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I love training the troops.

I guess it's just bringing out the potential in others because I can see it.

Lots of times they couldn't and they said, well, you can't do that.

My favorite two words are watch me.

They gave me a wonderful, wonderful opportunity to tour the world, meet people I never met before or ever will again.

You know, go up to the white House and be in the meeting room with four people, including the president of the United States.

Do that.

I guess the thing I always say is, if it interests you and you want to do it, just do it.

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To introduce the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff will be General Myrna Williamson.

General Williamson.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.

I am Brigadier General Myrna Williamson, United States Army retired, a soldier whom you would be proud to have behind you, beside you, or in front of you.

Thank you very, very much, Myrna.

Brigadier general.

Yeah.

One star.

Yeah.

I was the highest ranking woman in the army, and it took a while to go beyond that.

Now we have four star.

And President Trump fired the head of the Coast Guard, who was a woman, and he got rid of the four star general in the Air Force, who was a woman.

And our army forced our general retired before he could get rid of her and her husband's retired three star.

How about that?

Got to visit a lot of places.

Yeah.

If I had to name some of the most unusual things I've ever done or places that I have been.

Been to the top of the Empire State Building.

Top of the Washington Monument.

Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

Kissed the Blarney stone.

I got to go in and walk all the way down to the center of a pyramid.

A real pyramid that was big.

I remember that.

I spent three years recruiting in South Dakota.

There is not a place in this state that I have not been.

Also had part of Minnesota and part of Iowa.

Like down in Fort Riley, I like that area very much.

Fort McClellan, Alabama.

To Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

Fort Ord, California.

It was very interesting in a way.

We're out in the middle of the tundra in Alaska.

We could look right across the water and see, you know, the bad guys of Russia.

Yes.

And see Russia.

Sure could.

Got to visit Israel.

Spain?

I think I was in the Pentagon again.

The Women's Army Corp would not send married women to Vietnam.

So even though I'd volunteer, they wouldn't send me over there.

The first place I got stationed overseas was Germany and Commander W in headquarters, U.S.. Europe rented a house with the Antone Acaswetzers at 19 Saintvituskaska in Handschuhsheim, Germany.

Now try and have a drink and say that you couldn't do it.

And then we had to drive across.

I think it was 110 miles of no man's land.

And to get from West Germany into East Germany.

I got the word that I was selected to go to the National War College in Washington, D.C., and after that I would be assigned in the D.C.

area.

Guaranteed.

So there were 200 men and six women.

First time they allowed women.

I was Army, there was one Navy, there was one Air force, and there were three women from the State Department.

Well, so much for a guarantee to be stationed in the D.C.

area when we got done.

Because I came out on orders for Korea.

When I was in Korea, went for my annual physical, and I said, there's something wrong with my eyes.

And they did that puff test, you know.

No, your eyes are fine.

I went back the next week and I said something wrong with my eyes.

Puff test.

Your eyes are fine.

I went back the next week and I said there's something wrong with my eyes.

They did something different and they about went into orbit.

They said, when are you heading back to the States?

They said, go to the low vision clinic at Fort Belvoir and start getting treatment for your eyes.

So when I got back to the States, they started treating me for low pressure glaucoma.

It was always at Walter Reed, and then after whatever time it was, they sent me up to Johns Hopkins, and I went up there to the head guy in the whole world with this specialty, and he operated on my eyes and came out and couldn't see.

So I went to Johns Hopkins.

They took away my sight.

Yep.

I grew up in Gregory, South Dakota, and my grandparents had started a dairy, and then my parents ran the dairy.

And there was my brother, two years younger than I and me.

And every morning I said it, a little table that we put the milk in.

And then I filled 200 milk bottles.

We put them in the back of the pickup and drove down the streets of Gregory.

And I had one side of the street and my brother had the other, and that's where we delivered milk to everybody in Gregory.

Then we delivered some to the grocery store and the cafe and then went to school.

And then, of course, when I got home, I was time to wash all them bottles and start again the next day.

I was on the debate team.

There were five guys and me, and at about 5 a.m.

every Saturday morning.

We would meet down with a debate coach and head north to I-90 and Chamberlain area, because that's where there were enough other schools for us to have a debate meet.

Of the six of us on that debate team.

We had two who went and got their college degrees and went back to Gregory and took over their father's business.

We had two who became medical doctors and two of us who became generals in the army.

The other one went to West Point.

And of course, we didn't have women generals back then.

So of those of us who really like to talk out in the middle of nowhere South Dakota, we didn't do too bad.

I went to South Dakota State University and got a scholarship to go up there.

My boyfriend and I were both up there at South Dakota State.

Well, I was nearer to graduation than my husband was.

So I applied for this one scholarship that usually went to someone who was near to finishing their degree, and that was me.

Well, I did not get that scholarship.

So the next week, somebody took me aside who had been on that committee, and he said, Myrna, let me tell you why you didn't get that scholarship.

He said, everybody on that board voted for you, except this one old farmer who sat over in the corner just like this.

And he said, hell will freeze over before that scholarship will ever go to a woman, because all she's going to do is get married and have kids and waste her education.

So what are we going to do if we can transfer to the Black Hills, my husband can finish at Black Hills College and I can go out there and teach.

So we went out to the hills to look for a place to stay.

Found a little one room thing to live in, came back and we were gone that weekend.

And guess what was in the mail?

My husband's induction notice.

And I said, "I'm going too."

And I did.

And that's why I went in the United States Army.

The privilege of serving the United States in uniform is no longer limited to men.

To prepare the women who will serve with our regular army.

The Women's Army Corps recently opened a multimillion dollar training center at Fort McClellan, Alabama.

The wax first real home of their own.

Today's big picture offers the first good look at this new college for WAC officers and enlisted women.

Oh, yes, you had to go to Fort McClellan.

What they taught a lot of was hair and makeup kind of stuff.

We had to walk from our barracks over to the dining hall every day for lunch, and when we came back over after lunch, we had to press our skirts so we had no wrinkles in it to walk back to the classroom.

I thought some of that stuff was pretty silly.

My husband and I managed to get stationed together at Fort Ord, California.

I was assigned to the public Affairs office there, and I went down and sitting over across the desk, there's a lieutenant colonel sitting over there, and he's sitting over there just like this.

And I went over and I salute.

And I said, sir, Lieutenant McCullum reports for duty.

And he said, no, blank, blank WAC is working for me.

Get the hell out of here.

So I turned around and I went back up to the assignment office, and I said, I just got fired from my first job.

And they said he doesn't make the assignments we do.

Back you go.

So I went back, went in, Saluted And I said, sir, they said, you got me whether you want me or not.

And he said, well, get in there with the secretary and stay out of the way.

So I did.

Well, the secretary had this love of alcohol, and she was gone every Monday, and very often she was gone on Friday to get ready for the weekend.

Well, I can type and do shorthand and all that stuff with the best of them.

So I started doing her work, and that was in the days of carbon paper and correction fluid.

And after I'd done that for a little bit and she didn't show up a lot of the time, they said, Myrna, we don't know what we'd do without you around here.

And then I got assignments to go all over posts and write articles and meet visitors to the post and write articles about them and everything.

And that's how I really moved up.

Well, I was just so proud of that.

And I just walking down the street and my my feet weren't even touching the street.

I was so proud.

And I said, look at me, look at me.

I got a new silver bar on each shoulder.

And you know who took notice?

A bird flying overhead.

And that bird deposited a load of humility on this bar on this side right here.

So I looked up and I said, okay, God, I got the message.

It's never about me.

It's about others.

And when I stood on the parade ground at Fort Ben Harrison Indiana about 15 years later or so on, and my brothers pinning a star on one shoulder and the general's pinning a star on the other shoulder.

I'm going like this.

Just checking.

Just checking.

Yes.

And I had sent stars home so that when they pin the stars on me, my mother's friends back in Gregory pinned the stars on my mother.

My husband got out after two years.

He wanted to stay back in the Gregory area, and I got out of the military for a while, and I went looking for a job back in Gregory.

Well, my degree is in teaching.

Gregory didn't need another English teacher.

I went up toward Winner.

they didn't need anybody and went down to Burke.

And I said, I'm looking for a job, a teaching job.

And they said, what do you teach?

And I said, English.

They said, oh, can you start on Monday?

This is on a Friday.

I said, well, I guess so.

I went back to Gregory and some books they gave me and got ready to start teaching English, sophomore and senior English on Monday.

Well, of course, over the weekend the rumors are going all over Burke.

Oh, we got this Army captain going to come and teach us English.

What's that going to be like?

So I came to answer that question for him.

The first class I went into, we were on the second floor and I said, I understand that as the rumors have gone around Burke all this weekend, everybody wants to know what it's going to be like with an Army captain for your English teacher.

Let me just tell you how it's going to be.

You notice we're on the second floor here.

If I tell you to go over there and jump out that window and land down below and break two ribs, that's what you'll do.

You won't break one.

You won't break three.

You'll break two.

Do you understand me?

Oh.

Well, needless to say, I never had any problems.

And at the end of the year, I knew they loved me because they drove all the way to Gregory about 4 a.m.

one night and let the air out of all four of my tires.

What else can you say?

After a year of that, I got a letter in the mail and it said, would you like to go back on active duty?

After a while, I came out on the list for to go to the Women's Army Corps Senior Course at Fort McClellan, Alabama.

Similar to the advanced training offered by other branches of the Army.

The center also conducts an advanced officer course to prepare wax for staff duty at higher headquarters in the Army and Department of Defense.

You could live off post then.

Many of the women did not.

They lived in the little apartments on post.

I chose to live off post and I woke up one morning and I am telling you it had snow that I before trying to drive to post.

There were more cars in the ditch than you can imagine.

Well, they didn't know how to drive in snow for goodness sakes.

So I got about halfway to the main gate to go into post, which was probably a total of five miles, and the back gate was locked.

Couldn't even get in the back gate.

Went down to the front gate to get in the post locked up.

The post is all locked up.

Parked my car across the street as always, locked in and somebody had to come over.

One other gal lived off post and we had to listen to.

When she told us there was no reason for being late.

Everybody else had done post.

They walked down the hill and they were there.

And there's the two of us who live off post.

Well, that taught me a lesson for later on, I am telling you, for when I had a lot of troops to command and I said, oh yes, oh yes, we're going to change a few things around here.

Later on, some of my assignments took me back to Fort McClellan, and I was ahead of training the troops, the basic trainees.

I had five companies, 200 each in those companies of our new recruits.

And I love that.

I love training troops, I really do.

And it was just such fun.

The other thing is training the commanders, who were doing that.

My Captains there were commanding those companies.

And do you know, one of the things I just proudest of everybody who I ever had as a Captain under my command all made Colonel.

Every one of them, one of them went on to teach at West Point later.

They just did so well.

I was I was just so proud.

And training basic trainees.

Parents would come down for their kids graduation after eight weeks, and they'd come up and say, what have you done with my my son or daughter?

This is when we started also taking in men to train there.

What are you gonna with my son or daughter in eight weeks?

And I couldn't do in 18 years.

And I always said, well, it's really very simple.

When we say no, we mean it.

Oh...is that how it goes?

I said, yeah, that's pretty much how it goes.

When we say no, we mean it.

And we did.

And we trained some fine, fine people.

Truly.

I think I was in the Pentagon again, and I was selected to represent the United States of America at a NATO meeting of the women in NATO forces.

There were at that time 13 countries in NATO, and I was the United States representative to that group meeting over in Germany somewhere.

That was very interesting.

And as it turned out, I went back to next year as president of that organization.

And I remember going to check it out ahead of the meeting time.

And I walked into the back room.

And here's the U-shape, as you know, used to be the way that all the NATO things were done.

And then you shaped table up on the front, this big podium, big sign, United States of America.

And that was me.

That was me.

And do you know who I thought of?

The nameless, faceless farmer who would not give me the scholarship way back in college?

Because all I would do is get married and have kids and waste my education.

So that year, after being the representative one year there I am as head of a NATO committee.

That was truly, very, very awesome to me.

After the Pentagon got assigned to Fort Riley, Kansas, as head of a ROTC region eight South Central States, I had.

Oh God, what a 100 some colleges and universities and ran summer camp every summer for 1500 Cadets.

I loved that job.

I loved that job.

I loved that job.

I would have stayed there forever if they to let me do that.

I love being able to have an effect on young people because they are just so full of it.

Energy all over the place, and I just thought it was wonderful.

One of my historically black colleges was not being supported at all by the president, and so I had to go down and have a little talk with him.

And I said, sir, your Cadets are not going to make it.

You do not support them here on campus to do the training they need.

They come to summer camp, and they cannot perform as well as they should to get their choice of what branch they want to get into, and they're not going to be happy.

I said, you have got to support them back here on campus.

We were sitting at that round table and he said, well, General, you wouldn't understand.

You just went into the Army through ROTC and had it easy.

And I said, oh contraire, Mr.

College President.

I was not an ROTC because of a physical handicap.

And he pushed his chair back from the table and he's looking under the table.

Did I miss a wooden leg or is she missing a foot?

What's her physical handicap?

And I knew he couldn't stand it.

Finally he said, excuse me, General, you said you had a physical handicap, that you couldn't be an ROTC And I said, yes, sir, I was a woman.

He said, touché.

I love training the troops.

And we also had junior ROTC for how many high schools in the area.

Junior ROTC is absolutely wonderful.

These are in high schools all over the eight South central states I had.

And when we visit a high school, the Cadets are there in their uniforms and they have a whole bunch of medals across here.

And I go up to them and I'd say, oh, look at all those medals you have, and I have such a few.

And they just grew six inches under me.

It was magnificent.

I loved it.

And they said that when they introduced ROTC to one of the high schools in Texas, it immediately cut the pregnancy rate there by one third, immediately.

And many of those young people would go home at night and wash and iron their only shirt, and wear it the next day.

Junior ROTC is just absolutely magnificent for our young people.

Truly.

One time I was heading to visit my Texas schools, there my Lieutenant Colonel had made arrangements to fly us 60 miles North.

Over the loudspeakers.

I heard one pilot say to the other.

Well, I remember some high wires around here.

We better be careful.

So I looked out the front window.

It was so fogged and you couldn't see anything.

I said, listen, you set this thing down.

I do not need to be at this place today.

I don't want to die going there.

You set this thing down.

So we approach this little town.

Soon after that, the two pilots landed the plane in a muddy field.

I said, listen, this is just like all the towns in South Dakota.

What you guys do is you run up main Street and you're looking for a VF and an American Legion, and you're looking for a good old boy who will drive us the other 30 miles to visit the next college.

So they take off, and I'm sitting in the helicopter with the two pilots, and all of a sudden all kinds of cop cars down come down the road in front of us.

They come up the road on the side of us, sirens going and going and going like, what the hell is going on?

And people jump out of those cars.

And a loud speaker says, General Williamson, get out of that car and come over here to the fence.

What the hell has happened?

So I get out in the muddy field, go over, crawl through the barbed wire fence, which after I left the dairy farm, I swear it, I was never going to crawl through another barbed wire fence.

Well, the cops said they were alerted to the bank when these two guys in military uniform came running in.

They thought they were robbing the bank because three months before that, two people in military uniform had gone in and robbed the bank.

So they spread eagle them over against the wall, and they called the cops, and the cops came in and they finally said, well, no, we're down with that helicopter at the end of town.

And we finally convinced them that we were heading for the next town 30 miles up the road.

And they let us go, and they'd found us a ride.

We rode out of town in a big van and all over the side of this van it says, something exterminator service.

Well, I had been a general for 30 days, and I said, this is the end of my career.

When they hear back in the Pentagon that I just got kicked out of this little town and it was Keller, Texas.

I remember it well.

Well, we get up to the next town, here's the radio and the TV and everybody.

General Williamson, we understand you had a very interesting trip on your way up here today.

I got a call about three weeks later, and this guy says I'm a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram newspaper.

And I had lunch today with a professor of military science, and he started telling me about a bank robbery.

Headlines on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram the next day.

Did you ever hear a general giggle?

Because, of course, I still think that's funny as hell.

Well, further, I get away from it, the funnier again, ya know.

When I retired, I was on the Women in Military Service to America memorial Board of Directors, because they were going to have a women's memorial at the entrance to Arlington Cemetery, which you will know because whenever they show Arlington, they showed the cycle with the white pillars in front.

That's the Women and Military Service to America memorial, and that is where this came from.

I was privileged to be the mistress of ceremonies when we dedicated the Women in Military Service to America memorial, we had 45,000 people there.

It was fabulous.

If you ever go there, you're big, long hallway with kinds of plaques and this and that.

Then you go on the second floor and there's a series of windows that reflect the sunshine.

And on each one it's engraved a saying from women service members, when the sun shines, those reflections go down to the first floor, and you can read them on the on the first floor.

Fabulous, fabulous.

I met many women who said, oh, I wanted to go in the service.

Well, why didn't you?

Well, my brother or somebody said, that's not the thing that women do or it's not for you or blah blah, blah.

So I didn't go in the service.

I said, look what you missed.

Look what you missed.

Travel the world, meet people, get more education, do whatever because so many people will talk you out of something.

Just follow your own instincts.

If it interests you and you want to do it, just do it.