Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich, U.S. Navy (Retired), served as an F-18 strike fighter pilot for 20 years.. from 2001-2021. She flew combat missions in support of Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom. Her last deployment was boots on-ground as a Reconstruction engineer in Afghanistan. She is a Combat Air Medal and Bronze Star recipient. Currently, Dietrich serves as interim Chief Human Resources Officer at Syracuse University.
Dietrich was the guest speaker at our Flags of Our Heroes ceremony in June. With permission, her inspiring remarks are published below:
“Thank you. And to the families gathered here today, thank you for making space for me in this moment.
This week, our country turns 250. Everywhere you look, Americans are celebrating, debating, protesting, voting, posting online – doing all the loud, messy, sometimes frustrating work of a free people trying to figure out who we are and what we want to be. All of that is possible because our own citizens stepped up, took an oath, and agreed to protect the process.
The men and women we’re honoring today were part of this same messy country – the same neighborhoods, the same families, the same arguments around the dinner table.
But at some point, they made a different choice. They chose to raise their right hand. They chose to put on a uniform. And they chose to be different from their civilian neighbors. They chose a code. The code of the warrior. A standard. A set of obligations that most Americans will never have to carry.
They didn’t stop being human. They didn’t give up their personal story. They just agreed to hold themselves to something higher.
And it’s not about glory. Ask anyone who’s served, and they’ll tell you the same thing. It’s about the person to your left and your right. It’s about doing what you said you’d do, on the days it’s hard and the days it’s harder. It’s about showing up and trusting that the people beside you will do the same.
Your loved ones did that. In ways that were seen, and in ways that weren’t. And you carried your own version of that commitment – holding everything together, absorbing the uncertainty, loving someone through the distance and the risk and, for many of you, through the loss.
What Honor Flight Syracuse has built with this program is a way of saying with dignity and without fanfare that your veteran was known. That someone carried their photo to Washington, stood at the memorial, and said: this person served. This person was here. This person sacrificed for the greater good.
In a week when we are setting off fireworks and thinking hard about what this country is and what it ought to be, that matters. The freedoms we’re busy exercising right now were not
spontaneous. They were not self-generating. They were tended
to, carefully, over generations, by people who showed up.
To your veterans: thank you for showing up. To you, for loving
them and carrying them forward: thank you for showing up.
We hold this space together, today, in their honor.”