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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