Life Lessons: Michele Peeler Harper – Charlotte Magazine

When Michele Peeler Harper was 3 years old, she knew she wanted to be an astronaut. But by the time she enrolled in the ROTC program at Appalachian State University, she had a new dream: to fly helicopters in the Army. “I had people tell me that I should just quit before I get disappointed,” she recalls. “‘They’re never going to let you in the Army to fly.’” 

Harper graduated in 1993. Just a couple of decades earlier, Col. Sally Murphy had become the first female helicopter pilot to graduate from the Army aviation school. And it was only three years earlier that Maj. Marie Rossi became the first woman to fly a helicopter in combat. Today, women still make up only about 10% of military helicopter pilots.

As graduation neared, Harper faced a reckoning: She could take her chances on being one of the handful of women selected for aviation in active duty, or she could go to flight school and become a platoon leader in an aviation unit in the North Carolina National Guard, a reserve component of the Army. She chose the latter. It wasn’t what she’d planned for, but she says she made the right decision.

“I’m flying all the time, and I’m doing all these cool missions,” says Harper, now 54. “And then I would talk to my buddies from flight school who went on active duty, and they’re like, ‘Michele, you’re so lucky,’ because they’re stuck on a base.”

Harper’s parents had instilled a drive to give back to her community, and though she served in Iraq and conducted training in Japan and Germany, she found fulfillment in a career helping her neighbors in North Carolina.

“I wanted to be the pilot and commander of the space shuttle,” she reflects. Instead, in the North Carolina National Guard, she became the first female Black Hawk Company Commander, first female Aviation Battalion Commander, and first female Aviation Brigade Commander. She was also North Carolina’s first female state aviation officer. She retired as a colonel in May 2023, after 30 years in the service.

By then, she had long since abandoned any plans to pilot shuttles or jets. “There’s something about fixed-wing,” she says. “It’s up high. It’s not as connected to the Earth. It’s not as connected to people.”

Here’s Harper in her own words, edited for clarity and concision.

I grew up in Hendersonville, up in the mountains, and we had a little 1960s brick ranch house. We were a very close, tight-knit family. We did a lot of camping, hiking, whitewater rafting. To us kids, it was adventurous. We didn’t realize we didn’t have any money.

From a very early age, my parents really pushed that we should be here to serve. We should be here as citizens to give back to the world, give back to North Carolina, give back to organizations. Whether it was at church, or they were coaches at softball, or whatever it was, they were always in a service-oriented posture.

My dad wanted three boys, and he had three girls. (My brother came 10 years later.) Back then, my mom had traditional roles, serving the home, and my dad was like, OK, I don’t have these three boys to push out there in the world, so I’m going to push these three girls.

Even as a child, I was—my sisters would call it stubborn, but I would call it determined. If somebody told me no, that was the worst thing you could say to me. That word bothered me. I’d always want to prove myself. I knew that I wanted to go into aviation, and I knew nobody was going to tell me I couldn’t.

I didn’t have the money for out-of-state tuition, so I picked Appalachian State University because, at that time, they had the best ROTC program in the Southeast. When you go into the Army, you can’t just show up say, “I want to be an aviator.” They pick whether you’re going to be infantry, military, police, aviation—and aviation was one of the harder branches to get. So I got my bachelor’s in mathematics with a minor in military science and an emphasis in astronomy. I was the first in my family to go off to college.

When I was in ROTC, they kept discouraging me from trying to get aviation. Of the 10,000 or so kids that would be coming out of ROTC or the military colleges, at that time, only about 200 were selected for aviation, and only about five females were. A professor of military science was like, “You’re good, but are you that good?”

So he’s like, “Well, one thing you could do, there’s a National Guard unit that has helicopters. Maybe if you start drilling with them, you’ll learn more.” So I started doing that. I’m this little 22-year-old coming into this world of people who fought in the Vietnam War, and it’s like,
I am such an inexperienced idiot right now. But I drove up that first morning and came around the corner, and there were 15, 20 helicopters. I was like, Oh, this is where I need to be.

As I was getting closer to the end of my college career, the commander of that unit says, “You know, I’ve got an opening for a platoon leader in this unit.” So that’s what I chose to do. It was the best decision I ever made, because I was guaranteed aviation, and shortly thereafter, I went off to flight school.

It was the early ’90s. I got in at a time when women weren’t doing that. Most of the instructor pilots were Vietnam-era pilots, and it was very hard because most thought you shouldn’t be there. There were ones who said, “You can’t drive a car. There’s no way you can fly a helicopter.” I had lots of instructor pilots who were verbally abusive in the cockpit, saying, “This is ridiculous. You shouldn’t be here.”

My dad always said, “You can’t stumble over something that’s behind you. You’ve got to keep looking forward.” I just wanted to show him that I could do it. My parents would always say that the person you are destined to be is the person you choose to be.

I went to flight school and then went back to that unit that had accepted me as a platoon leader, and within no time, I saw how critical the National Guard was. Within that first year, we had some devastating hurricanes, and the Army, even though they’re right here, are not the ones that go help. I was flying all the time, doing rescues in snowstorms. I was sent out to Texas to fight fires.

There’s nothing like when we go down to the coast. All those little towns get flooded so bad when we have those big hurricanes. One story I remember so vividly is that we were flying down there, and we got to a trailer park, and I see this mother standing in deep water on top of her trailer, and she had her child in her arms, a baby in a diaper. And you’re able to go over there and hoist down a rescue tech. When she gets into your helicopter—even with all the sound—you can sense it as she releases that breath, like, I’m going to live to see another day. There’s nothing like that in the world.

Brigade commander is the highest leadership position you can get in North Carolina where you still have troops and helicopters. There’s only one in the whole state, so this is very competitive. Typically, they’re very tall, statuesque males, so you can stand in front of your 1,000 troops. I’m 5-foot-3¾, and I’m not 100 pounds anymore. I was like, Are they really going to pick me? 

As my packet was going before the board, my mother passed away, and six months after that, my dad passed away. He just walked in the store and slipped and fell and hit his head and died two days later, on his birthday. Ten days after he passed, I got the notification that they had chosen me to be the new brigade commander.

It’s a big military production when you take your brigade command. You have all your troops out there in formation. It’s a huge drill and ceremony. There’s helicopters flying, there’s people everywhere. I know my dad was looking down from heaven, but I would have loved to have seen him in that chair. He would have been like, “Hooah!”

In the military, they always say, “Mission first, mission first, mission first.” And I was always like, “People first, people first, people first.” Because if they know that I have their backs, that I’m working for them, then they will take care of the mission.

My husband and I got married in 2004. My kids are 11, 13, and 16. I was tired of missing everything: state playoffs, the band concert, birthdays. My husband and I were together two anniversaries out of 20. When my kids were younger, they called my uniform “the bye-bye suit.” They knew that when I walked out of my bedroom with that suit on, I might be gone for the night, for months, or for the whole year.

I was at the pinnacle of the leadership position to be with troops. The next thing would have been staff, then a general position. Now, general sounds great, but they’re not out there with the troops anymore. I would not have been flying anymore because generals are focused on bigger things. So, at 30 years, I knew that it was my time to go. I had achieved everything I wanted to achieve.

I’ve tried to make every moment its best. We’ve rescued people who then passed away, and when you’ve seen life slip from your hands, it really gives you perspective. You value life just a little bit more.

ALLISON BRADEN is a contributing editor.