Aug. 23 — AUSTIN — On Friday, Texas Land Commissioner and Veterans Land Board (VLB) Chair Dawn Buckingham, MD, introduced the next installment in a series highlighting the VLB’s Voices of Veterans oral history program. This week, they spotlight the service of Maj. Sharon Frederick, who served in the U.S. Air Force in Dubai during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.
Frederick was born in Abilene and attended Abilene Christian College in West Texas before joining the Air Force Reserve in 1987. She credits her military service for the strong sense of community it offered, something she learned while married to her husband, who also served in the Air Force.
“After traveling with my husband, I learned to appreciate the connection with the military,” Frederick said. “From the family members to the service members, and it was truly a community within a community.”
Frederick often thought about joining the Air Force, but her parents dissuaded her from doing so. They wanted her to stay home, both for her parents and her daughter.
“So I thought, OK, well, the best of both worlds, I’m going to join the Reserves and I really don’t have to travel as much, and I can also go back to school, because I dropped out when I got married,” Frederick recalled. “It just presented the best opportunity to be a part-time weekend warrior and go to school and work on my educational goals.”
A few years after she joined the Reserve, things started to get serious, Frederick said, when everyone started getting their marching orders for deployment
“It was kind of surreal because everybody was getting different orders and then I was hearing from my friends, ‘Oh, you’re next,’ and I was like, ‘No, I’m not going anywhere, we’re not going anywhere,'” Frederick said of the time. “Then I got a phone call and after hearing all the horror stories, of what I was going to do, people telling me I was going to die in two minutes, it was a lot. Of course, my family was devastated and as a single parent, I had to send my daughter to my parents in West Texas.”
During her 24 years in the military, Frederick served on multiple deployments. She recalled the surreal experiences during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, when your next breath was not guaranteed.
“You just lived under a threat every day, not knowing what was going to happen,” Frederick explained. “It was almost an accepted fact that if something happened, we knew we weren’t going to make it, and that’s how we operated.”
Click here to listen to the story of US Air Force veteran Sharon Frederick.
