What was Mom like before?

Many adult children have no idea how their mothers lived their lives before they were born, but Marilyn Bennett wanted to make sure that didn’t happen to her kids.

So she wrote a book to teach them that their loving mom was a scrapper in the old days. Bright, blue-eyed, adventurous, and courageous enough to join the Women’s Army Corp. That meant she and the friend she joined the WAC’s with had to leave their safe haven of Seattle, where they had grown up in protective and nurturing families, and travel by train across country to start their new lives in the U.S. Army.

“It’s not a big book, but it’s a good book,” said Bennett, who moved to Oak Harbor five years ago with her husband Ed. Their five children are scattered across the U.S., but it’s a sure bet she’ll make five easy sales of her book, “Memoirs of a WAC, U.S. Army 1952 and 1953.”

Book publishers like Publish America make it possible for individuals to write their life stories for friends, families and strangers interested in particular subjects. Bennett’s brief 50-pages of text plus pictures is a good primer on what life was like for young women in the U.S. just after World War II, and how they were treated in civilian and military life.

After high school, Bennett tried to become a stewardess, as flight attendants were called in those days. But one airline said she wasn’t big enough to handle “drunken fishermen” heading back to Alaska, and another said she was too short to reach the luggage space above the seats. So she turned to the Army for adventure.

The innocent young woman from Seattle met her first “dirty old man” when she got off the train to stretch her legs in Chicago. Only later did she learn what his lewd comment meant. In the Army, a soldier she dated tried to accost her in a cab, but she ordered the driver to stop and she ran back to her barracks. For a girl who had always been protected from the seedier side of life, she learned quickly how to take care of herself.

Not that that was so easy in the Army. During night watch, the women were issued whistles, not guns, to scare away intruders — usually men trying to sneak into the women’s barracks, and “a lot of the men weren’t respectful.”

Bennett spent her two-year stint in the Army in Fort Lee, Virginia, Fort Ord, Calif., and Frankfurt, Germany, where she worked as a secretary dealing with court martials.

“The older Germans were quite decent to us,” she writes, even though the U.S. occupation had not yet ended. However, “teenagers with hate in their voices” would call out “Army go home!,” and throw rocks at the U.S. troops.

She fell in love with a soldier named Jim. She describes the romance and the sad ending, when she became pregnant and he abandoned her, sending her $300 for an abortion. She turned the money down and had the baby, even though “it was at a time when unwed mothers brought shame to their families.” Although it was difficult, she writes that the baby, Deborah, “turned my world around with her charm.”

Bennett went on to enjoy a happy and fruitful life, raising a family and working for the telephone company, but she always cherished those Army memories, both the good and the bad. “It made me wiser, more self assured,” she said of the experience.

Bennett admires and envies women in today’s military, who are given a much broader role than women in the ‘50s. She notes they can fly airplanes and work in combat areas. Many have given their lives in Iraq. She wanted to go to Korea but the Army wouldn’t allow it, and she favors allowing women in combat if they meet the standards.

“In our war with Iraq at this time, women in the military have fallen with grace alongside their soldier and marine buddies,” she writes.

Most girls in her day married their high school sweethearts and stayed close to home. Not so Marilyn Bennett, who wanted to see the world. What she saw is concisely compiled in her book, which is available at Wind and Tide Book Store in Oak Harbor, or at amazon.com.