Maureen “Mo” Ramsey volunteered to be a soldier when the Army had just started training women to use M-16 assault rifles.

It was 1974, near the tail end of the Vietnam War, and at the height of the movement to pass an Equal Rights Amendment.

It had been years since members of the Women’s Army Corps were required to take a course in applying makeup and carry lipstick at all times. Established during World War II, the Corps would be absorbed into the regular Army in 1978.

Times were changing, if not quite fast enough for a whiz kid from Maryland who found herself in the thick of the civil rights movement during and after high school. Then she launched a 32-year career with the U.S. military that took her around the globe and to Afghanistan before she retired to Lubec.

“I thought to myself, ‘I am a citizen of this country, and I vote, and I have all these advantages and disadvantages, and yet my brothers and boyfriends faced the draft, but I did not,’ ” Ramsey recalled. “In my mind, equal rights meant equal duties.”

Ramsey, 72, grew up in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., the oldest of nine, including a brother who died in infancy. Her father was a WWII veteran and a retail executive with Sears, Roebuck & Co.

A Catholic school honors student, she had read Greek tragedies, Alcott, Ghandi and Hemmingway by eighth grade. A bit of a renegade in her white, middle-class community, she wrote an essay about the civil rights movement that ended with the question, “Have you ever considered that God might be black or a woman?”

Her interest in diversity led her to attend St. Cecilia’s Academy, an all-girls high school on Capitol Hill in D.C. “It was the best school and it was integrated,” Ramsey said. “I always thought outside the box.”

While in high school, she volunteered in congressional offices and attended civil rights demonstrations, including the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963, when she heard Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech.

Ramsey was class salutatorian when she graduated in 1967 and planned to attend college, but her father reneged on a promise to help pay for it. “Turns out my father did not believe women should go to college,” she said.

So she went to work as an information operator for the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Co. in D.C.

“I was working downtown when MLK was killed and the riots broke out,” Ramsey said. “For our safety, the company put us up in a hotel down the street and shuttled us back and forth.”

She was attending community college and working at Blue Cross Blue Shield in customer service when she decided to enlist. By September 1974 she was stationed in Baumholder, Germany, with the 293rd Engineer Battalion, working as an information specialist.

“But I didn’t have any training as an information specialist,” Ramsey said. “They didn’t know what the heck to do with me.”

Maureen Ramsey, left, just before graduating from basic training in 1974. Photo courtesy of Maureen Ramsey

So she got busy helping newcomers get oriented to life on the military base and in surrounding towns. She took photos and wrote articles for the unit’s newspaper. Her work sent her to project sites where U.S. soldiers were building roads, bridges and runways.

That’s how she met her late husband, Elmer, a combat engineer whose father was career military. They traded jokes on job sites, went on movie dates and got married in November 1975.

“When he smiled, it lit up his eyes,” Ramsey said.

The couple had four children within a few years while she was on active duty through 1977 and in the Army Reserves through 1981. She transitioned to non-commissioned public affairs positions, where she produced news articles and responded to media inquiries. She also conducted research, wrote hundreds of speeches and advised command staff on communications issues.

Ramsey got her bachelor’s degree in 1985 and was working toward a master’s degree in art education when her husband died in 1987 from injuries sustained during training exercises. She was left with four children age 10 and under.

“He died on Father’s Day,” Ramsey said. “That’s not a really good holiday for any of us.”

Ramsey spent the next decade working in public affairs at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. In 1997, she brought the four kids with her when she took a job with the Army Corps of Engineers at Camp Zama, Japan. She promoted U.S. projects in Japan, coordinated work with the Army Corps in Korea and organized receptions for VIP visits, including former Secretary of Defense William Cohen of Maine.

By January 2002, Ramsey was back in the nation’s capital, working as a senior public affairs specialist at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. It was just a few months after the Sept. 11 attacks, when American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the west wall of the Pentagon, killing 125 people in the building and 64 in the plane, including five hijackers.

“It was very sobering,” Ramsey said. “I worked with people who had witnessed the attack.”

In 2005, Ramsey saw a job posting for a public affairs officer stationed with the Army Corps as part of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. She and her late husband had always regretted never serving in a combat zone.

“I thought it through and decided, ‘OK, Elmer, we’re going,’ ” Ramsey recalled. “We were going to get rid of the terrorists and make conditions there better by removing the Taliban.”

Everything she had learned up to that point jelled in Afghanistan, Ramsey said. In more ways than one. During her 18 months there, she saw kids going to school in tents, refugees living in crumbling mud huts, villages without toilets or running water.

Maureen Ramsey served 32 years with the military, including for 18 months in Afghanistan starting in 2005. She now lives in Lubec. Photo by Robert McCollum

But she also witnessed joy. She recalled riding in an armed convoy that inspected a project in Kunduz, on the Tajikistan border. She saw a group of girls skipping on their way to school, laughing and waving their hands.

“It made an impression on me,” Ramsey said. “I wish all people could go to a place where they don’t have what we have. Because we have so much, and we waste so much, and we take so much for granted. It should humble us.”

Ramsey has hard feelings about the recent withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, citing the arrogance of American intentions and the cultural differences that assured they would never be realized. She’s angry that al-Qaeda never was dismantled, and the Taliban is as powerful as ever, and the Trump administration left the Biden administration in a no-win situation.

“We gave a new generation of Afghans hope, and then we smashed it,” Ramsey said.

Ramsey retired in 2013 after receiving numerous awards for her service as a soldier and a civilian. She decided to settle in Maine, a place she enjoyed visiting in her youth, and the birthplace of some of her political heroes, including Cohen, Margaret Chase Smith, Olympia Snowe, Edmund Muskie and Michael Michaud.

Now a grandmother with two sons and a daughter-in-law in the Air Force, Ramsey looks back with pride on her own military and civilian service to the U.S. Department of Defense.

“It was always Defense Accounting that issued my paycheck,” Ramsey said. “I never left it.”

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