101-year-old veteran still carries on values learned in Army
MONROE TOWNSHIP, New Jersey (WABC) -- A 101-year-old woman who enlisted during WWII still carries on the values she learned in the U.S. Army to this day.
Sgt. Millie Epifanio is a New Yorker, first-generation Italian-American and one of the original Women's Army Auxiliary Corps.
She still makes her bed every day and still does her Army exercises. She also still wears her dog tag.
"It says I got my tetanus shot in 1943 and gives the address of my mother in case, you know..." Epifanio said.
Epifanio grew up in New York taking care of her family, making $17 per week in a greeting card factory.
Her father was hurt after falling down an elevator shaft. That is when she volunteered and enlisted on her own to hopefully spare the lives of her brothers.
"We all had to be 21, that's why we're all dead now. It was like a calling to go and do this," Epifanio said.
She served for three years in Virginia, sorting and shipping Army clothes.
"Bed check was at 10 o'clock and it wasn't quiet when the lights went out -- you could hear the sobbing," she said of the women who missed their husbands and families.
She is most of all grateful for the boys, she says, who died or almost died, fighting for our country.
She loves these United States of America and asks that we enjoy life.
"And take a little schnapps once in a while," she added.
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