LTC Nicole Illene Blatt, USAF Oral History

title:

LTC Nicole Illene Blatt, USAF Oral History

creator:

Blatt, Nicole Illene (1968 May 28 -

subject:

US Air Force Academy (USAFA) | Air Force

description:

Nicole Ilene Blatt was born in May 1968 in Los Angeles, California. Her mother was a pediatrician and her father was a surgeon, and she grew up with a brother and sister. She attended a private boarding high school that had previously been boys-only, and she was in the first class to include girls for all four years. By the time she was 3 years old Nicole knew she wanted to be an astronaut, and by the time she was looking at colleges the Air Force Academy was the only university with astronautical engineering as an accredited major, which is the main reason it was her top choice. She began training at the Air Force Academy in 1985. She swam and played water polo on intramural teams, and found the athletics the most challenging element because athletics was where students gained peer respect the most. One of the most valuable training opportunities she took on was attending SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) school. This training was run by a combination of experts from Fairchild and upper-class cadets and simulated the experience of being interrogated, beaten, and more as a POW. It taught her how much she can handle and gave her much greater self-confidence. Between her second and third year, Nicole participated in the Stop Out program that allows cadets to take a year off from the academy. In that time, she spent a month backpacking in Europe, went to a semester school in France, and then spent a semester taking classes at UC Santa Barbara and working on the water. She graduated in 1990 and was commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant, with her first station at Norton Air Force base as a program manager for ballistic missile systems. She found that women were treated fairly and without discrimination once she was in the regular Air Force, compared to the constant fighting women had to do for equality at the academy. After her next assignment, Nicole was accepted into test pilot school (despite her poor vision) and was then stationed at Edwards Air Force Base to complete F-16 testing. Her next assignment in Tucson, Arizona centered on creating a tracking system that would mark friendlies for pilots on their weapon sensor videos and share all that information between Army, Navy, and Air Force systems. As one of the few servicemembers who knew how a CONOPS targeting system worked, in 2003 she was deployed to Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Iraq to get it set up and running properly before special forces teams attempted to push eastwards towards Baghdad, Iraq. For the entirety of this deployment, she was essentially traveling and working on her own, going wherever needed to teach others how to set up the system and keep their specific nodes connected to the larger system. This includes a trip to Kuwait to get a node back into working order for Marines and special forces headed out to take Baghdad less than 12 hours after her arrival. After that deployment, she was sent to Naval postgraduate school for 18 months, then assigned to Joint Forces Command, which is where she was stationed at the time of the interview. After 16 years, Nicole was unsure if she’d stay in past 20 years, partially because she was also interested in having a child. As of the interview Nicole had reached the rank of lieutenant colonel, and for her service she was awarded a Defense Meritorious Service Medal. A transcript of this interview is available.

publisher:

Military Women's Memorial Foundation

contributor:

Maliszewski, Jane

date:

2006-10-21

type:

Moving Image

format:

MiniDV

identifier:

84; 2006.084

source:

OHP | 3rd Annual Academy Women's Symposium | IMES

language:

English

relation:

618634

coverage:

1990s | 2000s | 1985-1990 | 1990-interview

rights:

Unrestricted