Bess Flynn

Once she was a lieutenant in the Signal Corps, heeding a plea from General Pershing for volunteers who spoke French to sign up and go to the front lines to handle communications during the Great War, which almost got Bess Flynn killed. When she came home the Army said her and the other women volunteers weren’t veterans. The Army did not swear in women was the lame argument of the bureaucrats. As she remembered it sure looked like an army officer who swore her in. Perhaps those really had not been lieutenant’s bars on her collar. Now Bess was a little older and a little grayer but she still carried the fire from those days while running the teletype section at the U.S. Embassy in Prague.