back lawn of the USS Arizona Memorial Visitor Center at Pearl Harbor. It is estimated by the Department of Defense that 65,034 Puerto Ricans served in the U.S. military during World War II. Soldiers from the island, serving in the 65th Infantry Regiment, participated in combat in the European Theater – in Germany and Central Europe. Those who resided in the mainland of the United States were assigned to regular units of the military and served either in the European or Pacific theaters of the war. Some families had multiple members join the Armed Forces. Seven brothers of the Medina family known as "The Fighting Medinas", fought in the war. They came from Río Grande, Puerto Rico, and Brooklyn, New York. In some cases Puerto Ricans were subject to the racial discrimination which at that time was widespread in the United States. World War II was also the first conflict in which women, other than nurses, were allowed to serve in the U.S. Armed Forces. However, when the United States entered World War II, Puerto Rican nurses volunteered for service but were not accepted into the Army or Navy Nurse Corps. As a result, many of the volunteers migrated to the mainland U.S. to work in the factories which produced military equipment. In 1944, the Army Nurse Corps decided to actively recruit Puerto Rican nurses so that Army hospitals would not have to deal with the language barriers when tending to wounded Hispanic soldiers. Among them was Second Lieutenant Carmen Lozano Dumler, who became one of the first Puerto Rican female military officers. In 1944, the Army sought to recruit up to 200 Puerto Rican women for the Women's Army Corps (WAC). Over 1,000 applications were received. The Puerto Rican WAC unit, designated Company 6, 2nd Battalion, 21st Regiment of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, was a segregated Hispanic unit. It was assigned to the New York Port of Embarkation after basic training at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia. The WACs were assigned to work in military offices which planned the shipment of troops around the world. Among them was PFC Carmen García Rosado, who in 2006, authored and published a book titled "LAS WACS – Participacion de la Mujer Boricua en la Segunda Guerra Mundial" (The WACs – The participation of the Puerto Rican women in the Second World War), the first book to document the experiences of the first 200