Women veterans of every branch of the U.S. military salute as the national anthem is sung at an auditorium at the Pritzker Military Museum and Library in Chicago for the announcement of the state’s first all-women Honor Flight to Washington D.C. later this year. (Photo courtesy of Tyler LaRiviere/Sun-Times)
Illinois’ first Honor Flight exclusively for senior female veterans will become a reality later this year thanks to the efforts of an enterprising Lisle woman.
Ginny Narsete, an Air Force veteran and former chief of staff for the Illinois Department of Veterans’ Affairs, is the chairwoman of the newly launched Operation HerStory, which on Oct. 7 will take 100 women veterans on a flight to Washington, D.C. The effort was unveiled Tuesday in a ceremony at the Pritzker Military Museum and Library in downtown Chicago.
More than 140 regional hubs across the country offer Honor Flights for veterans, but there has been a distinct lack of participation from women, even accounting for the fact that most veterans are men, said Narsete, who began working on the initiative last summer.
“The reason they are not on the flights is, they’re like my mom: they’ll relinquish their seat for a man,” Narsete said. “The second thing is a lot of them didn’t think they were veterans. The reason they didn’t know they were veterans is they didn’t get the same accolades as a man did.”
Read more about this overdue distinction here.
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