BROOKINGS – To the commander of Air Force ROTC Detachment 780, South Dakota State University, the Air Force is more than a profession: it’s a family and a way of life. That certainly has been true for Lt.Col. Erin Tedesco. The 46-year-old commander proudly admits to being born and raised an Air Force “brat.”

“My dad was in the Air Force,” she explains. “I was born at Wright- Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.”

Following that came a sort of roll call of Air Force bases where the family moved to and lived as they followed her father’s career: Air Command and Staff College, Alabama; MacDill AFB,Tampa, Florida,where she started school; halfway through kindergarten, orders to Korea, Yung Son near Seoul; and Clark AFB, in the Philippines.

Her father retired there and he and his wife began teaching and doing administrative work for Central Texas College, which has satellite campuses serving the military in the United States and abroad.

“They really loved the Philippines,” Tedesco said. “They really enjoyed living there. They could have lived there more or less forever. I spent eight years there. Then when Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991 (the first time in 600 years), we were evacuated.

“And we wound up moving to Wurzburg, Germany, where they continued working for Central Texas College.” She graduated from high school there in 1994. From there they moved back to the home her parents still owned in Tampa, Florida.

She ended up “happenstance at the University of South Florida, because it was right there in Tampa. I kind of thought that I would figure out what I wanted to do and then transfer after a established an ended up graduyear. But I made friends, got ating from USF.”­

She had majored in biolo­gy, stayed in Tampa and “felt drawn to the classroom. So I went into teaching elementary and middle school for awhile, mostly fifth and sixth grade (at St. Mary’s Episcopal Day School).”

Tedesco admitted to hav­ing “some wanderlust. I had spent my childhood growing up abroad. I wanted some more adventure and to see the world on my own, a little bit. I missed the kind of built-in family of being in the Air Force.” It was time to again be part of that.

Navigation training starts with the Navy

“I looked into joining and to Officer Training School,” Tedesco recalled, looking back to the beginning of her Air Force career. “I spoke to an Air Force recruiter and put my applica­tion package together. And off I went.”

She was selected for OTS in 2003. “You have to have a bach­elor’s degree. You have to go through a pretty rigorous selec­tion process,” she explained. “You have to take the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test. And you have to pass all the medi­cal reviews.” Following all that, “There was a bit of a wait.”

In February 2004 she start­ed OTS. In May she graduat­ed, was commissioned a second lieutenant and “was off to the races.” She likened the 13 weeks of OTS to being “almost like basic training – but for officers.”

Next came 2 1/2 years as a student navigator. Since she had “tracked to go for flying in fighters and bombers,” she was ordered to Naval Air Station, Pensacola, Florida. At that time the Navy trained its navigators and also Air Force navigators who had chosen those two career paths.

In addition to navigator training, she learned basic flying skills via a single-engine Cessna owned by “a private flight school” in Pensacola. She also completed six weeks of “what the Navy calls pre-flight indoc­trination, a ground school that also included some basic water survival skills. You learn about how aircraft work, how engines work, how to create an aeronau­tical chart.”

Then came “official flight school, where we began flying aircraft. So I flew naval training aircraft. The T-6 was my first at the time. You’re in the back seat doing navigation. You also learn some of the basic flying skills. You do have all the controls in the back seat of the aircraft.”

B-52 bomber: ‘Literally my speed’

In January 2007, in a manner of speaking, Tedesco rejoined the Air Force. For the next seven months, she was assigned as a “student weapons system officer” with the 333rd Fighter Training Squadron, at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, North Carolina. She was flying the back seat in an F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jet. For her it was not a good match.

“By this point I was strug­gling,” she admits, smiling a bit.. “I am not cut out for that type of flying. It’s brutal on your body and it happens very, very fast. That is just not how my brain and body work. There is a lot going on very, very quickly. I was not well-matched to that aircraft.”

Tedesco left that assignment and in October 2007 she was assigned as a student naviga­tor to the 11th Bomb Squadron, Barksdale AFB, Louisiana. She was soon flying in B-52 eight-en­gine bombers. It was a good match and the first of several assignments that would keep her permanently stationed at Barksdale until 2015.

“That I was much better suited for,” she said, laughing good-naturedly about her trans­fer to B-52s. “There was no need to wear a G-suit and no pulling Gs. The B-52 was literally my speed.”

From April 2008 to December 2010, Tedesco, promoted to cap­tain in May 2008, would serve in the 20th Bomb Squadron, also at Barksdale, as a radar navigator. Subsequent assignments would keep her at Barksdale, although on a regular basis the units to which she was assigned would deploy to Guam for six months at a time as part of “a continuing bomber presence in the Indo-Pacific … to show our presence in the Pacific.”

From January 2011 to April 2014, she served as chief of cur­rent operations, 2nd Operations Support Squadron. From May to December 2014 and now a major, she returned to the 11th Bomb Squadron, this time as an instructor weapons system officer: it was her last stint at Barksdale.

Kyrgyzstan, AFPAK Hands, the Pentagon

During her years at Barksdale, Tedesco had regularly volun­teered for individual service in Iraq or Afghanistan but not been selected. However, in late 2013 she did an individual temporary tour of duty, spending several months in Kyrgyzstan, where the Air Force had a “theater security operations cell” on a logistics base that provided support to Afghanistan.

Returning from that deploy­ment in spring 2014, she met two fellow Air Force officers while she was waiting to have her pass­port checked in the Baltimore airport. “They had these patches with the Afghan flag on them,” Tedesco said. “We started chat­ting and they said, ‘Oh yeah, we’re AFPAK Hands (APH).’

“They started talking about their jobs: how they learned to speak the Afghan language and they got to do the types of mis­sions in Afghanistan where they were out kind of on their own working with the Afghans and helping develop their military capacity.” She was intrigued and applied for the program and got selected in November 2014. She had been promoted to major in April 2014.

January 2015 found Tedesco headed to the Pentagon, assigned to Afghanistan-Pakistan Hand. She would stay with the program until July 2019. During those years, she would spend two one-year tours in Afghanistan as a project officer working with a camera-drone program that gathered intelligence; during her second tour, in 2018, she married fellow Air Force career officer Aaron McCurdy. (She would keep her own name.)

Prior to her second tour in Afghanistan, she had attend­ed and graduated from the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., earning a sec­ond master’s degree in strategic security sStudies.

Tedesco and McCurdy would serve together from August 2019 to July 2022 at the Allied Joint Force Command in Naples, Italy. Their return to CONUS would bring them to the Dakotas as commanders of Air Force ROTC detachments: she to South Dakota, he to North Dakota.

AFROTC dets: Jackrabbits, Bison, Coyotes

Tedesco came to Brookings and SDSU in August 2022. In addition to being Det 780 com­mander, she is department head and professor of aerospace stud­ies. Aiding her in her duties are four Air Force regulars: two captains, a staff sergeant and a technical sergeant. The detach­ment has 40 cadets.

Meanwhile, McCurdy went to similar duties at North Dakota State University (Fargo), as com­mander of AFROTC Detachment 610, which also has attached cadets from University of North Dakota (Grand Forks).

“We live about 200 miles apart, so we see each other on weekends,” Tedesco said. “This was our dream job; that’s why we were willing to be 200 miles apart to get this.”

A note of interest: Tedesco is the first woman to command Det 780. Are there attitudes and attention still being noticed when women go into military assignments that traditionally were filled by men?

“I think they’re going, but we’re not entirely there yet,” she said. “ … But we’re definite­ly coming to that point where people don’t notice it that much anymore.”

Lt. Col. Tedesco’s major awards and decorations include: Bronze Star Medal; Defense Meritorious Service Medal with oak leaf cluster; Air Force Commendation Medal with three oak leaf clusters; Joint Service Achievement Medal; Afghanistan Campaign Medal; Nuclear Deterrence Operations Service Medal; and NATO Medal.

Contact John Kubal at jkubal@brookingsregister.com.