Navy Pride

When Rhonda Gloodt talks about her whirlwind 23-year career in the U.S. Navy, she smiles with humble pride, recounting the stories of her time in service. She wells up, though, when talking about her most solemn duty: the ceremony of loading the remains of the fallen into the military planes.

“The soldiers were covered with a flag,” she says, tearfully. “They were taken care of honorably and were loaded headfirst. You never put anything on top of them. They were unloaded feet first, with a ceremony. You could feel their spirit moving around in the airplane like the soldiers didn’t know they were dead. All these young guys...”

Rhonda Gloodt joined the U.S. Navy at age 31 in 1985, planning to serve four years to pay for college. She ended up retiring 23 years later in 2008, after deployments that brought her to Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Scotland, England, Norway, Italy, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and more than a dozen continental U.S. cities.

Gloodt’s early childhood thickened her skin for the challenges she would face in her Navy career. Raised in Murray, Nebraska, she never met her father, a U.S. Army soldier who had been missing in action in Korea since June 1953, just two months before she was born. 

“It was extremely hard on my mother,” Gloodt says. “We went to live with my grandparents in Murray. They had a little house, but it was very comfortable. My mother, my sister and I shared a bed in one bedroom and my grandparents had the other bedroom.”

Gloodt says she spent most of her time outdoors in the rural farming community with a population of 350. Her family had a large garden that she tended to, and she often rode horses with her friends. 

That rugged upbringing served her well as a petty officer in the Naval Overseas Air Cargo Transportation (NOACT) unit, a mobile supply chain and logistics team that coordinated the transport of cargo and personnel to the Navy’s aircraft carriers across the globe, including in combat zones. She served in Operation Iraqi Freedom post 9-11, spending eight months stationed in Kuwait and Al Asad, Iraq in 2004. 

“Before 9-11, the NOACT unit never carried weapons,” she says. “When they sent us to Kuwait and Iraq, we had to carry M-16s everywhere.” Gloodt says she came under enemy bombardment while in Iraq but never had to fire her rifle, for which she is thankful.

Being a woman stationed in the Middle East presented myriad challenges, she says. When stationed in Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates, she ventured into town to buy jewelry and had a first-hand encounter with the male-dominant norms of the region.

“I was very modestly dressed in a black dress with long sleeves, but I didn’t have my head covered because I was told that if I wore a burqa incorrectly, I’d get in trouble,” she says.

As she walked down the street, every man who passed her gave her a rough shoulder butt, not enough to knock her down, but enough to push her off her step. “I just kept going,” she says. “I knew enough self-defense to take a kneecap out if I wanted to, but I was outnumbered and just kept going till I made it to my van.”

Her fondest memory of her service was in Fujairah, UAE, when a Black Stallion transport helicopter landed at the airport where the Navy was coordinating supply distribution to offshore aircraft carriers. “This beautiful Black Stallion helicopter landed with a cool stallion painted on its front,” she says. “And a female pilot stepped out.

“We knew she was going to the USS Eisenhower and it was just her and her loadmaster, so we asked her if she could use some help unloading, and she says ‘sure.’”

Gloodt’s NOACT unit had only four females in Fujairah, including Gloodt, and they all boarded the chopper and flew to the Eisenhower to help unload the cargo with the female pilot.

“It was absolutely amazing,” she says. “We flew over the aircraft carrier, and the whole battlegroup was with the USS Eisenhower. My heart was never so proud. I was expecting a bump when we landed, but we didn’t feel a thing. She landed the helo perfectly. It was awesome, one of the highlights of my career.”

Gloodt ultimately received her Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Nebraska while serving in the Navy. After retiring from the Navy in 2008, she went to work for Union Pacific Railroad. She and her husband Bob met in 2000, and the two moved to Marco Island in 2012. The Gloodt's grandson Jackson has carried on the family tradition, serving as a petty officer in the U.S. Navy, currently aboard the USS Wasp, an amphibious assault ship. Jackson’s picture hangs on Gloodt’s dining room wall below the uniformed photo of her MIA father.

When asked to reflect on her role as a female trailblazer in the male-dominated Navy, she says, “I never really thought about it that way, but now that I look back, we definitely were. We were just trying to do our job, right? And we did it well.”