Legionnaire Eileen Merullo was reading the names of the deceased at a Post 61 memorial service when it hit her: There were no women on the list.

"I was thinking to myself, there's no recognition for women at all in Revere, Mass. None. There is no signpost, nothing to honor the women, and so many women did go from Revere," she said.

As a World War II veteran herself, Merullo started her project then: a monument honoring the women who served during WWII. She got the go ahead from the commander, then walked over to city hall to discuss the project with the mayor. The city donated the space, and she began the project in earnest.

Merullo began a list of names that would reach nearly 150 — friends, friends of friends, hunted down by calling and writing old neighborhood families and acquaintances in the Boston and D.C. areas.

Merullo often fundraised, sending letters to "to everyone [she] knew, all over the country," she said.

The monument was dedicated Sept. 7, 2013, within a year from its conception, adding women to the list of monuments that dot the "beautiful" lawn in front of the post, women who didn't expect fanfare.

"They had served and women at that time did what they had to do, came home, took off their uniforms, and went back to their daily chores. No fuss, no honor, no parade, no nothing like that, and that's the way the women wanted it at that time. They went in to back the men up and that's all they wanted. They didn't want honor and glory for what they did," Merullo said.

Her own story follows this plot as well.

After finishing college, Merullo enlisted as a physical therapist with the Army. She said all the young people she knew were involved in the war effort one way or another.

"There were about 15 boys in my neighborhood that we played with, played hockey with, went to the beach with, and they all were called in. So I figured the war's going on, it's my duty to do that, and I did."

She was stationed at the amputee center at Walter Reed. The soldiers being flown in still stick in her mind.

"They were coming right in from their dirty front clothes. They shipped them right in to the hospital and then we had to soak their arm or their leg in water and clean it up," she said. "Some of them came and they hadn't even been unwrapped yet. It was open sores, and so they had to wait for the infection to go away and the healing to begin."

The arm or leg was contoured to fit a prosthesis, and the exercise regimen and healing would begin, Merullo said. Depending "on the attitude of the patient," she said it usually took about two years for the whole process.

"Then they had to worry about what they were going to look like when they go home and what will their friends think and their girlfriends and all that. Some of them got what they call a Dear John letter. . . . Because they had an amputee the girl didn’t want anything to do with them any more. So they'd send them a letter, 'Sorry you lost your leg, now you lost your girl,' something like that. Cruel," she said.

But focusing on range of motion and progress helped ease some of the pain. Merullo said before men were nearly ready to be discharged, the women would escort them downtown for dinner, "that way they became accustomed to being in the public and to being with people, and like to pull the chair out for you when you went to sit down and things like that." If they did well, they were were able to return home.

Though many of the patients have faded into memory she does remember one man specifically, a stretcher-bearer. He had lost both feet when he stepped on a landmine while recovering someone. Merullo said he wound up marrying one of the nurses.

"They were all young, just as I was, and in my heart I knew it was a pitiful thing that they lost their arms and legs and things like that but they were so brave.... It's a very difficult thing to lose an arm or a leg," she said.

"At that time, everything was just war, war, war, everything. Food was rationed, gasoline was rationed. Everything, the entire country, was war. So when it was over, then we all wanted to forget it, to get back to normal as fast as we could. So we just took off our uniforms and went back to whatever job we were doing or housework or whatever we were doing and that's the way we wanted it—to be at peace again," she said.

When Merullo was discharged after the war, she went to Illinois, to assist polio patients, then served four years at Chelsea Naval Hospital. She said while there she invented a device to measure supination and pronation for amputees with prostheses. She got married and returned to Revere, where she was voted the town's woman of the year in 2013 for these efforts.

She's happy to see women recognized among the many other monuments dotting the lawn in front of her post. But the dedication was a bit bittersweet. Many, if not all, of the almost 150 women the monument honors are deceased.

"To tell you the truth, I think they're all gone. Most people — that was civilian life, of course — they got married and moved out, but I think I was the only person here left in Revere that has survived so far," Merullo said.

But without Merullo's work and the resulting monument, it's possible these women would have been left out of history's footnotes. Now, they're names are kept in the heart of Revere.