Veteran Voices: Laura Johnson’s backstage pass to the world
Courtesy photo
Editor’s note: The Vail Veterans Program and the Vail Daily will highlight the service of an Eagle County veteran each month in Veteran Voices.
For the Johnson family of Duluth, Minnesota, the call to experience the freedom of flight was definitely a family affair.
Laura Johnson’s father had been a pilot during the Korean War and was now flying with the National Guard, while her two brothers were similarly engaged in military flight, one in active duty with the Air Force and the other with the Air National Guard.
It seemed only natural that Laura, the youngest of the three Johnson siblings, would follow her family up into the friendly skies.
“For me, it was definitely a matter of family following family into the military,” recalls Laura. “We went to all of the air shows at the base so I thought it would be cool to fly aircraft and be a pilot.”
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But then fate threw her a curve ball — she needed glasses.
“I had already enrolled at the University of Minnesota and joined ROTC,” explained Johnson. “Back then, you had to have 20/20 vision so I wasn’t able to get a pilot’s slot.”
“By then,” continued Johnson, “I had an ROTC scholarship so they were already paying for my school. I was going to school for civil engineering so I figured I could go into the Air Force as a civil engineer and then decide what I wanted to do from there. By the end of my four-year commitment, I had decided that I wanted to stay.”
“At the time, the big movement at the University of Minnesota was the effort to prohibit gays and lesbians from serving in the military,” she said. “They were trying to kick ROTC off campus, but it wasn’t going to happen because they would have lost a lot of federal funding.”
Johnson’s first assignment following her graduation was Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, which provided her with her Colorado connection.
“I had been out here skiing before, because I have some friends who have a condo in Lionshead. But when I got stationed in Colorado Springs, I really fell in love with Colorado,” she said.
She was at Peterson for three years before being transferred to Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. The base offered a two-year master’s degree program in civil engineering.
“Within civil engineering, we do all of the maintenance of the facilities and infrastructure on the base,” she said. “It’s almost like managing a little city. Our main mission is to keep the runways open, but we also keep the other systems running, keeping the lights on and the heat on.”
In addition to the construction and maintenance of base infrastructure, Air Force engineers are also involved in natural disaster preparedness and recovery of sites following war or severe weather events.
Throughout her 26-year career, Johnson rose to the rank of colonel and was put in charge of 1,200 men and women as a group commander. Right after the Sept. 11 attacks, she was involved in another major project, moving the Combined Air Operation Center from Saudi Arabia to Qatar.
The Combined Air Operation Center is a huge headquarters where they do all of the logistical day-to-day planning for how they manage all the aircraft in the Middle East.
“After 9/11, the Saudis wanted us to leave so we were in the process of moving the CAOC to Qatar,” she said. “All of that was really important because of all of those air operations that were taking place in Afghanistan. Everything needed to move very seamlessly from one country to another.”
During the course of her career, Johnson was assigned to four wartime deployments in the Middle East, with one-year stints in Iraq, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. She served as squadron commander in Iraq, leading a team of 800 people and overseeing the construction of the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.
When it came time to retire, Johnson was torn once again.
“I wasn’t quite sure that I really wanted to go back to work,” she laughs. “I knew I loved to ski and I thought it would be cool to live in a mountain town. The military pays for your move every time they move you, although the last one when you retire, they give you a year to use it. So I put all my stuff in storage and went to Colorado to ski for the winter.”
“When you go into the military, you’re going to be put in situations and meet other people from all different walks of life,” Johnson added. “There are going to be people that come from very wealthy families and there’s going to be people that have come from very poor families, or really bad situations. You have to learn how to work together, which sometimes can be tough, but it brings different perspectives on how to do things. It makes the team stronger.”
John Dakin is a 2022 inductee to the Colorado Snowsports Hall of Fame.
