Lynn salutes female veterans at ceremony

LYNN – In the 20-plus years that Maj. Marisol Chalas has served in the armed forces and worked in a male-dominated field, she’s questioned her capabilities more than once, but, eventually, she learned one very important lesson.”It took awhile, but I came to realize that the (problems) weren’t of my doing but of those around me who had trouble taking orders from a woman,” she said.Chalas shared her military experiences, as well as what it was like to study and work as an engineer, as the guest speaker during Friday’s Women Veterans Memorial Ceremony.Lynn is one of the few communities in the commonwealth that has a women veterans memorial and each fall holds a ceremony just to honor those special few.”It’s always a very special honor for me as a female to celebrate women who pioneered the idea of women being strong and capable,” said Mayor Judith Flanagan Kennedy, who delivered greetings during the ceremony.Kennedy said there are 1.7 million female veterans in the country and about 21,000 are in Massachusetts alone. The number in Lynn who turn out for the annual event is dwindling, but it is no less appreciated by those that attend.How we wage war todayVeterans Agent Jeffrey Hollett called Chalas a daughter of Lynn because she has lived here since she was 6, grew up on Hamilton and Henry avenues and attended Lynn schools. She joined the National Guard during her junior year at Classical High School, went to Massachusetts Maritime Academy, where she studied marine engineering, and eventually ended up in flight school.She became one of the first women to fly Black Hawk helicopters into combat and earned an MBA along the way. Today Chalas is serving in Ontario, Canada, as a U.S. Army Reserve exchange officer. Hollett said Chalas drove seven hours just to speak at Friday’s ceremony.”I became an officer in 2001,” she said, adding that she served a number of positions in an out of the Army and faced some discrimination on both sides.At Mass Maritime she was one of only eight women in her graduating class and one of only three studying marine engineering. A colleague once told her she was too pretty to be an engineer and another that “women take longer to get it,” she said.She remained undeterred.She and her colleagues worked things out, and the military not only taught her that she is stronger than she realized but also how to manage her weaknesses, she said.She also had plenty of commanders that saw her gender as irrelevant and praised a high school physics teacher for pushing her toward engineering.”I believe it’s possible for women to serve in a male-dominated field and be a strong and capable leader and maintain their femininity,” she said.Kennedy called her fierce.”I am so proud of her and the way she represents the city of Lynn and the way she represents Classical High School,” she said, before handing Chalas a citation.’70s- and ’80s-era veteransPatty Carter would have loved to have had the kind of military career that Chalas is enjoying, but she was in the wrong era.”I worked on helicopters, but I wasn’t allowed to fly them,” she said.As a female mechanic, she also suffered her share of discrimination.”They used to write ?barefoot and pregnant’ on my locker,” she said. “And this was the ’80s.”Brenda Gibb served as an Air Force medic from 1974 to 1978. A picture of her from that era shows her in a short, white nurse’s uniform, but she said she had a friend who served on an aerial refueler.”They had orders to refuel in Vietnam, and they had to let her off in the Philippines because women couldn’t fly into combat,” she said.Like Carter, Gibb said she would have loved to have been able to fly in the war, but that wasn’t an option for her.Korean warVeteran Lorrie Landry said her war effort seems diminished next to Chalas’ career, but she believes it was every bit as important. Her job was to lift the spirits of wounded soldiers or those on rest and relaxation. She was a singer, stationed in Japan, where she performed regularly for