody. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
University. ILLUSTRATION: Photos
Josette Dermody Wingo served as a gunsight instructor, left, during
World War II. Right, Wingo as she looks today.
by CNB