BRUNSWICK — At age 81, longtime Brunswick resident Juanita I. McCauley only recently joined Brunswick’s American Legion organization.

Some legionnaires spotted her wearing her Army veteran cap at Tim Hortons in Topsham and approached her. Her friends told her she better wear her hat in the picture.

That is because McCauley is being honored as a 20-year veteran of the Army as this year’s grand marshal of the Brunswick-Topsham Memorial Day Parade. Twenty years, one month and 24 days she served. She enlisted with what was then known as the U.S. Women’s Army Corps on Nov. 7, 1950, and re-enlisted in six-year intervals until retiring on Jan. 1, 1971, as a staff sergeant.

A native of South Dakota, McCauley said she was adopted before birth by parents who loved her and whom she idealized. Her father wasn’t well after he was exposed to gas during World War I and her mother, who was ill, died when she was only 13. She promised her parents she would either join the Army or be a nurse so they could rest easy she would be OK when they were gone. She was in California to finish high school and had attended a half-year of college when she enlisted. The agency that handled her adoption contacted her and helped her when she told them she wanted to join the military. Her father was still alive and, “In those days, the girls had to get the parents’ permission.”

She joined knowing it would make her parents happy and “so I knew my daddy didn’t have no more worries.”

Basic training

Don’t be deceived that her eight weeks of basic training was easy for McCauley because she was a woman.

“Basic was hard when I went in, in those days,” McCauley said. Basic training was in Fort Lee, Va. “We made $40 a month. You had your training there — I mean everything. You pulled your KP (kitchen police) and all the companies rotated. On your training, they put you through the gas chamber.”

That, she said, was a building where the recruits entered wearing a gas mask, “and they take you in there and there was nothing but the smell … they’d set this gas thing off, just like the men, and you say your full name and service number and then you head for the door and hopefully you can get out of there in time.”

“And then you went on march-outs,” she continued. “In other words, you had full packs on your backs and they would screen gas and you would drop right there. You had the same training as the men. You went under barbedwire fences and they shot over the top of your head and all that kind of stuff.”

After basic, she went to signal school at Fort Lee, where they taught her how to run teletype machines. She ended up working in correspondence, coding and de-coding messages that printed out on narrow tapes of paper the width of a Band-Aid.

From signal school, “they sent me to Washington, D.C.,” where the messages came straight from the Pentagon, “and the next thing I knew I was on overseas orders for the Far East,” McCauley said.

Stationed in D.C. for about a year, she couldn’t wait to leave, finding the Pentagon was just too big. Asked if she was sworn to secrecy about her work there, “Yes,” she declared, and nodded her head up and down when asked if she had to keep those secrets forever. “I had a very high clearance.”

McCauley went overseas where she was stationed in Japan in 1951 and was there when the May Day riots took place. She reported to Yokohama and was sent to Tokyo where she spent about two years. It was there she got involved with intelligence (or G2) work.

Next she was sent to Sendai, in northern Japan, and assigned to a company working for the 16th Transportation Corps. There were only nine women there, McCauley said, and when the men went to train in the field, the women stayed in the offices. But one day the colonel “finally got fed up. I was in the main office and he said, ‘No more of this, you’re going to the field with us.’ I said, ‘OK, I don’t care.’ I was a courier.”

Asked what the courier position entailed, “You got enough paper there?” McCauley asked. “I will tell it to you this way, yes, I carried a .45. I had documents,” she explained — classified documents she was trusted with due to her clearance. And it was very dangerous work.

Keep track of POWs

Especially because since she was in Tokyo, “I am the one who kept track of the POWs while I was in the Far East,” which is why she said the Communists wanted to get a hold of her. “They knew there was an Army woman, but they didn’t know which one it was.”

“When the mail came in from the POWs, it came to me,” McCauley said. “I kept a card so we would know which location the guys were at. Then it would go before the board (of officers) and it would be put on microfilm.” From there, it was out of her hands. Though it was screened first in Communist offices, using their encryption systems she used the mail to keep tabs on the location of their prisoners of war through the mail.

McCauley confirmed there were many POWs, and “there’s still a lot that never came back.”

It’s something she often thinks about on Memorial Day. When she got a call from parade organizers to ask if she’d be the grand marshal, “I said, ‘You’re asking me?’ Because I just figured nobody cared for the old-time veteran.”

She came home from the Far East in 1953 but then she re-enlisted six-years at a time until leaving the service. She served more time overseas than stateside and while she would have liked to be home while her father was alive, “he realized I had a job to do.”

Serving in Heidelberg, Germany, McCauley officially became a cryptographer and then she spent more than two years in Sheldon, England in civilian component duty. She was then stationed at the Army Security Agency at Fort Meade, Md., “next to the Pentagon again.” Then she was sent to San Antonio, Texas, where just to escape, she joined nurse recruiting. She found herself in Los Angeles, Calif., signing up girls out of high school who wanted to become nurses in the Army Nurse Corps.

In 1965, she went to Fort Sill, Okla., where there was a women’s Army battery, and was slated to be a counselor but instead was placed in the legal section. She was stationed at Fort Sill with two other Army veterans who have since passed away, Jenny C. McFarland and Irma Cosca, who both joined during World War II. Since McCauley had no family to return to, the three decided to move to McFarland’s home state of Maine after McCauley got out of the service. Once settled, she never left.

It was her work tracking POWs that highlighted her military career for McCauley: “I still think about them guys. I never knew them.” She even met a man at the Miss Brunswick Diner one day, recognized his name and asked if he was a POW. He was.

“I don’t know what ever happened to him. He was from Brunswick.”

“Yes, sometimes it’s haunting, I’ll be honest with you,” McCauley said. But make no mistake when it comes to her decades of service, “I have no regret at all.”

dmoore@timesrecord.com