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[upbeat music] I was in the classroom and I'm the guy that taught next to me, came over and said, "You gotta turn your TV on," I had a classroom full of kids, "Turn the TV on."

And it was about 30 seconds before the second plane hit the south tower.

And I remember seeing the first plane and having been to New York City and knowing how big that the World Trade Centers were and the silhouette of the strike, I knew that that wasn't a small plane.

But watching the second one go in, I turned to him and he's still standing at the door.

he said, "We're at war."

And that was the first thing, that hit me was this isn't an accident.

Somebody is attacking us, we're at war.

And by the end of the morning obviously the Pentagon had been hit.

The World Trade Centers had collapsed, the plane in Shanksville United 93 had also gone down, but we didn't know what else was gonna happen.

Was this the beginning of a prolonged attack or was this the culmination?

So at that point, nobody really knew that the attack itself lasted about an hour.

But after that, certainly within the traffic and the buzz within the military community, it was something... Was afraid that something was gonna happen.

And by the end of the day, the president had made a statement from the White House.

It was pretty telling that the United States was gonna be moving militarily somewhere.

And for about the next year or so, there were preparations that were occurring.

And I felt that it was most likely that I would be deployed, go off to whatever part of the world that we were gonna be fighting in.

And it appeared to be Afghanistan at the time.

So I kind of had that sense from 9/11 on, that definitely something's going to occur, and I'm gonna be deployed.

So we got prepared and ready for that.

We had already had National Guard missions that were in control of Bosnia.

We knew that the Kosovo mission was out there we would be a national guard that would be in charge and responsible for basically the peace enforcement throughout Kosovo.

And at some point we got a warning order for my particular slice of a unit.

It was really basically officers out of the first 112th that were gonna be called on to go to Kosovo as part of this mission.

So that became known probably in the fall of 2002.

So by 2003, the warning order came out before Christmas.

So we knew we were going to Kosovo.

And we're gonna be part of a contingent that would be responsible for providing a safe and secure environment within Kosovo.

So I learned what I could about Kosovo and what was going on there.

Obviously we'd had an active duty presence for a number of years given the genocide and the turmoil that had been occurring in the region from Bosnia down into Kosovo itself.

So I knew that that was where we're gonna go.

And it was the first time that a national guard command would assume command of basically a theater of operation Multinational Brigade East.

So it was the first time that we were doing that.

I wanna say up until maybe a year before we were deployed there it was still considered a combat zone.

So they were gonna combat patches.

When we were there, it was a hostile fire zone.

I don't wanna say get the perks, but you didn't have to pay income tax because of the hazardous duty area that it was.

I think one of the first things that I read about Kosovo that really got my attention was there were over a million landmines on the ground in Kosovo and Kosovo is not a big place.

So when you come to understand kind of the mentality of what was going on there, it was eye-opening for certain.

My name is Greg Henning.

I teach Western civilization at Northeast High School, but I never thought being in the military that I'd visit the cradle of civilization, Baghdad, Iraq.

Well, I listed about six months out of high school.

I was working at GE and seeing all these world war II vets that were breaking me in in building 13, and I decided maybe it was a little bit more out there than working at GE the rest of my life.

So I went down to the recruiting station and before I know it I was on a bus, Greyhound bus out of the area of the Buffalo.

And before I knew it, I was down at Fort Dix, New Jersey and going through my basic training.

I spent four years at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, and I became electronic instructor.

So I came back to Erie after that little stint and I was working back at your GE again, but a little more better skillset, and then I joined the army reserve.

then eventually I made it in the Pennsylvania National Guard and then went off to OCS.

So I spent on 19 almost 20 years, in the Pennsylvania National Guard.

And then I transitioned into what they call the Individual Ready Reserve.

So I was teaching half-time and still working at GE, so something had to fall off the table.

And then my first week of teaching at Northeast High School was 9/11.

So I can still remember the principal announcing one plane hit the tower, then two planes hit the tower.

Then you know, whole world kind of stopped for a few minutes and then it kind of played off from there.

And then in 2004, again, my wife gets a telegram at home and she calls me on the cell phone.

Hey, you're being deployed.

So that kind of, you know, your whole world's kind of spins around and your focus is getting things ready.

I mean, you have to get a will done, got to make sure everything is... All your matters are taken care of before you go down range.

And Benning was kind of a neat experience.

I mean, I'm an infantry officer, so it's kind of like going back home a little bit.

My youngest daughter was born there, but it was very chaotic there.

I mean, you see massive amount of people, some wanna be there and some people don't want to be there at all.

And there were so many people Benning, they couldn't put people up in the Fordham while they had actually had to go out their hotel rooms.

And so we were going in and out every day and towards the end of November, we got orders to go to Fort bliss.

And from Fort bliss, we were put on a very large aircraft and we we're off to Kuwait.

So, and that was like landing in a whole different world.

I mean, you are not in Kansas anymore.

When you go into the Middle East, it's just a different experience.

During my first appointment, I was working at the embassy in Baghdad and I had a Washington DC phone number.

So I could call her on my phone and we can have a conversation and I would update her what's going on.

The only time it was really kind of distressing to her was every so often we get mortar and rocket rounds going into the compound, and she could overhear like the big voice, you know, "Take cover take cover," you know, rounds impacting.

So Bobby, I gotta go.

I was a, what we call a congressional trip planner.

So all Congressman coming into Iraq would go through my office.

I would plan everything from basically when wheels down and Baghdad International Airport, until they actually left the countries.

You know, one of my very first code Ls was John McCain and Hillary Clinton, I think Lindsey Graham was in there, Ross Feingold was in there and Susan Collins.

So you have three Republicans and two Democrats.

Majority of them were on the Senate's appropriation committee, which is very important for what we're doing.

Hillary Clinton came in with 'cause John McCain and her kind of formed a special relationship.

It was kinda cool to see that.

They visit with Iraqi officials first day, second day, we went off to the Fallujah, which is an interesting experience given what happened to us a year before with a major military operation before the election.

And then after that, right there we went up to a place called Kirkuk, where they met with some of the local Iraqi leaders.

And then they left and then I got stay overnight in Kirkuk, which was an interesting experience, the next day we flew back by helicopter.

Well, we call ourselves O5 which is military rank as Lieutenant Colonel over 50.

And by during my second deployment, there was quite a few of us were in that particular situation, so a little more mature and we kind of mobilized as individuals, okay?

We didn't mobilize with a group and we kind of formed our little battle buddy group, and it's kinda neat we have a picture right now of our O5s of 50 with the current Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin.

My name is Jay Breneman and my American dream is a country where everybody has a chance to live a happy and productive life without the fear of hunger, without the fear of knowing if they were going to be forced out of their home, that they can live in a safe community and that they can live a life that is free from abuse, discrimination, and want.

I was 18 years old working at a food warehouse.

It was my first real full time job.

And I woke up one morning, I worked second shift.

I woke up one morning, had just moved to a new apartment.

I had a little 13 inch black and white TV hooked up the rabbit ears to it, try to get a local TV station, and I watched the terrorist attacks unfold on the World Trade Center.

And so that...

The attacks on 9/11 spurred me to call the army recruiter.

And I had...

I remember that conversation.

I called him and I said, you know, "You don't," you know, thinking because recruiters are supposed to be really aggressive about, you know, getting people to join the military.

And I was like, well we're at a time of war, I'm 18 years old.

They're probably eager to get me.

And I remember calling and saying, "You don't have to convince me."

"I want to join."

And you do this dream sheet when you go to basic training and it's basically what state side basis would you like to go to or cities or states, and then likewise what overseas ones?

And for my state side, I can't remember where I put overseas.

I believe I put Alaska, South Korea and maybe Hawaii.

I wanted to go to Pacific, if they sent me there.

And at the time we were only in Afghanistan, we hadn't been to Iraq yet.

And I thought I would go to whatever unit state side, to be sent to Afghanistan that was my anticipation.

But after I completed AIT, which is Advanced Individual Training for my job skill, I was there for, you know, I did nine weeks of plus of basic training and then six months of my skills training.

And then I got my orders for the second infantry division up by the DMZ in South Korea, and so I was a little angry because people were going to Afghanistan and I was going to the DMZ, but I went there for my first duty assignment.

And right around that time, the war in Iraq started and I started having these internal conflicts about that.

Being in South Korea, am I hiding out from being where everybody else is going, where they need me.

And so I remember calling basically the human resources for the army, for my job skill.

And I had canceled my orders.

I only needed one more signature to stay in South Korea and get bonus pay and all that stuff.

I called the...

This, the branch, US army branch.

And I spoke to a woman who was very kind, very nice.

And I asked her to give me orders to the first unit that was deploying, the next unit that was deploying.

And she must have asked me, I still can hear her voice in my head.

She must've asked me several times, "Are you sure honey?

"Are you sure that's what you want?

And you know, I was like, "Yes, please do."

And then, so she sent me to 2nd Brigade 10th Mountain out of Fort Drum, New York Before you go up into Iraq.

Again, we had only been in Iraq about a year at the time the U S had.

And so things were still relatively fresh there, but you fly into Kuwait and then your, all the vehicles you put on a ship a month before are finally arriving at the ports, and then you gotta get your vehicles off.

And then you're basically spending a few weeks or up to a month in Kuwait getting ready to go north.

And that was a really interesting preparing to go north of the border was interesting.

'Cause I was around like nine years old when the first Gulf war happened.

I remember seeing pictures in the paper of reservists who were being deployed.

I remember seeing videos of the bombings and I remember meeting some in my class in elementary school.

I remember there being some Iraqi refugees in class.

And so I remember hearing their stories.

And so it was, it was a little, it was more than a little, there was a lot of anxiety and pressure and unknowns about, you know, we heard about weapons of mass destruction.

We heard about all sorts of things.

So you're in the desert sand dunes.

First time I'd ever been in any desert, really hot right in the middle of the summer and preparing to go north.

And I had, because of who I was, I like to volunteer for things a lot, obviously at this point.

And so I had volunteered to be the driver of this large cargo vehicle.

And I was the only one that was licensed to drive it.

In the military you had to have a license like anything else, every piece of equipment license.

You know, that first drive into Iraq really like taught me.

It really was because of everything that the unknowns, it really shaped the rest of my understanding of the country.

And we were, every time we stopped at a camp to refuel and whatnot because I drove the biggest vehicle that also meant I had to tow all the other vehicles that were broken down.

Sometimes I had to tow them while we were on the road.

Sometimes I had to tow them while at the camp to the mechanics, and then I had to stay there while they worked on it.

And so, and this happened every stop, every time we stopped somewhere, I couldn't get any sleep because I had to move the vehicle.

And then it was just so hot.

Even at night, it was just so hot and we try to sleep on top of the vehicle that kind of cool off, but then people would wake us up because they're like, "You can't sleep on top of the vehicle."

"It's dangerous."

Right, but it was nice and cool up there, we got no sleep that first time and that first night, but the second night, you know, I was like, "Okay, you know we're fine."

"I'll catch up."

The great thing about the cab of this truck is we had a giant boxes in the back that normally had gear, but we stored a bunch of snacks and foods.

So we were good as far as all that goes.

But my vehicle was the slowest in the convoy.

I had Mk 19 grenade launchers.

I had 50 Caliber rifles and the huge crates really heavy.

Most of the heaviest equipment that we had for our unit was in the back of the truck.

And that first league of the journey I saw that, you know, when they say balls to the wall, the lever all the way forward, there was a throttle and it says, don't do this, but I did because you're going forever.

So I found that I could go at most 44 to 45 miles per hour.

And so when we got to that first stop, I told the commander and everybody else, we have, you have these briefings, every league of the journey.

And they said the second league was supposed to be the most dangerous.

There was more people, there was more, you know, threats of attacks.

There had been recently.

And I had asked them, I said you know, I asked the commander, which, you know, I was a young soldier at the time, but you know, I asked her, how fast did we move as a convoy?

And then people would pipe up were as fast as our slowest moving vehicle.

And I said, well, that's me.

I can only go 44 or 45 miles per hour.

And then so they said, well we're only gonna go that fast.

Well, we get to this area and I had like this little Intercom radio and we don't even have like a real radio system.

And the helicopter close air support comes in.

And when don't, you know, everybody else gets nervous and they stop step on the gas.

And me and Private Sanchez are in biggest vehicle at the very end.

And we get so far behind.

I can't even see the convoy.

We're just by ourselves and he's nervous and I'm nervous and he's making me more nervous and I'm already nervous as it was.

And we can't reach anybody over the radio.

I'm like they have to see us.

And, but then we, we get to this area where there's more people I guess it's a small group of some villages and probably something that would stick in my memory for the rest of my life was, we were told beforehand, when we get to this area, don't throw your MREs, your meals ready to eat.

Don't throw bottles of water at... they're gonna ask you for food and water.

Don't do it.

And they told us the reason why is because you give them some they're gonna want more, right?

Which is like, you know, why would you deprive people of food and water?

But that's what they told us.

Well, we get to this area where there's some villages and you know, I start cursing.

I get really upset because I noticed that the trucks in front of me had been throwing food and water bottles to mostly children, but a lot of villagers on the side.

And that made me mad because I was like, I'm the last vehicle?

I'm the biggest vehicle.

They're gonna think I'm loaded with food and water, which except for some slim Jims and Gatorades, you know, I didn't , it was all equipment and they start speeding path.

They start speeding down the road.

And the children, all different ages started like walking out into this road ahead of me.

'Cause they saw me coming and it got to the point where I kept driving further to the left of the road.

But then some kids were coming to the right and there's, I can't even tell you how many kids.

There's several dozen kids that were coming into the road.

And I remember she must've been a teenager, but I remember this, this girl and a bunch of other kids and they just did right in the middle of the road, like I'm driving 40 throttle 40 some miles an hour.

And they just put their hands up, you know, trying to stop my vehicle.

And you know, I'm nervous because we have weapons in the back and we have things that they go missing I'm in a lot of trouble for.

I wasn't so much worried about our safety with the children.

I was worried about Private Sanchez who was really nervous and he had the gun and was really worried about what he would do with his rifle.

And I was also worried that I would hit these kids.

So I kept going 47 miles an hour.

And I had veered off to the left lane and there was a long convoy of empty fuel trucks coming in the opposite direction, coming that way.

And at the very front is a dump truck, right?

And this dump truck has a 50 Caliber rifle on the back and there's a gutter and that's their protection, right?

For all these trucks, they're not going anywhere.

They're all going the same direction.

This dump truck is bigger than I am.

It's not moving.

And I remember the driver and the gunner just like telling me to move over.

So it was, for me, it was either stop, get overrun by the villagers to keep going, hit these young kids and I still remember the faces, particularly that the young girl or risk the head on collision with this dump truck that's going faster than I am.

And last minute I'm able to do, I'm able to swerve around the kids and barely miss the oncoming dump truck.

And they were just, you know, I could see the, their eyes, right?

They were just trying to sway me over, but we get to the next league of the journey and the next stop and everybody seems cool.

They seem, you know, fine.

They made it this way, but we do a, you know, you also do like this after action review, you know, after you went through.

And I, again, somebody, I was only at E4 at the time, especially I might've been an E3 at the time, private first class.

I might one of the two, I can't remember, but I remember swearing and cursing at the Lieutenant in front of a bunch of people, but nothing happened to me in that regard.

But yeah that second day was probably the hardest coming up there, but that really shapes, you know, that you, I perceived like the war zone.

I perceived what Iraq would be, but that was really my first introduction into it's just, it's somebody's home somebody's country.

People are living there.

They're trying to get by.

So that really shaped the rest of my deployment and my rest of my experience there for the rest of my life, so.

9/11 was a huge factor for me.

I remember being in high school, watching the towers and that immense sense of patriotism of this was an attack on us, and I wanna do something about it.

I was 17 when I joined so a couple of years in the passed from 9/11.

And I had talked to several recruiters and I finally met the recruiter that recruited me into the army and he gave me the best option and said, "You know, here's what we can do for you," and I kinda ran with it.

I did one tour in Iraq.

The deployment was from 2008 to 2009.

We were in the camp Taji area of Iraq, which is a little North of Baghdad.

Iraq was towards the end of my first enlistment.

Basic training was in 2004 and I was just getting ready to finish my first enlistment.

Actually, re-enlisted when I was in Iraq for another three years on top of my contract.

We did everything and anything under the sun, we did a lot of mountain patrols and dismounted patrols, but probably one of my favorite things we did was looking for weapons caches, I myself found two, my company found I think five total, and that was the most out of anybody in our brigade.

Essentially, a weapons cache is any site where they have buried or hidden weapons that can be used at a later date.

So, what we found a lot was a lot of artillery rounds that were buried in the ground.

The largest weapons cache that my company found was a barn that had plastic wells actually buried in the ground.

And it was full of RPGs, mortar rounds, heavy machine gun ammunition, the walls had any aircraft guns in them.

I mean, you name it, and it was probably in there.

EOD the Explosive Orders Detection guys come in and they will blow them in place a lot of times.

And that's what happened.

I actually found one weapons cache before they found the big one.

It was 46 rounds of artillery rounds ranging from a 105, which is a rather small artillery round to a 155 which is the most common.

And they came in and blew that in place.

And then later that night they got called out again for that large one that was at the barn.

For me this was a really great day.

The weapons cash I found, I was walking around with the metal detector and I had half my team on one side of this... trying to think of the word I wanna use to call it, not a ditch, but a smaller stream I guess.

He was on one side using the metal detector with a couple of other guys, and I was on the other side and he was picking up trash can or garbage really.

And then I found this spot that was 25 to 30 feet long.

And my team leader looked at me and said, "Carl, you got something for me?"

I said, "I think so."

He goes, "Well, what do you mean by you think so?"

So I've marked a spot in the ground and said, "Well, it starts here," and I walked back to him and I said, "It ends here."

And he looked at me he goes, "Well, I think you got something then."

So we called for shovels and we start digging, and I started getting into the ground further and further.

And then I hear my first tink.

At that point my stomach sinks, amd my heart goes in my throat 'cause I'm thinking to myself, "Did I just hit the tip of round, "and I'm gonna blow up?"

Luckily I didn't.

I uncovered it, and I had hit the body of it.

And as I was uncovering it, it still had the fuse cap on it.

So these were rounds that were still quite viable to be sent down range as we say, and as we were uncovering it, the hole gets bigger and bigger and bigger as these are stacked three and four rounds deep.

And we're just having the best time getting these out of the ground and getting them stacked up, And we called EOD, and they had actually been on another site with our third platoon that same day.

And we called up to them told them, we had a very dangerous round on ground, to the smaller rounds that we had found were actually white phosphorous rounds, something that hadn't been used since Vietnam.

So that was really scary.

And when we told them we had that on ground, they said, "Okay, we need to blow this "weapons cache that we have here in place "and we'll be there in five minutes."

From where we were at, we could see the explosion that they called us from, or we called them from really, and they were on our site within five minutes.

They had laid out a spot in the ground where they could safely detonate them and put the explosives on top of it.

And we pulled the vehicles away from that spot, and then EOD does their thing, and calls for a detonation, and then you hear, "Fire in the hole, "fire in the hole, fire in the hole, "come over," on the radio and big boom.

We actually did set up cameras so we could capture it.

And the camera takes some of the shockwave and you can see it rattle a little bit, but we're enough away from the shockwave that it doesn't do any damage to anybody or the vehicles.

Not all days were like that.

I mean we had our rough days, but I look back on those 12 years and I made lifetime friends, that I really miss.

It's because of the Vietnam that's we got to walk home the way we did.

You know, we got an escort in and we were welcomed with open arms from everyone.

And, you know, I can't say enough about the welcoming that we got compared to what the Vietnam veterans got.

And the Vietnam veterans were the ones standing front and center saying welcome home.

I commissioned because...

Largely because of college.

I got the opportunity to attend the Naval Academy.

And I kinda couldn't pass that up, as you know, it's a paid for school and it's difficult, but it was a great opportunity.

So did four years at the Naval Academy and then commissioned into the Navy afterwards, where I went off to my first ship.

So for us, we kind of do our Naval academy version of a bootcamp just before your freshman year.

So after that, depending on what you go do if you're a pilot, you'll go off to flight school.

For me, I was a surface warfare officer, so I got 30 days of leave after school.

And then after that I was on my first ship trying to figure out which way was up and which way was down as a brand new ensign in the Navy.

So my first ship was in Tarawa.

So as a USS Tarawa, it was a LHA-1, and it was actually the Tarawa class.

And so if you think of an aircraft carrier, it's basically kind of one step down from an aircraft carrier.

And it's one of the ships that the backend opens up, you know, and we work with Marines getting them to shore and helping them deploy.

On my first deployment in 2005, from 2005 to 2006 was about nine months.

We were on our way over to the Arabian Gulf and on the way there, I don't remember the exact month, it must've been October, November of 2005.

There was a large earthquake in Pakistan.

And a lot of the houses outside of the cities, there are built into the hillsides into the mountain sides, and so when an earthquake happened, it was just disastrous for a large part of the region.

And they asked for humanitarian help and relief, and all of that stuff.

And so my ship being the largest ship in our straight group, the Admiral that was running our...

The group of ships that I was with, he was put in charge of the disaster relief, and so a core element of his staff went out to lead the disaster relief in country and Pakistan.

And as an ensign there was a fair amount of us.

I had fully qualified and I volunteered to go with that disaster resistance relief, and I got the opportunity to spend the second half of my deployment about four months total in Pakistan doing that.

A lot of the rescue had been done by the local the Pakistani military and government, before we had had a chance to get out there.

Really what our relief efforts did was, we set up possible units, right?

So we worked with not only Navy, but Air Force, Army, Marine Corps.

So if you think of our army MASH units, right that the show MASH, we set up, we helped lead the effort in setting up one of those MASH units out there, Marine Corps hospital units that were more remote, as well as providing shelter, food, all sorts of things.

My major in college didn't really have much to do with what I was learning on the ground in Pakistan.

I was actually a Political Science major.

So some of that played in, right?

The international relations and things like that.

But really, you're just kind of learning as you go, specifically at the Naval Academy, everybody's required to take certain engineering courses.

So I did have a baseline technical foundation for working on the ship and things like that, but largely when you're out there, there's not too much of your degree, that's necessarily being put towards that.

Sometimes it is if it's like I said, if it's more technical.

'Cause I was so junior, I was given the more the menial tasks.

I wasn't in charge of a lot of the big big projects.

That was for folks who had a lot more experience than I did.

I had been in the Navy all of a year and a half at that point, but I got the opportunity to do some contractor work, getting toys for the kids in the kind of in the disaster regions.

So I actually worked with a local contractor on finding different things, like little toy helicopters that looked just like the army helicopters that were flying around providing relief.

And we would have stickers with the Pakistanian American flag on them or knit caps or soccer balls or cricket sets because cricket's big over there.

So I got to work with a local contractor ordering those, and then I actually got the opportunity to fly around a little bit and help distribute some of those toys and stuff like that to the kids in the regions.

The regions where we were at, they tended to be a little bit more, you know, on the not as affluent side, largely because again further...

Most of them were further away from the city.

However, there was a fair amount that was pretty close to the city as well.

But yeah, the... You know, I got some positive feedback from some of the units that were stationed out there that were actually living closer to the disaster areas because I personally was part of the headquarters element.

And so I was living more in the city working out of the embassy a little bit later, but we got some good feedback that the kids enjoyed, you know, getting those, and then, you know, it's just kind of an easy thing to cheer someone up.

It gives you perspective, you know, that's really what it does more than anything else is when, as a commanding officer now, right?

And it's largely reserved sailors and some active duty sailors.

I have that experience that perspective of, "Hey guys, "this is the big picture."

And that big picture perspective goes a long way when you have to buckle down and do things like COVID support, like we've been doing for the past year and change of mobilizing reservists to help out with COVID missions around the country, and having that big picture perspective and the opportunities to deploy to regions like that.

It goes a long ways in being able to kind of translate what sometimes people get locked in on is just here.

But if you look at the bigger picture, I think that's where it plays.

Well part of the disaster relief when we were in country, I think it was the first time that American military had been on the ground in Pakistan in something like 20 or 30 years, I don't know exactly, but we actually had for that particular disaster, an outpouring around the world of support.

So Japan sent forces over to help.

Really it was just delivery of goods and helping in like I said hospitals and stuff.

So the Japanese, the Germans, Australians, they had folks that were working with us, whether, you know, anywhere from folks who are helping with flight operations in our helicopters to the logistics sides of things, to potentially doing some rescue stuff for folks in the much more remote regions.

So I got to do that a little bit.

It was a pretty cool experience.

I spent Thanksgiving sitting next to people from all over the world.

It was interesting.

Right now, I'm the commanding officer of the Reserve Center here in Erie.

It's a Navy Operational Support Center Erie.

So you'll hear it called NASC Erie.

I am the commanding officer, and so I basically run the staff element and we provide support and help keep reservists who do their one weekend at a month two weeks a year.

And then occasionally they mobilize as well.

We help kinda keep them trained and ready.

So we provide support to them so that they can do short notice missions, like the hospital ship that went up to New York when COVID first hit.

We sent sailors up there.

So we had sailors leave here and go up there for a couple of months to help out with that effort.

We've sent sailors, you know, to parts of the country to help with COVID relief operations, as well as sailors around the world.

So that's part of what Navy reserves centers do.

So my route was different largely because I didn't know.

So I am one of the unique folks and I tell my path is not typical.

I applied actually to the Naval Academy very late, whereas most, you know, most people who applied to the Naval Academy are thinking about it their junior year of high school, and that's when they start their application, I started very late.

But as far as you know, I did work in recruiting.

So I've had the opportunity to talk to young men and women, whether it's enlisted or officer that they're interested in and kinda help guide them and answer their questions to see if the Navy is the right fit for them.

I joined, I was living in a small town in Cambridge Springs and I had three children at the time, still do, but I wanted to do more.

And I wanted them to see that they could do more too, and it doesn't matter what stage in your life you are, follow your dreams.

My dad is who I guess identify with the most and who I talked to the most.

My dad was in Vietnam and we used to have family picnics on the beach with old army rations.

That was kind of a picnic food.

And so whenever I was, I guess, questioning something or had questions or wanted more information, my dad is the first person I called.

My grandfather also served.

I have several cousins in different branches of the military, but I always called my dad.

I still call my dad.

And we now take trade stories a little bit.

And one of the funny things that my dad says, he goes, "You know, Angie, "out of these boys that I've had, "it took a girl to follow in my footsteps."

It was a very difficult decision.

My oldest son my goodness at the time he was 12, my daughter was 10, and then my youngest son was eight.

So they're all two years apart.

And I had never...

I had never been away from them.

Not especially for any length of time.

I picked actually my number one, it's the one I got, which was Fort Lewis, Washington out near Seattle in Tacoma.

So I joined because I wanted my kids to see the world and not know what happens and where places were just by a book.

I wanted to literally show them the world.

And so we moved to the West Coast.

So when I joined, I joined in July of 2001.

And when I got to what they call reception, which is where they kind of do all of your in-processing, there were too many potential soldiers, but you're not quite the soldier yet.

You haven't gone through that basic training.

There were too many there.

So I was held back in reception for... it was a total of eight weeks.

I missed my youngest son's birthday when he turned five, I missed my daughter's birthday when she turned eight.

So I guess they'd go back on the ages a little bit.

I was two years ahead.

You'd start to lose time a little bit.

And not having that purpose yet, not knowing what the training was coming, not knowing what I was going to be trained for.

That was a huge mental game that I...

Mental toughness that I had to overcome.

I was at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.

When I went in, I went in originally as an enlisted soldier.

So I was a transportation operator, has absolutely nothing to do with signal communications, But that was my job for the National Guard.

And that's where the transportation largely is trained is down in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.

About three days before 9/11, we had a conscientious objector training.

So they do a mock play of the United States is being attacked.

And what are you going to do?

And it's for that really hard gut check of, do you have what it takes to be in the military?

And three days later I was on KP, which is Kitchen Patrol, so kitchen duty, and I just remember the way that our drill sergeants came in.

We're like, "Oh man, what did somebody do now?"

You know, "We're in for it."

And they said, "Stop immediately, "everything that you're doing "and get back to the barracks, "as soon as possible."

We just knew that there was something a little bit different, but there was that that little part of us and we're like, "Okay, this is just another little thing, "they're gonna mess with us a little bit."

And by the time that they were...

I think there was probably a group of like eight to 10 of us, and by the time we made it to the classroom, again, you just knew there was something completely different.

There was no joking, there was no talking.

There was... And we had no TVs up until that point.

I hadn't seen a TV in two months.

The televisions were gone, and I had already been starting to have those feelings of what did I do?

I left my three young kids and seeing all of that happen, it was another huge gut check of what did I just do?

But the reasons why I joined weren't just for my children, it was because I wanted to be a better citizen.

I wanted to be a better person.

I felt like I had something to give.

And that feeling never left.

I never wavered.

So we went out, we called our families, made sure everybody was safe.

And the next day, you can bet that our training was completely different.

There was that sense of purpose and that sense of importance that we weren't just out there to play in the mud or to play on some ropes or, you know, on a huge, you know, army playground, I guess.

But the purpose and importance was completely different.

The feel...

The training was different.

It was a lot more intense.

The job that I was ultimately assigned was a signal communications officer.

So I help people talk.

So it can be computers, it can be radio satellites and any form of communication.

It was up to me and the team and the soldiers that I worked with to help other people communicate.

I was in a fob diamondback, so forward operating base diamondback, which is in Mosul.

I ran what was called a node center.

So essentially it's like a telephone company and you have different subscribers and clients off of this main node center.

And it would go off to another like little outsight and then they would go to another outsight from there communications again, we had a lot of striker brigades that were operating around that time, right through there.

So helping them have communications when they're out doing a movement was pretty key.

We also set up the computer networks and the telephone networks up there.

The things I remember, was the sound of birds.

And I know it might sound a little crazy, but there were so many pigeons.

The trees were literally alive with these pigeons and the sound of them were almost, it was almost deafening and having to walk in the temperature, the highest temperature I'd seen was 126.

You'd walk a few feet, then you'd have to stop and then you'd have to walk a few feet, then you would have to stop.

It just completely took the energy right out of you.

So there was that, so we kind of, we called it shadow hopping.

It's what the soldiers and I called it.

So there was a shadow hopping between that to escape the heat a little bit.

And I learned quickly because I had to run shifts 24/7.

I started taking later shifts because it was a little bit cooler at night, but not always.

So there was that.

There was a young Iraqi man, and he used to stand around the outside of our motor pool, which is where we store all of our equipment and our vehicles.

And my soldiers on downtime, they would either play ping pong or football, and they would be out there throwing the football across this parking lot.

And one day I just watched you cause I didn't always, you know, join in, just let them have their own time away from here the boss lady, I guess, but they invited him to play.

And to see that connection, there was no language communication.

You know, there was this huge barrier, but it was just through just that common human, I guess, decency.

They taught him how to throw a football.

And it's just those little things like that, that really caught my attention when I was there.

Just that human decency and exchange, you know, later on, I felt like I had made a big impact or at least some impact on some people and through my service.

And there's one term that we use in the military and that selfless service.

Once that's instilled in you, one of those core values is instilled in you.

You don't let go of it.

So I am very committed to helping other people and that's something that I haven't stopped and I enjoy doing.

And then I give that credit to the military.

It helped me step up and instill a lot of values or even just give it a term to the values that I had.

And the selfless service is one, like I said, I still do.

I'm on the board for the Behavioral Health Council here in the area at the VA. And it is a way to still help other soldiers and other veterans that are coming back that need that extra help, so.

So at a young age, my parents had taken me to see the Thunderbirds.

I went to an air show in Cheyenne, Wyoming and saw the Thunderbirds.

And at that young age, it must've been about 10.

I knew that's what I wanted to do.

I wanted to fly.

And however I was gonna get there, that was my dream.

So it was always Thunderbirds.

And that had that clear vision all through high school, everyone who knew me knew that I was going to be a pilot and I was going to fly.

So when I went for a scholarship to go to school, I went to the air force first and the air force informed me, if you take the ROTC scholarship, we will tell you what your major is going to be, and you cannot change that major.

And we actually get most of our pilots from the Air Force Academy.

And at the time I wasn't ready to go far from home.

I was from Pittsburgh and the Air Force Academy is in Colorado, and I wasn't willing to do that.

I really wanted to go to Penn State.

So the Navy was one floor up and I walked upstairs to the Navy and never thought about the Navy.

I asked them about a scholarship and they said, "You can major in whatever you want, "and we get most of our pilots from ROTC."

And I said, "Sign me up."

So my transition from Thunderbirds to Blue Angels, I was like, "I'll be the first female Blue Angel, "that's easy enough."

And that's always, that was my focus in high school and now in college, I was gonna be a Blue Angel.

Well, between your junior and senior year of college, they send you to an aircraft carrier.

So as your midshipman, they send you to your midshipman cruise to see what you would... See all the platforms that the Navy offers, and see what you might be interested in doing.

Now, I was very set on jets, but when I got attached to the USS Eisenhower in the Mediterranean, so I took a flight from Pittsburgh to Cannes France and met the USS Eisenhower.

I was attached to the Helicopter Squadron, and I didn't even know the Navy had helicopters.

I thought it was an army platform.

So I was like, "Okay, helicopters great."

"It seems like a very boring job."

"Something I'm not interested in all," but they had an F14 squadron on the carrier, but the F14 squadron wasn't taking any midshipman, and they wouldn't let any midshipman fly, but that was my dream.

So I walked into that ready room, the Jolly Rogers.

And this is a time when it was all men.

And I sat down in a chair in the ready room.

And the CEO is like, "What are you doing here?"

And I said, "I wanna fly."

And he goes, "We're not getting any hops to midshipmen, and you need to get out of here."

And I said, "No, this is my dream, "and I wanna fly."

And he goes, "What school do you go to?"

And I said, "Penn state."

And he goes, "Big 10, you're flying."

And it was because he went to Indiana.

So it was so great because I was on this midshipman cruise with other midshipman's from Harvard and Princeton.

And they were giving me a hard time for going to a state school.

But I was the only midshipman who got to fly in that 14.

So I sat in the back seat, like Goose in Top Gun.

We got the cat shot off the carrier.

We flew for two hours.

We broke the sound barrier.

We did barrel rolls.

We were pulling Gs.

The CEO flew at the same time in his jet.

And he played the Indiana fight song over the radios.

I had to listen to it, but it was amazing.

And then we caught the trap on the way in, and that was it.

I was sold.

I was gonna fly jets.

Three days later I'm in a helicopter.

So if you're in a midshipman attached to a squadron, you can fly whenever you'd like.

So every day I'd come in and go, "I'll take that flight."

A helicopter on an aircraft carrier has a pretty basic job.

They fly what they call starboard D. So you're flying on the starboard side of the ship in a basic D formation.

And you're basically waiting for an aircraft to get in some kind of distress.

You're there to rescue somebody if something happens.

So that's your whole job.

And all of a sudden, I'm sitting there with two rescue swimmers.

I'm sitting in the back of the helicopter and we hear aircraft in the water.

And we just look at each other and two Air 14s had hit each other.

So it's something we don't really practice today because there aren't many militaries that we're not allies with, who have the capability in military aircraft like we do.

So they were practicing dog fighting and they weren't very good at it.

And they clipped wings.

And one of the jets that was... Actually happened to be the pilot I had flown with, he made it to the carrier and another one had went into the water in the Mediterranean.

So we go flying over again.

I'm a midshipman in college.

I had no training.

I have no idea what's happening.

I'm sitting in the back of this helicopter and they rescue the NFO.

So the Naval Flight Officer who sits in back and he had broken his leg 90 degrees the opposite direction, and it's hanging on and they get him into the helicopter.

And unfortunately the pilot had been killed.

He had hit his head on the canopy and got enwrapped up in his parachute.

The rescue swimmer went down and cut him out of his parachute.

And when we got back to the carrier, they were gonna live flight the NFO over to Turkey to save his leg.

But I helped carry the stretcher because I was there and I was in a flight suit and I want it to be of help.

And he looks up at me and he says, "When I heard the rotors coming, "I knew I was going to be okay."

And when he said that to me, I changed in that moment, and I decided to be a helicopter pilot.

So it was just those words were enough for me to change my whole dream to "This is what I wanna do."

I want to fly helicopters.

Usually your jet guys, they're not there to help, they're there to hurt.

But the helicopters they're there to help.

So that day I decided I'm gonna be a helicopter pilot.

And I went to flight school.

I graduated first in my class.

I got my wings three days after 9/11.

So I got wings, September 14th, 2001.

And I became a helicopter pilot.

I went right out to San Diego.

I decided before I left, I got winged in Sept in September 14th, and before I was supposed to be checking for duty, October 1st, I decided to go to ground zero.

I wanted to see it.

And this was the time when there were still lost posters and things like that., and my mom is from New York.

My mom is from Jackson Heights, Queens.

And so I had family there.

And by the time we all logistically made it to ground zero was midnight.

So it was very quiet and ominous as we walk up and I'm looking around and I see a New York police officer and I go over and I talked to him and I said, "Where can I get a patch?"

And he's like, "Those stores are closed right now."

And I said, "I know, "but I would really love to have a New York PD patch."

I told him, "I'm a Navy pilot, "I just got my wings, "we're going to San Diego, "we don't know what's gonna happen, "and I would love to fly with a patch," because as a pilot, you have to wear the flag on this side, but you can wear whatever you would like on this side of your flight suit.

And he looked at me and he goes, "You're a pilot.

And I said, "Yes."

And he ripped it off his coat.

I still have it.

So this is what I flew with.

I did two deployments to the Middle East, and this is the patch I wore and I still have it.

So this came directly off his coat, and I was proud to fly with it.

And my American dream is really straightforward.

It's that we grow to appreciate the nation that we live in, that we understand that there were people that came before us who had this idea of what a nation could be.

And that really has struck and resonated with me.

What can America be?

What can we do?

What can we provide for ourselves, and not just for ourselves, but for our families, and that we can be so unrestricted in who we can become and what we can do.

It's amazing to me having been in different parts of the world where your life has kind of set out for you, here's what you can do, here's who you can become because of who your family is or what your family has done in the past.

That's not us.

Our story is of freedom and liberty and all of those things that give the individual the opportunity to say, "Hey, if you have an idea in your mind "and you wanna proceed with that, "and you wanna go forward with that, "it's open, it's available."

And we see that on so many different levels.

I think what we tend to do is focus at times on the negative too much, and we don't recognize those opportunities that the American experience provides for us.

It's kind of a corny analogy, but I'll use the analogy from Epcot Center at Walt Disney World, the American Adventure.

You go in and you watch this animated story of America.

And it strikes me the opportunity that's there.

That for those characters that play some portion of that, there are people just like we are, for the most part, they're not, you know, born into any great position, but they may assume a great position or they may have a great idea that allows them to pursue that American experience.

And that to me is the great motivation in life for us as Americans is we can do that stuff.

As you tie that into people who've served in the military.

Those are the people who've given us the opportunity.

Those are the people who've given us, blood, sweat, tears, and even their lives so that we can go out and we can have this experience that's truly American that we can do the things that we want to do.

There's always that possibility that we could fail, but there's not the possibility we can't try.

And the possibility that we can try that we can go out and do those things that so many other people never get to do that we have the freedoms to do that.

It's really wonderful.

So for me, as I spent 30 years in the military, having a family of my own kids, I translate that to them.

Your dad, for his service gave you my kids and my grandkids and generations to come the opportunity to go out and seek those things that you wanna do.

And that's the American experience to me, is that we have that freedom.

We have that liberty, to go out and be the people who we wanna become.

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