Eileen M. Isola is the lead editor of the new book Necessary Turbulence: Fifty Years, One Unbreakable Sisterhood Forged in the Crucible of the Air Force Academy. She is a graduate of the Air Force Academy, and is a decorated combat pilot and an international airline pilot.
Q: What inspired you to create Necessary Turbulence, and how did you choose the contributors to the book?
A: If you’d asked me when we began more than three years ago why we were creating this book, I’d have given you a very different answer than I am giving you today. Back then, it began with the fairly simple thought of, “Hey, 2026 is going to mark 50 years of women at the Air Force Academy. Someone should write a book.”
We knew that more than 12,000 women had entered the US Air Force Academy (USAFA) over the previous 50 years, and today more than 8,000 have graduated. I had this deep conviction, this deep sense of knowing, that somewhere within all of those lives was a larger story.
But we didn’t know what that story was.
So, we put out a call for submissions and invited USAFA women, both grads and non-grads, to tell us about their lives. We weren’t looking only for famous graduates, trailblazers, generals, CEOs, astronauts, or women with extraordinary resumes. We wanted the lived experiences of women across five decades, across generations.
More than half a million words came back.
We began reading. And we read and read and read.
Slowly, something extraordinary happened. Rather than the Writing Team deciding whose stories mattered most, we realized the story wasn’t living inside any one woman’s experience—or even within a select group of women. It was living between them.
Individually, every woman could tell us what happened to her. But when we stepped back and looked across 50 years, a remarkable pattern came into focus. We weren’t reading individual stories anymore. We were witnessing one collective heroine’s journey unfolding across the decades, a journey that had never been seen.
That changed our understanding of the book entirely.
We stopped thinking of ourselves as authors writing a book and began thinking of ourselves as stewards and shepherdesses entrusted with the privilege—and responsibility—of faithfully revealing a story that had always been there but simply couldn’t be seen until enough lives were viewed together.
I think of it a little like standing inches from an Impressionist painting. Up close, all you can see are individual marks of color. The painting isn’t created when you step back; it was there all along. But only distance allows you to see it.
Time did that for us. Fifty years became the distance that finally allowed the picture—the story—to emerge.
Ultimately, 108 women’s voices appear in Necessary Turbulence, brought together by a nine-woman Writing Team, whose Academy experiences span five decades.
We didn’t create their collective story. Together, we made it visible.
And once we saw it, we couldn’t unsee it.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: Like many books, this one eventually revealed to us what its title had to be: Necessary Turbulence.
Once we saw it, it felt almost inevitable. The phrase captured not only what these women experienced over 50 years, but also what their presence caused—and why that disruption mattered.
The title captures the essence of the book in two distinct ways.
First, there is the turbulence these women lived through personally: the pressure, resistance, uncertainty, disruption, and constant recalibration required to build lives and careers inside institutions and systems that had not originally been designed with them in mind.
Sometimes that turbulence was dramatic and visible. Sometimes it was quieter—the accumulated effect of having to prove yourself again, adapt again, recover again, or find another way forward. It could be uncomfortable, destabilizing, even painful.
Across the stories in the book, we repeatedly saw women finding ways not merely to survive that turbulence, but to grow through it, lead within it, and sometimes transform because of it.
Then there is the second meaning, which may be even more important.
The women themselves created turbulence simply by being there.
When the first women entered the Air Force Academy in 1976, their presence disrupted assumptions about who belonged there, who could lead, who could fly, who could command, and what military service could look like.
As successive generations moved through the Academy and into the Air Force—and now the Space Force—they continued to expose gaps between inherited assumptions and lived reality. Institutions had to confront policies, traditions, systems, and expectations that no longer fit the people they existed to serve.
That turbulence was not incidental to change. It was necessary to it.
Without people entering established systems and forcing those systems to encounter something they were not built to accommodate, institutions rarely evolve on their own. The friction reveals what needs to change.
And that is where the title moves beyond the military for me.
Any time people enter spaces from which they were historically excluded—or step beyond roles that others had assumed they were not suited to occupy—there is likely to be turbulence. Old expectations collide with new realities. Individuals have to adapt—and institutions do, too.
So Necessary Turbulence ultimately became much more than a description of what these women endured. It became a way of understanding what they did.
They unsettled things that needed unsettling. They changed assumptions simply by living lives that those assumptions had failed to imagine. And the turbulence they created helped make possible a different reality for the women who came after them.
That is why the word necessary matters every bit as much as the word turbulence.
Q: The author Ryan Leigh Dostie said of the book, “Burns with visceral, teeth-clenching accounts and restores to the historical record the women whose service has been repeatedly footnoted, minimized, or erased.” What do you think of that assessment?
A: I think Ryan Leigh Dostie understood exactly what we hoped this book would do.
Her words moved me when I first read them because she captured both sides of Necessary Turbulence: the intensely universal human experience inside these pages and the larger historical significance of putting those experiences together in one place.
The stories can absolutely be visceral. There are moments in this book that are difficult to read because they were difficult to live. Women describe harassment, assault, discrimination, isolation, war, loss, death, injury, failure, betrayal, and the enormous pressure of having to prove that they belonged.
But the book is not a catalogue of what was done to women. That would profoundly diminish these lives. The book does not reduce them to victims; their words are testimony.
These women also flew aircraft, commanded units, served in war and crisis, built organizations, led people, raised families, trained generations who followed them, broke barriers, challenged assumptions, rebuilt after devastating losses, and changed the institutions they entered. They were not simply enduring history. They were making it.
That is why Ryan’s word “restores” matters so much to me.
For a very long time, much of the story of women in the military has existed in fragments—an individual first here, a famous general there, an astronaut, a combat pilot, a headline when a barrier fell. Those achievements matter enormously.
But when history is told primarily through exceptional individuals and milestones, something essential disappears: the thousands of lives between those milestones that actually made institutional change possible.
That is the historical record Necessary Turbulence restores.
I think that matters particularly now because we are again hearing questions about women’s service and belonging in the military framed as though those questions remain unresolved.
They are not.
We are no longer standing at the starting line in 1976 asking whether women might be able to succeed at the Air Force Academy or serve effectively in the military. We are standing on 50 years of evidence.
Women have served in war and peace. They have flown aircraft, commanded units and organizations, met demanding standards, trained others, led in crisis, and strengthened the force.
So when someone asks whether women really belong or whether their presence inherently undermines military effectiveness, my response is that reality has already answered the question.
The burden is no longer on women to continually prove that they belong.
The burden is on anyone attempting to dismiss, minimize, or erase the evidence of what they have already done.
And that is where I feel a particular responsibility as one of the stewards of this book. We did not gather these women’s stories simply so that we could look backward and admire what they endured. Historical memory creates an obligation. Once the record exists, we cannot pretend not to know what it shows.
One lesson that emerges powerfully across these 50 years is that endurance should never be confused with institutional health. The fact that women succeeded inside systems that sometimes failed to protect, understand, or fully value them does not mean those failures were necessary or should be preserved for the next generation.
Dignity, trust, accountability, standards, and leadership are not distractions from military readiness. They are part of readiness.
So when Ryan says the book “restores to the historical record” women who have been footnoted, minimized, or erased, I hear something larger than praise for the book. I hear the reason the record matters.
Once these lives are visible together, it becomes much harder to reduce 50 years of women’s service to an abstraction, to manufactured nostalgia, or to a political talking point.
The evidence has names now. It has voices.
And it has 108 women telling us what actually happened.
Q: How do you think the Air Force Academy has changed for women over the past half-century, and what do you see looking ahead?
A: This may be the hardest question people ask me about the book because the truthful answer is complicated.
The Air Force Academy has changed enormously for women over 50 years. And it has not changed nearly enough.
The measurable progress is undeniable. Women arrived in 1976 at an institution that had been built entirely for men and in which many people openly believed women did not belong.
Today, women graduate from the Academy into every career field available to their male classmates. They fly combat aircraft. They command. They lead operational organizations. They become astronauts, generals, engineers, physicians, scientists, and senior national-security leaders. Things that were once considered extraordinary have become wonderfully ordinary.
That is real progress, and Necessary Turbulence documents how much women themselves helped create it.
But one of the most sobering discoveries in reading 50 years of women's stories was how much more slowly culture changes than policy does. Rules can change on a particular date. A law can be signed. A career field can open. A restriction can disappear from a regulation.
Culture doesn't work that way.
Across five decades, we found barriers changing form rather than simply disappearing. Women in later generations had opportunities earlier women could scarcely have imagined, yet we continued to hear echoes of the same underlying experiences: being regarded as an exception, being judged differently, confronting sexism, questioning whether they belonged, and sometimes having to expend energy proving themselves in ways their male peers did not.
Our youngest contributor makes that impossible to dismiss as ancient history.
Kamryn Markwei is a member of the Class of 2026. She writes movingly about wanting to change the Academy from within, about confronting bias, supporting other women, and wanting to leave the institution better than she found it.
Yet she also writes that the Academy was still not, in her experience, the kind of place she was certain she would want her own daughter to attend, because she would not want her daughter to endure what women around her had endured.
When you can place the experiences of a woman from 1976 beside those of a woman graduating in 2026 and still recognize some of the same cultural patterns, I don't think we should congratulate ourselves too quickly.
That doesn't mean nothing changed. It means access changed faster than culture did.
And looking ahead, I think that distinction matters enormously. The next 50 years will not be spent asking whether women belong at the Air Force Academy. Fifty years of evidence have answered that question.
The challenge now is whether the institution can finally build a culture worthy of the people it asks to serve there.
That means more than allowing women through the gates or giving them access to the same career fields. Belonging is not simply admission. It means being able to stand fully inside an institution without your sex, race, religion, sexuality, or some other part of who you are being treated as evidence that you are somehow less legitimate.
It means holding people accountable when they demean, harass, assault, or marginalize others. It means leaders refusing to dismiss destructive behavior as tradition, toughness, humor, or simply the way military culture works.
And it means understanding that dignity and accountability do not weaken a military institution. They strengthen trust, cohesion, leadership, and ultimately the mission.
One of the lessons of Necessary Turbulence is that women became extraordinarily successful even when the culture around them was not always healthy. But their endurance should never be used as evidence that the culture was acceptable.
The fact that earlier generations survived things younger generations should never have to endure is not an argument for preserving those conditions. It creates an obligation to change them.
So when I look toward the next 50 years, my hope is actually quite simple. I want a young woman entering the Air Force Academy today to inherit the opportunities these 50 years of women fought to create without also inheriting the fight over whether she belongs there.
That would be progress worthy of celebrating.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m working on my own memoir.
For more than three years, Necessary Turbulence required me to think almost entirely in the collective—to listen for the larger story living across other women’s lives and to write in the voice of “we.”
The memoir asks something very different of me. Now I have to turn inward and tell one life honestly.
It is a story about what happens when a life repeatedly changes course in ways you could never have planned: becoming a member of one of the early classes of women at the Air Force Academy, flying and commanding in the military, working inside the White House across the period before and after Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was enacted while simultaneously being investigated because I was gay, confronting cancer and physical disability, experiencing profound personal loss, and rebuilding a life more than once.
But I don’t think of it primarily as a military memoir, a cancer memoir, or even a story about overcoming adversity.
At its center, it is about identity: what happens when the structures, roles, relationships, and assumptions that once told you who you were begin falling away—and what it takes to remain whole enough to decide who you will become next.
Writing Necessary Turbulence taught me something important about storytelling: sometimes you cannot understand the meaning of an experience while you are standing inside it. You need distance before the pattern becomes visible.
I think I finally have enough distance from my own life to see the pattern.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: There is one thing I hope people understand about Necessary Turbulence: this is not a book only for people interested in the military, and it is not a book only for women.
The United States Air Force Academy is where this particular story unfolds, and these 108 women are the people who lived it.
But beneath the uniforms, ranks, airplanes, wars, and military careers are questions almost everyone eventually confronts: Who am I when other people have already decided who I am supposed to be? What do I do when I enter a place that wasn't built with me in mind? How much of myself do I change in order to belong? What happens when ambition collides with loss, when certainty disappears, when a life I carefully constructed suddenly changes? And how do I make something meaningful from what happened to me?
Those are not military questions. They are human ones.
And perhaps the thing that affected me most deeply during the more than three years we worked on this book was discovering how many women did not believe their experiences were important enough to become part of history.
Again and again, women essentially told us some version of, “I don't really have a story.” And then they began telling us one.
That hit me deeply, and it hit all of us on the Writing Team.
We tend to think history belongs to the people whose names appear in headlines—the firsts, the generals, the astronauts, the people who receive medals or achieve something publicly extraordinary. Those people absolutely matter. Their accomplishments belong in the record.
But history is also made by the woman whose name you have never heard.
The woman who stayed.
The woman who left.
The woman who failed at something and began again.
The woman who quietly challenged a rule.
The woman who protected someone beside her.
The woman who endured something she never told anyone about.
The woman who became the first without ever becoming famous for it.
The woman who made a path slightly wider so the person coming behind her would not have to squeeze through quite the same opening.
The woman who opened a door without even knowing there was one there.
When you gather enough of those seemingly ordinary lives together, you discover that they were never ordinary at all. They were the mechanism of change.
I think that may be one of the most important things Necessary Turbulence taught me.
History is not only what happens at the top of institutions. It accumulates through individual human lives, often quietly and almost invisibly, until enough time passes for us to recognize what all those lives created together.
For 50 years, thousands of women at the Air Force Academy were living that history. Many never thought their experiences counted as a story—because no one had ever asked.
We asked.
And 108 women answered.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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