Loree ‘Rowdy’ Draude

Loree ‘Rowdy’ Draude

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Show notes

Welcome to the new Literary Aviatrix Leadership and Development author interview series. 

Loree “Rowdy” Draude was a combat pilot among the first women to deploy on an aircraft carrier. She also navigated a very successful career in the tech sector. Now Loree brings her professional experiences together to help coach and inspire business leaders, and her love of art and creativity to entertain and inspire audiences with her one-woman show, “I Feel the Need.”

Her book, She’s Just Another Navy Pilot, is Loree’s memoir of that first carrier deployment, which began the day LT Kara Hultgreen lost her life in a fatal crash on takeoff. Soar Into Joy brings together the advice Loree finds herself repeating as a coach to her clients. 

You can find her books on the Literary Aviatrix website, and you can find Loree at her website https://loreedraude.com and on Instagram and FaceBook @loreedraude

Transcript

[00:00:00] Liz: Hello and welcome. I’m Liz Booker, literary aviatrix, and I’m excited to celebrate the close of a very special year for women in naval aviation and launch a new special series of interviews for 2024 with the author of two books. She’s just another Navy pilot, an aviator’s sea journal, and Soar into Joy, a combat pilot’s wisdom on falling in love with your life.

Lori ‘Rowdy’ Draude, welcome.

[00:00:38] Loree: Thank you so much, Liz. I’m really excited to be here and talk with you today.

[00:00:41] Liz: Oh my gosh, I’m so excited to talk with you. We have so much to talk about. And before we get started, I just have a couple of exciting things to say, specifically about the timing of this interview with you.

So first of all, we are wrapping up an amazing special year for naval aviation. This year we celebrated 50 years of women in naval aviation and, for those of you who don’t know, as a Coast Guard aviator, I went to flight school and graduated from Navy flight school, so I’m also a naval aviator and I have my mug out here.

I am Naval aviator number 25175. Yeah, the other side of the mug says, Fly Coast Guard. So yeah, I got my wings on, I got my helicopter on and all that stuff. So I’m real excited about that. We celebrated 30 years of women in combat in aviation, and you obviously have both of those under your belt. And then we also celebrated the first year that the Blue Angels had a female performance pilot on the demonstration team.

And that has been celebrated across the country many times. I was privileged enough to go to the first performance in El Centro, and I know she just recently had her homecoming in November, when you and I were busy because we were in New York, and we’ll talk about that in a little bit.

The other thing that this interview does for me is it helps me launch a new series of interviews that I’m going to continue into 2024 called the Leadership and Development Series, in which I hope to interview authors of books who that are, you know, taking their military or aviation experience and teaching us something about leadership development, either, you know professional development or personal development.

And you have a book that addresses that. So we’ll get to those in just a second. So yeah, we’re going to be talking about two of your books. The first of which let’s start with your memoir. She’s just another Navy pilot. So help us out with that. Tell me all about that book. Sure.

[00:02:43] Loree: That book started as a journal that I kept during my first deployment to the Persian Gulf, and it was really one of those things where I knew it was going to be a momentous experience.

And, you know, it was the first it was the first West Coast deployment on an aircraft carrier with women in combat aviation squadrons and women as part of the ship’s crew. And so I wanted to just be able to document it. For myself. And then maybe, you know, in the future, if I at the time I didn’t have any Children and I thought, well, maybe five kids, they might want to read about this.

Who knows? And I could just throw the journal at them. But you know the deployment was challenging. We had a, some leadership challenges on that deployment. And by the time I got back, I was really happy that I had just captured a lot of my feelings about what it was. like to be on an aircraft carrier for six months as part of an air wing and all the challenges that come with that.

And then in addition to that, all of the challenges of the first integration of women into a, an air wing and on a carrier. So it really started. For my own mental health, I think, just to be able to have a place to write about these things. And then when I got back there were some media reports about the deployment that I didn’t feel completely accurately represented my experience.

I had, despite the challenges, I had a very positive experience on that deployment. I was talking with, my ex husband’s brother, who is a journalist and had written a book about the the near crash of a FedEx flight into Memphis by a former Navy pilot. So he was well versed in the publishing arena.

And I was describing to him, you know, my frustrations. And he said, well, have you ever thought about writing a book about your experience? And I hadn’t. I really had only kept the journal for my own personal reasons and I told him about the journal and he said, send me that journal. So I sent it to him and we just started talking, you know, again, this was 95, I think 96 and or 96 and we started emailing each other and we created the book from that. So the journal was the foundation for that book. And then I filled it in with things like, you know, my experiences growing up in the military having, you know, two parents who are in the Marine Corps and how that affected me and my own entrance into naval aviation.

And we just used that as the basis for a book about what it’s like to live on an aircraft carrier. And that really was my intention, was just to share what is this experience like? Because most people don’t get the opportunity to deploy on an aircraft carrier or live on a ship like that with, you know, thousands of other people.

And I really wanted to describe that. But Dave, my co author, wisely advised me to put in more of my own personal experience because I think it makes it more relatable to a reader. And so he really helped me out on that. And that’s why I published She’s Just Another Navy Pilot. The name, I really, you know, my whole goal with flying and, being part of that first wave of women aviators was to hopefully you know, be able to show that, hey, we’re just another Navy pilot, right?

We’re not women pilots. Yes, we’re women, but that doesn’t affect the quality of our airmanship. And so that was the title that I felt would reflect that perspective. It was funny because Naval Institute actually wanted to call it carrier women and that was a hard no because the first thing that came to my mind was the book Little Women and I’m like I don’t want you know ‘Little Carrier Women,’ so thankfully they Yeah, they were receptive to She’s Just Another Navy Pilot.

Yeah,

[00:06:39] Liz: I totally get that. The meaning of that title and I appreciate it. And I just want to emphasize. So you were on the first carrier deployment of combat women in aviation and

[00:06:53] Loree: On the West Coast. I do want to be clear. Yeah, the Eisenhower had actually deployed a few months before we did on the West Coast, but it was that first wave. Yeah, for sure.

[00:07:02] Liz: And but so you were the first group of women on this aircraft carrier that they had seen, you know landing fighter and bomber aircraft, combat aircraft on a carrier. You start the book off with, you know well, we get to hear about your childhood and those kinds of things, which we should probably talk about.

Let’s start with that. You’ve mentioned these parents but there’s a special arc in your life that I absolutely love. And I’m glad that I got to sort of see you in action you know, living your best life now and bring it all full circle. Tell us about like your childhood and your parents influence on you joining the Navy.

For sure.

[00:07:48] Loree: I, you know, I grew up moving around a lot, so at least every three years. My father was a career Marine. Yeah. He was a career Marine Corps infantry officer. And my mom was a Marine Corps officer for a year. And back then, if you got pregnant, you’d have to get out of the military.

So I was the one who ended my mom’s military.

[00:08:02] Liz: Oh, you dashed her dreams . . .

[00:08:04] Loree: I did. So we always joke that this was my payback was I had to go into the military. But you know, I grew up in a military family. I have two younger brothers and one who also joined the Navy. He was a career Navy intelligence officer.

And you know, it was just part of who we were as a family and who we are as a family is that we love our country. We support service. And all of us knew that to some degree or in some way we would serve. And the funny thing though, is that for me I’m the only I’m their only daughter. And growing up, I always really enjoyed I enjoyed things like math. I actually ended up majoring in math in college, but I also really liked creativity. And so I loved art. I loved performing theater. I loved writing. And so when it came time for college I had actually thought about, okay, how can I do both of these things?

How can I serve and also be an artist? And so when I went to college at the University of San Diego, I started off as like a theater arts. You know, doing theater but I think I was a poly sci major you know, to make my parents happy. And then I saw a show and I really, I saw A Chorus Line that was playing in San Diego and I was like, Oh my gosh, this is what I want to do.

How can I do this? Maybe I can serve for four years, you know be a, an unrestricted line officer do some kind of service and then pursue theater. And I wanted to change my major to theater. And my parents were like, There’s no way you’re doing that. Nope. You are not changing your major to theater and becoming an artist. You really need to stay in Navy ROTC and see that through.

And so at first I was like, Oh gosh, I don’t know how, you know, that’s a bummer. Cause I really enjoy the artistic parts of my life. But then, you know, fate is just such a really interesting thing and how these things come into our lives that we don’t expect. And yet they have such a huge impact. And for me, what that was a field trip that my Navy ROTC unit went on during the Christmas break, my freshman year of college. Right. You know, a couple months after I’d had this conversation with my parents and we went to a bunch of naval air stations and Marine Corps air stations in Southern California.

This is back when El Toro and Tustin were Marine Corps air stations and that field trip literally changed my life because it exposed me to something that I had never been exposed to before. I did not know that aviation was a possibility for me. I did not know that I could be a pilot as a woman.

I knew that aviation existed, but I had just never seen female airline pilots. I, it just wasn’t a thing. And when I actually learned about it and found out what it entailed and you know, the challenges, but also the people I was meeting in that, you know, in those squadrons that we visited, they just were all really funny.

And that’s something that was important to me, and they just loved what they did. And I don’t think I’d ever really seen people who were so enthusiastic about their jobs and doing a job that seemed very impactful and meaningful and was aligned with my desire to serve my country. And so when I came back from that field trip, I said, that’s it, this is what I want to do.

And, but I also was you know thoughtful about it. I went on a flight with a friend of mine who had his private pilot’s license to make sure that it was something that I really actually would like doing. And when we flew over San Diego and, you know, his little Cessna, it was like, I had never seen the world from that perspective before. And it was, you know, you know how it is, it’s life altering. It’s this is what I, this is what I want to be doing. So that’s what changed it for me.

[00:12:00] Liz: And then you got into the Navy. When did you finish flight school? When did you get your wings?

[00:12:05] Loree: I got my wings in April of 1992.

[00:12:07] Liz: 1992. Okay. That’s shortly after I joined the Coast Guard, so I got my wings in 99, so I’m a little bit behind you.

Then tell us about this squadron that you went to that you were super excited about, but they weren’t real excited about you.

[00:12:23] Loree: Oh, yeah. So coming out of flight school you know, there really weren’t a whole lot of options at that time because the ban on women flying in combat had not been lifted yet.

So I was very limited to what kind of roles I could go to. And the job I was assigned to was flying in a squadron that would essentially fly missile profiles. So we’d pretend to be a missile. And that way we could train pilots in the fleet. We could train ships in the fleet on how to track missiles and, you know, pretend to shoot them.

And but the great thing about this job was that the platform they were using to simulate missiles was an F A 18 Hornet. So I got to go fly F 18 Hornets. But at the time. There, I think I was the first woman to go straight from the training command, you know, just fresh out of getting my wings directly to the Hornet training squadron.

All the other women who I think had gone through Hornet training had been flying something else before and then went to the Hornet training squadron. You know they had a little more experience. I think they were definitely tougher than I was. And so showing up at this squadron it was a few months after, it’s probably about six months, eight months after Tailhook 91 it just was not the most welcoming environment for a female pilot straight out of flight school.

[00:13:44] Liz: Hold on. Say more about that. Cause I think that’s a really interesting dynamic of like backlash against you because of their bad behavior and getting caught in Tailhook. Let’s just unpack that a little bit.

[00:13:57] Loree: Yeah, I mean, well, I think I represented a lot of things that they were really not happy about. Yes, many men behaved very badly at Tailhook and did things that were illegal and morally horrible, sexually assaulting women. And and I think part of what contributed to that at Tailhook was. A victory, you know, in the first gulf war, feeling very invincible and especially, you know, you know how naval aviators are already, certainly egos to contend with and, you know, feeling they were, they deserved whatever they wanted.

And I think that you know, unfortunately there were some aviators who did some really horrible things, but I don’t view them as representative of naval aviators. I won’t speak for you, but I served with so many wonderful, you know, men who were advocates for me, who supported me. And so it was really shocking to be in an environment where there were men who you know, looked at me as incompetent because I was a woman without ever flying with me in a cockpit, they just made all these assumptions about who I was and what I was capable of because of my gender.

And that was really the first time I’d ever experienced that. And you know, and that speaks to the professionalism of the aviators in the training command and in Navy ROTC, like I had just not run up against that before. So being in that squadron at that time was, it was not the best time to be there.

And, you know, but that being said, that squadron today, the commanding officer is a woman. So it’s fantastic. I mean, there’s, look and I’m absolutely not excusing behavior at all. But I think it helps us to understand why, at least it helped me to understand why maybe these guys were feeling the way that they were feeling.

They were used to their world being a particular way. I think they were very tied to this concept of who they were as people, based on their role as naval aviators and what that meant and what it means to be a man. And so having a woman come into their world and do the things that they were doing, you know, like it was really, I imagine that was very challenging for them.

It doesn’t mean that excuses bad behavior or the way that some of them treated me. But I mean, I can have some sympathy for what they’re going through without accepting the way that they reacted to it. Thankfully I made it through. It was not easy. I definitely barely made it through, honestly.

I also had a really limited training syllabus as a support pilot. You know, I wasn’t going to a fighter squadron, so I did not go through the full training regime of, you know, learning how to use the F 18 Hornet to do everything. I did not land on the carrier in a Hornet. I didn’t learn aerial combat.

I didn’t, I never bombed anything with a Hornet. It was all I think I had 16 flights altogether in the training squadron, before I went to my support squadron. So it was just, you know, a weird condensed experience and you know, challenging in a lot of ways.

But thankfully I mean, I had advocates like Captain Rosemary Mariner, who was I think she had just left Lemoore at the time when I was getting there, but I had been in contact with her before because, you know, like there just weren’t that many women aviators. So we pretty much all knew each other and Captain Mariner knew all of us.

So she knew who we all were and she was looking out for us and she, I mean, yeah, I don’t think I would have gotten through that squadron without her support and her advocacy. But yeah, so that was definitely one of the tougher times I had.

[00:18:13] Liz: And then from there, you got assigned to a new aircraft. Tell us about that.

[00:18:18] Loree: Yeah. You know, I’d been flying in VAQ 34 in that Hornet support squadron for almost a year. And during that time, things were changing, you know after tailhook people have been advocating for women to have more opportunities in the military and specifically with ships and with aviation.

And so my dad, in fact, was actually one of the commissioners on the Presidential Commission. So he was a general at that time and they were appointing people from a wide spectrum, I think, you know, it was supposed to be a bipartisan commission that looked at the issue of women in combat in all different types of combat from ground combat to aviation.

And so they. They looked at other countries, how women in other countries were serving in the military and what were the challenges or benefits. They did surveys, you know, within the military it was a huge study and then they made recommendations at the end of that.

And the commission actually recommended, there were 15, they recommended eight to seven against women flying in combat. However, I think there was enough of a groundswell movement and just, you know, in America, I think people were really reexamining what it meant to be a woman in the military and how women were treated.

What women were capable of doing in the military. The other thing I should mention is, you know, this was after the first Gulf War, women had served in the first Gulf War, women had died, women had been taken prisoner of war. America’s views on what women could handle had definitely shifted from, you know, even post Vietnam where women had served, but they weren’t always As close to the to combat as they had been in the Gulf War.

So I think public perception was shifting and that also really pushed the Clinton administration to lift the ban on women flying in combat. So when that happened But, you know, they wanted to put women into all the different types of squadrons. And the only one that I don’t think got female pilots were A6s because they knew A6s were on their way out.

So when they were looking at assigning women into these different squadrons, you know, at the time I thought, well, you know, I’ve got 140 hours in the Hornet.

I was expecting to go back and transition to a fighter squadron. But I think a couple of things affected my, my assignment first, they didn’t have any women flying in S threes. There were. So they needed some women aviators to go to that platform and second, you know, I’d had a lot of challenges going through the Hornet rag and the fleet replacement squadron.

And I think that that did not help me because, you know, and who knows what actually happened, but I heard that, that like they did not want me to come back through that squadron. And you know, I wasn’t going to get orders there. And at the time, it was a tough decision because I could have fought the orders.

I could have passed. I could have said, you know I really want to stay in Hornets And so I’ll wait until the next go around which would have been another year but that would have meant a year of not flying because the support squadron was shutting down as part of the base realignment and closing. You know a lot of squadrons were shutting down and that was one of them So I would have not flown for about a year and I also didn’t want to go back to a community that, or, you know, at least to a squadron that really didn’t want me there.

You really want to be supported by your instructors. And so I you know, I thought about it and I thought, I think I’m going to have more impact and I’m going to be, I’m going to be able to serve better if I go to S3s. And it’s. You know, it’s S threes are a great jet. I think they get, they used to get the bad rap just because, you know, it’s not a sharp pointy nose that goes out and shoots other aircraft.

And so aviators are, you know, there’s hierarchies and people talk about what’s the coolest. And there’s a lot of, as we mentioned, ego involved. And at first I was disappointed because I, you know I enjoyed flying the Hornet. Yeah. I was actually kind of excited to not have to stay in Lemoore and I was going to San Diego, which is great.

Yes. Well, I did my undergrad in San Diego. And so that was you know, an attraction. But once I got to San Diego and I started with the S3 squadron, I mean the pilots in that community. We’re incredibly supportive. I think a lot of it is the function of the mission and how you fly.

And the S3 is a crew aircraft. You know, at the time it was starting to come down from doing a lot of anti submarine. It was starting to do fewer anti submarine missions, which is what the S3 was originally designed for, a four person crew. But, I mean, flying with three other people is a lot different than flying by yourself.

And I think the culture that supports a crew aircraft is different than a culture, a single you hear about single seat mentality. And I think there was something to it. But anyway, that’s a very long answer to why I moved over to S threes. But it turned out to be such, you know, a wonderful a wonderful move for me because I loved flying with the S three community.

They were incredibly supportive. They You know, they didn’t care if I had challenges in Lemoore. They didn’t care if I was a woman. They just wanted to know that I was going to be a good team player. And I was.

[00:24:49] Liz: And an S3, what’s the working title for an S3?

[00:24:55] Loree: Yeah, it’s the S3B Viking.

[00:24:56] Liz: Viking. Yeah. So you mentioned that it was a four, four person crew and that it was tapering off of anti submarine operations. So what was its new mission primarily?

[00:25:08] Loree: Yeah, this is one of the great things about S3 is that it can do a lot of different missions. And it, what we did a lot of during my second deployment was, what they started calling sea control, which was.

Really flying out from the carrier and being able to go out and identify surface contacts that radar might not be picking up or even if radar was picking it up, if there wasn’t identify identification to the extent that they needed it, we’d go and see what flag they were flying, what they might be carrying.

If it was a cargo ship. So it was a lot of I guess, surface reconnaissance. You know, going out and identifying other ships. But we also primarily what we did was in flight refueling for the air wing. So those Hornets are very thirsty. They go through gas pretty fast. And so what we would do is fly overhead the ship during launches and recoveries.

And we carried a buddy store on our port side that, you know, would have gas in it in case any of the Hornets—it’s primarily Hornets, but you know, also we refueled Tomcats during our deployments while the Tomcats were still around and any fixed wing except the E2s and C2s. They would come up, refuel, and then go, you know, have a little bit of cushion so that when they’d come down to land, if for any reason they weren’t able to land on the first try, they had enough gas to make a couple of passes.

 We did a lot of info. of refueling for the air wing what we call organic refueling because it’s within the air wing. Typically when the Hornets and other and Tomcats would go out to fly missions. And the EA 6B Prowlers, too. I should leave those guys out. They, we would we would do refueling over the carrier, but if they had to do a long mission over the beach, then they would refuel off of Air Force refuel tanker airplanes.

 We call it organic refueling because it’s within the air wing.

[00:27:05] Liz: Okay, and then, and it was armed with weapons, and what were those weapons for?

[00:27:09] Loree: Yeah, we did carry well, during my first deployment, we carried torpedoes because we were still doing anti submarine warfare. But we normally would launch with Mark 82 bombs and You know, again, for surface control, if there was a surface threat again, we’re not going to be the ideal platform for doing any kind of bombing because we couldn’t carry smart bombs.

But there was actually, I think, a in the first call for an S3 did take out a surface target or at least bomb one with with bombs. So it’s so the S3 also carried the slam. And I think what’s the slam? It stands for standoff land attack missile.

[00:27:56] Liz: Meaning that you’re off at sea, but you’re attacking land.

[00:28:02] Loree: You know, because that makes sense because it was used against a ship in 91. And then actually in the second in the second gulf war an S3 also launched a maverick missile. So again, we’re not the primary, we’re not going to be the primary platform for ground attacks, but, and we’re not an air to air player at all.

But. But, you know, the S3 did carry things that could help out the effort if need be.

[00:28:35] Liz: And you as a pilot still had to land on a carrier. So let’s talk about that.

You know, a little Coast Guard helicopter pilot here. I have my own special landing experiences on ships. They’re very different, I’m sure, than a carrier.

But you do a great job in the book of describing that experience. But what I’m more interested in talking about is just sort of the environment that you were walking into for this first deployment that you were going to go do and why. So let’s talk about that.

[00:29:04] Loree: Yeah. You know I think what it really boiled down to, like the challenge. The challenges that we had boiled down to the men worrying that we were not qualified, that we had been pushed through training for political reasons that we didn’t have the qualifications to be there. And the, and all of us women worrying that we weren’t going to be given a fair chance because we were women and because there were these doubts about our qualifications.

 You know, that’s a tough place to start where there is a gap between, what people are expecting and what your you know, professional behavior and assumptions. You know, I, as an instructor my, my second tour after I deployed did my two deployments. I was an instructor pilot and. And actually, even back in the training command as a student, there were situations where we would see pilots who got pushed through even though they were having some challenges and these were male pilots and the fleet was saying, hey, we need pilots in this particular platform.

I don’t care if they’re on the border. We need them now. Right. For operational readiness, whatever. And so like it was really frustrating. And I’m not saying this to say that women were not qualified because we had gone through all the training, same training that the men had, we weren’t pushed through.

We were. You know, we went through the same at the same pace. But it felt when those situations came up where someone might say, Hey, you know we need to have someone right away that you know, leaders would look the other way because they needed to fill a spot, but when women came through, then people were doubting whether or not we were qualified.

 You know, again, what can you do as a lieutenant? You can just, what you do is you just do the best job you can and you pull your weight, you find advocates. You find people you can trust. And I was really lucky. A lot of the women who are flying in some of the fighter squadrons were not as lucky.

You know they did not have as many supportive Squadron mates or leaders and some did but some didn’t and that absolutely makes a difference when you’re in a squadron. You want to feel like you’re part of the team.

[00:31:41] Liz: and you walked under the ship or flew out to the ship at a very unfortunate moment in history, yeah of women in aviation, which right after or like actually when

[00:31:57] Loree: It was the day.

My, yeah. You know I had done my training in the S3B Viking. I had gotten my assignment to VS 29, which was on board. the Abraham Lincoln part of carrier air wing 11. And that was going to be the first West Coast air wing that had women in combat aviation squadrons. And so women were in the various squadrons.

There were two women pilots in the Tomcat squadron. There were three, I think three in the Hornet squadrons. And you know, in, pretty much all the squadrons, helicopter squadrons E2, C2 squadrons. And the first day that we were doing training exercises on board the Lincoln, my first day with VS 29 that we were actually going out and flying out to the fleet what we call the fleet.

It’s basically when you’re getting ready to deploy. We were typically when it’s time for you to come in and land you fly into the carrier, you check in with the carrier when you’re about 10 miles out and they say, you know, they let you know what kind of landings are happening depending on the weather.

And then you keep going and then you hold overhead the carrier. And so typically on a nice day, which it often was off the coast of San Diego, everyone is in stacks over the carrier based on what kind of airplane you’re flying. So the fighters are down low because they’re the first ones to land.

A jet like the S3B Viking, which can stay you know, a loft for a long time will be up higher and also because we refuel other airplanes were typically the last ones to land and then you collapse the stack. So everybody, you know, as everyone lands, you come down in altitude on that day when we checked in and it was a nice day we got put in a holding pattern, which is really unusual.

But, you know, you don’t ask you do what you’re told. So we held and we held for a long time and we’re Oh, it’s weird. I wonder what’s going on. And then finally, I think it was like about 45 minutes to an hour later, we were called in to come in and do our landings and, you know, everything was pretty normal.

Everyone’s, you know, running around the flight deck doing their jobs. We did some landings and went over and did some catapults, you know, at you’re getting warmed up, you’re getting prepared for doing all the exercises and the training. And so after we had done whatever we need to qualify our jet needed some maintenance.

So they send us back to San Diego, and when we got back to San Diego again, this was like in 94, no internet, I think very basic, if that. Someone said, Hey, did you guys hear about the F 14 that crashed? We’re like, no what are you talking about? And I said, yeah, there is a Tomcat that crashed about an hour before you landed.

And we’re like, wow, that’s shocking because, and I think it speaks to the professionalism of all the people on the flight deck. Like it was business as usual. And so the next morning I was getting ready to go back out to the ship and I was reading the San Diego Union Tribune. And there was something in there about how an F 14 Tomcat had crashed the day before on board Abraham Lincoln.

And that the backseater had been rescued, but the pilot was lost at sea and presumed dead. And the name was withheld pending the notification of his next of kin. And I was like, ah, that sucks. You know, I mean, I didn’t know any of the male pilots in that squadron, but I knew Kara Hultgreen and I knew Carrie Lawrence.

And and so I was, I mean, I feel bad saying it, but I was a little relieved that it wasn’t anybody I knew, but I still felt bad that it was somebody. And again, you know, like in, in aviation, you know how it is, Liz. It’s it’s like a, it’s a dangerous profession. And even when people are trained, well, stuff happens.

And, you know, it’s often there, but for the grace of God, go. I know that things like that didn’t happen to us that we’re still here. So I flew back out to the carrier and. When I got on board I was in the ready room and talking with the other female officer in my squadron Jana Raymond, who was a naval flight officer and we were walking to our stateroom together and she stopped and she said, did you hear about Kara?

And that’s when I just like I knew, you know, when she said that, it was like, oh, shit. No, no way. Because not just because it was a huge loss, but like Kara embodied everything that you would expect in a fighter pilot, not just a female fighter pilot, but a fighter pilot. I mean, she just was larger than life.

She you know, she was funny. She was, you know, blunt. I mean, just it She just had a lot of the qualities that you would expect and you would want in a woman who was one of the first female fighter pilots, you know and you know, losing her right off the bat was really difficult for all of the women, but also her squadron.

And it just raised a lot of controversy, you know, people, there were some male pilots who released her training records. And that was just. That really hurt because it felt like,

[00:37:33] Liz: Well, there were, there were accusations and assumptions and innuendos and rumors and all of this garbage about how she was a poorly performing pilot and had been pushed through now.

So she’s the first fully Qualified Fleet Fighter Pilot. And I have her memoir. Well, sorry. It’s not her memoir. It is basically almost a transcription of her diaries and letters that her mother compiled in her, you know, after she died. It’s called Call Sign Revlon: The Life and Death of Navy Fighter Pilot, Kara Hultgreen by Sally Spears.

This book is out of print. But I have a copy that I got about 10 years ago, and I will loan it to very good friends as long as they promise to give it back to me. And I haven’t read the whole thing. I’ve kind of flipped through it to see bits of it, but in the conversations that I’ve had over the past, you know, two years, you know, whether it’s Bev Weintraub’s Wings of Gold, or even talking to Connie Reeves, who was a helicopter pilot in the Army, who was on staff at the Pentagon after this happened and heard the disparaging things that senior officers were saying about Kara in the aftermath of this.

It infuriated her so much she ended up writing a book inspired almost from this, in which men in the fleet are trying to kill women. You know, that’s how bad and how impactful it was for her to hear these negative comments about this professional pilot who had done everything that she had to do.

And so what that did, though from, you know, reading your book and just try to place myself in that situation of first of all, you’re emotionally dealing with the loss of a friend and then also emotionally with, you know, the loss of a pioneer. And then you’re stepping into a space where everybody now doubts you even more because this has happened.

And I think it was proven, or at least you know this better than I do, but I’m pretty sure that it was proven that this was a mechanical issue, and that they put a bunch of guys in the simulator, gave them the same issue, and they had, and Same outcome every single time. So is that right?

[00:39:55] Loree: Yeah, so it was actually you’re very close, which was it was a mechanical error compressor stall. That was exacerbated by an overshooting start, which is considered pilot error. However, they did do the simulator. The squadron went into the simulator. So these are aviators going into the simulator knowing that engine is going to fail and still the only person who survived was the commanding officer.

[00:40:30] Liz: Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah.

[00:40:32] Loree So it’s, you know, it wasn’t. Completely not human error. There was some human error by having an overshooting start, but there was the mechanical failure.

[00:40:41] Liz: But you could have gotten out of that overshooting start any other day.

[00:40:46] Loree: Right. Yes. Yes, absolutely.

And it’s just like the worst point to have anything like that happen. It’s, I mean, the reaction has to be so fast. And I think, you know when you consider all the factors of wanting to, you know, to save the jet, wanting to make sure you don’t crash into the flight deck.

All of these things. You know I can’t even imagine. I mean, again, I’ve been very lucky. I’ve never had to be in a situation like that. That’s never happened to me, but it’s still you know, again, there, but for the grace of God, go I and yeah, when that happened, I think what was maddening about it was that you know, I knew of other aviators who had challenges in the training command and had, and I’m sorry, let me rephrase that. I knew of other aviators who had been in mishaps and fatal mishaps, and these aviators had struggled in the training command and when they had their mishaps, nobody was saying, hey, they had problems in flight training and, you know, no one released their training records to the media saying, oh, this person, you know

[00:42:09] Liz: So it was her mom that released her training records to the media to correct the record because she didn’t struggle in training, you know she was high performing in training. Yeah.

[00:42:22] Loree: It’s, yeah. So I think that’s what was really I think that’s one of the things that hurt the most because when you are in aviation and you are part of this, you have this camaraderie with your fellow aviators to see aviators do something like that to a fellow aviator.

[00:42:39] Liz: These are your sisters and brothers. This is family. Yes. Yeah. It’s horrible.

[00:42:45] Loree: Yeah. Yeah. That, that hurt the most.

[00:42:46] Liz: Yeah. And so now you walked into this, like now you’re, now you are in your proving ground with all of this baggage and background noise on top of all the normal background noise that was already there.

So how’d you get through it?

[00:43:02] Loree: I was lucky. I had guys in my squadron who were, who talked sense into me because it was very easy. It would have been very easy to think, oh, all these guys are out to get me specifically the landing signal officers who were not the most personable of people.

But you know, they have a very serious job. I became a landing signal officer towards the end of my first deployment and like LSOs are there for safety. And but you know. Our air wing LSOs were known for, we used to joke that they were equal opportunity assholes. Like they were just

[00:43:42] Liz:  I say that to frequently on this podcast. I say that very often. There are many equal opportunity assholes in aviation. It’s just, you gotta have the right radar to know what kind of asshole they are.

[00:43:55] Loree: Right. Exactly. And I was really lucky because you know, I hadn’t, I had not fully developed that radar yet. I think I felt like I had a pretty good sense.

But I had a couple of aviators in my squadron who were prior enlisted and they really, they were like big brothers to me who said, look, here’s, you know, everyone has challenges. It’s rare, you know, that a nugget, you know, a first time deployment aviator comes to the boat and just. It’s, you know, nails everything, right?

It’s a new environment. It’s challenging. Everyone has a struggle at some point. So don’t feel like just because you’re having a struggle that there’s something wrong with you. Let’s figure out. For me, you know, I was, I’m trying to remember what exactly my issue, I tended to get overpowered coming into land.

So I did bolter. I had one night where I boltered three times mortifying, but you know, I learned and so I went back and I studied the landings you know, every landings recorded. And then the pilot Joe Keith, callsign FlowJoe, he said, look, every time you have any free time, you are up on that LSO platform watching landings.

And you know, it was like graduate level study of carrier landings where I was listening to how the LSOs were grading them. I was watching them. I was really understanding more. How do I do this? You know, well, how do I really get better at this? And knowing that there was somebody who believed that I could do this, right?

Who wasn’t who knew and, you know, had been on deployments before. And so having that support really made the difference for me. And my commanding officer as well was you know, a really gruff man and very demanding, but also, you know, he he’d go up all the ladders to the tower. If the air boss was yelling about one of his pilots, he was up there, you know, and so he, we always knew that he had our back, even if he then came down and chewed us out afterwards individually.

But yeah, so I felt like I had really good support. And again I was lucky in that regard. A lot of the other female aviators on that deployment did not have that kind of support from their leadership or from their fellow aviators.

[00:46:21] Liz: You know what I found interesting too is just reading about you know, when I was landing on a ship, it was ranged from 210 feet to 378 feet to a 210 was pretty sporty.

You know, and the three 78 had. A couple hundred people on board, but they weren’t all sitting in front of the TV watching me. They all, most of them had jobs, you know, so like they were watching me on the bridge. They were watching me down on the messdeck, but there were no other pilots on board watching me because the other pilot was in the cockpit with me.

You, this is like on the closed circuit television all over this. 5, 000 crew membership and all of these fricking pilots who were your peers, whatever are watching that. It’s ah, so much pressure.

[00:47:10] Loree: I think that’s where you really learn how to compartmentalize because you just think about that.

Right. I mean, you know, like I say in my show, it’s and I think I may have written this in my book too. It’s I cannot think about the fact that there are 5,000 people watching me fail at my job right now. You just can’t because you have to focus on the job in front of you and what you’re doing and getting yourself and my crew on board safely without endangering the lives of all the sailors on the flight deck.

That’s what you have to focus on. But then after, you know, then the next night you’re the one sitting in the ready room with the bowl of popcorn.

[00:47:50] Liz: That’s brutal. That’s a brutal environment just all around and congratulations for getting through it and getting through it successfully

[00:47:57] Loree: And for you as well. I’ve seen some of those landings that people videotape of helicopters in, you know, the pitching decks and stuff like,

[00:48:06] Liz: Oh yeah, I have things to say about this later when we get to your other book. I’m excited about it too. Okay. Cause there’s a little something in there that I absolutely was like cackling laughing at when I read it and we might have to actually do a duet.

So anyway, but we’ll get to that in a little bit. Okay. Your memoir talks about all of these things and all kinds of other great stuff, like hairy moments that you had also having a you know, a husband who is also on active duty and how you guys kind of navigated that.

We’re going to let people read about that in your book. You know, is there anything else you want to say about this book before we move on to hearing what happened after and then moving on to the next book?

[00:48:48] Loree: I just hope it helps people have a peek into what that life is like and how You know, honestly, how amazing it was because I would love to see more women in naval aviation and in any kind of aviation.

I think we’re still, you know, not where we need to be as far as representation. So I hope it inspires young women to think about naval aviation as a career.

[00:49:13] Liz: Yeah, me too. And I also think it gives us a really wonderful history of that moment in naval aviation and like what that personal experience was so it’s you know I just I’m out here encouraging everybody to tell their stories and you did it, and so thank you for giving us this contribution to the canon because it’s a very distinct moment in time and your experiences are just really instructive for all of us both to appreciate what you had to do to come before us so that we could come along and do our thing.

And yeah, just all the challenges that you faced. It’s just incredible that you guys all got through that. So good job. After the Navy and you know, they could read the book and stuff like that to get the details on what the transition was. But after the Navy, you did a lot of big important things in the business world.

So like just walk us through a little bit of that transition and yeah. What you did.

[00:50:15] Loree: It’s funny. Yeah, it’s funny because I almost did not go to the business world. And when I got out of the Navy or when I knew I was going to be finishing up my service and leaving the Navy I applied to business school and I applied to Film School, because I had made a bunch of music videos while I was in the squadron, and I really loved that process.

And I mean, this was back in the late nineties, where it took, you know, a three minute music video probably took a month to put together because the software wasn’t there, you know, it just was a different time than it is now. But I really enjoyed that creative process, and so I did apply to film school and I got into a great film school and I ended up turning it down because I talked myself out of it.

I was still at the point where I just I still worried that I wouldn’t be successful doing something that was really out of my wheelhouse. And I felt like at that point I was I felt like I was a good leader. I really enjoyed supporting teams and I wanted to do that, but I felt like I’d be more successful doing that in the business world than I might be doing that in the film industry.

So I ended up doing business school, which was. It’s such a great experience because coming out of the Navy, I think there still was a fear of am I going to be successful? Am I going to be able to transition into this completely different world and you know, not end up homeless or, you know, under a bridge somewhere.

I just like I it’s so in looking back, it seems so irrational. And even now, when I’m coaching veterans or talking with veterans who are transitioning out, you know, I still hear that fear, right? You get used to the security. You get used to the knowledge of what you’re going to be doing the next day or the next month or year.

[00:52:10] Liz: You understand the rules, you understand how everything is so laid out for you. Yeah. It’s really hard to conceptualize. How am I going to translate this into the civilian world? Yeah.

[00:52:19] Loree: Totally. And you know what I tell people is that just imagine you are. If you were going to move from here to, I don’t know, to France, let’s just be easy, you know, and you don’t speak any French, what are you going to do?

You’re going to start learning the language. You’re going to start talking with people who have lived in France. You’re going to start understanding what does it mean to live in this new world? And that’s how you start understanding how you can be successful in this new world. And business school was a really nice transition because I got to learn about things that I didn’t really know anything about finance, accounting, you know, corporate strategy, all these things. But also I got to practice and develop things I did know something about like management, operations. And I got to be part of this amazing network of people from all over the world. I mean I went to the Wharton school at the University of Pennsylvania.

And so it was 40 percent international students, which was such a great, you know, change from being in the U. S. military where I was just surrounded by other Americans, which, you know, of course is wonderful. But it was so expansive for my own experience to be able to hear from people about how, you know, they did business in their country or what their cultures were like.

And it really helped to open my mind you know, to more experiences in the world. But even coming out of that, I, you know, I was trying to decide, well, what kind of job should I do first? And I ended up doing management consulting for a few years to better understand how businesses work and how to identify when things aren’t working.

How do you improve those things? And again, you know, just working with some really talented people who had come from backgrounds that I could learn from and that, you know, really helped again with me figuring out, okay, what do I want to do next? And I think what I ended up doing a lot of projects with companies around marketing strategy and the companies were in the tech industry.

And so I was really attracted to the innovation and the pace of the tech industry. So when I, finished up at Bain. I, you know, there, I think there comes a point in every management consultant’s life where they realize, well, I would say in most management consultants lives where they realize they don’t want to be a partner because it is a grind to get to partner, you know, similar with investment banking.

It’s just super long hours. Lots of travel you know, can be challenging on relationships and families. So I actually took a kind of a little bit of a interesting side job at Stanford University at their business school where I was, it’s so funny how, you know, these things come back into your lives in ways that you didn’t expect, but it was a job creating video case studies.

So I would create these little mini stories on video where I would interview a CEO about a challenge that they had and the CEO would describe it. And I’d write the teaching materials as well as edit the videos. And then a business school professor or a learning and development professional at a company could use it as a training mechanism.

It was really fun, but I was pretty, I was an individual contributor. I wasn’t really working with a team or supporting a team. And so after about a little over a year of doing that. A friend of mine reached out to me and he had started and sold the company Military.com, and so he was looking for someone to run his marketing team and I’d never run a marketing team before.

I didn’t really know much about online marketing, but he is a former P-3 NFO. And so he said, look, I know your background, you’re. You’re going to do fine. So again, it was, you know, having an advocate, someone who believed in me doing something that I wasn’t sure if I could do. And I ran marketing at military.com for three years and. It was one of those experiences that, again, was transformational for me because that’s where I learned from the experts about digital marketing and you know, all the things that go into growing a community. We actually had a very vibrant military online community before Facebook.

I was at military. com from 2006 to 2009. You know. It was really interesting to see how that community engaged and then eventually I went from there to a startup that was doing online payments. So something very different, but I was running marketing for them and you know, it’s just really in hindsight.

I can see the pieces being put together, but at the time I really focused on going to roles where I liked the people I was going to be working with. I liked what they were doing. So the mission what was it that they were focusing on? And how could I you know, bring something? How could I bring my own strengths as a leader or as a marketer or as a creative problem solver to help these companies be even better?

And these teams be even better. So that, you know, that, yeah. From there, I co-founded a company that lasted for a year before it went under and we just could not get product market fit and we ran out of money. I took a little bit of time off then. I was also going through a divorce. So it just seemed like a good time to kind of take a step back and figure out what do I want to be doing with my life?

And from there, I went to a job at Google where I was managing their global online communities and all of their social media support. And so again, a great opportunity to learn from people who were doing an amazing job of managing these communities. And. As the team lead, I could advocate for them and help them with their own professional development and grow our communities.

And I did that for about three years. And then I then was recruited by Meta, then Facebook to manage their global help center for businesses. This is, you know any type of business who is trying to figure out how to use their advertising platform, which can be very yeah, complicated but powerful.

But if you’re a small business owner and you’ve got five minutes a day, yeah, we had to be able to teach those people how to use the platform as well as a, you know, a business analyst or someone who’s working for a huge company whose only job is to do advertising on Facebook. So it was a, an interesting challenge to be able to serve multiple audiences for multiple products.

And you know, after three years of doing that, it was, The company was very different after three years from when I joined. I joined right before the 2016 election and the Cambridge Analytica scandal that happened. You know, after three years I was ready for something new and that’s when I left and started my own coaching and consulting business.

So yeah, gosh, that’s 20 years summed up.

[00:59:43] Liz: But it’s really fun to hear like all of the post military things that you achieved. And sort of that path is really cool. And then the consulting thing, are you still doing that or is that? Tell us about that so if somebody’s interested.

[00:59:57] Loree: I am, Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I support leaders and they tend to be executive C level roles in companies.

I’ve supported startup founders as well as C level executives. It comes back to a lot of the same issues which are around how we view ourselves and what we want in life. And I typically get asked to coach people who are dealing with executive presence issues or teamwork issues.

How do they inspire a team, motivate their team? And so I’ve also worked with teams who are struggling to be effective together and consulting wise. It’s more around you know, giving advice. Coaching is different than consulting. And a lot of times I think people expect a coach to tell you what to do, but that’s not really our role as a coach.

A coach is I’m there to support. I’m there to challenge. I think really the best coaches know how to ask the right questions to help their clients find their own answers within them in a way that they can’t do on their own. And I think it’s similar to working with a coach at the gym.

You know, you get stronger, you can go in and work out by yourself. But having someone there to guide you in doing those exercises and watch you and point things out. Is probably going to help you get stronger faster but I can’t do the bicep curls for you. You’ve got to do that yourself.

[01:01:30] Liz: Yeah.

Yeah. And so how long, you’ve been doing that for how long?

[01:01:34] Loree: Oh gosh, it’s been almost four years now.

[01:01:39] Liz: I’ll ask you to remind us this at the end, but if somebody’s interested in your services, where can they find you?

[01:01:45] Loree: My website is easy. It’s LoreeDraude.com and I’m also on Instagram and Facebook. So LoreeDraude all one word, and it’s probably the easiest place to find me.

[01:01:56] Liz: Well, there’s another thing you’ve been up to the past few years that I was so privileged to witness as we referred to earlier, we were in New York City the weekend that the Blue Angels had their homecoming, and you know, our girl came back from her first year of performances. So tell us about this.

[01:02:19] Loree: Yes, and I will just say I was so sad to miss that I would have loved to have gone and it was so cool of you to be at my show, Liz. I really appreciate your support.

[01:02:27] Liz: It was great timing. I, you know, I had, we had talked about this. So I went to Washington DC to see the opera adaptation of the play Grounded, which is a one woman play about an Air Force pilot who gets pregnant and is grounded and is put on a you know, in drone warfare, and it’s all about sort of like her dealing with the idea of being actively involved in war, but going home to her family every night and like dealing with that.

So I love the concept of the play. I have not seen the one woman show. Opera is a little different and you know, I was excited to come in and see a one woman show performed by you. Which was excellent. So yeah, tell us about this is your arc, right? Like you always, I was like what is a former Navy pilot doing on a stage by herself?

Like what? And then once I read your story, it all made sense. So tell us about it.

[01:03:35] Loree: It’s so funny, again, how these things evolve or come into our lives. I don’t think I ever, like I had never thought about doing a one woman show and I had been participating in a writer’s workshop for a few years and it was mostly personal narrative.

You know, I had already written my memoir. And I wasn’t planning on writing another memoir. I just was, it was just very cathartic to be able to sit down and write stories about my life. And I noticed that the stories I wrote about my experiences in the Navy there was, you know, plenty of stories I was writing that were not in my memoir and so people were really interested in that.

And one of the other women in the group had done a one woman show, had taken a lot of her stories from that workshop and put them together into a one woman show. But she was a professional actress. So I was a little intimidated. And I went to the woman who runs the writing workshops. Her name is Beth Bornstein Dunnington.

And I asked Beth, I’m like, you know, I’m, What do you think about I was kind of thinking about maybe taking some of my stories and trying to put together a one woman show because, you know, I did theater in high school and I really enjoyed it and I would love for more people to hear stories about women aviators.

And if I’m the person to be the voice of that, maybe that might be something people would be interested in. And she said, yes, you need to do that. And so right before the pandemic we started working together and pulling together a story with all of the different, many of the stories I’d written in the workshops.

And then again, very similar to how I did the book all the stories from the workshop or the foundation, and then I just kind of filled in the blanks. To make an interesting story arc. So I premiered that show. Yeah, pandemic happened. So I actually didn’t do it on a stage until November of 2021 in New York off Broadway at a solo festival and sold out a show, which was really exciting.

And then had a second show as well. And from there, I took the show to the Edinburgh fringe festival in the summer, 2022. Performed it like 23 times. Yeah, that was, you know, it was one of those experiences where afterwards I’m like, I feel like I can do anything if I can get through doing the show, which, you know, that version was, I mean, the newer version I think is emotional too, but the first version of my show was very personal.

It was more about my own personal journey and so it was tough to get up night after night and, you know, share and go through some of the toughest emotions I’ve been through and some of the most challenging parts of my life. And, you know, doing that 23 times in a row was, it took a toll.

It definitely was. I started thinking do I want to keep doing this? But I, it was really fun to be able to to, I’d always talk with the audience members after the show and, you know, it was great to talk with people whose children were in the military or they had served in the military, and it was just this really wonderful experience of feeling like I was giving voice to something that needed to be told and so that was a great experience, but at the end of doing Edinburgh I realized it wasn’t quite the show that I wanted it to be.

It was, I felt like it was too much about me and I wanted it to be more about this topic of women in naval aviation around the idea of what are women capable of doing? What was the perception of women then versus now? You know, how have women progressed in the military? And, you know, but still with the stories of what is it like to land on an aircraft carrier?

What is it like to get catapulted off an aircraft carrier? You know, I have a scene where I, the audience is with me as I, you know, lose both of my generators on a catapult shot. And then I have to come back and land at night. And it’s, you know, I really wanted to give people a taste of what it’s like to be deployed and all the challenges and also, you know, the fun parts of that too.

 That show I premiered at the Hollywood Fringe Festival earlier this year, and then did two shows again at the same solo festival in New York City this past October, November. And that’s where I saw you and got to meet you in person. Finally.

[01:08:13] Liz: That was so cool. I mean, I like. It’s right in the middle of Times Square, and it was just crazy.

I was like, whoa, that’s cool. And then it’s these all these little theaters, I guess, because it’s the solo festival, meaning every show is a one person show. And so they have a whole bunch of these going on throughout the week and simultaneously everything. And so I showed up for yours and I loved it. I mean, I thought it was just like, I loved.

The technique that you use, you start with your flight suit down and you put it on and you get all, you get your hair put up, like we’re going to join the Navy now. And then at the end you take it all down and you show us, you know, you talk about where we are and the embarrassment of being you know, the fact that the Navy has taken this long to get a female on their demonstration team when Air Force has been doing this for a really long time.

So yeah, really gives us a sense of the pace of change that we’ve lived through.

[01:09:13] Loree: Yeah. Right. It feels like some things I don’t know. I mean, just realizing as I mentioned in my show that when I left the Navy in 99 I was not the only woman who could have qualified for the blue angels.

You know, as an S3 pilot, I don’t know if they’ve even had S3 pilots on the blue angels because the qualification is you need to have, I think it’s 1500 hours of pilot time in a combat jet. Right. So they leave it open enough where I think, you know, it could be, it used to be Tomcat guys or Hornet guys, or I don’t know if they’ve had Prowler pilots or it typically tends to be fighter pilots who go to the Blue Angels.

And so and even in 93 there were women who had a lot of hours but you know, by 99, when I got out, there were definitely several women who could have qualified. And it’s frustrating that it’s taken this long to get an F 18 pilot. They did have a Marine Corps woman C-130 pilot who flew Fat Albert.

But you know, for the Hornets, it’s and especially as you mentioned the Air Force has had several women Thunderbird pilots. So I don’t know The Navy feels very resistant sometimes to that kind of change, but yeah, I don’t know. Well,

[01:10:46] Liz: Well, Navy in my novel, let’s see who wins. Let’s see if I publish it before they do it. But in my novel, I have a black female demonstration pilot. So let’s go Navy.

[01:10:58] Loree: Yes. Oh my God. Don’t even get me started. That was just a few years ago that they, I know. Had their first black tactical jet pilot. I’m like, what? There hasn’t been a female.

[01:11:11] Liz: It’s glacial.Change is glacial. Yeah, it’s excruciating. I know. Here we are. Yeah. Anyway, it’s good job. It’s about time. Yay.

[01:11:20] Loree: Well, we’ll celebrate and just, you know, continue to get the word out so that

[01:11:25] Liz: Hopefully her presence brings, you know, a whole lot more women to the Navy for the future, which is the whole point of those demonstration pilots.

So now we get to your latest book, Soar into Joy, which is why I’m calling this as part of my leadership and development series and kicking that off because it is a, it’s a self-help book and it incorporates a lot of things that I have read in other places that, you know, have changed my life and have really honed you know, my choices and my behaviors.

And then a bunch that I hadn’t read about and you kind of pull that together and tie it in with your military experience, your corporate experience. Tell us what inspired this book and why you decided to publish it.

[01:12:13] Loree: Yeah, I, you know, started thinking about a lot of things that I found myself saying over and over again to clients or talking about with my coaching clients.

And you know, a lot of my clients hire me because they are in the startup world or they’re in tech and they want to tap into that experience. And so I wanted to be able to have a way to bring all that together into kind of a guidebook or a self-development book where it would have a wider impact than just a one on one conversation I might be having with the client.

And even though I’m really proud of my first book, I felt like it was more of a slice of life. This is what it’s like to deploy on an aircraft carrier, which is what I wanted it to be, but it’s, I don’t really feel like I shared as many lessons or, you know, things that I had learned.

And I wanted to incorporate more of that into a book. So I wrote this book to share the things that have helped me because I feel like I’m, and I don’t know if it’s just years of experience because I’m old now, but it’s, I just feel like I’ve learned so much and I’ve been so lucky to be able to do that through the experiences in the Navy, my experience as a leader in tech, but also as a coach and the training I’ve had as an executive coach, I wanted to be able to pull up all of that together into something that anyone could benefit from. And so that’s really what, you know, inspired me to write the book and share those lessons with people.

[01:13:42] Liz: It’s a great quick read. It’s called Soar into Joy at Combat Pilots Wisdom on Falling in Love with Your Life. It, like I said, it incorporates a lot of lessons that you could take the time and go read a bunch of tons of other books. And I think you even have a reading guide in the back.  

[01:13:59] Loree: I do. I have resources.

Yeah. I mean, I don’t feel like there’s anything revolutionary in this book or anything that has. It’s probably not been said before, but what I found valuable was just being able to maybe say it in my own way and say it in a way that sometimes people might relate to it differently. Or also like sometimes I’ve read things and.

Sometimes it takes two or three times before I’m like, Oh, okay.

[01:14:26] Liz: You need to hear it presented in different ways and stuff. And that’s what’s fun about this. Like you give us a framework and you use SOAR as the acronym for it and you even use like actually gliding. I, so I’ve been, I’ve taken up gliding in my retirement and so I really liked, you know, the metaphor of gliding to kind of express that.

It’s joy that you can achieve in life and what that feels like. Dad, did you want to talk about any I think people should buy the book and find out what your store acronym is, but if you want to share any of it, let us know.

[01:14:52] Loree: Yeah, I know. I’m happy to share it. And you know, for each letter of that acronym I have some stories that I shared about how these came up in my own life and also you know, tips on how to expand all of these and increase them in your own life.

So the S is for self awareness. So really understanding what your values are, what’s most important to you, because I think that by identifying that and being really clear on it, we’re able to make better decisions about how we’re spending our time on this planet.

So the O is for openness, and this is, was life changing for me in the sense that being willing to, admit that I’m wrong about something or being open to how other people might be able might see a situation, I felt really enabled me to be a better leader and just a better human being in the sense that it increased my empathy for others. So openness is the O.

A is, I’d say probably my second favorite one for appreciation. And this also has been life changing for me, like really, finding all the things that I’m grateful for in my life and cultivating that sense of appreciation, I think brings even more good things into our lives. If we’re focusing on things that we’re grateful for versus things that we don’t have.

And then my favorite one is the R, which I think is also really challenging for people, which is responsibility. And I think of it also as ownership. So really being in charge of how we’re living our lives and being deliberate in the choices that we make to honor our values that we’ve found in the self awareness part, but also creating that path and bringing those things into our life that we want to have in our life.

That’s our responsibility.

[01:16:43] Liz: Yeah. I like too, you have a few exercises in here for you know, in terms of self-awareness I started asking my friends, what are my superpowers? You know? You say you should go ask your friends what your three superpowers are. And then you also have these little flight plans that are sort of practical applications about things that you can do to take action now and and move toward your goals,

[01:17:07] Loree: So yeah, I mean, as much as I love thinking about things and talking about things, it’s this is something from my own life. It’s I got to do something, so I’m really encouraging people. Yes, it’s wonderful to reflect and to visualize, but you also just got to do stuff if you want stuff to happen.

[01:17:24] Liz: That’s true. That’s true. Well, it’s really great. Did you have anything else you wanted to say about it before I call out one thing in the back of this book?

[01:17:31] Loree: No.

[01:17:34] Liz: I was reading this and it’s all good stuff. You’ve got all these great anecdotes some that we read in your memoir, but others, like you said are from your business world.

You’ve got like little diagrams and stuff that are from other people’s, you know books or concepts that are super helpful in the way that they’re presented here. And you’re, and there’s a little bit of humor in here. But my favorite bit that they had me laughing out loud last night is where you bring in all your creativity and you’re talking about it’s, I’m going to just read it to you and read your own book to you.

“It’s funny how the things we truly desire often find a way into our lives. I couldn’t do community theater while I was based on an aircraft carrier, but while we were out at sea, I was an enthusiastic person participant in our fo’c’sle follies where our air wing squadrons gathered together to perform funny skits.”

And then you. . . “And even poking fun at the Navy,” and then you say, “I even started writing a musical parody of West Side Story called Top Side Story about the life on a flight deck of an aircraft carrier. Obviously, there was a song called Jets,” in which you say. I’m not going to sing it. Well, I’ll do it. “When you fly jets all the way from your first carrier qual to your last flying day.”

And then, but that wasn’t the best part. And this is, I will butcher this, I apologize to all the listeners, I am not a singer and I also have a cold. I also wrote a song to the tune of Maria. Ready? Do you want to sing it or do you want me to?

[01:19:16] Loree: No, I definitely want you to.

[01:19:20] Liz: “A helo. I just flew a bird called a helo.

And suddenly the ground will never feel so sound to me.” And then how does this part go? Because there are a couple of verses in between. “A helo. Say it loud and there’s rotors flailing. Say it soft and it’s almost like praying. Oh, Jesus, don’t let the nut fly off my helo.”

Okay. I will torture you no more.

[01:19:51] Loree: Wahoo (clapping)

[01:19:57] Liz: If you can make yourself vulnerable enough to stand in front of an audience for an hour, 28 times in a row. I will embarrass myself by singing on my podcast.

[01:20:08] Loree: That’s amazing. You don’t know how much joy you just gave me, Liz. It is one thing to write words, but to hear someone perform something that you’ve written is just a gift. Thank you.

[01:20:21] Liz: So let’s please find somebody better to perform that than me. Please finish. Please finish that piece of art and so that I can go watch that. That would be amazing.

[01:20:26] Loree: Well I hope also like I’m going off of memory that is. This is, you know, this is of things that I had heard of long, long ago. And there is a thing called a Jesus nut on a helo, right? That’s what I thought.

[01:20:53] Liz: It’s not like an actual part. Okay. Yeah. Too funny. Wow. That was fantastic.

I love there are so many things that you embody that that I find reflect a lot of me, while I didn’t get out of the military and go off and do business things, you know, I got a master in public administration. I went into diplomacy like you know, I was an HR manager, so I did a bunch of other stuff aside from flying. And so that’s given me like a huge basket of skills and experience that I now apply to my creative life. And this is part of my creative life. Having conversations with you you know, being able to dig in and ask you questions and all of this stuff is I’m living my, I’m, I am in joy. I have soared into joy. I actually soar to for real, as a glider pilot, as a student glider student, I’m not qualified yet. Let’s be clear about that.

But so yeah, I’m just it’s. It’s so inspiring to see somebody like you who takes their lifelong interests and accomplishments and puts them all together. It’s the thing that I encourage the people in my life to do is to let’s sit down and then what are you passionate about? Now, what are you good at? What skills do you need? You know, how do you get to where you want to be in whatever time frame that you think you want to be there? And so I just think it’s amazing.

Everything that you’re doing. It’s awesome.

[01:22:11] Loree: Well, thank you. And thank you so much for amplifying the voices of women aviators and those who write about women aviators. It’s so important to get these stories out. When I joined the Navy, like there were just you couldn’t find women to talk with and, you know, hardly any of them had written there weren’t any stories that I can think of.

So it’s so wonderful, the work that you’re doing in service of getting the word out so that other people know about our stories and hopefully more young women will join aviation, in particular, Naval Aviation.

[01:22:45] Liz: All of, all my mission in life, and my pleasure, and my privilege to be able to do this and to be able to talk with people like you.

So thank you very much, Loree. Remind us one more time where we can find

[01:22:59] Loree: you. Absolutely. My website is loreedraude.com it’s l o r e e d r a u d e. com I’m also on Facebook and Instagram as loreedraude, all one word. So I have a page on Facebook. I have a policy. I only. Except from requests from people I’ve met in person, but my Loree Draude coaching and consulting page is open for anyone to follow. And then my Instagram is also public.

[01:23:28] Liz: Excellent. Yay. Thank you, Lori.

[01:23:30] Loree: You’re welcome. Liz. Thanks so much for having me on.

[01:23:33] Liz: Thanks so much for listening. I want to give a shout out to one of my fans who very kindly sent me a note recently. Her name is Gita Brown, and she had this to say,

“Hi Liz, just a quick note to say thank you for all you do.

I’ve been following you for over a year now and have gotten so much from your work. I’ve listened to podcast episodes, read some of your recommended books, and enjoyed following your travels and aviation cultural events on social media. Newsletter open rates, click rates, and social media likes never tell the full story of a person like you for the work you do ripples through the world in ways that you may never see.

I’m a little ripple just popping up to say thank you. I’m a,” and she says her age, which is the same as my age. “Educator who only recently gotten bitten by the aviation bug and your work has given me tremendous historical context, creative inspiration, and a feeling of company on this path. Thank you for your work, your efforts, and your passion for literature and aviation.

You truly embody the best of both worlds. Best Gita.”

Well, Gita, thank you so much for that feedback. You know, sometimes I’m out here feeling like I’m just having a one-on-one conversation with somebody, which is really special, and then I put it out in the world and it kind of just feels like it’s going out into the void.

And so it’s always nice. I see Gita out there interacting with my social media stuff. I welcome feedback, even critical feedback, because I can only get better with critique. So please feel free to engage with my social media stuff. Send me a note. Let me know how I’m doing. And of course, leave a review wherever you watch or listen.

Check out the Literary Aviatrix website for these and hundreds of other books by or featuring women in aviation in all genres for all ages. And while you’re there, sign up for the Literary Aviatrix newsletter to stay up to date on all of the Aviatrix book news. If you enjoyed this interview on YouTube or podcast, please subscribe and drop a review if the option is available.

I’d like to thank Michael Wildes of Massif and Kroo for his help in producing this interview and his support of all things literary aviatrix.

Blue skies and happy reading.

[01:26:07] Loree: Oh my God. Totally. I love that you sang my song.

[01:26:12] Liz: I thought it was terrible. I actually practiced. I was hoping I’d be better.

[01:26:16] Loree: What? No. Oh my God. That was so cool. I’ve never heard anybody sing that, so it was really neat. Thank you. I like it. No, I loved it. I loved it.

Now watch out Grounded. I mean, Liz will be coming to the stage with Loree Draude’s Topside Story musical.

[01:26:22] Liz: It’s. We will just, yeah, we’ll just spare the world that pain. Too fun. That’s fun. Okay.