Soldiers in uniform

The Hanna, Elk Mountain, Medicine Bow (HEM) High School is the location for an annual breakfast honoring the military and veterans. It is usually held the day before Veterans Day, as it was this year.

During this event there are several speakers from the military and veterans commemorating this special day in America. It is not common that the speakers are women but this past Thursday, there were two that came to speak to the students and residents.Both of them were different in rank, experience and age, but both were proud and honored to be at the breakfast honoring veterans. Samantha Gellar is a 2021 graduate from HEM. She is currently in the Army which she joined when she was 17 and in high school. "I enlisted on my 17th birthday and went through boot camp while I was in high school," Gellar said. "Boot camp was challenging then, but it was nice to go through it and then be able to come home and tell people of its challenges."

Gellar said she did part of her training while in high school and part of it once she had left. "Doing it that way really helped me get some time in service down," Gellar said. "It really helped me become more prepared which helped me in my performance."

To be in the military had been a life long goal of Gellar. Her military occupational specialty (MOS) is a radar assistant operator for field artillery. "It is really cool because they only really started letting females in field artillery since 2013," Gellar said. "I am really one of the fortunate ones that got to jump into it. Pretty much what I do is operate radar equipped vehicles. It is super fun and super rewarding."

Gellar is going to the University of Wyoming while being stationed in Cheyenne. She is in the Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) and helps with recruiting.

Gellar said she had no idea how many facets of the military she would be in when she graduated HEM. "ROTC has given me a lot of scholarship opportunities which I would not have had otherwise," Gellar said. "It has really helped me as I work towards long term life goals." She hopes to make a career in the military even if it is not full-time.

At the University of Wyoming Gellar is studying psychology.

The HEM grad recommends the National Guard if someone is not quite sure if they want to join the military. "At the end of the day, the military is what you make of it," Gellar said. "It is up to you to be optimistic and have a good attitude. It can be bumpy if you make it bumpy, but it can be rewarding if you make it so."

Gellar is relatively new to the military but the guest speaker from Cheyenne, Lara Taylor has been in the Army for 23 years.

"I am the first female in my family to join the military," Taylor said. "The military is much different today than when I joined in 1999, as it was different than in 1940. When I joined they still had us put in separate rooms. We had to be separate on so many different things from the male soldiers." Taylor admitted it was not always easy. "It was really difficult for male soldiers to understand what we could provide them in the realm of being a soldier, which was no different from what they could provide," Taylor said.

"What I have seen in my past 23 years is a definitive difference in how we are, as a society, accepting females into military roles." She gave examples. "Since I joined we have accepted women in combat roles and seen them go into combat," Taylor said. "We have seen females excel during combat, we have seen females come out all that much better than some male counterparts and the cohesion, that was actually a concern back in the day, has been overridden by the absolute humanity of who we are and the need to take care of each other."

Taylor has been pleased with what she has seen happen. "I have seen this very good shift from no longer females in uniform, we are soldiers in uniform," Taylor said. "That is important."