Thank you.
As a proud grad of Memorial University, I have to do the shout-out for Newfoundland, or I will get into trouble there.
Unfortunately, I think it is very common that women leave the military and want nothing to do with that chapter of their life at all. In order to move forward and close that chapter, they would not self-identify as a veteran if they had institutional betrayal, military sexual trauma or negative experiences.
When we think of the full spectrum of age groups, we have a number of women who—especially in the earlier generations, when women couldn't be part of combat—would say, “Well I gave 15 years or 20 years, but I didn't go into combat. I didn't deploy. I didn't do those real roles, so I can't consider myself a veteran.” That's not an uncommon terminology for people, especially from the fifties and sixties. “I didn't go to Korea. I would have, but I wasn't allowed to, so I'm not a veteran.”
Unfortunately, a lot of the women had to leave quite early in their careers after a sexual misconduct event. Again, they haven't felt the right to call themselves a veteran, because they left earlier than they wanted to. Their vision of who they thought they were going to be never manifested, so there is a lot of work....
I believe that Christine Wood is here today, and she said it very well. It took several years after retirement of processing it, thinking about it, getting involved with the community and advocating before you felt that you owned the right to use that word. We have such reverence for that word. We have such reverence for the World War I, World War II and Korean vets, and if we weren't that, how can we call ourselves veterans?