As far as holidays go, Veterans Day flies under the radar for most people as simply a three-day weekend marking time until Thanksgiving. Few people think about the countless soldiers who have served the country, many of whom are former and current Huskies.

Then: The UW in the 1940s

In 1941, the UW was a very different place.

Tuition cost $90 a year, with an additional $2.50 charge for an ASUW card, and the price of room and board could amount to $30 a month.

It as also a time when men were obligated to sign up for either the Navy or Army ROTC.

When 17-year-old Allan Osborne decided to enroll at the UW months shy of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he chose the Navy.

“I just had a sort of feeling,” Osborne said about his choice. “I guess it was because I had hardly seen the ocean.”

Fellow classmate Carl Walske also chose the Navy, which was more selective than the larger Army ROTC.

“If you had a little bit of the competitive spirit, that was one [reason to join Navy ROTC],” Walske said, who graduated early with a degree in mathematics. “Also, Seattle is a seagoing place, so it was a natural fit.”

ROTC-hosted dances were popular as the focal point of social activities, Walske said, and friendships quickly flourished.

“We developed quite a camaraderie, which carries over to this day,” he said.

Aside from his own ROTC duties, Osborne kept himself busy working on odd jobs. He said he arrived on campus with $100 in his pocket and did what he had to do to earn money.

Osborne chauffeured around the wife of the president of Bank of America, hawked ice cream cones at the canteen in Clark Hall, shoveled sawdust into basement furnaces to save money to take his girlfriend to a dance and worked at Sureshot Espresso on the Ave. despite the job’s interference with his academic load.

“I worked afternoons, even though I had an afternoon chemistry class,” Osborne said. “I had someone tell me when the tests were.”

As for the war, Osborne said he knew things were in pretty bad shape “with what was going on in Europe.”

Walske agreed, remembering his time at the UW before the devastating day of the Pearl Harbor attack.

“When I entered school, there were war clouds,” Walske said. “But no one expected that the Japanese would attack; it was sort of a bit of a shock.”

Dec. 7, 1941 brought the United States into the “European” war and turned the UW campus into a sea of uniforms. Twelve fraternity houses were converted into military training homes.

“Immediately, there was a wartime attitude,” Osborne said. “We knew we were all going some place.”

Osborne became an area warden, wearing his uniform twice a week and staying up late to monitor the floors of his hall. The late nights led him to fall asleep in his math class, and on one occasion his professor threw an eraser at him to wake him up.

As the war turned more serious, education became accelerated.

“When the class of 1944 graduated, the Navy said, ‘Take the juniors, too,’” Osborne said.

He graduated early, at the age of 19.

Lois Horn, a 1944 UW alumna, was a newlywed and part-time waitress when the Japanese bombed the Hawaiian naval base. She was 18.

“We thought we’d get bombed [next]; we weren’t prepared,” she said. “Kids started quitting school… We were all patriotic and scared. Mostly scared.”

Horn went downtown to enlist and to her surprise, she was interviewed by her old high school English teacher.

“He told me, ‘I’m not going to let you fill out this application,’ she said. ‘You can better serve your country getting an education.’”

She quickly followed her former instructor’s advice, and when she returned to school, Horn knew she still wanted to be involved in the war effort somehow.

“Even in high school, I was kind of unusual like that,” she said. “I was always saying, ‘We got to get over there, to help those Brits and to help those French.’”

Ultimately it was an issue of The Daily that helped her decide her next course of action.

“There was an article on the front page about how they needed Japanese translators,” she said. “At the time those classes were very unusual. Professor Gowen had started the school with Chinese language programs in Denny Hall.”

Horn enrolled in a Japanese language course, where she was one of seven women. The other six dropped out by the end of the year.

“On the first day our teacher told us, ‘Girls don’t do very well with this,’” she said. “Well I thought, ‘I’ll show you.’”

The intensive course proved challenging for Horn, who studied over the holidays and had few course materials. In the end, her efforts paid off, literally.

After only one year of study, the U.S. government hired her to teach other soldiers Japanese conversation.

“The government was taking anyone with a sprinkling of knowledge about Asita,” she said. “I went from starvation to fat city.”

On top of taking 15 to 20 credits, Horn was working at the YWCA and maintaining an active social life when she began teaching soldiers and civilians at night school.

“I was kind of scared,” she said. “Here I was, this young girl wearing anklets and sandal shoes, teaching these older men. They couldn’t believe I was their teacher.”

Meanwhile, Horn’s husband entered military training after quitting his job at Boeing when they wouldn’t let him enlist. Horn stayed behind to finish her degree, and two days after graduating she went into the Navy as well.

She was sent to Boston to train at Smith College and found the transition fairly easy, except for the change in supervision.

“To go from college, where everyone’s kind of laid back and carefree, to a place where everyone’s watching your every move, was a challenge,” she said.

Twenty-five percent of the trainees did not make it, and were sent home.

“One important thing to note was that the Navy was segregated at the time, but we had two of the first black female officers,” she said. “It was a learning experience for some of the girls; we had come from all over.”

Horn went on to translate Japanese weather messages in Washington, D.C., where she lived in the same apartment building as Vice President-turned-President Harry S. Truman. Her experiences with the Navy were, for the most part, exciting.

“For the women, by and large, it was more of an adventure than it was dangerous,” Horn said. “It was fun. We got to travel.”

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Horn, still married after 66 years, continues to take classes at the UW for her own enjoyment through the Access program. Along with Walske and Osborne, she is involved with alumni relations at the University.

Osborne went on to serve in the Korean War in 1950, interrupting his studies once again. After 14 years, he was able to finish college, and now holds a Ph.D in organic chemistry.

Walske obtained a Ph.D in theoretical and nuclear physics from Cornell University and worked at the Pentagon for seven years under the secretary of the Department of Defense. He was instrumental in implementing the construction of the memorial at the flagpole at the end of Memorial Way, where the names of all deceased UW WWII veterans are engraved.

Now: The Iraq War

UW student Jerry Jensen was deployed to Iraq in 2004. He had several motivations for entering the military.

“I wanted to have that experience that I didn’t think I was going to get in the corporate world,” said Jensen, who attended Green River Community College.

He is now pursuing a business degree at the UW until being commissioned as a military officer.

“I did the college thing for awhile, and I had been around a lot of people with parents or grandparents in the military,” he said. “I guess I always wanted to be a soldier and have that experience.”

Jensen served in the sniper section of his unit, which was involved in the well-known Battle of Mosul. His deployment was the first longtime separation between Jensen and his then-girlfriend, now his wife.

“It really was a test. Not being married but having been together for a long period of time put us in an awkward gray area,” he said.

Now Jensen is more appreciative of his lifestyle in the United States.

“I realize how fortunate we are as Americans and how lucky I am to have my family and my health,” he said.

Fellow ROTC cadet Christine Coggiano was deployed to Iraq last year and served as a medic in Iraqi villages.

The 28-year-old single mother had been studying pre-medicine at the University of Hawaii when she decided to enlist in the military.

“I was nervous,” she said. “A lot of my friends who were pre-med were nervous about the gore, and I wanted to see if I didn’t crack. I didn’t want to be one of those people who wasted all those years [of school] to find out that I wasn’t good at my job.”

Coggiano found the transition “physically and emotionally draining,” much as she had expected.

“I was one of the few females to work on the line with an engineering unit,” she said, noting that she wasn’t part of a scout team. “I wasn’t that hard core.”

As a female medic training Iraqis on how to deal with physical trauma, Coggiano ran into some cultural trouble.

“It was really hard initially, because I was female,” she said. “I was not well-received [because] … I had no man that was in charge of me. My translator somehow got them to trust me.”

Coggiano, a natural blonde, resorted to dyeing her hair dark brown and wearing a bandana around her head in order to be treated as an equal among both villagers and soldiers.

“I didn’t want to stick out. I wanted to fit in,” she said. “That way nobody ever bothered me. Nobody saw me as a female. The guys saw me as a soldier, not as a female.”

After a year in Iraq, Coggiano was selected as one of 200 soldiers to complete her education, which she is currently doing at the UW, pursuing a degree in biological anthropology.

Since her time back, she has found that her outlook on life has changed.

“I really didn’t think it would, but it did,” she said. “It has been really different. I’m more sensitive to anti-war protests and the perceptions that people have of what is going on over there.”

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UW soldiers have done their part in protecting our country over the decades. They deserve all of our remembrance and reverence. Thank you, veterans.

[Reach reporter Arla Shephard at features@thedaily.washington.edu.]