Captain Anne Flammang is the first female veteran to be featured in our series “Those Who Serve”, which is fitting, because her military history is one of many “firsts”. Recently retired from the United States Coast Guard after thirty years of service, Anne was the first woman from her home state of Illinois to graduate from the Coast Guard Academy, and, as a member of its second class, one of the first women in the nation admitted. Captain Flammang was the first female selected for the Permanent Commission Teaching Staff at the Academy and was the first woman at the New London Academy to be named an Associate Dean.
Sometimes luck and destiny wind themselves into our lives. Such is the case with Anne’s career which she believes couldn’t have been any better if she’d planned it. Though service to the country ran in Anne’s family – her father was a Marine Corps Officer – Anne wanted to become a teacher. But there were five children in the family, and in consideration of the cost of college tuition, and the fact that Anne was “the one with the profile of a cadet”, it was decided that she would enter one of the service academies. Anne remembers her father announcing this at the dinner table when she was 14 years old, her step-mother’s objection — but girls are not allowed in military academies, and her father’s response, “They will be by the time Anne is of age.”
Of course, he was right, as was Anne’s eventual choice. Originally she’d wanted to attend the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, but she was informed by her congressional representative that all appointments were filled. She discovered that the Coast Guard Academy is the only military service school in which the Superintendent appoints recruits. She applied and was accepted, sworn in as a Cadet and to the Uniform Code of Military Justice in June of 1977. She underwent four years of training as a cadet, earning her Bachelors’ degree during that time, and upon graduation in May of 1981, Ensign Anne Flammang became a Commissioned Line Officer.
The Coast Guard Academy, Anne says, was “a good fit”. She was used to a small school environment, having come from a town like Hampton and graduating with a class of only 92 students. She liked the idea of humanitarian service, its mission of “helping people”. Additionally, the Coast Guard seemed to do a better job integrating women than the other armed forces, she said, recalling the Secretary of Transportation’s 1977 announcement “women will go to sea” and noting that women were awarded distinguished service medals in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
After graduation, Anne’s first tour of duty was aboard the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Rush WHEC-723, as a Student Engineer. Based in Alameda, California, the high endurance cutter was on fishery patrol covering the territorial waters of the Pacific all the way to the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea. She became an Engineer Officer of the Watch after five months of on-the-job training, during which she traced all the cutter’s mechanical systems, from stem to stern, which, she says, was a great way to learn the ship. She served 24 months on the Rush and advanced in rank from Ensign to Lieutenant Junior Grade. During this tour, she engaged in naval battle training, wherein scenes are invented and the crew is rated. The Rush also participated in international naval exercises with Australian, Canadian and American warships in the largest allied exercise in the northern Pacific since World War II. The fleet exercise included air craft carriers, battle ships, supply ships, and oilers.
Anne’s second tour was in a district personnel office, and while there, she met the Veterans’ Representative from the University of California, Berkeley at her office, which resulted in Anne’s application to a Masters’ program in English. A series of fortunate events, chiefly an interview with a professor who was on the committee that selected candidates for graduate school, and who was impressed with her military background and her “voracious hunger for literature”, earned her acceptance to Berkeley. She would later earn a PhD. from the University of Iowa.
Shortly after Anne returned to her alma mater in New London as an English teacher, the congressionally mandated Permanent Commission Teaching Staff was revived, and in 1990 she became one of five officers selected for this unique corps, and the first woman in the PCTS. This assignment would limit her Coast Guard duties to teaching; she was no longer eligible to serve as a line officer, the only route to flag officer, or Admiral, but it would lead to a position as Department Head and Associate Dean of Faculty and to the career she’d dreamed of as a child, teaching, which she speaks of glowingly. In short, “I got to do everything I wanted to do in the service,” she says. Anne retired after 22 years of teaching at the academy and 30 years of service in the Coast Guard as the rank of Captain.
The best part of her military experience? “When I was a valued member of a team, and together we did something important,” Anne says, using examples from her time as a Cadet, on the Rush, and at the Academy. She still has friends from her Cadet years, her Officer years and her teaching years and maintains contact to this day.
And the hardest part? “Getting over my fear of not being able to do something,” Anne says. “I was really tentative about accepting certain challenges and putting myself forward in leadership roles. I didn’t want to be in front, and I had to get over that. I had to learn to accept the responsibility of my rank.”
As to equality in the ranks, Anne observed that the participation rate of women at the Academy is higher than the military at large, noting that the Coast Guard set high standards of conduct for its public servants with a sincere desire toward progress. “We’ve come far,” she says, acknowledging, “there’s still a ways to go.” She hopes she has imparted to her students an understanding of life as a “relay race”, and the message, “pass the baton”.