A month and a day after graduating Gilmer High School in 1999, Russell Gheesling reported for boot camp. Yet not just any basic training, but a multiweek regimen before the start of college at the United States Air Force Academy.
“I got there in June right at the end of (high) school,” he said during a phone interview last week. “I majored in civil engineering, and part of the reason I chose it is it had a direct tie into the civil engineering field of the Air Force.”
Soon there was a setback. However, Gheesling overcame it.
“I found out, unfortunately, after I got to the academy that I have a slight red-green color deficiency (partial color blindness in eyesight) so I wasn’t going to be able to fly,” he revealed. “I didn’t go (to the academy) 100 percent to fly, although I certainly would have if I’d gotten the chance. So majoring in CE let me be in a career field that I’d be able to learn about and that I knew that I’d be interested in doing.”
On Aug. 1, Gheesling, 43, earned the highest rank below general in the Air Force — he is now Colonel Russell Harrell Gheesling. He was asked how he felt about his latest attainment as a member of our nation’s military.
“It’s incredibly hard to believe at some points, because I still feel like a young captain that doesn’t know near as much as they should.” he stated. “You just kinda keep going. The most important thing is to recognize how much you don’t know from those that do.”
The career Air Force officer graduated from the academy in 2003 as a second lieutenant.
“You’re commissioned in a ceremony right at midnight on the night of graduation, so you graduate college and are commissioned into the force on the same day,” he explained.
Pros and cons
Twenty-four years after that initial pre-college boot camp, Col. Gheesling is now stationed at Hurlburt Field near Fort Walton Beach, Fla., the home of Air Force Special Operations Command; technically, it’s part of the Eglin Air Force Base complex. While there, he is the SOC command engineer. With him are his wife, Julie, and their children, Henry, 15, and Campbell, 12. He’s traveled many air miles from his first duty station at Moody Air Force Base in Valdosta.
“Julie is from Gainesville, and it worked out well being in Valdosta because she was at UGA at the time — Erin Grizzle (a mutual friend) actually introduced us — so we were able to kinda long-distance date while she finished up college,” he said. “We got married in 2005, and she came down to Moody.”
The job description of an Air Force civil engineer is to “build, maintain, repair and respond to emergency situations on Air Force installations” on stateside bases and overseas installations where air power is utilized, he noted. Gheesling was asked about raising a family on the move from one duty station to another.
“I’ve been dwelling on this more and more, especially in the last few months, but it’s all about pros and cons,” he reflected. “People ask you, ‘Would you go to the academy again?’ and ‘Is it (the moving) that bad?’ There’s a lot of really goods and there’s some negatives, and you just gotta be able to find a balance. As long as the positives can outweigh the negatives, it’s worth it to keep going.”
Still, there are the times when “I hate my kids have to pick up and move after making really good friends or getting comfortable somewhere, but then they’ve lived in six states, and they’ve lived overseas too. We’ve traveled to over 15 countries, so they’ve had some pretty amazing opportunities.”
Gheesling confesses it’s “tough” for his children to have to leave the friends they’ve made in school. However, they now have friends all over the United States.
“In today’s day and age, kids have cellphones so they actually keep up with those relationships with their friends … we’ll go on vacation and find out somebody we used to know is at Disney World the same week as us or at the beach the same week, and we’ll link up and see them,” he said. “It’s tough, but it’s definitely balanced by a lot of cool opportunities.”
Proud to be from Ellijay
Are his parents, Ronnie and Nancy Gheesling — who both attended the promotion ceremony — proud of his accomplishments?
“They say they are, but they don’t know all the stories though,” he said with a laugh.
“All the near misses and things like that?” Gheesling was asked.
“Exactly!” he replied.
When his father, Ronnie Gheesling, was asked how it felt to have a colonel in the family, he replied, “I feel pretty old! When I was in the service (Air National Guard), colonels were old people.”
“It seems like no time since he went to the academy in 1999,” his mother Nancy Gheesling added. “We are obviously proud.We had a lot of family (at the promotion ceremony), plus Sid (Webb) and Brian Nealey (from Ellijay). So just seeing so many people being there to support him made you proud — and humble, to be honest. I so appreciate people who would go down there for that.”
“There were probably 100 people there,” said Ronnie, which included Air Force personnel — officer, enlisted and retired — who had worked with their son, their only child.
“They came from all over, and that was really fun,” Nancy said. “Getting to see people we’ve met and known throughout his career was special. The Air Force family sticks together. Russell has a wonderful wife and tremendous family support too.”
Nancy said she and Ronnie have prayed for Russell and his family and deployments “pretty much daily.”
“We just want him to do what he’s supposed to do,” she said of potential retirement down the road. “Whatever God has for him and what’s right for him, that’s what we want.”
Sid Webb, a former Gilmer Christian Learning Center director who hails from an Air Force family, was at Gheesling’s promotion ceremony. He talked to Gheesling about the academy back at Gilmer High and wrote a letter of recommendation on his behalf.
“It’s been wonderful to see how he has grown and been very successful in the military, and also how God has used him,” he said. “He’s got a great family, and they’re devoted to the right things.”
“We’ve kept in touch the whole way,” said Gheesling as a protégé. “I was able to invite him to come to a national security symposium in Montgomery (Ala.) that the Air Force put on earlier this year. And I invited him to the promotion. Since he had played such an important role in my life between Sunday school teacher and cross-country coach and all these things, I actually had him do the invocation at the promotion ceremony. That was really cool.”
That invitation included Webb being nominated to attend the National Security Forum as a delegate.
“We spent a great week together,” said Webb. “When I found out he was being promoted, I wanted to attend. It was a very meaningful ceremony to his family and me. The general who spoke had worked with him a number of times and had very strong, positive things to say about Russell’s leadership.”
What would Col. Gheesling say to the folks back home in Elijay?
“I’m incredibly proud to be from there,” he replied. “Growing up there had a huge impact on me and my ability to be the person I am, because I learned about hard work, treating people fairly and honestly, and knowing people who love each other and take care of each other. I’m really, really glad that that’s where I grew up.”
‘Incredibly rewarding’
Is there any one thing that sticks out in his military career?
“Out of random luck, I was selected in one of my last deployments — at Scott (AFB) at the time — to go to New Jersey for five months in 2021 during the Afghan mission to bring out all the interpreters and government officials that had helped us while we were there,” he shared. “I was running a tent city to help bring those folks who were trying to get away from the current regime in Afghanistan into America, and it ended up being an incredibly rewarding experience — frustrating and rewarding, like anything you do with the government because it’s never as smooth as it should be, because there’s little things that can frustrate you from time to time.
“But it was incredibly rewarding to see people who had worked to help us, and were now going to have a chance at a really good life in America through the stuff that our team was able to do there. That was probably one of the more impactful things I’ve done, and in a weird way it capped — not that I’ve retired yet — a lot of my military experience. Because I was at the academy during 9/11 (the terrorist attacks in 2001) and deployed to Afghanistan, the Middle East and Asia. So that mission as we were leaving Afghanistan brought closure to what my career had been about.”
Asked about retirement from his career in the Air Force, Gheesling replied, “You can never say for sure what you’re going to do because between the plans of the good Lord and the Air Force, they’ll just laugh at you!”
Travels of an Air Force officer
Russell Gheesling said the “irony” of joining the Air Force and wanting to see the world was that his first assignment was at Moody Air Force Base back in Georgia at Valdosta.
Other duty stations along the way to becoming a colonel in the Air Force during a 24-year career are listed chronologically:
﹣ F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Cheyenne, Wyo.
﹣ Wright-Patterson AFB, Dayton, Ohio
﹣ Langley AFB, Langley, Va.
﹣ Royal Air Force Base Lakenheath, United Kingdom
﹣ Naval War College, Newport, R.I.
﹣ Wright-Patterson AFB (as a civil engineer squadron commander)
﹣ Cannon AFB, Clovis, N.M.
﹣ Scott AFB, outside St. Louis, Mo., in Illinois
﹣ Maxwell AFB, Montgomery, Ala.
﹣ Hurlburt Field, Fort Walton Beach, Fla.