In military parlance, you would be right on the mark in calling retired Army Sergeant Major Roselyma Trujillo a ‘Strack’ troop. By definition, that would be a soldier with a perfect uniform, no dangling threads, shoes or boots immaculately polished, medals and insignia in perfect alignment.
Trujillo, who grew up in Salida, Colorado, but now calls Pueblo home, has a story that is truly American. A small town girl right out of high school wondering where life would take her and expecting that the journey would not be far. Then, one day, serendipitously, she meets an Army recruiter in the most unexpected place, and the fuse is suddenly lit on a life and career she never imagined.
“I don’t even know why the recruiter was at my house,” Trujillo recalled in a recent phone chat. But there he was when she got home after her shift at a local restaurant, a job, by the way, she already knew was taking her nowhere. But the Army, she figured, would take her somewhere, places she had not even dreamed about.
It was 1958, and Trujillo was a freshly minted high school grad. But in a matter of weeks, after cajoling her mother into signing for her to enlist, she would be on a bus to Denver where her amazing two-decades long journey would begin. She was ‘in the Army now.’ And, as she tells her story, she couldn’t be happier.
“I really liked it,” Trujillo remembered. All the running, jumping and regimentation of basic training was like high school gym class, she said. It was so much fun, she may have even been sad when basic training came to an end. But Army green had a way of washing away the blues.
Her first posting was, like basic training, at Fort McLelland, Alabama. There, she began learning the job of a clerical specialist. Luckily, she’d taken typing in high school. But here, she was learning ‘the Army way.’
“As I got rank,” Trujillo remembered, “the typing and filing didn’t last long.” Soon, she had people working for her and only typed when it was something she really needed to do.
Trujillo’s Army journey would next take her on assignments as fascinating as any girl from small town America could imagine. Fort Knox followed. Yes. That Fort Knox, where the country stores much of its gold. There, it was a nearly three-year assignment.
Next, New Jersey’s Fort Monmouth and a job working for the Army’s Adjutant General. Then it was on to Germany, a place where she would, over her career, have multiple assignments, each coming with a promotion. For Trujillo, the stripes just kept coming.
Back in the states, her path took her in a whole different direction. Once again at Fort McClellen, her career took a different turn. There, she took on the role of a drill instructor, a platoon sergeant. “It was a lot of work, but I knew what to do, what to expect.” She remembered her own basic training drill sergeant. “I just followed her example.”
Her career ricochetted between the U.S. and Germany. It was all, she said, like a grand adventure. In Germany, her free time allowed her to see the country. “I got to travel to different cities,” and take tours things she had only read about, see centuries-old castles.
Back in the U.S., Trujillo was dispatched to Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. It was there that she met an Army icon. General Omar Bradley, who along with General George Patton, was a genuine American hero. Bradley, a five-star general, was senior commander of the Army in WWII and the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Bradley lived his retirement at Fort Bliss. “He liked to sit with enlisted people,” Trujillo said.
Away from the Army now for more than forty years, Trujillo says it was a wonderful life and a grand adventure. The Army allowed her to see a world she might only have been able to read about. And regrets? Not really, she said. She made friends, visited fascinating places and took in the culture of a couple of continents. And she still had her family at home.
Her time in Army green also gave her the experience of two of the 20th century’s military inflection points. The first was 1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis, a moment that took the country to the brink of war with the then Soviet Union. And, on special order of President Kennedy, a mandatory six-month extension in the Army.
The other was the Viet Nam War. “I asked to go,” she said. “My request was turned down.” Back then, the only women getting assigned to the war were nurses.
Looking back, meeting that recruiter after her restaurant shift in a ‘go nowhere’ job may have been the luckiest accident of her life. It catapulted her into a career that allowed her to not simply read about it, but to actually see the world.
