Of course, not everyone loved the backyard landing.
A week after it hit the local news, a columnist wrote a snide piece about the “militarization of suburbia,” about how Guard units should be dropping sandbags, not showing off in cul–de–sacs.
Public affairs sent me talking points. The CO told me to keep my head down.
My father, who’d spent years rolling his eyes at anything that looked like “showboating,” walked into the kitchen one morning waving the paper.
“You see this?” he demanded.
“Trying not to,” I said, pouring coffee.
“Well, you should,” he said, slapping the paper onto the counter. The print shook slightly with the force of his irritation. “Guy says you turned his neighborhood into a recruitment ad.”
I waited for the inevitable punchline—something about how they weren’t wrong. It didn’t come.
“You got nine people off that roof,” he said instead. “You flew into a flood while this joker sat at his laptop. That landing in the yard—hell, it was impressive. If the neighbors’ kids sign up because they saw you, that’s not recruitment. That’s inspiration.”
I stared at him.
“Who are you,” I asked slowly, “and what have you done with my father?”
He huffed.
“I still think the HOAs gonna send you a letter about the grass,” he said. “But they can send it to me. I’ll frame it.”
The call no one wants
For all of that, the real test came a year later.
We were three hours into a training flight—a long cross–country meant to simulate a deployment movement—when the vibe shifted.
The clouds over the mountains had that stacked, bruised look, but the forecast said the storm line would hold north. We were light, no cargo, just crew.
Then a call came across the Guard ops frequency: civilian medevac aircraft down in remote terrain. Weather closing in. They were scrambling rescue assets, but the nearest SAR bird was an hour out. We were twenty minutes away.
My co–pilot flicked a look at me. The question was wordless.
“You want it?” he asked.
We both knew the rules. Training flights aren’t supposed to divert to real–world missions without a cascade of approvals. We also knew what it means to sit on your hands when someone’s beacon is pinging.
“I want it,” I said.
We toggled through channels, got patched into the state SAR coordinator, made our case. Credentials, location, weather. There was a hesitation, then a clipped, “You’re the closest. You’re cleared to respond. Give us updates every five.”
The coordinates led us to a valley scarred by an old landslide. A medevac helo had tried to thread the gap between two ridges in marginal visibility and lost.
We found the wreckage by smoke and luck. The aircraft lay tilted on a slope, rotor blades snapped, tail bent. A firefighter on the ground waved frantically, radio crackling, “We can’t get the pilot out. He’s pinned. Fuel’s leaking.”
We couldn’t land next to them; the slope was too steep. I held us in a hover just above a flatter patch while the crew chief rigged the hoist.
We got the crew out one by one, bloodied but breathing, except for the pilot. His legs were trapped under twisted metal. Local ground teams worked the extrication with hydraulic tools while we circled, calling updates, watching the storm clouds slide closer.
“Ten minutes,” the SAR coordinator said over the radio. “After that, we’re calling off attempts. Lightning risk.”
Lightning doesn’t care what you’re doing. It doesn’t care that a man is trapped and awake and staring up at you with eyes that say don’t leave me.
We pushed it to nine. At eight minutes, the ground team’s leader shouted, “He’s free!”
We lowered the basket, the injured pilot gritting through pain as they slid him in. The first crack of thunder hit as we hauled him up.
We cleared the ridge line, turned for the hospital, and nobody in that aircraft breathed until we were on approach.
After we handed him over, the flight back to base was silent. We’d done everything right, and it was still too close.
Three days later, my CO forwarded an email from the civilian medevac company.
Your Guard crew bought our pilot a second life. Thank you.
I didn’t tell my father about that one either, not right away.
He found out anyway.
At Thanksgiving, months later, between the turkey and the pie, my uncle mentioned an article he’d read about “some Guard pilot who helped rescue a downed chopper in the storm.”
Dad nodded toward me with his fork.
“That was her,” he said. “She was the one who held the bird there.”
I blinked.
“You read that?” I asked.
“I keep an eye out now,” he said gruffly. “Can’t have people talking about my kid and me not know what they’re on about.”
The VFW night
The strangest night of my life wasn’t the flood, or the backyard landing, or even the capital ceremony.
It was a Tuesday in a wood–paneled VFW hall that smelled like spilled beer, old smoke etched into the rafters, and the sharp tang of floor cleaner.
Dad had called a month earlier.
“Got a favor to ask,” he said.
I braced.
“You go viral again?” I asked.
“Ha–ha,” he said dryly. “No, this is…different. The post commander wants someone to talk to the guys about the Guard. They’re all eighty and still think it’s weekend warriors and sandbag drills. I told them I had a kid who flies. They said, ‘Bring her.’”
“You…want me to give a talk at your VFW?”
“You can say no,” he said quickly. “I just thought—You always said I never listened. Maybe it’s time they did.”
I said yes.
On the night, I walked in wearing my uniform—not dress blues, but the same flight suit I wore on missions, boots scuffed, name tape squared, rank crisp.
The hall was about half full. Old veterans in unit hats and suspenders. A few younger guys, Guard and Reserve, sitting at the back nursing sodas. A dusty American flag hung behind a dais that had seen decades of speeches and debates.
Dad sat at a corner table, not at the front, not with the commander—just another member. That struck me more than anything.
The post commander introduced me.
“Lieutenant Holt here is gonna tell us what the Guard really does these days, beyond those commercials with the shiny trucks.”
There was a rumble of chuckles.
I stepped up, palms flat on the chipped wood.
“Evening,” I said. “I’m Avery. I fly Blackhawks for the Army National Guard.”
“Active or Guard?” someone called.
“Guard,” I said. “Drill, state orders, federal when we’re called up.”
“So you’ve got a day job,” another guy said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Two, actually. The rotor one and the paperwork one.”
That got a small laugh.
I didn’t give them the glossy version. I told them about the flood, the wildfires, the nursing home roof. About missed birthdays and surprise mobilizations. About showing up when the state calls—because a bridge washed out, because a blizzard blew in, because someone’s beacon pinged where no ground unit could reach in time.
Then I told them about the Blackhawk in my parents’ yard.
“That day wasn’t about a stunt,” I said. “It was about making one man who thought ‘Guard’ meant ‘less than’ see that the work doesn’t care what patch you wear. The river doesn’t check your component. Neither does the fire.”
The older vets listened in a way I hadn’t expected. Some nodded. A few stared at the table, chewing that over.
Afterward, a Marine with Korea on his hat came up and clapped my shoulder.
“Didn’t think much of the Guard back in the day,” he said. “But I’ve seen you folks pulling people out of hurricanes on TV. You’re doing the job. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.”
“Working on that,” I said.
Dad waited until the crowd thinned.
“That was good,” he said. “They needed to hear that. I needed to hear that.”
We walked out into the cold together, breath fogging in the parking lot lights.
“You know,” he said, “my old man never saw me do what I did at the steel plant. Never saw me pull a guy out from under a press. Never saw me walk the line after the strike ended. He just assumed I clocked in and out and collected a paycheck.”
“That bug you?” I asked.
“Back then? Yeah,” he said. “I told myself it didn’t. Guess I spent the last ten years doing the same damn thing to you.”
We stood there, the VFW sign buzzing behind us, the distant sound of a train rolling through town.
“You’re not a poor soldier,” he said. “You’re a rich one. Just not in the way I was measuring.”
I swallowed around the lump in my throat.
“Dad,” I said, “you don’t have to say it like that.”
“I do,” he said. “Because you spent a lot of years letting me talk over you. The least I can do now is shut up and listen.”
The next generation
The Guard is a revolving door in the best and worst ways. People come in young, full of fire, and leave older, full of stories. If you stay long enough, you become the person you needed when you walked in.
Two summers after the backyard landing, we got a new pilot fresh out of flight school. Warrant Officer Jenna Price. Twenty–three, sharp eyes, faster brain, chip on her shoulder big enough to block an LZ.
On her first drill weekend, I found her alone in the hangar after everyone else had knocked off for the day, sitting on an overturned crate, staring at the Hawk.
“You planning to ask it to prom?” I asked.
She startled, then smirked.
“Just trying to believe they’re really gonna let me fly that,” she said.
“They let me,” I said. “How bad can their standards be?”
She snorted, then sobered.
“My dad says I’m wasting my degree,” she blurted out. “Says I should have gone straight to an airline. Says flying Guard is ‘pretend military.’”
Bus driver. Poor soldier. Play acting. The words change; the cut is the same.
“Does he know what we do?” I asked.
“He watches the news,” she said. “He just doesn’t connect it to me. When I told him about my class’s night–vision flight, he asked if we got to see any fireworks.”
I leaned against the fuselage, the metal familiar at my back.
“Let me guess,” I said. “You’ve stopped telling him anything that matters.”
She looked at me like I’d read her journal.
“He doesn’t take it seriously,” she said. “I’m not gonna keep opening my mouth just to get laughed at.”
“Then don’t,” I said. “At least not with words.”
She frowned.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You can’t make somebody believe your work’s real by explaining it louder,” I said. “Sometimes you just keep doing the work until reality makes more noise than their opinion.”
“That seems…unsatisfying,” she said dryly.
“Oh, it is,” I said. “For a while. Then one day, the world catches up.”
I told her about the nursing home. The capital. The lawn.
“So what happened?” she asked. “Did he, like, fall at your feet, apologize for everything?”
“No,” I said. “He started asking better questions. That’s enough.”
She nodded slowly.
“You ever wish he’d said it sooner?”
“Every day,” I said. “And also—if he’d given it freely at the start, I might’ve built my whole sense of worth on it. This way, I had to build it on the work itself.”
She thought about that for a long moment.
“So basically, I shouldn’t wait for him to clap,” she said.
“Exactly,” I said. “But if one day a Black Hawk lands in his metaphorical backyard and he shuts up long enough to really look at you, let him.”
The last flight he watched
Years pass faster when you measure them in flight hours.
I made captain, then major. I picked up more staff work, more briefings, more time behind a laptop and less in the right seat. I still grabbed stick time whenever I could, but the Guard is like that: they train you to do a thing, then train you to organize a hundred others doing it.
Dad got older. Gray took over what was left of his hair. His hands shook a little when he held a coffee mug. He still mowed the lawn every Saturday, straight lines as precise as my runway approaches.
One fall, our unit hosted a family day on base. Static displays, barbecue, face paint for the kids. We set up a Blackhawk and a medevac bird on the tarmac for people to climb through.
My sisters—two of them now with toddlers in tow—came. Mom came. And Dad, in his best jeans and a windbreaker with a small American flag on the chest, walked right up to the bird like he’d been meeting it for coffee every week.
He put his hand on the skin just below the cockpit, palm flat.
“Hey, bus,” he said under his breath.
I snorted.
“Careful,” I said. “She has feelings.”
He grinned, but it was softer than it used to be.
“Remember when I called you a poor soldier?” he asked.
“Vividly.”
“I was wrong about that,” he said. “You’re the richest one I know.”
“I don’t exactly see the extra zeros in my bank account,” I said.
“Not that kind of rich,” he said. “The kind where you lay down at night and know if your number’s up, you left the place better than you found it.”
We watched as a group of kids climbed into the cabin, the crew chief explaining the hoist hook, the webbed seats, the helmets. One little boy turned to his mother and said, “I want to be her,” pointing at me.
Dad heard it.
“He’s got good taste,” he said.
Later, as the sun dropped and the shadows stretched long across the tarmac, he pulled me aside.
“This might be the last time I see you with one of these up close,” he said, nodding at the Blackhawk. “My knees complain too much about long drives these days.”
“We can always fly lower and wave,” I said.
He chuckled.
“Don’t you dare waste fuel on my account,” he said. “Just…keep doing what you’re doing. Even if nobody claps.”
“You clapped,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Took me longer than it should have. But I got there.”
He squeezed my shoulder, then walked away, hands in his pockets, the wind tugging at his flag jacket.
I watched him go, the Hawk humming quietly behind me as the crews prepped her for her next task.
The thing about being called a poor soldier is that you start to internalize the idea that you have to justify every move. That you owe the world an explanation.
Standing there, watching my father walk away with his shoulders not as stiff as they used to be, I realized I didn’t owe anyone an explanation anymore.
Not because a Blackhawk had landed on a lawn, or a governor had shaken my hand, or a viral clip had made strangers say they were proud.
But because the work itself—the early mornings, the checklist–driven calm in chaos, the faces on the nursing home roof and in the floodwater—had already defined my worth long before anyone else caught on.
We talk a lot in the Guard about “quiet professionals”—people who do the job without fanfare, who let the results speak louder than the résumé.
If there’s anything I learned from being “the poor soldier” in my father’s eyes, it’s this:
Your worth is never up for a vote.
Your mission, whatever it looks like—a cockpit, a clinic, a classroom, a kitchen—is not diminished because someone at a distance can’t see its shape.
You don’t need a Blackhawk in the backyard to prove anything.
But if the day comes when the work you’ve been doing quietly roars overhead and rattles someone’s windows open, don’t apologize for the noise.
You spent a long time flying through their silence.
If my story resonated with you, share it with someone who might need the reminder. And if you want to hear more stories of service, resilience, and the moments that redefine us, consider subscribing. We’ve got more to tell.
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