Instruction: Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow.
Recently, I stood in an airfield in Sweetwater, Texas, and looked up. I was wondering what it would have been like to take off from there in a small plane, flying into the dust of West Texas and the chaos of World War II, as my grandmother had. The land around me had the palette of a well-used watercolor set and the topography of a paper towel: gray and brown, flat forever. It is dry all year round, except when it suddenly pours. The wide, featureless landscape makes for big, blustery winds and difficult orientation. Also, it is famous for its rattlesnakes.
During World War II, Sweetwater’s Avenger Field was the primary home of a program that trained women to fly military planes. They were called Women Airforce Service Pilots—WASPs—and they were the solution to a high-stakes problem: The war needed pilots, and men were dying quickly. From 1942 to 1944, these women volunteers engaged in just about every aspect of military flight operations except combat—ferrying aircraft, testing planes, transporting cargo, training new pilots—so that the men would be free to fight in Europe and the Pacific. More than 25,000 women applied to the program, fewer than 2,000 were accepted, and 1,074 completed training.
By the time the program ended, the WASPs had risked—and in some cases given—their lives to save male pilots a cumulative 60 million miles of flying. But during the war, they were classified as civil servants, no different in the eyes of the government from the female federal employees who typed memos or cooked on bases. After the war, they were ineligible for veterans’ benefits, and kept out of both the military and commercial cockpits. For decades, the WASPs lobbied to be recognized as service members. Today, they are still largely unknown. Soon, they will all be gone.
Patricia Perry, my Grandma Pat, was born in 1921, an only child. She grew up in Auburn, a small town in Northern California’s Sierra foothills. This was farm country—stone fruit and grapes—and when she was in high school, Pat learned to fly a friend’s parents’ crop duster. She was high-achieving, sheltered, patriotic, and eager to please—always, according to my mom, “trying to be the son her father never had as well as the daughter her mother insisted on.” In 1941, she moved two hours southwest to study political science at UC Berkeley. Instead of joining a sorority, she lived in the International House, where she was surrounded by students from all over the world, including many who had fled the war in Europe.
After graduation, she’d planned to attend law school at Berkeley, where she would have been one of just a few women, but deferred her admission to join the WASPs. She met the criteria: 5 foot 4 or taller, at least 21 years of age, high-school diploma, extensive flying experience. On July 5, 1943, when Pat was 21, she began her training in Sweetwater. She had never left California before.
