I thought, This looks like
fun!”
She was also drawn to
the competition’s focus on
raising money for home-
less female veterans. From
2010 to 2015, the homeless
female veteran popula-
tion tripled to more than
36,000, according to the
Department of Veterans Af-
fairs. Boothe, the pageant’s
founder, had once been
homeless, as had Pabon,
when she was 19. “Seven
months pregnant and
sleeping on my aunt’s liv-
ing room floor, that’s how I
became part of that statis-
tic,” Pabon says. “I wasn’t
living outside, but I became one of the
people who are couch surfing. That’s
part of the homeless population that’s
not counted at all.”
A year after her son, Javon, was
born, Pabon rejoined the service; she
later married a fellow soldier. Last
year, she set her sights on Ms. Veteran
America to celebrate how far she’d
come.
The high point for her was the tal-
ent competition, where she recited a
poem she’d written in the voice of a
Women’s Army Corps (WAC) member
from World War II, wearing a vintage
uniform she had cobbled together
from eBay. One stanza told her col-
leagues: “I want you to believe that
what you are doing / Is not just for thiswar but for our future generation of /
Female gladiators that we are paving
the way for.”
Pabon won the competition and
the prize money that comes with it:
$15,000 toward a car, a home, educa-
tion, or a student-loan repayment. As
part of her reign, she acts as a spokes-
person for Ms. Veteran America and
performs 100 hours of community
service, educating people about
homeless female veterans.
“A lot of people get hung up on ‘I
don’t have a talent’ or ‘I’m not good at
wearing heels,’” Pabon says. “We want
you to know it’s a competition among
sisters. It is not about how good you
look in a dress. It’s about your com-
passion for your own.”rd.com 77ph
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Don’t call Ms. Veteran America a pageant, says Desiree
Pabon (above). The contestants prefer the term competition.