Rock Falls’ Navy veteran reflects on 21 years of service

When Kahla Davis joined the U.S. Navy 42 years ago, she was doing something that not many young women did at the time. And that sense of accomplishment is just one of the memories she took away from her 21 years of military service. “I knew I was doing something that nobody else I knew back home was doing,” said Davis, who lives in Rock Falls. Davis enlisted in the Navy in 1984. “My mom married a man who was in the Navy; he retired in 1980,” Davis said. “When I got to be a junior, I thought, ‘I don’t know that I want to go to college. I don’t know that I want to continue school. I’m over it.’ He got to see some neat places in the Navy so I thought, ‘Let me see what it’s all about.’”She still had questions, and those questions were ones that her recruiter, who had never signed a young woman before she enlisted, may not have been immediately able to answer but eventually did. “A lot of my questions he didn’t know the answer to but he found them and I found out later that he knew my paren