Humans of the Lik: TSgt Autumn Bogert

Photo By Staff Sgt. Matthew Angulo | Tech. Sgt. Autumn Bogert, 39th Comptroller Squadron Command Support Staff section chief, speaks about how she's developed resilience during her Air Force career. Before Bogert worked in administration she was a security forces troop.  

INCIRLIK AIR BASE, 1, TURKEY

09.24.2020

Story by Senior Airman Matthew Angulo 

39th Air Base Wing

“After I came back from a deployment, I was not the same person. Mostly because I started feeling the injuries and the pain from the first deployment six years earlier. I had to deal with the mental trauma that had surfaced from that stuff I had blocked out. For instance, we had an operation where we did a convoy and we came across an IED [improvised explosive device] and it exploded just in front of our Humvee and my muscle memory kicked in. I was able to roll the Humvee to avoid the IED blast. I could never do it again if I tried but we landed wheels up and pressed forward. We got out of there without anyone being injured critically at that time. I didn't realize at the time, how I mentally blocked that out, cause we didn't talk about it. We didn't do anything about it. And we just pressed forward and continued our mission. It was years later after a couple more deployments that I started to feel the neck pain and the shoulder pain and the back pain and decided to talk to somebody and ended up being medically disqualified from security forces at that time and was able to get my dream job as administration. So here I am, they offered me two different AFSC’s [Air Force Specialty Code] when they gave me the opportunity to retrain. One was finance and one was administration. So in 2016, I went to admin tech school and ever since 2017, I've been working with the finance squadrons around the Air Force as an admin troop.
Without the resilience skills that I've learned and I've been able to implement into my life, I would not be here today. One hundred percent. Physical resilience was huge when it came time to deal with the inner injuries. Because I had to realize that my body wasn't capable of doing what it once was. It would've been very easy to fall. It was very easy to fall into a depression and feel bad about myself and just not take care of myself. After so many months, I realized that it was not worth letting go. So I slowly built myself back up and fought to get the medical care I needed. I was medically disqualified in September of 2015; and when I was, I worked for three years to become deployable again. So in June of 2018, when the doctors cleared me to deploy again, it was the biggest victory of my career. It was the spiritual resilience and the physical resilience that got me through what could have been a defeat and the end of my career as an Airman. So I could have let it be the end and I could have separated and said this is enough, but I knew there was a reason for me to continue. The resilience skills that we talk about aren't just buzzwords, it really matters when you learn coping mechanisms on how to deal with stress. And that's what I learned. That's how I did my job as security forces and that's how I do my job as administration now.”

• Date Taken: 09.24.2020
• Date Posted: 09.24.2020 03:31
• Story ID: 378532
• Location: INCIRLIK AIR BASE, 1, TR