Vets start female-focused VFW post - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

Vets start female-focused VFW post

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Marlene Roll is used to standing out in a crowd.

The former Army reservist joined the Veterans of Foreign Wars in 1991 shortly after returning from a deployment in the Middle East during the Persian Gulf War. She quickly found that attracting fellow female military veterans to the male-dominated VFW was no easy task.

As Roll rose through the ranks of the VFW, and post after post asked her for advice on attracting female members, she decided maybe a different approach was needed.

“I thought the only way to bring them in was give them a post of their own,” said Roll, chief of staff for the New York state VFW and women veterans chairwoman for the national VFW.

And so, Roll went to work organizing what has become the nation’s only VFW post founded by and targeting the needs of women.

Men often wear their military backgrounds almost literally on their sleeve, with jackets or hats proclaiming their veteran statuses, Roll said.

“But not in the female world. A lot of them didn’t even know they were veterans and eligible for the VFW,” said Roll, 46, of Alden, N.Y. “And a lot of them shifted gears when they came back — ‘I’m a mom, I’m a business woman.’”

The VFW has a membership of 1.6 million, with membership typically being men ages 60 and up, said Jerry Newberry, VFW director of communications.

With most of the VFW’s 7,500 posts predominantly filled with retired men, “their needs and issues are a lot different than the new veteran of a foreign war,” said Renee DeRouche, 46, of Orchard Park, N.Y., and commander of VFW Post 12097.

“Our age range for our post is late 20s to mid 40s for the most part,” said DeRouche, who has spent 27 years full and part-time in the U.S. Army, Army Reserves and National Guard, including time in the Middle East as part of Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom. “Everybody’s still working. Some of them have little kids. So the needs become a little different.”

Thirty-four women and eight men were charter members of VFW Post 12097, which launched in July 2010. Today it has a membership of 49, 40 of them women.

“We’re really focused not just on female issues but the younger veteran issues,” said Josh Schreck, 29, of Hamburg, N.Y., one of the male members of the post. “The retirees aren’t worried about educational benefits and vocational rehab. That’s our daily lives.”

Schreck joined the post after his wife, Leonora Schreck, who was injured in Iraq during her time there in the Army, became interested in joining.

The post meets once a month in another VFW post’s hall in suburban Buffalo. Its aim, members said, is to serve both as a social setting for female and male veterans and as an advocate for their particular needs.

“A lot of female veterans coming out (of service) don’t realize they have access to the VA, they don’t know there’s a complete women’s wellness center to take care of all their needs,” said former Army reservist Debra Post, 48, of Holland, N.Y. “We provide the information for them and where to go.”

And with the post members young enough that many of them still are being deployed overseas, it hopes to provide support to family members left behind, DeRouche said.

The Buffalo post is the second-ever started by women. The first was founded in 1995 in Topeka, Kan., by female National Guard members who served in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The post is now defunct but lasted about six years, said Darrell Bencken, former Kansas state quartermaster.

“I think people moved, they got out of the Guard, and there just wasn’t enough to maintain it,” Bencken said. “But it lasted. It wasn’t a flash in the pan.”

Women account for roughly 208,000 of the 1.4 million active-duty personnel, said Pentagon spokeswoman Eileen Lainez.

As of January, 25,000 women were deployed in support of military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Since the U.S. began operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, 260,000 women have been deployed in support of those operations, Lainez said.

The VFW does not keep tabs on how many of its members are women. But with women playing a growing role in the nation’s military, the organization expects to see more posts started by female veterans, as well as more women playing leadership roles in the VFW, Newberry said.

“We faced the same challenge with our time when we came back from Vietnam,” Newberry said. “It’s history repeating itself every generation.”