Annual City Hall ceremony honors women veterans

LYNN – Before giving her speech at the annual Women Veterans Memorial Ceremony, Major Tonia Costa stopped and shook hands with four women veterans seated in the audience.”Without them I wouldn’t be here,” she said.Costa was invited to speak at the event that brought out veterans, city and state officials, including State Rep. Robert Fennell, representatives from state Rep. Steven Walsh’s and U.S. Rep. John Tierney’s offices, and Ward 1 Councilor Wayne Lozzi. Mayor Judith Flanagan Kennedy also read a proclamation declaring it a day to honor and celebrate the city’s women veterans.Costa said she joined the Massachusetts National Guard in 1992 and spent six years testing the waters in different career paths until one day the company commander pulled her aside.”My immediate response was, ?what did I do?'” she said. “And that is when he told me, ?Tonia, you have what it takes to be a great officer.”In 2000 she attended Officer Candidate School at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, and over the last dozen years she has served overseas twice during Operation Iraqi Freedom, took command of the Recruit Sustainment Program stateside and, since 2010, has been assigned to the Military Police Battalion.”The Army is evolving,” she said.It has certainly evolved from the days when Marie Muzzioli and Lorrie Landry served.”I was in California in 1944,” said Muzzioli, who is from Nahant. “I spent two-and-a-half years in the Navy as a storekeeper second class.”Muzzioli said she worked on a base where damaged ships were brought.”I saw many, many ships so damaged you wondered how anyone came out alive,” she said.She enlisted at age 19 because there were no boys in her family old enough to serve, she said. Her brother was only 10, and her sisters were not interested, but when she told her father she wanted to join the Navy, he took her down to enlist.”I was the first Italian girl in the area to join the service, but after that a lot joined,” she said with a smile.Muzzioli was a WAVE (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) but Landry, a Lynner, was a WAC (Women’s Army Corps) during the Korean War. Also 19 at the time, she served from 1951-1954 as an entertainment specialist, she said.”I was a singer with the 293rd Army Band,” she said. “I had a great time.”After her father died, her oldest brother became the patriarch of the family, and he was in the Coast Guard.”I loved him so much ? I wanted to be just like my big brother,” she said.Landry said she was stationed at Walter Reed but she also did a tour of Japan and serving taught her independence.Also in attendance at Friday’s ceremony were a dozen students from Frank Grealish’s government class. The Lynn Classical High School students filed by and each shook Muzzioli’s and Landry’s hand and thanked them for their service.Landry said, with a nod toward the kids, that she believed the annual ceremony is important because it impacts the kids and gives them a reason to feel patriotic.”Which I think is something that’s missing today,” she added.Also on hand for the ceremony were veterans Suzanne Reilly and Carolyn Carceo.Carceo enlisted in the Air Force and served in the 1970s and ’80s for decidedly less glamorous reasons than her predecessors.”I needed a job,” she said. “My unemployment benefits were running out and figured if I didn’t screw things up I’d have a job for four years.”She stretched it to almost six and she enjoyed it, she said.Reilly also enjoyed her time in the service as an Army classification and assignment officer during the Vietnam Era in the 1960s but the war was a bit harder on her.She enlisted because she wanted to travel, and ended up in Alabama, Georgia and eventually Germany, she said.”I was sent to Germany just as the war was heating up,” she said.Reilly said her job was “a lot of responsibility for a 19-year-old,” but she loved it. She left, however, after her husband was sent to Vietnam and went missing, she said.”I got out to search for him. There was a group of mi