Raymond Ochoa
Joseph Estrada
Joanna Rodriguez Vargo
Air Force
2017
Joanna Rodriguez Vargo
In her earlier live Joanna Vargos father was in the Air Force and fought in the end of WW2 and flew planes. The reason she wanted to enlist because she went to the air show in riverside where she lived and she saw a women in the air force and she wanted to join. She loved theatre growing up and majored in it but she noticed it did not pay so she joined the Air Force reserves. Something that Joanna definitely did not want to do is be stuck behind a desk for a job she wanted to travel. She went to St. Thomas Elementary School & Notre Dame Catholic High School in Riverside and went to Cal State San Bernardino and studied health science. The Air Force has been in Joanna’s life because her father was in the Army and her cousin was sent to Vietnam when she was eight.
Joanna’s father went into the Navy for two years then went to school and used his service to go back to school which was Cal Poly Pomona and was lucky enough to get the GI bill. In his physics class his teacher who were not very nice suggested a trade school, so he took the benefits for his service and went to become a machinist. After a year of school the Korean War began and so he decided to go and fight. When he joined he was given the rank of Staff Sergeant due to his time in school, which gave him a higher rank than most soldiers going into the war. He was the highest ranking in Korea and most Hispanics weren’t able to achieve that rank. While being a Staff Sergeant in Korea he was able to obtain a B-26 airplane and got his name engraved in the cockpit.
Joanna got an interest in the Air Force one day when her dad took her to an air show at March Air Force Base, when she saw a woman in a blue uniform and asked her what she did and then found out that she was part of the Air Force and told herself that she wanted to be in the Air Force. At the time she was in the 10th grade so when she was 17 she enlisted because her other career choice was in theater and it did not pay well. During her training, she turned 18 at the training in Texas. She took a placement test and it gave her 3 options of what she was going to do, she could've been a cook, an admin or medical engineer, Joanna followed the path for being a medical engineer and later she was sent off during the Gulf War Operation Desert Shield. The day Joanna was sent out was surreal. She could not believe this is happening and on the plane she cried because she was leaving her family and you really don't know what can happen in the war. While Joanna and her comrades waited for anyone who was injured so she either had to fill sandbags to keep them on edge or she had to do kitchen duties and she picked kitchen duty so she wouldn’t have to go out in the heat. She was stationed outside Kuwait in a city during and she didn’t go and kill anybody, the closest thing to combat she saw was when a missile came and hit the city she was at and that was it. During her time in the Air Force Joanna met the man who would soon be her husband, David. He was an Air Force pilot for 25 years now he's retired and is a pilot for private plane companies. During her time at Kuwait, if she needed to go to the bathroom or just go outside the city she needed a male soldier with her at all times because the cultures are different over there and the men don’t see women as important as men are. War was a lot of hurry up and wait. Sometimes they would bomb the place by the base so they would have to put on gas masks and wait for the gas to clear to help people. The most amount of injured soldiers they would get is about 30 max and at the least 15. She told us that a cracker box is a medical car and it just looks like a cracker book and she had to help people off it so she can help them or she help them on the cracker box. Jobs that people took care of during this war are now a computer's job. She met some great people during her time in the war and when asked if there any memorable people she met, she said there is a lot of people she remembers but it depended on the task her and that person worked on together and how well they did.
When she was away from her family she had to keep in touch with her family and she did so by phone and she could get to stay in touch one or two times a week. Leaving her family was stressful because no one wants to leave their family and one way she dealt with all the stress was by eating food to overcome it. She didn't have any pre-combat rituals in the Air Force and she didn't carry or do anything special for good luck.