‘Nice girls don’t join the military’: New Fairchild commander proves her mettle – and critics...

The summer before sixth grade, Cindy Dawson went to an air show with her father and was enamored by the flight maneuvers the pilots performed.

“I just thought that would be the coolest thing that anybody could ever do,” she said, especially having already heard stories about her grandfather flying bombers during World War II with the Army Air Corps.

So by the first day of school, she had already decided what she wanted to be when she grew up.

“I was going to attend the Air Force Academy and I was going to graduate and I was going to be a pilot,” she remembers saying in front of the whole class.

Then her teacher laughed in her face.

“He said, ‘You can’t do that. Nice girls don’t join the military,’ ” she recalled.

“I said, ‘Not only can I, but I will,’ ” she remembered. “He motivated me in a way that probably nobody else could have because I had to prove him wrong.”

Dawson graduated first in her class from the Air Force Academy in 2005, then trained to be a KC-135 Stratotanker pilot. While deployed to Qatar in 2009, she was the co-pilot in the first all-female KC-135 flight crew.

And on Friday, more than 1,700 KC-135 flight hours later, the airmen of Fairchild Air Force Base’s newly reactivated 97th Air Refueling Squadron saluted their new commander during an assumption of command ceremony: Lt. Col. Dawson.