Reflecting on the past 16 years, Leesa Lowder said it was amazing how the pieces of life’s puzzle sometimes come together.

“Mom always told me things happen for a reason,” she said.

When Lowder graduated from Pendleton Heights in 1992, she wasn’t sure where her life was headed. Now, she said, she’s exactly where she wants to be and doing exactly what she wants to do.   

Lowder works as a nurse in the surgical intensive care unit at the VA Medical Center in Indianapolis. In addition to that full-time job, she regularly exchanges her hospital uniform for a green flight suit, which is the standard dress code for her other occupation as a U.S. Air Force flight nurse.

“Looking back over time, I realize I was meant to do this,” she said, as she began describing the twists and turns that brought her to where she is. She wanted to go to college, but finances weren’t available. Her dad encouraged her to explore the military as an option.

Lowder ended up talking with an Air Force recruiter, who arranged for her to take a battery of aptitude tests. Her scores indicated she was a good candidate for technical school. She signed up for four years and was assigned to imagery intelligence, a component of general military intelligence. The job entailed reading aerial footage taken from various aircraft platforms.

Lowder’s first assignment was just prior to the Haiti crisis of 1992-93. She was chosen to go to Guantanamo Bay and was there when Jimmy Carter flew in for peace talks. “That’s when I realized the significance of the job I was doing,” she said.

Her next assignment took her to Panama, where she helped provide intelligence used by the Drug Enforcement Agency for counter-narcotics operations. From there, she had a rotation to Saudi Arabia in 1995.

With only about a year remaining on her four-year stint, she wasn’t sure what direction to go. She again spoke with a recruiter, who made her aware that she could become a Reservist if she committed to another three years, so she did. Stationed at Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Atlanta, Ga., Lowder trained as a command post aircraft controller. She loved it and was the honor grad of her class.

She still needed money for college, so she went to a temp agency. “The person who interviewed me was an Air Force captain who saw a young kid needing a break in the world,” Lowder said. They offered her a position recruiting plasma donors for a medical company.

“That fueled my fire for getting into something medical,” she said. “It opened my eyes to how blood banks touch so many lives. I don’t think people realize how precious that gift of life is,” she said.

Lowder enrolled into night classes at Georgia State University, and found work on fishing boats in Alaska to earn money during the next two fishing seasons. But, she yearned for her home in Indiana.

She said it was divine intervention that caused the next sequence of events.

A young man who walked into her mother’s workplace noticed Lowder’s Air Force photo on the wall and began asking questions. As it turned out, his father was the chief in charge of safety at Indiana’s Grissom Air Reserve Base. He was looking for a safety technician.

A phone interview led to a job offer which opened the way for Lowder to return to Indiana. “I knew if I was ever going to make something happen, this was it,” said Lowder, who by then was a staff sergeant.