During my Air Force years, I served under three commanders with three very different personalities. One was methodical and procedural. One was operational and instinctive. One was strategic and future-focused. They disagreed about many things, but they agreed about one: they wanted to retain me. All three wrote it in my Officer Evaluation Reports (OERs).
At the time, I didn’t think much about it. I was young, busy, and focused on the work in front of me. But looking back, those OER lines say more about leadership, and about what leaders notice, than anything else from that period of my career.
Commander #1: the air evacuations
The first commander taught me that leadership reveals itself when systems are stressed. Long before the blizzard, he had already seen how I behaved when the stakes were measured in heartbeats, not clinic schedules. I served as the medical officer on two emergency air evacuations that defined that period of my career.
The first involved a baby girl with bilateral subdural hematomas from shaken baby syndrome. We flew on a Learjet, likely the base commander’s aircraft, because it was the only platform available quickly enough. The flight to Denver lasted a little over two hours. She deteriorated midflight, and I had to reestablish an IV line in the air, not a stable surface, not a forgiving moment, and not something you forget. She survived because the team stayed focused and adapted to the aircraft we had, not the aircraft we wished for.
The second evacuation was even more complex. A newborn boy with a single ventricle, the kind of heart found in birds, not humans, needed an emergency cardiac catheterization to reopen the connection between his atria so his blood could mix. The defect had escaped detection on fetal ultrasound; had it been recognized, the mother would have been transported before delivery to the medical center in San Antonio. Instead, we launched an emergency flight that lasted six hours.
This time, we flew on a KC-135, a tanker, not a passenger aircraft. It had jump seats lining the fuselage, as all cargo aircraft do, but the infant’s transport bassinette had to be secured in the center of the aircraft. I spent the entire flight lying on the deck next to him, completely unsecured. No seatbelt. No harness. No restraint of any kind. If we had hit turbulence, I would have been seriously injured or killed. At the time, that didn’t qualify anyone for a medal. Today, it would.
The aircraft had no AC power outlets, so we rotated the battery-powered monitors in sequence to preserve enough charge to get him through the ambulance transfer. Once on the ground, I plugged everything in and kept him stable through the handoff.
The return flight took two days because of weather, with a crew rest stop in South Dakota. We slept in our uniforms, ate whatever was available, and stayed ready to move the moment the weather cleared.
After that mission, the squadron bought an inverter. No one wanted to repeat the experience of flying a critically ill infant without a reliable power source. That purchase said more about the mission than any award could.
Those evacuations weren’t dramatic to me at the time. They were simply the work. But the commander saw something in them: judgment under pressure, calm in uncertainty, and the ability to keep a team functioning when the system around us was strained.
He wrote in my OER that he wanted to retain me.
Commander #2: the SAC meeting and the snow gates
The second commander taught me that leadership recognizes steadiness long before it says so out loud. I treated his wife for a sprained ankle at 10:30 a.m. during that same blizzard. She went home, relieved and grateful. He was away at a Strategic Air Command meeting. She called him. She told him what I had done.
He flew home commercial that night, through a blizzard, bypassing snow gates to reach the base. He arrived at 11 p.m. and walked into the medical center to see who was actually holding the line.
He didn’t come back because he doubted me. He came back because he trusted her, and because he wanted to see for himself.
He saw the ER calm, warm, and functioning. He saw that I had volunteered for a second shift, not for extra pay, but because the roads would be plowed by morning and the mission still needed a clinician.
He wrote in my OER that he wanted to retain me.
Commander #3: the one who looked ahead
The third commander taught me that leadership sometimes sees a trajectory before the person living it does. He valued discipline, judgment, and the ability to navigate institutional absurdity without losing one’s center. He saw that I could do that. He saw it in the way I handled families, the way I documented, the way I protected patients from the system’s rough edges, and the way I stayed calm when others escalated.
He told me, quietly and without ceremony, that he wanted me to stay in the Air Force. But he also knew something else: my path was leading somewhere beyond the service. He didn’t try to block it. He didn’t try to redirect it. He simply acknowledged it.
And he wrote it in my Field Grade (Major and above) OER.
Three commanders, one pattern
Three commanders. Three personalities. Three leadership styles. And all three wrote the same thing: retain this officer.
At the time, I didn’t see it as a pattern. I saw it as part of the job. But now, decades later, I understand what they were responding to. It wasn’t brilliance. It wasn’t ambition. It wasn’t anything dramatic.
It was steadiness. It was judgment. It was the ability to execute the mission without theatrics. It was the instinct to protect people when systems became rigid. It was the refusal to let absurdity dictate behavior.
Those qualities matter in medicine too. They matter in leadership. They matter in every institution where the stakes are high and the systems are imperfect.
All three commanders wanted to retain me. All three saw something in me before I saw it in myself. And all three understood that I was headed for bigger things, and maybe, just maybe, into history.
Ronald L. Lindsay is a developmental-behavioral pediatrician.
