The oldest living U.S. Marine just celebrated her 107th birthday
It's probably difficult to imagine that a woman would be the oldest living Marine but when she enlisted in 1943 times were a bit desperate because of an event you may have heard of called World War 2.
At the start of the war effort, women were only allowed in as nurses or some sort of medical assistant but later other branches of the military opened up roles for woman in administrative roles which were mostly domestic. I'm not trying to downplay their importance, don't get the wrong idea, it was just a different time in the 40's.
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Sgt. Dorothy "Dot" Cole was among more than 300,000 women that volunteered for enlistment following the attacks on Pearl Harbor and in her own words "Everyone was out doing something and I felt the need to do the same." She was part of a plan in the military to serve as administrative substitutes to free up men to move on to combat theaters around the world (at the time it was just the Pacific, but you know how the story goes.)
Don't think that just because she was a woman that she had it easy. She had to train in Camp Lejeune in North Carolina just like every other Marine. Lejeune is one of the largest military bases in the world and it is located nearby my home in North Carolina.
Someone put together this nice video to celebrate her 107th birthday and I gotta say, "Dot' looks and sounds a lot better than a lot of the people I know that are 20 to 30 years younger than she is. I wonder what her secret is? I think that she should give a blood sample so we can find out what sort of superhero DNA she has got going on there.
It wont be much longer before every American who participated in World War 2 will no longer be with us. In 2015 there was nearly a million people still alive and kicking but by 2018 that number was halved and in just 5 years that number has dwindled to around 300,000. There were over 16 million people involved in the overall war effort during World War 2. Those are some crazy numbers.
On another note, the final veteran of World War 1 passed away a little over a decade ago at the age of 110. It is pretty amazing to me that people are living that long just in a general sense.
Happy Birthday Dot and thank you for your service!