Military spouses who advocated to bring their POW/MIA husbands home from Vietnam will have their efforts etched in stone – literally.
In July, the coastal town of Coronado, California, voted to approve the installation of a statue honoring those women, known as the League of Wives. Like the book of the same name, the fixture hopes to tell the story of the previously unsung heroes of the Vietnam War, military spouses.
The spouses who made up the League of Wives were tired of their government’s perceived inaction so they took matters into their own, often daintily gloved hands. This coalition welcomed all branches, ranks, locations and races. And they were rulebreakers to some extent, defying tradition by telling the stories of their husbands’ torture to the national media.
As military spouses, they were officially discouraged from engaging the press by both the Department of Defense and society. According to the 1949 “The Navy Wife” handbook, “it was considered indelicate for a lady to permit her name to appear in a newspaper,” let alone call one with a juicy story.
But that is precisely what they did, led by Sybil Stockdale.
“I’m thrilled that Sybil [Stockdale] and her League of Wives will be memorialized in Coronado- the birthplace of the POW/MIA movement,” said Heath Hardage Lee, historian and author of “The League of Wives: The Untold Story of the Women Who Took on the U.S. Government to Bring Their Husbands Home.” “Sybil would be so proud, but not surprised, to know that Navy spouses led the effort to make this dream reality.”
The power of Sybil Stockdale was not that her husband, James Stockdale, was the highest-ranking officer in the Hanoi Hilton. But rather her ability to build a coalition of military spouses and give them permission, by virtue of her husband’s rank, to tell their stories. The effort to honor Sybil and the League by creating a memorial statue was spearheaded by a nonprofit, The League of Wives Memorial Project, co-led by Coronado residents and military spouses Alexia Palacios-Peters and Christina Bagaglio Slentz and founded by Brad Willis, Coronado resident and NBC News foreign correspondent.
Their statue
The LWMP collaborated with Hardage Lee and sculptors Christopher Slatoff and Elisabeth Pollnow to design the memorial.
“People loved [Sybil] so much and admired what the League of wives did,” Slentz said. “Because they cared, was it something that was really difficult [to conceptualize with the memorial] because everybody had strong feelings about how it should go.”
The LWMP hoped to capture the history and legacy by making Sybil the only recognizable figure of the four women featured in the League of Wives statue. The other three women are unidentifiable, representing the national movement that eventually comprised the league.
All figures are wearing typical attire of the late 1960s, communicating to onlookers the lack of women’s equality in that era. The women are on a pedestal that tilts upwards, indicating their uphill climb to bring their husbands home.
In addition to possibly being the first statue honoring military spouses for their non-combat related efforts, this statue is unique because fewer than 8% of U.S. public statues are of women.
The back of the statue features a plaque and a place for a fifth figure.
The vote
On July 19, supporters lined the Coronado chamber, including League member the 90-year-old Pat Mearns. The LWMP Foundation had to fight an uphill battle, with one council member voicing the minority concern of the community. He believed in honoring the league but thought the memorial belonged in Washington, D.C., beside other national monuments that honor service men and women.
Although LWMP leaders have indicated that they would support installing a version of the statue in other locations, they believe the contributions made by the military spouses in the league did not occur exclusively in the National Capital Region.
The next phase of the memorial is fundraising. Donations can be made through Paypal.
