PARADE GUESTS OF honor

Veteran of the Year Eva Rodriguez

How does Eva Rodriguez sum up her 20 years of active duty in one word? “Extraordinary.” She was just 16 when she took the test to enter the military. She officially joined at the age of 18 after she graduated from St. Florian High in Hamtramck and went on to serve in the U.S. Army from 1981 to 2001. Rodriguez served as a patient care specialist, L.P.N., for seven years, and then after attending flight school transitioned to a warrant officer helicopter pilot who flew both UH-1 “Hueys” and UH-60 “Blackhawks.”

“We didn't have money to do anything, you know, like go to college or something like that. So, [joining the Army] gave me a chance to do what I wanted to do, which was to help people as a medic. That was the first thing, because I had dreamed of that. I saw a lot of things around me, a lot of people with troubles. And I wanted to do something.”

"I had six uncles who served in the military,” Rodriguez says. “I was the next generation. My father had only daughters.” At the time Rogriguez joined the Army, only about eight to 10% of those enlisting were women. “They deployed 500,000 troops to Desert Storm, and I think that there were 43,000 women in all different jobs,” Rodriguez says. Even now, she estimates that the number of women in the military is about 12 to 15%.

In 1987, Rodriguez became the 827th female helicopter pilot internationally. She has also received numerous awards including the U.S. Legion of Merit, the nation’s seventh highest award, and the Air Medal.

During Desert Shield/Desert Storm, she flew 52 missions, logging 181 hours of combat/danger flight time in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait. She also flew missions in support of the Sinai Peacekeeping force in Egypt, Israel and Jordan, as well as counter-drug and humanitarian relief missions in the Carribean, Central America and Columbia.

As for being selected as this year’s Veteran of the Year, Rodriguez says it was “definitely a surprise and an honor.” A Roseville resident, Rodriguez is a native Detroiter who settled back into the area in 2016 to be with family. She is a member of the Walter F. Bruce VFW Post #1146 in St. Clair Shores. One of the family members Rodriguez is in the Detroit area to spend time with is her 80-year-old father, a singer-songwriter who simply goes by the name Rodriguez. Mr. Rodriguez is featured in the award-winning 2012 documentary “Searching for Sugarman.” After she retired from the service, Eva Rodriguez toured with her father and filmed much of the concert footage seen in the film.

Eva Rodriguez compares the experience of war with touring with her father’s rock band. “It's an adrenaline rush,” she says. “It's what's new, what's next? Where are we going? I like to travel, and coming back and stopping is difficult. So, touring with my father, you know, the whole rock and roll touring and travel, putting on shows and hotels and airports and all that, it has a similar feeling. You know, it's for peace, it's the opposite of doing it for war, but the unity and the bonding with people getting through the hard times and over the nervousness and all that. I find it's kind of the same, you go really hard, and then you come home and then what do you do? Right? You have to learn how to come down from it healthily.”

Between her time in the military and touring with her father, Eva Rodriguez has visited 52 countries. While in the Army, she completed five overseas tours and was stationed at six different bases in the U.S.

“Within the military, I feel I had two of the best jobs in the army really, to be a nurse and to be a pilot,” she says. “I couldn't think of anything else that I would want to do.”