It's the Brian Laira show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. On this Memorial Day, we're airing some

favorite segments from our WNYC Centennial series,

100 Years of 100 Things, including 100 years of The New Yorker magazine with editor David

Remnick, 100 years of Catskills hotels, and 100 years of street photography.

But on this holiday, it seems appropriate to start here with a segment we did on 100 years of

women in the military. In this segment, we mostly cover the time from World War I when the first

women were allowed to enlist, yes, allowed, through the Vietnam War. As a starting point, we

recognize the sacrifice of the eight women whose names are on the Vietnam War Memorial

Wall in Washington, D.C. They were all nurses, and that was out of more than 58,000 total names.

More recently, according to the Center for Military Readiness, at least 166 U.S. women were killed

in combat in the wars since September 11, 2001.

Of course, now we have a new Defense Secretary who famously said,

we need moms, just not in the military.

We'll get to that.

But we start with a clip from a Vietnam War veteran.

This is retired Navy Lieutenant Commander Bobby Hovis from a video

from the American Vietnam War Commemoration Organization.

I was the first Navy nurse to volunteer for Vietnam and the first Navy flight nurse to volunteer

for Korea. Winston Churchill said one time, there's nothing so exhilarating in life than to be

shot at and missed. And that's what happened to me.

Shot at and missed, Lieutenant Commander Bobby Hovis during Vietnam. That from the Vietnam War commemoration video released in

2020.

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