In 23 years of serving in the United States Air Force, Col. Betty Venth said her proudest accomplishment is the work she did at a port mortuary in Dover, Delaware shortly after Sept. 11, 2001.
Now the commander of the 14th Medical Group on Columbus Air Force Base, Venth was a registered nurse and only a handful of years into her military career when she and a team of other medical professionals in the military were tasked with helping identify bodies of victims from the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon.
“We needed to process them, we needed to identify them, we needed to give them back to their families,” Venth said through tears. “So I was part of that team that took samples and was able to identify those folks and give them back to their families and give them closure. Honestly it’s really the best moment of my military career.”
Her story was one of several told at a Veterans Day panel on Women in the Air Force at New Hope Middle School Friday, but it was the only one that received applause from the hundreds of students, faculty and guests — including area veterans — who attended the event.
Venth, along with Master Sgt. Beverly Freeman and Lt. Michelle Strickland, spent about an hour answering questions submitted from students about their military careers. Each guest joined the military for a different reason and each had a different specialty — Strickland is a student pilot, Venth oversees health care of those stationed at the base and Freeman described herself as “the mom” of the base for her role advising wing commander Col. Samantha Weeks on personnel matters.
The questions students submitted dealt with topics from deployment and combat to basic training, but NHMS Principal Sam Allison said he thought Venth’s story about 9-11, in particular, struck a chord with the students, who hadn’t been born when the attacks occurred.
“They know about it, but I think her emotions probably showed them that (the military is) much more than a job,” he said. “It’s a way of life. … I think they appreciated, one, that she went through that; and two, that she was willing to share that with them.”
‘A giant team’
Both Venth and Freeman have been deployed to Afghanistan, where Venth worked at a prison of 500 inmates. Venth has also been stationed in multiple states, including Alaska, and England. Freeman has been on seven different deployments, including nine months in Niger, where she was in charge of 176 Navy and Air Force personnel building a runway.
“We were out there sleeping in tents,” Freeman said. “We had MREs, which are Meals-Ready-to-Eat, so basically it’s like packaged meals. I will say that is one of my favorite deployments besides Afghanistan, because I actually got to be part of the mission.”
Venth also talked about a humanitarian aid mission she took to remote villages with limited access to health care when she was stationed in Alaska.
“I got a chance to fly on a Black Hawk helicopter and go above the Arctic Circle,” she said. “… I hit three different villages along the way. I got a chance to figure out remote emergency care because we had a kiddo get injured on a snowmobile and fracture a femur.”
Strickland, who was stationed at CAFB straight out of college and has never been deployed, talked more about her participation in the Department of Defense-wide Alpha Warrior competition, which she won earlier this year, and her experience flying.
“If I (fly fighter jets), you could be doing things (like) surveillance, which is kind of like you’re a secret spy in the sky and you get to find where all the bad guys are,” she said. “Or you could be something like cargo where you’re carrying people or machinery or weapons systems from A to B. It’s a very dynamic career field and there are always opportunities to cross train to do something else.”
Strickland said being in the military is “unlike anything else.”
“You’re part of this giant team and you’re all working toward the same mission, so you have something in common with everyone wearing the same uniform you are,” she said. “It’s really neat. You make some of the best friends you will ever have in the world, … and you do a really cool job together.”
Women in the Air Force
Though each officer said she loved her military career and the opportunities it afforded her, they agreed they occasionally dealt with sexism in the military.
For Venth, that meant learning a male officer tried to keep her from being assigned to work in the Afghan prison, his reasoning being that Afghanistan’s culture is less accepting of women in certain roles and that she would be in danger there.
For Freeman, that means having to be “stricter than she would like to be” with some of the enlisted and lower-ranking male officers. She used her deployment in Niger as an example.
“When I said I supervised 176 people, it was 176 men,” she said. “Me being this little yea-high female, sometimes you’ve got to be a little bit stronger than you need to be and kind of lay down the law. I might be 4-11 and I ain’t going to say my weight, but when it comes to me saying you’ll do a thing, you’ll do a thing.
“By the end of that deployment working with those guys, they were calling me ‘Mom,'” she added.
Strickland said there’s an idea that women in the military either let the men “step all over them” or get a reputation for being bossy and arrogant. She’s done her best to do neither and said the men she serves with have been extremely inclusive.
“For all the females out there, don’t ever let anyone step on you,” she said. “Don’t ever let anyone make you feel like you are not equal, because we are. We’re an equal force, we are in every force and we’re a force to be reckoned with.”
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