Portraits of Courage: Helen Dolenc

PALMER — She can tell you the exact place she was when she heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor.

“I was at the corner of Carson Street and Lakewood Boulevard,” said Helen Dolenc of Palmer. She and her boyfriend were driving back from the beach to Long Beach, Calif., and heard about the attack on the radio.

“I was absolutely shocked,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it. I was horrified.”

While Dolenc was working at a job with pretty good compensation, she decided to join the Women’s Air Corps in 1944 on her 24th birthday.

“My patriotism outweighed the compensation I was getting from working,” she said. “I considered myself to be a very patriotic young lady. This was the beast way to serve my country.”

Dolenc also had a brother who couldn’t serve because of medical reasons.

“I felt I was taking his place for our family to be represented in the military,” she said. Her younger sister would later follow in her footsteps as well.

Dolenc was sent to basic training in Des Moines, Iowa, for three months before being sent to Kelly Field in San Antonio, Texas. She was assigned to work in finance and payroll.

Dolenc, however, wanted to get farther away from California than Texas — she wanted to go overseas. She continually asked her supervisor if she could go and when the first opening came down, she applied and was sent to overseas training at Fort Oglethorpe, Ga.

After the training, she was chosen to be a replacement in England and headed across the ocean on the Queen Elizabeth. She was assigned to the U.S. Strategic Tactical Air Force. In October 1944, Dolenc was serving her country in England. In December, she moved on to France.

“We were surrounded by woods and the Germans were being dropped behind enemy lines,” she said. “We couldn’t walk one block without being escorted. Girls couldn’t carry guns then.”

They had to be escorted from their billets to the mess hall and back.

“We always had a soldier with a gun to protect us,” she said. Dolenc said that, for the most part, she was never in any real danger.

“Filling the needs [of the soldiers] outweighed any fear I had,” she said.

Dolenc was discharged in 1946 as a staff sergeant about six months after the war ended and went home to California.

Ready for another adventure, her desire to see the Northern Lights and the Midnight Sun brought her to Sitka on Jan. 7, 1947.

“I didn’t know a soul in Alaska,” she said. Except for working in Africa for two and a half years, she’s stayed in Alaska.

Dolenc’s patriotism is still as strong as ever. After the invasion of Iraq, she remembers telling others that, “if I had an opportunity and they needed me, I would join and serve again.”