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By Mac Leepson
It’s not every day that a veterans’ service organization’s
national election results make headlines in the nation’s
top newspapers. But that’s what happened on August
3, 1987, when The New York Times and The Washington Post
trumpeted the fact that Mary Stout had been elected the second
president of Vietnam Veterans of America the day before by
an overwhelming majority of the four hundred delegates at
VVA’s Third National Convention in Washington.
“Woman Takes Command,” was the NYT headline. “Woman
to Lead Charge for Viet Veterans Group,” the Post said,
followed by the subhead: “Election Follows Tradition
of Non-Tradition.” The newspapers played up the fact
that Mary Stout, who had served as a U.S. Army nurse in Vietnam,
was the first woman chosen to lead an American VSO. At the
time, Stout felt that her election signified an important
step in the recognition of the role played by women in the
Vietnam War and as veterans’ advocates at home.
“I think this is really significant,” she told
the reporters, “because for the first time a national
veterans’ association has acknowledged that there are
women who are veterans, and ‘veteran’ is no longer
a male word.”
Outgoing VVA President Bobby Muller, who
supported Stout’s
candidacy, touted the fact that her election showed that
VVA was unique among the nation’s VSOs, which were
dominated by an older generation of veterans who did little
or nothing to help Vietnam veterans. Stout, who had served
as Muller’s national secretary, he said, is “truly
a remarkable person.” The “old-boy network is
truly a club for the old boys, and that’s one reason
why we’re proud not to be a member of that club.”
The “fact
that the delegates elected a woman,” Muller
went on to say, “is one of the clearest statements
you can imagine that Vietnam veterans are a totally different
generation of veterans—much more progressive in thinking
and not as sexist, racist, and reactionary” as the
old-line VSOs. “It’s a helluva statement.”
Mary
Stout today plays down the fact that she was a pioneer in
the women veterans’ movement and plays up the fact
that from the first time she became involved with VVA in
1981, she felt she was being treated as a veteran, not as
a woman veteran. “I never felt an awkward moment being
a woman and being active in VVA,” Stout said.
“Yes,
later in my presidency, there were crude people who said
some things, and that got a little bit wearing. But I never
felt out of place in VVA. I just felt I fit in at VVA as
a veteran. I never felt that it was because I was a woman
or wasn’t a woman. I fit in because I was a
veteran.”
From the Beginning
Mary Stout, who was 43 when she was elected
VVA president, joined the Army in 1964 during her last year
of nursing school. She went on active duty after graduating.
While at her first duty station, Fort Ord, she met Carl Stout,
a young Army officer, and the two newly minted lieutenants
quickly decided to get married. When Carl Stout received
his orders for Vietnam, Mary Stout volunteered to go to the
war zone.
“I thought it would be important for us, for
our life together, that I had that experience, too,” she
told Kathryn Marshall in the oral history, In the Combat
Zone. “It
just seemed like Vietnam was going to be a real important
experience in his life, and I didn’t want to be cut
off from it.”
Mary Stout arrived in Vietnam in November
1966, several weeks before her husband-to-be did, because
he had gone to jungle school in Panama. She served with the
Second Surgical Hospital, which was in An Khe when she arrived
and then moved to Chu Lai in June of 1967. “I kind
of worked everywhere in the hospital,” she said. “I
spent most of my time in intensive care.” It was often
a harrowing experience. “We
had a lot of people come in with missing arms, legs, hands;
you name it, it was gone,” she said. She witnessed
the worst that the war had to offer—death and maiming—up
close and personal for an entire year. It was an experience
that left emotional wounds that didn’t heal for several
years after she came home.
Lt. Mary Stout returned from Vietnam
in November 1967 and took an early out. Carl Stout came back
almost two months later and they were married on December
30, 1967. Carl Stout, who was drafted, decided to make the
Army a career. The young couple moved to Wichita, Kansas,
then to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point where Carl
Stout taught for three years. When he was sent to South Korea,
Mary Stout took her children and moved back to her hometown
of Columbus, Ohio.
“That’s where I met up with
the local VVA chapter,” she
said. It was 1981, just three years after VVA had been founded.
She was working for the USO at the time, and one day met
with local VSOs to get help with a fundraiser. “I had
heard something on the radio about a Vietnam veterans group,” she
said, and so Stout asked the head of a local VFW post about
them. “And the guy says: ‘They’re a bunch
of radicals; we don’t want them involved.’ “ That,
to Mary Stout, was like waving a red flag at a bull.
Immediately,
she said, “the hair was standing up on
the back of my head.” She decided to contact that group.
The
next morning, she said, “after the kids were off
at school, I called this number. I explained the whole thing,
and the guy I talked to, Parker Lee Hargrove, said to me: ‘We’d
be interested in that. And when did you serve in Vietnam?’ It
wasn’t like, ‘I’m not asking you if you
served,’ it was like he knew. And now I’m in
shock, sitting on the kitchen floor. So I talked to him for
a little bit.”
Mary Stout paid a visit to Columbus Chapter
16 a few days later. “They had an office in a very
seedy part of town,” she said. “VVA in the early
years was in very seedy places. So I drove downtown, I walked
into that office, and I knew that I was in exactly the right
place.” She
joined the chapter (which later disbanded) on the spot. She
found a home. She rose in the organization and was named
executive director of the Ohio State Council.
“The issues
certainly were the things that kept me active and kept me
interested,” she said. “I
saw VVA as an organization that actually could do something
about them. The other VSOs weren’t much interested.”
One
day in the spring of 1983, Bobby Muller, VVA’s
founder and first president, came to Columbus to meet with
the Ohio State Council. “It was the first time I ever
met Bobby,” Stout said. “He’d been there
before and people kind of seemed enamored with him, but I
had never seen him or heard him speak. And the first time
I met him I didn’t like him at all.” That soon
changed.
When Carl Stout came back from Korea, the family
moved to Maryland. Mary Stout, who had had experience doing
membership data entry for the Ohio State Council, contacted
the VVA national office in Washington about the possibility
of a job with the Maryland State Council. “I asked
Rick Weidman [VVA’s current director of Government
Relations] if VVA had something like a State Council in Maryland
where I could work. He laughed and said, ‘Mary, the
national office is the only place [in VVA] that has any paid
staff.’ ”
Within days, she was offered, and accepted,
the job of national Membership Director, replacing Weidman,
who took over VVA’s
Government Relations Department. “We lived up north
of Baltimore, and I commuted down to Capitol Hill and sat
in the garage of the little town house that was VVA’s
national headquarters with the mice running across my feet
doing data entry for membership,” she said. “I
had a lot of experience in talking to veterans thinking about
joining a chapter and putting together materials about how
you form a chapter and the things you need to do. Of course,
we didn’t have any Constitution at this point because
we hadn’t had a convention yet. So I worked in membership.”
VVA’s
first national office was located in an infamously run-down
building in a not-good section of the nation’s
capital. “It was an old town house with a blue door,” Stout
said. “Ginny Richards was kind of the office manager.
We had a receptionist. We had Ken Berez and Jenny Berez and
Rick and I. We had a little living room where the receptionist
sat and everybody else except for me was in the middle room.
I was in the garage until it got too hot that summer so they
moved me. We had mice.”
Bobby Muller “and John
Terzano had offices upstairs and Lynda Van Devanter had an
office upstairs. This was a little, tiny townhouse. It was
almost like being in Vietnam in some ways. You just don’t
have very much, so you make do with what you’ve got
because the mission is so important.”
The first year
on the job included VVA’s Founding Convention
in the summer of 1983. That Convention, Stout said, “was
absolutely amazing. We had to approve every article of the
Constitution, every Resolution, and start from scratch. I
was so busy I don’t think I ate anything at all for
something like four days. And I probably slept for two hours.
But it was okay because the adrenaline was just going all
the time. It was exciting.”
The Founding Convention
in Washington, she said, “was
the first time that many VVA members worked together with
other Vietnam veterans, other than people in their chapters.
It was very contentious. But we got so much done and we met
many wonderful people who” stayed with VVA “for
years and years, through the years when I was secretary and
national president. And many of those people are still there,
like John Rowan, Tom Corey, and Jack Devine.”
Mary Stout
won election as VVA’s national secretary
after the 1985 National Convention. And then, in 1987, she
swept into office as president, succeeding Bobby Muller.
While the media attention at the time focused on her gender,
Stout was committed to working on a wide range of Vietnam
veterans’ issues.
During her four years as VVA president,
the organization accomplished a great deal, including leading
the fight to force the Veterans Administration to institute
judicial review. Before that, veterans had no legal recourse
if they were turned down for a VA claim. That also included
the fight to get the VA to recognize for the first time the
health consequences of exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam.
And, not coincidentally, VVA was the only national VSO to
fight for women veterans.
“VVA has always been the leader
in women veterans’ issues,” Stout
said. “And the person who started that and the person
who can most take credit for women veterans advocacy is Lynda
Van Devanter,” who headed VVA’s first women veterans’ efforts. “She
is the one who started it all.”
When Van Devanter—like
Stout, a former Army nurse who experienced emotional difficulties
after coming home from Vietnam—left VVA, “everybody
kind of looked to me to be the next Lynda Van Devanter,” Stout
said. “I
said, ‘I’m not Lynda.’ We already had a
women veterans committee, and my thought was to bring those
women in and let them be the spokespersons for women veterans’ issues.
I could go before Congress when we did and there were certain
issues where I felt I was the best person, being the leader
of the organization, to be there. But when it came to women
veterans’ issues about PTSD, I wanted to get our experts
from the field to also come in. Sometimes it would be me
with them. That was one of the most important things.”
She
also encouraged other women to take more active roles in
VVA. “I certainly looked for women I knew and encouraged
them to come forward and run for the national board,” Stout
said. “I think that helped bring women into active
leadership roles in the organization. I think seeing me [helped],
but also me saying to them, ‘C’mon. You can do
this. If I can do this, you can do this. I’m a housewife
from Ohio, for God’s sakes.’ ”
Stout also
takes pride in helping to establish VVA as an effective advocacy
organization for veterans on Capitol Hill. One veteran House
legislative aide told Stout, she said, that “VVA was
extremely effective legislatively and that we got that way
not only because we worked so hard here in Washington, D.C.,
which we did, but because our members in the field knew the
issues and went to their members of Congress.”
Other
VSOs, he said, “send out a message around the
country that says, ‘Call up your congressman and tell
him these words.’ But they don’t really know
what it means. Your people really know the issues; they can
talk intelligently about the issues and the reasons why.” That
fact “is one of the things that VVA can be most proud
of,” Stout said. “Not only did we educate our
members, but our members wanted to be educated. They wanted
to be actively involved. And the things that we got while
I was president—judicial review, the Agent Orange legislation—is
certainly a tribute to that network of people in the field
who really worked those issues.”
Mary Stout left VVA
following the 1991 National Convention and eventually went
to work at the VA in Washington. Today she is chief of the
VA’s Veterans Health Administration’s
Forms, Publications, and Records Management. “I like
the job,” she said, “because I still have a lot
of contact with veterans from our website. They can send
us messages directly and they do. Many times those messages
are not about the forms or publications, but are about issues
they are having, and we are able to help them find what they
need. I also have a lot of contact with VA people in the
field.”
As for her tenure as the first female head of
an American veterans’ service organization, Stout said: “I
think a lot about what we did, what we did with Agent Orange,
with judicial review, with women veterans, and other things.
What we did was amazing. I’m proud of that time. We
had a lot of challenges and we met them.
“We had a lot
of great times together. The important thing is that we worked
together, and I don’t think
there were a lot of egos. I think that was something that
made it work, that there weren’t big egos. There were
people who really saw that there were things that needed
to be done and that we could do them. And it took all of
us. It took all of us to do it.”
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2011, Vietnam Veterans of America. All Rights Reserved. 8719 Colesville Road, Suite 100, Silver Spring, MD 20910