Forum gives female vets options
Sherwood event features resources for 24,000 in state
Deb Flynn scribbled notes in a journal Saturday morning as she sat in a room surrounded by more than 30 other Arkansan female veterans.
Flynn, 56, of Sherwood served in the Navy from 1982 to 1991, working as a jet mechanic and a dog handler in the U.S. and in Okinawa, Japan.
While at the Arkansas Department of Veterans Affairs’ biannual women’s event, Flynn wanted to pay special attention because she was preparing to file her first claim with Veterans Affairs.
After working so close to the jets’ takeoff and landing pads, Flynn said she had developed tinnitus, or ringing of the ears.
“I’ve had it for a long time, but it’s gotten worse over the past few months,” Flynn said.
The 2014 gathering in Sherwood, titled Urban Camouflage: Service to Success, offered tips on a range of issues female veterans need to know about transitioning back into civilian life, from interview clothes and hairstyles to getting funding for continuing education.
The event also featured about 27 public and private vendors who can help veterans find work after their military service. Each organization gave a presentation and set up a booth.
Of the 250,000 veterans in Arkansas, more than 24,000 are women, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. But getting all those women into the state’s Veterans Affairs office in Little Rock is a challenge, department spokesman Kelly Ferguson said.
Though women have served in the military since the Revolutionary War as nurses or alongside their husbands in some capacity, the development of female-specific services through the federal Veterans Affairs department is recent and still unfolding, Ferguson said.
Many female veterans don’t know all the resources
available to them, Ferguson said,
“Only in the last two decades has there been an effort to focus on women,” she said. “For many years, women veterans were treated like their male counterparts when they came back into the workforce.”
After a federal mandate that Veterans Affairs hospitals also house women’s clinics, one opened at the Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System in 1996, Ferguson said.
Rita Miller, the oldest veteran in the room at 94, has witnessed such changes.
Miller, now a Fayetteville resident, served as a nurse in Germany during World War II and wore a military-issue brown-and-white striped dress and a small hat. These days, women are allowed to hold a broader range of positions in the military, including serving in combat zones.
While outside individuals and groups work to change the public perception of fe- male veterans, part of that effort must also come from the female veterans themselves.
Female veterans have not historically accessed the resources available to them partly because many do not identify themselves as veterans, Arkansas’ Women’s Veterans Affairs Coordinator Gina Chandler said.
“I would say I served, but I thought a veteran meant that you went to war,” said Chandler, who served at a California Air Force base from 1990 to 1992.
Any woman, no matter where or when she served, has access to all the benefits that male veterans do, Chandler said.
Recently, the national conversation for female veterans has focused on military sexual trauma, but Chandler said she wanted to remind women that there are many types of services for them, including education, health care and workplace integration.
Flynn said she found the day educational and planned to make an appointment with Chandler to get help with her claim.
“I wish more people were aware, even of this event — that they know that they can go and to not give up,” she said. “If they haven’t filed a claim, they can go, they can get information and get help.”