By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
While in Washington from England for the "Air Force Academy Awards," Staff Sgt. Roann Leatz visited her parents in Dowagiac last week before departing for Albuquerque, N.M.
It's a good thing Leatz, 29, likes to travel because her seven-years-in-January military career has taken her to every continent but Australia and Antarctica.
During the Air Force Association National Awards the eight-person crew she is a member of received the Lt. Gen. William H. Tunner Award for the Outstanding Airlift Crew of the Year.
Her crew distinguished itself with heroism on a high-risk combat rescue mission during Operation Enduring Freedom.
During the infiltration of 70 coalition special operations forces, one of two Canadian CH-47 helicopters was shot down by enemy fire in northern Afghanistan.
Leatz and her crew were assigned to execute an emergency re-supply air drop of cold-weather gear, ammunition, food and water.
Despite hazardous terrain and one enemy engagement, the crew delivered a "bullseye."
They enabled the "eradication" of 10 enemy fighters and the successful extraction of all 70 coalition forces to safety, according to the AFA citation.
"We all felt really honored to be there because of all the pageantry and brass," she said of the awards ceremony.
The awards were part of opening ceremonies leading off a three-day exposition that was fascinating in its own right because it was like seeing into the future with all the concept planes and think tanks that participate.
Leatz is the daughter of Ron and Ann Leatz of 402 Main St. She is the youngest of four children. Her oldest sister and brother live in California. Her older sister resides in Kalamazoo. Roann calls Littleport in Cambridgeshire county home, recently relocating from Florida, where she lived during Hurricane Katrina.
"I still consider California my home," she said Friday, though growing up she also lived in Colorado, Utah, Arizona and Indiana. She also spent some time in Alaska after joining the Air Force. Her mother is a Dowagiac native. Her father is originally from St. Joseph.
"My plane is known for its ability to fly completely blacked out on NVGs (night vision goggles," Leatz explained. "Bad guys can't see us. We fly down at about 250 feet at just over 300. Flying that low and that fast, by the time they hear us, we're already gone. A mountain is a great thing to have between you and somebody shooting at you. It makes for a very bumpy ride. We were in a really deep valley. Our wingspan is about 132 feet from tip to tip. I swear we were going to clip the mountain about any second."
The drop zone (DZ) wasn't marked. "We didn't want to give this stuff to somebody else (the Taliban), so we circled and came around again with cover from a gunship."
"Ten seconds" after making the drop, "We got shot at by an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade," Leatz said. "We did a maneuver and got out of Dodge. We're prepared to get shot at. We train like we're going to get shot at. Sometimes the bad guys get some intel on where you're going to be. They'd already shot down two helicopters, so they knew someone would be coming to help them out. It sounds kind of cheeky, but I just felt like I was doing my job.
"Many elements fell together in one night. The plan and the DZ changed many times before we took off and we had to be flexible. Not seeing markings on the DZ the first time and deciding to take the risk and come back around to make sure this stuff got delivered. Going home was an option, but we decided these guys needed this stuff."
Leatz is an MC-130H loadmaster. "It's also called a Talon 2, a second-generation war bird with specialized capability. I'm the one who handles all the cargo, personnel, vehicles – anything that can be loaded into the back of the plane. I'm responsible for making sure it's in safely and restrained properly. I handle all the weight and balance paperwork.
"My most fun is air drops. Up to 32-foot platforms and up to 35,000 pounds we can drop from our plane," Leatz said. "Most of what I do is 'in theater.' If I deploy to Afghanistan, they say, 'We need you to take this many guys, their trucks and their gear over to this airfield.' " Those are the kinds of "packages" she delivers.
In the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan there often isn't anywhere to land, so then they drop "bombs, bullets and beans," in Air Force lingo.
With Special Operations Command, England "is a staging place that provides us with global reach," Leatz said. There are three Royal Air Force bases nearby.
"Another Talon 2 squadron is in Florida, in Fort Walton Beach, where I came from." She'll head home Oct. 8 after a week in Albuquerque for training. Her dog, a chocolate Lab, is staying with friends.
"We're responsible for 92 countries in our theater," she said.
She trained nine additional months after basic training to become a loadmaster. "It's a challenging job with lots of information you have to pull out and apply. I learned how to compute a vehicle's center of gravity. An aircraft is basically a teeter-totter when it's in the air. It needs to be balanced." Ironically, "I hated math" in high school.
"When I found out what jobs were available to me, I talked to people who were retired. My uncle retired from the Air Force and he knew exactly what a loadmaster was when I asked him about it," she said. "The biggest thing was the ability to fly. Only 2 percent of the enlisted Air Force are fliers, and there's only another maybe 2 percent of that who are female. I liked having a job that not everyone else has. This job allows you a whole lot of responsibility and pressure and I like challenges. If I was not a loadmaster I think I would be a SERE (Survival, Escape, Recovery and Evasion) instructor."
The MC-130H has four propellers. Its cargo compartment is 41 feet, plus a 10-foot ramp area.
"The biggest advantage of this plane is that it can go a lot of places other planes can't," Leatz said. "We land on dirt runways, on the sides of mountains and covered with ice in Alaska. We did some trips down to Cyprus and to Africa quite a bit. We go over to Germany for training. I'd love to go to Antarctica. We had trips to Poland, Norway and the highlands of Scotland. While I was in Florida I did some training in South America. It's so much fun to go to these countries – the Philippines, Thailand, Kuala Lumphur, Malaysia, Guam – and to see things that aren't American and don't cater to English speaking.
"It's a big world," she mused, "but it's also a really small world and really interesting to see. I wish people got out and traveled more. It would give Americans a better perspective on the world. Only 12 percent of Americans have passports. Sometimes it's really hard for me to listen to people who have an opinion on what's happening somewhere else when they're never left their backyard. It's hard for me to be in the military now and to listen to people have so much to say about something they really don't know much about. You only get one side of it from news."
"I enjoy what I'm doing," said Roann, who sees herself teaching after her military career. "As long as I enjoy what I'm doing, I'll keep doing it. It's opened a lot of doors for me already just being in the military. My job has definitely given me a global perspective."