Summerlin Institute's Class of '63

Bartow, Florida

Veteran’s Day 2016: Lt. Col. Kris R. Ludwigsen, USAFR, Ret.

On Veteran’s Day we remember with appreciation the service and sacrifices of the Americans who’ve served in the Armed Forces—another elite 1%. And today I would like to focus on the women who’ve volunteered to serve in the military. I am a veteran of Desert Storm and my father was torpedoed in the Navy in WWII. A Scottish ancestor, Daniel McClure, fought in the American Revolution in the battle of Ft. Vincennes, and 200 years later I went on active duty in the USAF. We all survived the dangers of our tours of duty in the Army, Navy and Air Force.

In the American Revolution women of verve formed a militia like the “minutemen,” or stepped up as “spies in skirts.” In the Civil War they disguised themselves as men to fight alongside their husbands. While Rosie the Riveter went to work building battleships and bombers to backfill positions vacated by men, the WASPs of WWII flew hundreds of missions over some 64,000 miles but were only granted veterans’ status in 1977. After the WACs (1943) and the WAVES (1944) came the Army nurses deployed to tend the wounded in Viet Nam. From active duty to the National Guard women have seen combat and suffered severe injuries in Grenada, Panama, Bosnia, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Why would a woman choose to join the military? Some volunteer out of patriotism, a desire to serve their country, or family tradition. Some join for adventure or travel, to be exposed to a broader view of the world. Some join for financial independence and a structure that makes it possible to leave home or support children on their own. Some sign up for the training and education opportunities. For me it was the professional experience. As a psychologist teaching in a university and rubbing elbows with part-time instructors who were active duty psychologists at Wright-Patterson AFB, I wanted the immersion clinical experience the Air Force provided.

The military is a microcosm of society that includes physicians and nurses, social workers and psychologists, dentists and dieticians, attorneys and chaplains—as well as missile launchers and those on fighting on the front lines. It is a milieu that provides an identity and a role with valuable lessons to teach. The military is about learning responsibility and reliability, making a difference, resourcefulness, leadership and teamwork, camaraderie and pride in an esprit de corps. It is about courage under fire, proving yourself as an adult without family support, and about Service before Self, subordinating your ego to the mission.

No one could have predicted that I would go into the Air Force. I was a flunk-out from Brownies because I couldn’t stand the regimentation, and the protests against Viet Nam were raging when I was a graduate student. Yet in joining the military some ten years later I had the benefit of experiences I could never have had in civilian life. I was the first and only military psychologist for the state of Utah, stationed at the sole DoD hospital. My office was right around the corner from the ER and I was on call 24/7 to deal with active duty and dependents, officers and enlisted, men and women, retirees and their spouses, including wives from Thailand and other countries. There were foreign nationals training on base as part of a NATO objective, plus US army and navy members stationed in Utah. As a “lone ranger” I learned that if I didn’t do it, it wasn’t going to get done. I had to establish priorities for treatment and I had to grasp what it was like to be in the shoes of the diverse members of this military community.

In my first several months I earned a commendation medal for disarming a young airman holed up in the barracks who was fending off the Security Police with a hunting knife, a danger to himself or others. The USAF wouldn’t release him to return home to tend to his ailing mother on the East Coast and when she died he blamed the Air Force. I had to marshal all my moxie and use psychological skills to talk him down, to get him to put down the knife and agree to be hospitalized, then walk out hand in hand through the flock of Security Police to provide moral support and avert an incident.

Before that there was a Thai wife with a history of baying at the moon who’d been taken to the ER numerous times and then to the locked ward of the civilian hospital off-base. This time she’d slashed her husband in the knee with a meat cleaver. In my office I learned that she’d just heard that her older sister, “like a mother,” who’d shielded her from a life of prostitution, had just died; but her GI husband couldn’t cope with her anger and grief. I got her to agree to a shot of thorazine, a major tranquilizer, and saw her home in an ambulance. That intervention put an end to the crisis incidents and admissions. To advocate for other dependents I started a spouse abuse treatment program and formed a liaison with the Asian Association of Utah.

As the first military psychologist at this 18-bed hospital, I had an advantage in that no one really knew what a psychologist did. So I was able to create my own job description including meeting with the squadron commander or first sergeant to explain the dynamics that had resulted in the member’s problem behavior, which was often the precursor to discharge. After assessment and treatment my goal was to integrate the member back into the squadron to salvage his or her Air Force career. And acting on gut instinct I saved a young airman from committing suicide. He’d already arranged for his bank account to be sent to his mother and was planning to climb up into an F-16 fighter jet in a hangar and pull the ejection device to shoot him out with a fatal impact.

When a stream of young women from Dugway Army Proving Ground was hospitalized, I drove out to the desert once a month to investigate the cause and to run an enlisted women’s morale group. In such isolated surroundings, these women were being harassed by their male counterparts, resulting in acute stress symptoms that prevented their functioning on the job; and I worked with the company commander who had them transferred out of a hostile work environment. That led to a research study on the mental health symptoms of enlisted women vs. enlisted men that I presented at the USAF Behavioral Sciences Symposium. Two days before leaving Hill AFB a squadron commander and his first sergeant showed up at the clinic to present me with a desk set inscribed: “To Dr. Kris Ludwigsen, from the men and women of the 388th Equipment Maintenance Squadron,” the largest squadron on base—better than any medal.

On my next tour of duty the regional hospital at March AFB set up a MASH-type air evacuation facility camping out in the dusty California desert where we were served MREs, Meals Ready to Eat, a kind of TV dinner aka as “Meals Rejected by Ethiopians.” As with the “soldier girls” mobilized to Iraq and Afghanistan from the National Guard, you learn to serve in whatever capacity you’re needed, to do the best you can, even if you haven’t been trained for it. The Joint Chiefs of Staff recently lifted the ban on women serving in combat positions; for it is clear that women have become an integral part of the military and have demonstrated their willingness to fight during the wars of the past decade.

When you’re mobilized, you have 24 – 72 hours to get your affairs in order and pack a mobility bag with combat boots, combat fatigues, etc. It entails notifying your employer, making a will, finding someone trusted to oversee your financial and household affairs and someone responsible to care for your children for an indefinite length of time. It turns one’s life upside down. The Desert Storm mobilization in 1991 came as a surprise because the reserves hadn’t been called up since the Korean war; but today we are an all-volunteer military.

The transition back to civilian life is not easy; wartime stress and separations foster family problems, substance abuse and social isolation; suicide rates are high. Many vets have suffered the toxic effects of Agent Orange or traumatic brain injury, or are afflicted with post-traumatic stress disorder. President Obama has beefed up the aid offered by the Veterans’ Administration; and the Warrior Care Network program at Emory has successfully employed the psychological techniques of systematic desensitization via virtual reality exposure to treat PTSD in 200 vets, supported by psychotherapy, family and relationship counseling, sleep disorder management, yoga and legal aid. Charitable concerns such as the Paralyzed Veterans of America and the Wounded Warrior project have helped, but we can do more on a broader scale to support our vets whose special needs originate from having given their all.

A colonel affiliated with the ROTC unit at UC Berkeley once told me that the composition of the Air Force should reflect the demographics of our country. I believe that applies to women, currently 19%, as well as to blacks, Latinos, and other minorities. And we must include gays since TSgt. Matlovich who earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart in Viet Nam proved that a gay soldier can exhibit the courage of Audie Murphy in war time.

Blacks were admitted to West Point after the Civil War (1870). But they were ostracized by their fellow cadets so that their only social contact and support came from the black servants who slipped them pocket money and food. Women were only admitted to West Point, Annapolis and the Air Force Academy more than a century later, in 1976 as authorized by Congress; and today they comprise 16 – 20%. Prior to retiring as a lieutenant colonel I was an Academy Liaison Officer interviewing for the Air Force Academy, where one of my top schools was Carondelet. These girls excel in leadership, in AP classes including math and science, in citizenship, and in athletics on the soccer field. So it is unfortunate that female cadets at our service academies have endured sexual harassment and sexual assault; and that enlisted women are subject to the same. Perhaps national attention in bringing to light these signal events is the harbinger of remedying this injury to our best and brightest.

The Air Force was the most innovative and exciting period of my 35-year career as a psychologist, one I’d gladly relive. As former POW Senator John McCain said, “American women are already serving in harm’s way today—all over the world and in every branch of our armed forces. Many have made the ultimate sacrifice and our nation owes them a deep debt of gratitude.”