Dale Kerslake served in the Navy for 22 years. In 1979, she reported to the USS Ajax as one of the first women to go to sea on a Navy ship. The Clinton resident is writing about her 48 months on the repair shipafter recently completing a memoir writing class with Whidbey Island Writer’s Association.

“It would be a crime if you didn’t get your memories down,” author Don McQuinn told her March 3 in Coupeville.

McQuinn led writers on an afternoon recalling military memories as part of the Whidbey Writers Workshop, an annual conference that draws writers from around the world to Whidbey in early March.

McQuinn, a Pacific Northwest writer, has written nine novels including “Targets,” “Warrior,” “Wanderer” and “Witch.” During “Telling the Stories of Military Life,” Vietnam veteran McQuinn helped people begin to write their experiences.

Not everyone who attended the workshop had served in the military. One woman served as a U.N. flight nurse during Korea. Another man hopes to record his mother’s experiences as a code-catcher during World War II. And another man is capturing a group of World War II veterans’ stories.

Each person’s efforts is crucial to saving a vast amount of military history, McQuinn said.

“We’re losing a great amount of anecdotes and little details from veterans,” McQuinn said.

McQuinn offered his family as an example. An uncle survived landing in the first wave during the Normandy invasion. The man made it through World War II with “enough scar tissue to make a saddle,” McQuinn said.

No details, except for a few spare anecdotes, exist of his uncle’s exploits.

Not only is losing these details sad for families, McQuinn said fiction as well as non-fiction writers rely on first-hand accounts to color their work.

McQuinn called Betty Dennis Lepp’s extensive diaries and collection of letters and photographs a “fabulous resource.”

Lepp plans to use her diaries, letters and photographs to write about her career and make sure her friends’ service isn’t forgotten.

Lepp, an Oak Harbor resident, trained as a nurse and flew for the United Nations airlift in 1950 and 1951. Her transports went from Vancouver, B.C., to Toyko, Japan, sometimes on the Hong Kong, China. In the days before jets, the Vancouver-to-Tokyo leg could take longer than 29 hours and included refueling stops in Anchorage, Alaska, and Kamiak, in the Aleutian Island chain.

“This was before unions,” Lepp said. “We flew a lot of hours.” Fun and excitement of flying half-way around the world made up for the long hours, she said.

“And there were always lots of eligible men in Tokyo,” she laughed.

Dale Kerslake said feedback she received from other writers has helped her add necessary details to her writing.

“Hearing other people say ‘What does that mean?’ and ‘I want to hear more about that’ is important,” she said.

Joining a group of writers can help people get details down, McQuinn said.

“It’s just as hard as joining the Marines but a lot more fun.”

For more information, go to www.writeonwhidbey.org.