Retired Air Force officer speaks of sacrifice at LSUS Veterans Day program

Retired Air Force officer speaks of sacrifice at LSUS Veterans Day program

SHREVEPORT - Sacrifice.

When retired Col. Russell Mathers, who served 27 of active duty in the U.S. Air Force, speaks of sacrifice, he is talking about much more than his own.

He speaks of family sacrifice, like when his wife Jeanie cared for their three-year-old daughter during and after her hospitalization while Mathers was flying bomber combat missions in Afghanistan.

Mathers delivered the keynote address Tuesday at LSUS's Veterans Day program to celebrate those who served and are still serving in the military.

"Sacrifice is something that military members and their families do not just in wartime but also in peace time," Mathers said. "Military members have given up some of their rights and personal freedoms willingly so they can defend this nation.

"Things like lifestyle sacrifices - they don't choose where they live, who they working for or what job they are going to do. Families don't choose which holidays or birthdays their military member is going to miss, where they deploy, when they deploy and for how long."

Mathers said his family leaned on the support system of military wives during the hospitalization of their daughter.

He took a short phone call from his wife detailing the daughter's illness, then flew from the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia to support combat operations in Afghanistan the next day.

Mathers quoted a Navy Reservist and current STRIKEWERX colleague when discussing the balancing of different obligations in a military member's life.

"He says if your family and your boss at work and the commander of your unit are equally upset with you, then you're doing it right," Mathers said. "You have to balance that, and if you are favoring one, you are upsetting the other two more."

Barksdale Air Force Base has usually been home base for Mathers throughout his military career, and he is still supporting operations as a civilian director of STRIKEWERX, an organization which assists Air Force Global Strike Command solve its most challenging problems by connecting people and resources across government, business, and academia.

Mathers, a pilot in B-52 and B-2 bombers, recalled one fateful day in which he came the closest in his career to ejecting from his aircraft.

Two of his eight B-52 engines caught fire not long after takeoff from Barksdale on a training mission to Utah, one of the rare training missions in which live bombs were being used.

Because both engines were on the same side of the bomber, Boeing and Barksdale personnel on the ground were calculating how to distribute the copious amounts of fuel on board, especially since the engine fires were closest to a wing (which was loaded with fuel).

Mathers had lost 25 percent of the flight control and both of those engines, which ripped off their mounts and hurtled to Earth.

He manually guided the aircraft in the area for six hours to burn enough fuel to make landing again a possibility.

As the bomber limped back to base and neared touch down, an unexpected issue arose from unequal drag related to the missing engines.

Mathers, who had the bomber just 10 feet above the runway, managed to climb again, account for the unequal drag on a second landing attempt and safely land the plan.

He called it Barksdale's "Apollo 13" moment detailing how airmen of all types rallied together to problem solve and troubleshoot any issues that would prevent the crew from returning safely.

"The flight ended in the early morning hours, and my mom heard a report on the TODAY Show that morning from Katie Couric talking about this landing at Barksdale Air Force Base," Mathers recalls. "We've gone through this ordeal, and I'm just getting through all the toxicology and blood samples and all the things that happen after something like that. I wanted to take a shower, and my mom calls because she somehow knew I was involved. I didn't want to answer it at the time, but my wife said, 'Talk to your mother.' She was right. It's more than just airmen or military members that make sacrifices."

Dr. Kevin Baxter, chair for the Department of Leadership Studies at LSUS and an organizer of the Veterans Day event, asked what happened to the engines that broke free from Mathers' bomber.

A member of the U.S. Army at the time, Baxter remembers rushing to Water Loo Baptist Church in Elm Grove to secure the site after something fell from the sky and smashed through the roof and some pews in the empty church.

It was one of Mathers' engines.

"God saved enough of that engine so that the Air Force could reverse engineer what happened, and we were able to document what happened in technical orders so we'd be prepared if it ever happened again," Maters said. "It did happen again in 2015, and the airmen referenced those orders to land the plane safely."