News

JBLM’s about to become quieter: PAO is eager to see what’s next for her

  • Published
  • By By Bud McKay
  • Northwest Guardian
JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD --  A voice no one thought could be silent, will grow noticeably quieter from McChord Field Saturday. That's when Lt. Col. Anna Sullivan, chief of public affairs for the 446th Airlift Wing since 1992, retires from the Air Force Reserve and from federal government service.

"I am ready to retire, and I want to retire," Sullivan said. "I'll have 29 years in as a Department of Defense civilian and 40 years with the military. I can't wait to see what's next, but it's going to be hard to top this."

For the majority of service members who join the reserve or guard, a large incentive is getting to do something totally different in the military than they do for their full-time civilian jobs. But when you're an Air Reserve Technician, like Sullivan, her full-time government civilian job is married to her Reserve position.

"I plan to clean out my garage and then just rest -- and I mean rest," Sullivan said. "For more than 30 years in the Reserve, I've only averaged about six days off a month."

Sullivan, a Seattle native who graduated from Lincoln High School in Seattle, started her military service Aug. 22, 1974, when she enlisted in the active-duty Navy just a few months before the end of the Vietnam War.

"I was the first woman to work on harbor tugs on the west coast," Sullivan said. "I volunteered not really knowing what I volunteered for."

She did three years on active duty and mustered out at Naval Station Seattle in Sand Point, now known as Magnuson Park. She took a break in service in 1978 and was a full-time student enrolled at the University of Washington and living on Lake Union. After a break of a year, she decided to join the Navy Reserve in Seattle 1979 -- and she had a good reason.

"I needed money for books," Sullivan said. "The only problem was the Navy didn't have the budget back then to have many Reserve weekends."

But on one of those weekends, she found herself at McChord Field for a briefing -- that's when the light bulb went off and she was inspired to join the Air Force Reserve.

"It was like all of that time I was in the Navy, 'I could have had a V-8' all along," she said. "I knew I found myself a home."

She started the process of transferring to the Air Force Reserve and joined the 446th in 1980. She started her Air Force Reserve career working on the avionics systems of the C-141A Starlifters.

Two years after joining the 446th, Sullivan transferred to the 315th Airlfift Wing at Charleston AFB, S.C., continuing with the C-141s.

In 1982, she transferred to the then 926th Fighter Wing, at Naval Air Station New Orleans, to work on electronic countermeasures for the A-10 Warthogs. That's when she realized she wanted to become a public affairs officer in the Air Force Reserve and enrolled in the journalism program at Louisiana State University. Sullivan graduated with a bachelor's degree in news and editorial journalism in 1985.

And it was finally in 1987, when Sullivan's public affairs goal was realized when she was commissioned as the ART with the 926th FW public affairs office. But it was only the start of her big dream.

From that moment on, she was constantly checking in with the full-time public affairs officer at the 446th Airlift Wing.

"I used to check in on my beloved McChord and ask, 'Are you sick? Are you retiring?'" Sullivan said. "I really wanted to come home."

Then, out of the blue, in 1992, Sullivan finally heard the voice on the other end of the phone say, "Yes, I'm leaving."

"I immediately wrote a letter to the wing commander at the time (Col. Tom Gadd), and said, 'I have the best job in the entire Air Force, now let me do it at the best place in the world,'" Sullivan said. "I finally came home -- again."

But it wasn't a homecoming with a picture-perfect start. Just months into the job, two C-141s collided and crashed over Montana on a routine night-time air refueling mission Nov. 30, 1992, killing all 13 active-duty aircrew members on board.

"My mother called me -- she's the best little command post in the west -- and said, 'I think two of your planes just crashed in Montana,'" Sullivan said. "I called the McChord command post and they confirmed the crash. I asked, 'Do you need help?' They said yes, so I came in and spent the next 17 hours in the command post."

Even though, it was an all active-duty aircrew, Sullivan took the public affairs lead for the days that followed in what she called a ferocious media frenzy.

That's when Sullivan said, she knew she could handle any public affairs situation -- good or bad -- that may come up. And since then, she's witnessed and told the story about dozens of historic and hundreds of routine missions.

Trying to choose highlights of all of the missions she's covered for the wing, she mentioned two that will always stay with her. The first was when she flew into Hanoi, Vietnam, in 1996, as the wing flew the remains of four Vietnam service members who were reported as missing in action.

"It was such a long mission, and I remember thinking while we were flying from Guam to Hawaii with them, that I should be crying by now," Sullivan said. "But when an honor guard member stood and started to run his hand over the American flag-draped transfer cases, that's when I lost it and the tears just kept coming and coming. All I could think about was they were finally coming home."

The second memorable mission was another homecoming mission for her -- she flew along with C-17 aircrew members to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

"We landed at Louis Armstrong International Airport -- the same airport I flew in and out of many times as a young Airman," Sullivan said. We got in at night. And the first person I see after walking out of the ramp into the airport was a lady who was wearing nothing but a garbage bag -- she had no shoes, socks, jewelry -- nothing but the garbage bag.

"She stood as soon as she saw me and looked at my name tag on my uniform and said, 'Thank you Ms. Sullivan.' I spoke with her and she was so polite, and she didn't even know where her children were. It was so heart wrenching -- it still is. I don't how anyone can get over that."

The aircraft Sullivan flew on would evacuate 225 people from New Orleans to Austin, Texas, all strapped to the floor.

"I can see each one of them still," Sullivan said. "I left a little of my heart there."

With her extensive public affairs resume, Sullivan said she thought about progressing her career and moving onto command positions in the Air Force Reserve Command. But soon discounted those ideas.

"It's this place -- this wing that make you want to stay," she said. "Some people are just meant to go and move around. I just know I was meant to be here. But I don't think I did too bad. I mean, I came in as an E-1 in the Navy and am retiring as an 0-5 in the Air Force -- that's not too shabby."