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By Ron Paglia
FOR THE TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, August 12, 2007
"Each time I find myself flat on my face, I pick myself up and get back in the race." -- "That's Life," Frank Sinatra, 1964 (words and music by Dean Kay and Kelly Gordon).
H. Lenora Byrd likes to kid that "one of these days, I'm going to get a life."
And if what lies ahead is anything like the first 66-plus years, it might make for a good story, a sequel to what she openly -- without reservations -- reveals in her first book.
Byrd, a resident of the Fayette County village of LaBelle, has been a military officer, a musician and singer, a semiprofessional softball player and a reunion planner. Most recently, in fulfilling a longtime dream, she added author to her list of accomplishments. "It's something I've wanted to do for a long, long time," Byrd, a 1958 graduate of Brownsville High School, said of "WAC Major: Herstory, A Black Woman in the White Man's Army," (XlibrisCorporation). "It began as a catharsis for me, a way to purge everything that had built up inside me over the years." The healing process began in 1995 with Byrd pulling thoughts and emotional scars from the journal she had kept for many years. It culminated earlier this year when she invested her own money to have the book published.
"I guess I was recapturing all of those experiences in the military," Byrd explained of her 21-year career in the U.S. Army. "Being a black woman, one who was an officer at that, in the military was not, for the most part, a pleasant time. I put everything into manuscript form and then began placing excerpts on my blog (www.tweety1216.typepad.com/lenora). Friends, classmates and former (Army) comrades began encouraging me to write the book, so I decided to jump in with both feet." Byrd pulls no punches in her tales of the humiliating defeats and triumphant victories of a feisty black gay woman as a member of the Women's Army Corps (WAC) and later the "regular Army" in an interrupted career running from 1961-1965 and 1971-1989.
The military experience began three years after graduation from high school. "It was January 1961, and I had completed two years of studies at California State Teachers College," Byrd recalled. "I majored in biology and then switched to the teachers curriculum. But I knew I didn't want to be a teacher, so I decided to look for something else." The answer, she thought, came as she was walking along Market Street in downtown Brownsville. "The Army recruiting office was located along that busy street, and I was enticed by a big poster of a man pointing directly at me with the message, 'Uncle Sam Wants You,'" she said laughingly. "Did Uncle Sam really want Lenora Byrd? The recruiter, Sgt. 1st Class Burkhardt -- I don't remember his first name -- convinced me he did."
Three weeks later, Byrd, 21, was on her way to eight weeks of WAC basic training at Fort McClellan in Anniston, Ala. In addition to learning about military life, she also got her first taste of reality in the Deep South. "On my first pass off post, I was startled ... the Ku Klux Klan marching unopposed down the main streets of Anniston, a hop, skip and jump from the fort," Byrd says in her book. "I was mystified to discover that blacks could not frequent restaurants or hotels and that the water fountains and bathrooms were marked 'Colored and White.' I could not identify with the trials and tribulations of the southern black people. I was in a foreign place. 'This can't be the Promised Land that will permit me to be all I can be,' I thought. The only way I could deal with this unfamiliar discrimination was to be calm and cool and use humor because being hostile and rebellious would only get me into deep trouble."
Byrd posted an exemplary record at Fort McClellan, and her next military challenge was for Advanced Individual Training (AIT) as a medical corpsman at Fort Sam Houston in Texas. Because she wasn't keen on the medical field, Byrd was promoted to corporal and became a platoon leader. She was chosen for Officer Candidates School (OCS) and returned to Fort McClellan. She was commissioned as a second lieutenant in June 1964.
Her service was disrupted when she married Fred Lindsey and became pregnant. "I was an officer, and he was a sergeant first class," Byrd said of her husband. "But officers dating enlisted personnel was a definite taboo. My superiors were not at all pleased with this kind of fraternization. Once I became pregnant, I was forced to resign my commission and leave the Army." The brief union did produce one of the most glorious achievements of Byrd's life, a daughter, Chantay, who now works at the Pentagon. "(Marriage) wasn't for me," Byrd said. "I learned that later when I accepted the fact that I was gay. But it did bring this wonderful girl into my life, and I am deeply grateful to God for Chantay."
Byrd was anything but idle during her time away from military life. She completed her education by earning a bachelor of science degree in social work, a master of education degree in secondary guidance counseling/consulting and a certificate of completion in multimedia technology at California University of Pennsylvania. She was hired as a caseworker with Fayette County Child Welfare Services in Uniontown with duties to find foster and adoption homes for young black children.
But Byrd longed to return to the military. That desire became reality when she received a direct commission as a first lieutenant at the U.S. Army Reserve Center in Hiller (Brownsville). First Lt. Malcolm "Scott" Campbell, commanding officer of the 430th Replacement Company, administered the oath, and the ceremonies also included the presence of 1st Sgt. William G. Gordon, the longtime NCO leader of the unit where Byrd had re-enlisted with the rank of specialist fifth class.
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