Karen Etzler knows what it means to be in the minority. But she’s never minded it. The St. Joseph woman and Vietnam veteran served only with men at Lackland Air Force Base, where she worked on aircraft hydraulics despite the fact her mechanical skills were undeniably lacking.

But this assignment allowed her to enter the Air Force right way, rather than having to endure the nine- to 12-month wait her recruiter told her she’d have if she pursued a more traditionally female field such as nursing. It was 1974, she was 19 and the military was eager enough to have women in non-traditional fields that it overlooked her mechanical score of 15 (The minimum score required was 40).

“‘How soon can you get me in?’” she remembers asking the recruiter. She adds that after she was on the job, “I did think about my recruiter when I was working under the wing of a KC-135 on a cold blizzard night in South Dakota, as the line I was working on would not start and this pink oil was running down my arm, down my side and literally filling my combat boots.”

She never quite got the hang of mechanical trouble-shooting, she says, “but anyone can learn to take parts off and put them on.”

And despite the fact there weren’t even any women’s restrooms accessible to her on night shifts, Ms. Etzler loved serving in the military and went on to an awards and decorations and a casualty-affairs position — wearing a beeper, in the days before cell phones, in order to learn of fallen soldiers and contact their families.

Ms. Etzler met her husband in the Air Force and married at 21, going on to have five children and to leave the military at a time her husband was transferred. Keeping her family together was more important to her than keeping her career, but she never lost her love for military service. And now, with three of her own children — including a daughter — in the military, she’s serving veterans.

And not just any veterans, but women like herself, who she’s found face unique challenges not only in the military but also after they’re discharged.

“In looking back on (my) experience,” Ms. Etzler says, “God had a plan for me, as it taught me how to deal with an all-male environment where women were not welcome and they basically did not know what to do with us — very similar to the VA benefits system and even more so with the VA health care, (which) was definitely built and designed to take care of male veterans.”

For a few months now, Ms. Etzler has been the Missouri Veterans Commission’s women veterans coordinator (Missouri is only the second state to institute this as a full-time position, she says). Located in St. Joseph’s state office building, her job is to contact women veterans to let them know what benefits are available to them and to bring leaders’ attention to challenges women face in the military, such as sexual assault at rates much greater than men experience and trauma from active combat — something women aren’t supposed to be a part of but that is difficult to avoid in a war without a defined front line.

Amy Bennett of St. Joseph, who served in the Air Force from 1993 through 1997, met Ms. Etzler at a conference recently and sees her work as “a great benefit.”

“I kind of just researched things on my own,” Ms. Bennett says of her experience seeking benefits after being discharged. “A lot is following up things for yourself to see what benefits you have ... And now, with some women in a war zone, different needs are coming up.”

Ms. Etzler also has been appointed to the Department of Veteran Affairs’ advisory committee on women veterans, a national committee with only 12 members that provides advice on the needs of women veterans when it comes to rehabilitation benefits, compensation, outreach and other programs administered by the VA. This is a great honor, but something that means just as much are the responses from women she makes contact with in Missouri — some who have been veterans most of their lives but have never truly taken pride in it.

“A lot of them don’t feel they’re veterans, because they didn’t go off to war and serve in combat. A lot of them came back, became wives and mothers and now grandmothers and put their military service behind them,” Ms. Etzler says. “They tell me, ‘Thank you for remembering us; we thought we were forgotten.’”