Good Night Captain Mama by Graciela Tiscareno-Sato

She supervised a multinational team at NATO battle staff headquarters and conducted air-support operations inside Bosnia-Herzegovina. Her almost 10-year military career took her to four continents and 23 countries. They listened, sometimes in dismay, when she called from faraway places and would say, in Spanish, “You won’t believe where I am.” “Even then the whole thing was bizarre for them,” she said. They were there when she graduated and when she earned her wings.

Her Mexican-born parents preferred a more traditional role for their daughter.īut they delivered her to Berkeley, where she was an Air Force ROTC cadet. The native El Pasoan was a first-generation college graduate. Tiscareño-Sato may still be an anomaly among them. Nearly 20 million of them are alive today, and this isn’t the only day to thank them for that service. This week she spoke virtually to 14 groups of elementary and middle school students to mark the federal holiday honoring living military veterans. Tiscareño-Sato tells students, who have no idea these kinds of barriers existed, that they may face different obstacles, including some of their own making. The reason? The crew had a woman on board, and women technically weren’t allowed to serve in combat, “even though women were doing these jobs,” she said. Retired Air Force navigator Graciela Tiscareno-Sato, a Texas native, is author of several books, including a series of children’s books about her character “Captain Mama.” Delores Holloway, Courtesy Three other crews serving on the same mission got their air medal at Riyadh Air Base, she said. The weird, scary operation took place in 1992 aboard a gas station in the sky above Saddam Hussein. She was to navigate a KC-135R, basically serving as the crew’s mathematician in the highly technical, complex aerial refueling of fighter jets over Baghdad. Tiscareño-Sato, 54, was fresh out of flight training, a first lieutenant and graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. She verified it’s true, though on this Veterans Day she has to tell the story behind that story. Almost 30 years had passed since that first mission, but she was curious and called Air Force personnel in San Antonio.

Good Night Captain Mama by Graciela Tiscareno-Sato