and why I am so proud of her
I never met Mona-Lynn Howard. She was my first cousin once removed, and by the time she was growing up the family connection had already gone quiet.
Her father was Herbert Wayne Howard, my uncle Adran’s son. Wayne lived with my grandparents in Eden, Alabama when I was a boy. He was twelve years older than me and I idolized him. Whenever I visited, I followed him around the place, pestering him to let me hang out. After he finished high school he enlisted in the Air Force. While he was overseas he married a woman from the Philippines named Mona. When they came home we sat on my grandparents’ front porch for long games of Monopoly. After my grandmother passed in 1968, Wayne, Mona, and their young son AW moved away. I lost track of them. Years later I learned Wayne had settled in Las Vegas. For reasons he never explained he cut the ties back to Alabama, and I never saw or spoke with him again.
That is the distance Mona-Lynn grew up on the far side of. Born in 1967, she joined the Air Force and became the first woman selected as a loadmaster on the MC-130H Talon II at a time when women in combat roles were still limited and the aircraft was selectively manned. She served in the Gulf War, instructed at RAF Mildenhall with the 352nd Special Operations Wing, and later trained aircrews at the 58th Special Operations Wing at Kirtland. People who flew with her remember competence without show and a habit of teaching the next person the job without the old rivalries getting in the way.
One chief master sergeant still keeps a photo of her on a drop from the back of a Talon II. He says her guidance as a young loadmaster set him up for the rest of his career. Another recalled that she helped people navigate the sharp edges of the community and still remained an AFSOC aviator through and through. Off duty in England she drove a little silver Mini painted with Talon II graphics while she helped with local fundraising. The work mattered; the people next to her mattered.
She died in 2009 at forty-two, complications after what should have been minor surgery. She is buried at the Southern Nevada Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Boulder City. For years that was the public record: a quiet, early end to a life spent in the back of special-operations aircraft.
Then, in late 2024, the 58th Special Operations Wing named a new drop zone at Double Eagle Airport II after her. Howard Drop Zone is now where MC-130J crews practice the low-altitude aerial deliveries that still keep special operators supplied when nothing else will do. Some of the techniques she helped establish or refine are still in the books. The place is not a monument so much as a working patch of ground where the next generation learns the job she once did.
I never sat across a table from her. The Alabama connection ran through a father I once followed around my grandparents’ place, then through a silence that lasted decades. What remains is the service record and the Drop Zone that now carries her name. She broke a barrier by doing the work to the standard the mission required. She taught the people who came behind her. Years after she was gone, the Air Force still found the practical way to keep her name attached to the training that matters. That is enough to be proud of the cousin I never knew.
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