Oral History Program Colonel Regina Sabric Interviewed by Lorrie Rands & Natalie Rands 19 August 2019 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Colonel Regina Sabric Interviewed by Lorrie Rands & Natalie Rands 19 August 2019 Copyright © 2022 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Beyond Suffrage Project was initiated to examine the impact women have had on northern Utah. Weber State University explored and documented women past and present who have influenced the history of the community, the development of education, and are bringing the area forward for the next generation. The project looked at how the 19th Amendment gave women a voice and representation, and was the catalyst for the way women became involved in the progress of the local area. The project examines the 50 years (1870-1920) before the amendment, the decades to follow and how women are making history today. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Sabric, Colonel Regina, an oral history by Lorrie Rands & Natalie Rands, 19 August 2019, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Colonel Regina A. Sabric 19 August 2019 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Colonel Regina Sabric, conducted on August 19, 2019, at Hill Air Force Base, by Lorrie Rands. In this interview, Colonel Sabric discusses her life, her memories, and the impact of the 19th Amendment. Nute Rands, the video technician, is also present during this interview. LR: Today is August 19, 2019, we are in Colonel Sabric’s office at Hill Air Force Base, it’s about 10:30 in the morning, and Nute Rands is on the camera. I am Lorrie Rands conducting the interview. NR: Thank you so much for doing this today. RS: You’re welcome. LR: As she said, thank you very much for your willingness to do this, and let’s start with when and where you were born. RS: I was born in New York in 1973. LR: Where at? RS: New York City, we lived in Queens. My dad was a New York City cop and my mom was an emergency room nurse. So we grew up there until we moved to Pennsylvania a couple years later. LR: So you don’t really have a lot of memories of New York? RS: No, we moved when I was about four. I grew up in Pennsylvania in the Poconos since I was about four. LR: What took you to Pennsylvania? RS: I think my parents wanted us to grow up more out of the city. 2 LR: Fair enough. Was your father still a cop then? RS: He was, when he was done being a police officer we moved out to Pennsylvania, so when he retired we were done. LR: That makes sense. How many siblings do you have? RS: I have a brother. LR: Okay, are you older or…? RS: I’m younger, yes, I am a year younger. LR: Alright, so both your parents worked, how do you think your mother balanced working and taking care of her family? RS: Well, when we moved to Pennsylvania, my parents opened a real estate business so they worked together. When we were younger, I think my grandparents were there and a few others, but when we moved to Pennsylvania, my parents worked together so I think that was an easy high five, “I’ve got this practice, you’ve got this practice, you got school,” so I think that made it a little bit easier probably. LR: Makes sense. So what was it like going to school in Pennsylvania? What are some of your memories of elementary school? RS: So I love it, and it’s funny ‘cause I have an eight-year-old, but I remember on Saturday morning you woke up, got on your bike, came back for lunch, came back for dinner, and you came back when it was dark. We had our little bike gang. You used to hop on your huffy bikes and ride around, and go play, and get dirty, and come back. That to me is what I remember about growing up in Pennsylvania. It was good. 3 LR: That’s awesome. What about school? What do you remember of school? RS: So I was busy in school. I played field hockey, basketball, and soccer. I was on the student council, and did peer support volunteering. I was a busy high school person. Always involved in something, which was good. LR: How did you get involved or why did you get involved in those types of activities? RS: So we grew up playing sports, my brother and I, and we are very competitive to say the least. Sports were our “thing,” and just being outdoors. Student government always interested me, and then we had this peer support volunteer of helping kids as well. I think just being involved is a big thing for me. I am not a person to sit down and be idle, that lasts for about ten minutes with me and then I’m done. LR: Okay. So who were some of the women that you looked up to as a young girl? RS: So flying-wise, you have the WASPS, the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, that’s a big deal for everybody in my era, especially fighter pilot-wise, that’s who we emulated. They set the stage for the rest of us. When I got in, women were just barely starting to being able to be fighter pilots, so those women set the stage decades ago for us. But there’s been a lot of great women, Condoleezza Rice, Amelia Earhart, I mean, there’s a lot of great women in front of us who have paved the way. LR: Right, right. As you were growing up, were you encouraged to pursue an education? RS: Oh, absolutely. There really wasn’t a question. LR: Alright. So when you graduated from high school it was just a, 4 RS: You were going to college. LR: Did you already have a college you wanted to go to? RS: Yes, so honestly, I think it was never even forced on us, it was just something we knew we were going to do, we were going to college. My brother’s a year older, he went the year ahead of me.. I was an aerospace engineer in college, so we looked at all the aero-engineering schools and then I ended up going to Penn State, which was great. It was about two and a half hours from home, perfect distance from home, but a great school for engineering, really is what it was all about. LR: Going into aerospace engineering, flat out engineering then was a male-dominated degree. Did you face any challenges? Or what was that like for you? RS: No, to be honest, I’ve always been in the male-dominated things so it’s never been something that fazed me or intimidated me. In college, I had to study extra hard but it had nothing to do with me being a woman, it just didn’t come naturally to me. But that kind of stuff never fazed me, you know, there’d be one or two girls, and it’s the same my entire career, there’s not many of us who fly fighters. But we all know each other and it’s a great network we have now. So no, it never really was an issue. LR: It almost sounds like it’s wanting to fly, being in the Air Force was something you’ve always wanted. How did that come about? RS: So my dad took me to an air show when I was younger, and that sparked it, I would say. Always had an interest in aerospace. When I was about eighth grade, and I think tenth too, I went to space camp and space academy in Huntsville, 5 Alabama. Very interested in the whole space aspect. Obviously went to college, was an aerospace engineer, I got my private pilot’s license and started doing gliders in college. So it was always my interest forever, and I think it did start with my dad taking me to an air show and looking up and smiling. LR: Are you close with your dad? RS: He passed about seven years ago. My mom’s still alive, but my dad, we were super close. My dad had his private pilot’s license too. I never got to go with him, but I did take him flying eventually, which was a great time. LR: What were some of the challenges that you encountered throughout your training as you were going through? RS: So I think a lot of the challenges are the same. Are you asking women specific? LR: Yes. RS: Okay, we all go through the same training courses so there’s one standard, which is phenomenal and everybody has to hold it or you don’t get through. So from undergraduate pilot training to when you course select for your airplane to graduate, when you go on to do your mission qual-training, it’s all the same training. I think as a woman, I’ve never had any specific issues. You’re usually the only girl in class or maybe there was another, one or two would be the most you would ever see in a squadron. I think that’s changing a little bit more nowadays, which is great, than twenty-four years ago when I got in, but it was never an issue. I will say, I’ve had a phenomenal experience being a woman in the military. Every fighter squadron I’ve been in it’s like I had thirty big brothers or thirty brothers, I’ve never had an issue with that. There has been a few times, I 6 remember walking into one of my squadrons and, “Hey your only here ‘cause you’re a girl,” you hear that a lot. But that doesn’t bother me because you blow it off, you do your best, and then you prove why you’re there. There’s comments you would hear probably when I first got in the Air Force, I don’t think you hear that anymore, which I think we’ve come a long way, and says a lot to where we are today in 2019. I will say, there was one time, and I remember it to this day. I was a lieutenant and walked in, “Hey, you’re only here ‘cause you’re a girl,” and when that person left the squadron, he told me, “I was wrong to say that, you absolutely deserve to be here.” We all talk that the cockpit doesn’t know a gender, you just go in and do your best. A pilot’s a pilot, it doesn’t matter if you’re male or female. LR: I absolutely love that, thank you. So when you first started, where were you trained? RS: So initially when I got into the Air Force, there was no pilot training slots available so I went through navigator school. I went through Pensacola with the Navy, and then I ended up getting an F-15E Strike Eagle, so I was in the backseat before I was in the front seat. So I had to go through navigator school, I did that for a couple years and then I got to transition to pilot training from there. It was definitely not what I had planned, I will say that. When I’ll do some of these speeches, I’ll talk about how, everything you plan doesn’t always work out. So I went into navigator training, then I went to Seymour Johnson to fly the F-15E, end up getting deployed in Operation Allied Force, got to go to war as a Lieutenant. So while it wasn’t planned, I absolutely wouldn’t trade it for the world. 7 There are things that happened in those two and a half years that were phenomenal, and then I got to go to pilot training and pick up the F-16 world from there. LR: Okay, so how do you think, doing the navigator school, helped you as you were moving into the pilot training? RS: I think it gives you more “air-sense,” we call it. When you go in with somebody who has never flown, and I had flown for two and a half years in the back seat, which you get some sit time, you get to talk on the radio, you know what flying’s all about. It definitely gives you an upper edge, When you go to pilot training, just because you’ve got the basics behind you because the basics in flying is same-same. NR: Given that you didn’t get your goal that you wanted originally what advice would you give for those going into those kinds of careers that don’t get what they want to get? RS: So, I would say enjoy what you’re doing, that was my biggest thing. While it may not be the path you actually chose, there’s a few of those for me that I wouldn’t trade for the world, and it ended up to have me in this seat, which I think is the best seat in the Air Force. I’m the Operational Fighter Wing Commander, and it doesn’t get any better than that, flying the F-35, in my opinion. But all those different paths took me to that. So to me, everything we do in the Air Force, you’re going to learn something from it, you take the good and you take the bad and you go on from there. People ask me the same question all the time, “Hey, enjoy what you’re doing right then, take something out of it, you know, learn from 8 it and then move on.” For flying I called it a little bit of a jink, I took a jink of the navigator training and did a few other things but that experience made me who I am in this seat and I learned a lot from it. LR: That’s cool. So we’re talking about the F-15, that’s the one when you first got in. How long were you doing that? RS: I did it for about two and a half years and then I went to pilot training and got an F-16 out of pilot training, and then I was in the F-16 for about ten years flying. LR: What are some of your most memorable times in that span? RS: So I’ve got to do a few different things, one of the big things when I was in South Carolina, we did a lot of Operation Noble Eagle, which is defense of the United States. As a fighter pilot we train primarily to go overseas right? The war is going to be on somebody else’s ground. I think 9/11 changed that all for all of us, so shortly after that, 2002 to 2005 I was at Shaw Air Force Base and we did a lot of Operation Noble Eagle. That meant a lot of CAPs over New York or D.C. or something. So while it’s not the most exciting thing sometimes to fly combat air patrols (CAPs) in the sky for six to eight hours at a time, I think it’s a much bigger picture of what we were doing. Post-9/11, the world changed right? We did a lot more home sanctioned, we still do to this day, of “We’ve got to protect CONUS, not just the overseas stuff but the Continental United States as well.” We did a lot of Noble Eagle out of Shaw, and there are some great memories out of there, but I think it’s a little different when you land and you know that, no kidding, you’re protecting the United States, it’s not just a war overseas. LR: Alright, and then from the F-16 where did you go? 9 RS: So I was active duty in the Air Force throughout, I ended up getting out at Nellis. I was, I did the Aggressor Squadron, which that’s a squadron that you get to simulate the bad guys, to train our guys. LR: Oh, interesting. RS: Yeah, it was a really interesting assignment, so that was my last active duty assignment but I decided to go into the Air Force Reserve Command, from there. I ended up flying the MQ-9, which is the unmanned aerial systems, so the UAVs, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. I did that for a few years at Holloman and flew the T- 38 with that as well. LR: What prompted you to do the Reserve? RS: So it gives you a little bit more flexibility, I had just had my son, I wanted a little bit more flexibility, I still wanted to serve, but wanted to have a little bit more of a say in what I was going to do at that time. With him being little, it was the perfect opportunity. I went and did the formal training unit, which is teaching, then at Holloman, so I taught the MQ-9 for a while and the T-38 as well. LR: Okay, so the same question I asked you earlier about your mother, how did you balance your professional life with your home life? RS: I’m still trying. I just sent my son to school this morning, so that’s part of the reason I had some stuff going on this morning. He’s a really resilient kid, obviously, we all know what military kids are like. He has grown up in the military for the last eight years and we’ve moved every two to three years since he’s been little. I will tell you, he’s a phenomenal little boy that gets it. A couple months ago we had the first squadron deployment go out and I brought him. The 10 jets were going out at one in the morning, I was like, “Come on, we got to go say goodbye,” and he knew. He sat in the room ‘cause he knew Mommy had to go wish the guys going to war good luck, and he knows when I have to go meet someone who just came back from a deployment. He’s very resilient, I will say, and he gets it. I’ve dropped a few balls here and there, we all have, I think, but he gets the balance that sometimes I’ve got to concentrate on work and then sometimes it’s him. He’s really good at understanding it for an eight-year-old. LR: Okay, and if I’m too personal just say so. RS: No, it’s fine. LR: Do you have a partner to help you? RS: No, I’ve been a single-mom since he’s been born. His name is Tyler, so when we go every two or three years, we find the new school, we find the daycare, and sports, we can do those together. Its a team effort here and there. I will say, there has been times where, as a two-year-old, he’s been under my desk or the pack-n- play was in the conference room and a few other things. I’ve had great bosses who understand the flexibility of the single parent thing, but my whole front office knows who Tyler is and he comes and says, “Hi.” I will pick him up at one today and he will hang here for a couple hours until I give a night fly and I hand him off to a babysitter. NR: Where did you get your Torch name? RS: Oh, so my call sign comes from fire. Usually your call signs come from something you do or maybe something that didn’t go so well. So when I was a captain at Shaw in South Carolina, in the F-16, we went out for a sortie and we had inert 11 bombs, which means there’s not explosives in them, they’re just like concrete. It just so happened to be dry that day and it worked off a rock and a spark happened and it burned down acres of the range, so there was a fire on the range. The next day, I had a fire in my jet taking off, and the next day after that, it was a night sortie and we have flares that we use for defense stuff, all the flares dropped on the ground so it was like fireworks. It was about three days of fire and so we have a naming board and every call sign name up there had to do with fire, so it was pretty accurate. LR: That’s really funny. It seems like you’re saying you moved every two to three years and I know that’s active duty life, but I’m wanting a more linear timeline of all your posts, but that might be a bit much. RS: Well, no. So when I was in the Strike Eagle, I was overseas at Lakenheath, and then I went to pilot training at Shepherd in Texas, and then my first assignment in the F-16 was at Shaw in South Carolina. Then I went out to Luke in Arizona and taught, so I taught all the new kids in the F-16, and I did that for a couple years. And then I went to Nellis and did the aggressor squadron, the one I was talking about where we’d simulated the enemy to train blue forces in the Air Force, and then I went to Holloman and did the MQ-9. Then I did my Pentagon, I had to go to the staff. So for a pilot, coming out of the cockpit is not usually what we like to do but we all have to do it for the most part. So I stopped flying for a couple years and went to the Pentagon, where I learned all the programming, requirements, a lot of stuff like that. From there I came out and I took a different turn as well, I didn’t come back to the Fighter world, initially, I went to Special Ops. I went to 12 Duke Field in Florida and I was the Operations Group Commander of our Reserves, Special Operations group, there. Was a phenomenal year and a half, and from there I came here as the Wing Commander. LR: Okay. I know you said it was a good time, but was it hard to not fly for those years? RS: Sometimes it’s a little bit of a break too, we run pretty hard on our ops-tempo we call it. We’re always go, go, go. So a nice break that usually lasts for a little bit until you’re like, “I want to get back to flying.” But, it was good. I was only in the Pentagon for two years, so that was my only time not flying out of my career for a non-flying assignment. So it was good and I had some great leadership ahead of me that put me there for a few years and they kick you back out and don’t let you sit there. LR: Right. So did you go right from the F-16 to the F-35? RS: No, so that’s when—I was out of the F-16 for a little while so that’s when I went to the MQ-9 and the T-38, then I went on my staff tour, then I flew Special Ops for a little bit, and then I came into this. LR: Okay, I’m trying to keep it straight, you moved around different things. RS: Yeah. LR: So what is the difference between the F-16 and the F-35? Other than the obvious look. RS: I think the technology piece is probably the biggest thing when we talk about the difference in the F-35, because the F-16’s a phenomenal airplane. They’re both built similarly for a lot of the same missions, we call it air to air, air to ground. 13 Whether you’re shooting missiles at bad guys in the air or dropping bombs on the ground for the air to ground side. I think the F-35, it’s the latest fifth gen. We talked about LO, stealth technology and that, but the F-35, I think, does a good job of, we call it sensor fusion. It takes all of this information from all sorts of different sources and technology and blends it into the airplane to give us this battlespace picture, that is phenomenal, that is different than the F-16. Taking all the sensors, taking all the information that comes into that, you use that, then to push out and fight the fight. It is a very different concept in the F-35 than the F-16 about how to employ it, but they’re both phenomenal airplanes. The F-35, technology-wise, is definitely head and shoulders above the F-16. LR: What is one of your most memorable experiences throughout your career that you're willing to share? RS: Like being a woman or...? LR: In general, just—I mean, yes, we’re focusing on women but I don’t want you to just limit. RS: Okay. To be honest, I think deploying is a very memorable experience. I’ve had a few deployments, and when you deploy that’s what we train for, that’s what we fight for, it’s what we’re built for, right? So when we go down range and deploy, that’s what you do down there, of world shuts off and you’re focused on your job and all that. I think the stuff that gets accomplished downrange is something you’ll never forget. Some of the things you see downrange you’ll never forget, the comradery, the sense of patriotism. I remember doing a reenlistment downrange for one of the guys that worked for me, swearing him in again to say he’s going to 14 take the oath to reenlist. I think you see the best out of people, particularly in the military, downrange as well. Those to me are the big things we’ve seen. I’ve seen a couple other things on the bad side that you know you’ll never forget either, but we train and train and train a lot and we run people pretty hard to be the best of the best and when you send them downrange and see them do great work, that’s a great experience to say, “Hey, we got there, we did our job, and we came back.” LR: Okay. How do you think education empowers, not just women, but as an empowering tool? RS: I think education’s important, not necessarily maybe what the topic is, but just willing to be open and to learn. I was an aerospace engineer, did that absolutely help being a pilot? Yes, but to be a pilot in the Air Force you don’t need to be an engineer or have anything to do with flying, you could be any major, you just have to have a degree to be a pilot. Do I think that helped? Probably. We do a lot of professional military education in the military, we call it PME, but it’s the topics, that teach you the different things that you wouldn’t have learned, but I also think it’s being open to learning something new is probably the biggest thing I pull out of education. I think we see that now while I sit on the older side of the military, you see the younger airmen come in who think differently than we do and we teach them differently and there’s different ways to do things nowadays that are better. I think as we grow and evolve, that’s probably the biggest thing we see in education of “What works better for this group versus that group? Is a powerpoint the best idea? Or do we need to go out and be interactive and go teach 15 something?” So I think being open to learning how to learn is a different concept as well. LR: Okay. Because of active duty life you’re constantly moving, do you find that a hindrance or do you look at that and see how that might’ve been a good thing for you personally? RS: I think I’m used to that. To me, three and a half years is the longest place I’ve ever been in my military career, and when you get to that three year point, you know you’re going to go. Mine is slightly different, we have Reservers here who have been here ten/fifteen years, so the Reserve can give you flexibility to say, “Hey, I’d like to fly the line” or “I’d like to work on that airplane and I want to stay in the 419th forever,” we have the flexibility to do that. In the leadership seats where I sit, I now move every three years and that’s my choice and I know that. To me, that’s a good thing. I think moving around a little bit, you get to experience a whole lot more, you get to embrace different cultures. I’ve had the opportunity to see different things get done different ways. One of my biggest pet-peeves leading is when I ask somebody why we do something and the answer is, “Oh, we’ve always done it that way.” That might be the best answer and that’s fine, but to me, if it’s not the best answer, we go out and explore a different way to do things. I think moving around you see different techniques, you see different ways of leadership, you see different mission-sense and all that. I’ve taken a lot out of it, I’ve never regretted the moves, even some places that I didn’t necessarily want to be in ended up being great assignments. I think it’s what you make of it. I got advice once, “When you get to a new location, 16 you live your first six months like you’re a tourist,” because if not, three years pass and you haven’t done anything you’ve ever wanted to do. So I’ve taken that to heart for the last few assignments, so whenever we go to an assignment, we jump in. We’ll go explore everywhere and live those first six months because life takes over and you get busy and school, and sports, and work all happen. LR: Yeah, it’s true. So I know you’ve only been at Hill for a short time. RS: About sixteen or eighteen months, something like that, LR: Have you had the opportunity to be out, off-base, and see the culture that’s here? RS: We have. We’ve been to Salt Lake. We’re campers so we’ve been to Yellowstone. We’ve been throughout Idaho, Boise and Northern Utah. We try to get out and see all the country fests and all the rodeos, we’ve immersed ourselves into the west. LR: I am just curious, because Utah’s so different from most any other place you will live, and having lived a few different places, how does getting involved in this culture, how has that been? Was it strange? What was that like for you? RS: No, I will say Hill and Northern Utah, and we all talk about it, all the commanders and everybody that works here, I’ve never seen a more welcoming community than here. The community leadership is phenomenal. The community, in general, is very welcoming and embracing of Hill Air Force Base and what we do and all that. When we do all of our community outreach, it’s phenomenal how many people are, “What can we do to help?” or “We’re here for you guys, what do you need?” Everybody’s always willing to reach out an arm or “Hey, what can we do for you? Is there anything the military needs from the community?” So it’s been 17 very embracing I would say, we love it here. I mean, we love it here so I can’t say anything negative about it because, since day one where we walked onto Hill and started meeting everybody in the community, it has been a phenomenal organization, both with the partnership with Hill and the community, and we felt it. LR: That’s awesome. NR: What advice would you give to young and older women when it comes to just embracing women’s rights? RS: So I would say there’s nothing we can’t do, there’s no glass ceilings. The days of not being able to do something is in the past for the most part. I’ve never been told I couldn’t do something, which is probably a good things ‘cause it might not went well for me. I would just say if you have a dream, go for it. It really just depends on how much you’re willing to work for it, how much effort you’re willing to put into it. I think anybody’s goals, either young or old, are achievable, which I think is awesome. The women were getting us to vote and we used to have a restriction that women couldn’t fly fighters, that’s gone now, I mean that left a long time ago when I came in so that was a good thing. You’ll see the rest of military starting to open up, career fields that were typically blocked off to females, that’s going away and the other components as well. So, young or old, I think if you want to do something, you go for it and it really has nothing to do with gender anymore, it has to do with your ability and your drive to get there. LR: On that, and this is something I’ve been asking everyone. What does the term Women’s Work mean to you? 18 RS: Women’s work? [taken aback] I don’t think there’s such a thing. I sit in a very unique seat obviously, but when we talk about “Is that man’s work or women’s work?” To me that doesn’t mean anything, particularly in the military, work is work, it doesn’t matter what your gender is. We all have the same job. It doesn’t matter if I’m a female pilot or it’s a male pilot or a crew chief is male or female, it doesn’t matter, we all have the same job. So it’s not a woman’s work, man’s work conversation to me. That would never enter my mind. I will say, especially as being a single-mom, that doesn’t work with me either because it’s all my work. I was cutting the lawn and making dinner the other night, so to me, that term doesn’t really float. LR: Okay, I love getting that answer to that question ‘cause everyone has a different take on it so thank you. What you just said brought up a question. How did becoming a mother change your outlook on your career? Or did it? RS: I don’t think it did. I think I’ve been more flexible because of it, so working the twelve hour days, I can’t cut all that time anymore, not that we should anyway. I don’t really like the term ‘balance’ because trying to balance that is what I was getting at. I like to use the word ‘blend’ a little bit more, because to me, ‘balance’ implies that if work is a priority then my family life suffers and like it’s a seesaw and to me that’s not really. I try to blend it and sometimes work’s going to take priority and I think we get that and then sometimes I’ve got to go run, like this morning, I had to go to the first day of school ‘cause that to me was the priority of the day. That worked out well, so that I can fly tonight because I got to go see my son off to school. So I’m not so sure it changed me, I just think it made me better 19 at organizing a little bit and trying to fit all the jenga pieces in where they need to be. My calendar is pretty interesting, it’ll say, “fly, go pick up Tyler, hive five him off to a nanny, go read for tonight, you’ll have a meeting with somebody.” So I don’t think it changed me, I will say it definitely didn’t change my goals. I know that. I’ve been a single-mom for eight years and that hasn’t limited me at all. I’ve been a squadron, a group, and a Wing Commander. I’ve had to, not give up a few things, I’ve had to figure out how to make it work and like I’ve said I’ve got phenomenal bosses ahead of me who get, “Hey, I need to take today off,” or “I need to do this,” or “This is the priority of the day,” and then my son gets it if, “Hey, it’s a drill weekend, this is a work weekend.” He understands drill so he knows one weekend a month Mommy’s not home. I just think it’s how you fit it all in. LR: I was married to an enlisted man, so it’s a little different career paths, but were you always looking towards a command of your own? RS: I think so. I came in as an officer and I think when you’re younger your whole goal is you want to lead a flying squadron. I will say, when I was younger you emulate, “Hey, I’d like to lead my own squadron one day,” and then from there, you know group command is next and then wing command’s next. This is a phenomenal job, and there’s the gold ring right there for the F-35 wing. I think growing up, squadron command is probably what you want to do first. If you were to reach for the long pull, that would be the squadron command job. 20 LR: Okay, and this is where my ignorance shows...I’m trying to think of squadron and wing, which one, RS: You have a squadron and then you have a group and then you have a wing. So the squadron, for instance, I have ten squadrons in my wing and then I have three groups, so one of those groups has five squadrons, one has two, one has two, and then the wing is above it. LR: Okay, that actually now makes a little more sense. RS: Yeah, a little different than the army talks, battalions and all of that kind of stuff. So we go squadron, group, wing. LR: What are your goals now that you’re a wing commander, what’s next? RS: I love this job and would like to stay here for a long time, I have told my bosses they could leave me here. But typically, I’ll see probably two or three years siting in this seat. cause we are on the same timeline with the FTD, about every two to three years you’ll rotate out the Commander and that’s how we all do it. So in theory, next summer, if I was super lucky maybe the summer after, but it’s really what the Reserve Command needs me to do next. It is really whatever my bosses above me need me to go do, they’ll still put me where they need me to do the best work for the Reserve Command. This job is phenomenal and I’d love to sit here but, we take our experiences and then I’ll go to a staff job or I’ll go to a Reserve Command and work there, and that’s where you funnel all the experience I’ve had up to that point to now look at policy and operations and strategic stuff to go on from there. I’m not done yet, I’m not ready to retire. I love 21 the Air Force so whatever the Reserve Command needs me to do next, that’s where I’ll be. LR: Yeah, well it’s obvious as I’m sitting here talking to you that you love what you do. If you were to be in a room with women her age, early twenties, what would you share with them? RS: One of the things that always sticks with me is, and I heard it from somewhere, so this is definitely not from me. “Take your seat at the table.” Maybe it was a Lean In thing or something I was at once, but for like women in the room, “Take your seat at the table,” don’t sit at the back, don’t sit on the wall. If you belong at that table you take your seat, you give your opinion, you be confident in your job. If you go into something, if you’re the expert on it. be the expert on it. If you’re not, go research it and then become the expert on it. I think a lot of it is confidence. Going into a room what you want to do is have confidence, be competent in what you’re doing, and then lead from there. I think some of it is instinctual, I think some of it you have to learn. I think we all learn what are good and bad traits we have in leadership. I think continually evolving on them is a big deal to, “Hey, I’m pretty good at this,” or “Maybe I need to get better at that one.” I think you always look at people above you and laterally and below you, when we talk about mentor stuff, I think having a mentor is super important. I’ve had some great people that I can just pick up a phone and call, which has been phenomenal, both my same rank, higher rank, and lower rank as well. I think you find mentors anywhere. I think you find mentors both on the female and the male side, which is super important. The female mentors, I think we do a much better 22 job now than when I was younger. There weren’t many, but now we’ve got a whole young group of Lieutenants, Captains, and Majors who we can now call and be like, “Hey, have you seen this,” they’ll be like, “Yeah, I have. Here’s how I dealt with it or here’s my experience with it.” I think that’s an important thing of where we are today versus where I started. LR: So did you not have someone that you could...? RS: Female fighter pilot-wise, no. There’s only a few handful ahead of me. When we started the whole group of all the female fighter pilots talking to each other, which is awesome ‘cause there’s still not that many of us. It’s still a relatively small number within the Air Force. But it’s the conversations of “How do you pee in the jet? How do you have kids and then get back in the cockpit? How do you balance single-mom or dual military or a spouse who’s civilian? How do you mod your flight suit to have the zipper go where you need it to go?” It’s those kinds of conversations that have come night and day from when I was younger. Now we’re like, “Hey, that zipper is the wrong way,” or “This might work for this,” or “Hey, have you thought about this for when you have a family?” or “this might be a good assignment.” I think we talk a lot more nowadays, which is a good thing. LR: So when you were just starting out, how would you do it, not having the connection that you’ve established, RS: We had some people who were creative and, “Hey, let’s try this,” or “Let’s try that.” You would try to figure it out on the path while you were forging it a little bit on some stuff. 23 LR: You found the WASPS, those that you looked up to, there’s probably a lot of women that are going to look up to you. How do you feel about that? RS: It’s good. It’s a mixed review with me on this one, because I know it’s a big deal and I’m super happy that there are women who would say, “Hey, she’s great and it’s awesome she’s a role model,” and I get that and I’m super proud of that. I will flip the coin a little bit but also say that gender doesn’t matter, I don’t sit in this seat because I’m a woman, I sit in this seat because of how I got here. I think it’s a dual-edged sword with me a little bit of first female in F-35, reservists and, first female wing Commander. I get those stories have to be told because there is an absolute reason and I know I’m a role model to other people. But at the same time, it’s 2019 and I think we’ve gotten to a point that gender doesn’t matter, it’s your work-ethic, your leadership, how you command, and how you lead is how you get to these seats. That’s a tough question for me all the time, I’ll be honest. I struggle with it because I know both sides are important, but I also know when we talk about being a female in the jet, what a big deal it is for me to take off my helmet and there’s long hair coming out of it. I do know that. Somebody seeing me, whether it’s at Hill or somewhere else, I do know that a female walking out of the jet is a big deal to a little girl sitting on the ground, or a little boy, to say, “Hey, I can do that someday,” which is a good thing. NR: So I started down the idea of the pilot path a while ago and learned about some of the things you have to do, and one of those things is the survival training. How did you handle that, going through? Because I know you have to meet the same standard a man has to. 24 RS: You know it’s not going to be pleasant and you know it’s going to be hard going in. I think I went through in 1996. I remember there was myself and another fighter pilot going through and we got pulled aside before we even started and said, “You guys know you are targeted going through this as relatively new fighter girls going through?” We started laughing like, “We knew that, you didn’t have to tell us that, but thanks.” So that to me, you just know you get dirty, and you fall in the creek, and you have to kill a bunny, and you have to gut a chipmunk. That stuff didn’t bother me. You simulate P.O.W. camp and that wasn’t pleasant but it’s not pleasant for the guys either so it had nothing to do with being a female. I will say that stuff teaches you to dig deep, because when we’re sitting in there in our simulated training environments all you do is think of the John McCains and everybody else who was actually at the Hanoi Hilton and you’re like, “I can survive four days of this, they did five years or whatever.” I think it makes you dig deep. I think it makes you appreciate the people who came before. It makes you appreciate what people sacrifice their lives for, whether it’d be their lives or their freedom. You learn a lot about yourself in those situations. They teach us all the life skills right? Could I probably go snare a chipmunk and live off it? Maybe. Or I’ll eat leaves, who knows, but I think it teaches you the resiliency part of it, If you’re in that situation, what’s the mindset I need to be in? You fall back on all the skills they taught you and go from there. It’s not a training I’d ever want to repeat, don’t kid yourself on that one, but I will say that it is probably one of the most valuable trainings I’ve ever been in, survival school: 25 water, land, and P.O.W. camp, because it teaches you more about yourself and what you’re doing there than anything else. LR: That actually sparked the question that I had. We didn’t spend a lot of time on your early life, which I normally try to, but as you were going through your education and knowing this is what you always wanted to do, how do you think that time in school helped you? Because the one thing I’m hearing a lot is gender doesn’t matter, especially in what you do, and yet outside of the military, gender does matter. RS: It does. LR: How do you think what you’ve learned here in your time in the military could actually be used outside of the military to help with this idea that gender doesn’t matter? RS: You know what though, I think it started for me before the military. I never grew up thinking I couldn’t do something. I had parents that were super supportive and, “Hey, if you want to reach for the moon, you go for the moon.” I don’t think it started in the military for me, because I think there was never anything I would look at and say “I couldn’t do it ‘cause I was a girl.” I was super competitive with my brother, and I had really supportive parents. I think I worked hard to get where I was. I think getting into the military, we saw things evolve a little bit and it’s not to prove yourself, it’s just to do your best. If you want something, you do your best, and you try to achieve it. I know I talk about it doesn’t matter, and, I think it’s because I just never had that mentality of ‘I couldn’t do something because I was a girl.’ Which is a great way to grow up. I don’t think any of us 26 should grow up stove-piped into certain lands at all, and I think we see the younger kids, like my son, he knows there’s no girl land/boy land. I did show and tell in the second grade last year in his class, and to him it’s quite normal that Mommy’s a fighter pilot, he doesn’t know any different, which I think is awesome. I just never had that thought either of there was nothing I couldn’t do because I had that growing up. So I think when we talk about, me being a role model in this seat, I know it’s a big deal, but I think it’s great that we can look across the spectrum. You can look in industry and you can look in military, you can look in teaching, you can look at politics, anywhere, we’re starting to see a whole lot more of mixed-gender stuff, which is a good thing for the country, and for different opinions, and diversity, and all that. LR: That’s actually really cool. Okay, so I am going to ask my final question, and this is a question we have asked every woman we have interviewed. How do you think women receiving the right to vote shaped or influenced history, your community, and you personally? RS: Oh. I think the women getting the right to vote just made everybody on par. We got away from women were second-class and subservient or, didn’t have a say. I think the right to vote obviously gave us a voice, which cannot be underestimated about where this has taken us, which I think it phenomenal. For my community in general, obviously right to vote led to a whole lot more openings for what happened for women. Women became allowed in the military, women became allowed to fly, women became allowed to fly fighters, and then here I am in 2019 flying the premier fighter of the Air Force, so to me, that all came from right to 27 vote, to equality, to getting a say, to getting to do everything that you should be able to do. I think that’s where it led me personally. The last one was what? LR: Your community, but you’ve been involved in so many communities. RS: Yes, so like we talk about our community’s our tribe, my community’s the military and my tribe is fighter pilots right now. But that to me all started with getting the right to vote, and from there, it has rippled and opened up so many doors that there are little girls right now who, wouldn’t even understand what it would be like not to have a say or a vote. The answer right there. LR: I agree. Okay, is there any other story that you’d like to share before we turn off the camera? RS: One of the stories, and I always remember it because I was Lieutenant when we did it. My Commander and I, we brought a bunch of Girl Scouts into the F-15 SIM. That is one thing that I think has always shaped me a little bit, because I remember doing that and I remember they took our squadron patch and shrunk it down onto their sash. But I think it spoke volumes of where we were, we had a Girl Scout troop in a fighter simulator. That’s not what I did when I was in Girl Scouts. Not to say there’s anything wrong with it, but it’s not where I was twenty years ago in the Girl Scouts. When we got to do that, I remember. We had all our gear on them and put our G-suits, and our vests, and our helmets on them, and we were like, “This is a very cool experience for a bunch of Girl Scouts to be in a simulator,” because it speaks volumes of where we’ve come. LR: That’s awesome. Thanks for sharing that.