Squadron Leader Bronwen Kelly at Whenuapai Air Force base. Photo / Alex Burton
Monique Barden talks to three women at the top of their game in the New Zealand military
Air Force: Squadron Leader Bronnie Kelly
She wanted to be a photographer but they weren't recruiting photographers at the time, so they said, "Bronwen, we know exactly what you would love to do, you
would love to be in logistics." "But," says Kelly, "every time I saw or heard an aircraft take-off, I just wanted to be on it.
"I thought the uniform looked pretty cool and it sounded like a good life, so I thought I would join up when I was 17." She's the youngest of three sisters who all joined the air force. Growing up in Geraldine, a small town in South Canterbury, Kelly's father was a helicopter pilot contracting in Papua New Guinea. When she was 14 her parents moved there, sending her to St Margaret's boarding school in Christchurch and flying her over in the school holidays.
Flying took her parents all over the world, living in Hong Kong for 10 years under British rule, then Taiwan. "I definitely think Mum and Dad have always loved other cultures and travelling. My older sister is just like me who got the travel bug and my middle sister is more of a homebody, so it didn't kind of rub off on her but they've always been kind of interested in other cultures," says Kelly.
Kelly is the 40 Squadron executive officer and air loadmaster for the Boeing 757s. It's a two-fold job, making her the commanding officer's right-hand-person and in charge of a crew of loadmasters who calculate the accurate weight and balance of the Boeing 757s. She manages all kinds of different cargo not be authorised for civilian airlines, such as explosives, outsized military equipment and vehicles, which is flown to remote and unsupported airfields.
Becoming an air loadmaster was a challenge for Kelly to get into and, at the time, there was only one other female loadmaster. "I do think that men back then were a little wary and we have had loadmaster reunions and some of the old, old guys come and they go, "Who are you here with, love?" and I laugh and say, "I'm a loadmaster too." Now, there isn't an air force trade she knows of that doesn't have a female in it.
Kelly has been deployed to UN peacekeeping missions in Kosovo, East Timor and Bougainville in the late 90s and early 2000s, then to Afghanistan in 2007. Afghanistan was her first deployment after having children, when her daughter was 2 and son 5.
"You really don't worry about your own safety when it's just you, but then when you have kids it does make you think twice. It just made me think a little bit more about I guess the risks that you're taking … so that kind of put a different spin on things for me," says Kelly.
She does the flying season every October to Antarctica, transporting scientists and resupplying fresh food and they take politicians to Pacific Island Forums and around Southeast Asia. But their primary customer is the army, who they fly with all their equipment to wherever they're conducting exercises or operations around the world.
Her job involves a lot of humanitarian aid work with disaster relief flying, where the phone can ring at anytime and say, "Right, tomorrow you're going here. Off you go, sort it out," says Kelly. She recently flew vaccines and life support equipment to Samoa for the measles epidemic and NZ Army Engineers to Australia to support the bush fires. She has done refugee evacuation flights from Honiara and cyclone relief flights to Samoa.
"When you can see what you're doing, like flying refugees out of a country, it feels good to be able to do something. That gives you a nice warm, fuzzy feeling," says Kelly.
But the gratification she gets from those humanitarian aid tasks also puts pressure on her family by taking her away.
"If you've got partners or children, it means being away and missing out on birthdays, Christmas' or school prizegivings, competitions, that sort of thing. ... I'm sure most women are the same who work, feeling that mummy guilt of not always being there," says Kelly.
After returning from Afghanistan, she decided to be a stay at home mum, taking a year's leave without pay when her daughter turned 4. "The guilt was just eating me up inside." She spent a year with a lot of mothers who didn't work, only to discover they feel just as guilty.
"You can't win … I think it's just you learning how to live with whatever your decision is going to be, your kids - if you provide them with a stable home life - they are going to be absolutely fine, that's what I had to learn for myself."
Recently, while out in the car with her now-13-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son, they were discussing what they would do if they won Lotto and she said she wouldn't have to work anymore. But they weren't keen on that idea, she says. "They said, 'We wouldn't want you to win Lotto Mum, because then you wouldn't do the cool job and we love telling our friends what you do and you telling us what you've been doing when you're away, that makes us proud.'
"So, I sort of thought, 'Ah, I haven't ruined my kids' lives after all.'"
And the uniform is still cool, it's maybe not what you call stylish, says Kelly, "but that's kind of one of the things I love about it ... I like the hard-wearing, you know you spill your lunch down your front and it's okay, give it a wee clean up and it'll be fine."
She describes herself as "a good bugger" and hopes her friends and colleagues would say that too. "I just love this place and I'm lucky with the job I do I absolutely love it, it's probably the people because you know in any workplace, they are what makes it. It's the people you work with, people know how to have a laugh, have a party, but they know how to knuckle down when they need too."
Army: Colonel Angie Fitzsimons
She only went to places where people were expecting her and she always had a pistol. It was risky, al Qaeda and Islamic State forces were present and although it seemed very calm, there was deathly violence in the north. When she went there, she had to wear her body armour and couldn't venture outside the United Nations camps. Colonel Angie Fitzsimons was the Chief UN Military Intelligence Officer for a peacekeeping mission in Mali, West Africa.
She was heading towards a teaching career in 1983 when, during a summer holiday job in the Territorials, a female platoon commander inspired her to join the army.
"I didn't realise until I saw that female officer that being a leader was something that I really wanted to do," says Fitzsimons.
Growing up in Christchurch, the eldest of four siblings, she completed a BA in French at Canterbury University and a year at teachers' college, before signing up for officer cadet training in Waiouru. There were only three of women on the course and one dropped out after a month.
"That was tough; it was not the environment where I had come from. I went to a girls' school and studying French at University there were mostly women there, so that was a bit of a cultural change for me."
But Fitzsimons' self-imposed high standards motivated her for the challenge.
"I wanted to do as best I could - and the bar is always a bit further away when you're running around after a bunch of 18-year-old men."
Getting through the officer cadet training year was physically hard and she pushed herself beyond her boundaries, doing things she never thought she could have done.
"As you're dragging yourself around and you're starting to not believe in yourself, they're saying, 'Come on Ma'am, you can do it.'
Fitzsimons' first deployments were peacekeeping missions to Bosnia in 1995, Bougainville in 1998 and East Timor in 2002. Bougainville provided a unique experience she hadn't seen in peacekeeping missions.
"They genuinely could forgive people who had attacked their families. It was amazing to see that in action; they had these reconciliation ceremonies. We would be invited sometimes, and you would get to see that and it was extremely powerful."
She was deployed to Afghanistan in 2006, followed by a short mission to Syria in 2012. Being in war-zones made her resilient but she found it hard leaving unfinished business. When the Security Council decided Syria wasn't a peacekeeping mission, they were withdrawn.
"It was terrible; we knew some of the people because we were living in the community, you always wonder what happened to them," says Fitzsimons.
Before Mali, she did a three-year tour with the UN Headquarters in New York, working on the peacekeeping intelligence for the Mali counter-terrorist mission.
"We had a lot of casualities on that mission; people were killed. This was different; it felt more like Afghanistan than any peacekeeping mission I had been on. There were so many IEDs [Improvised Explosive Devices]."
Her job was to gather intelligence to try to predict where the next attack was going to happen. "It was real, it wasn't just theoretical stuff," says Fitzsimons.
In her early deployments making her way in a male-dominated world wasn't easy. In Bosnia, she spent six months with only two or three other women in her contingent. By the time she got to East Timor, there was a woman at every rank. She thinks this was a pivotal time for the army, which was recruiting more women and trying to keep them in.
"When I graduated from officer cadets, the recruiting guys said, 'Well, I'm not sending you back to your school, because the last thing I want is 20 more girls coming in.' But that would not be the message today, says Fitzsimons; the army is trying very hard to recruit more women.
Progressing up through the ranks was challenging too.
"Initially it was fine, until I started getting some of the jobs that my male counterparts and peers wanted," she says.
It was quite isolating without a female peer group and, in the early days, she felt like she had to be one of the boys. "I was always proving myself, every role I went into I thought, 'Here we go again.' That was tough, it kind of wears you down, every position I went into I was having to prove myself. But after a while it stopped."
As she became more confident in her leadership style, she realised what she could offer in a situation was probably quite different from male counterparts and that is the way the military should be.
"When I was younger, it was like a period of conformity where you had to conform to a leadership style and then I realised, 'Well, this isn't exactly me,'" says Fitzsimons. "'I don't think you have to be one of the boys, you can be yourself.'"
The UN and New Zealand understand that you just open other communication channels by having women as part of a deployment and peacekeeping process, says Fitzsimons.
"Just walking along the street wearing your helmet and body armour, a woman would catch your eye and she'd realise, 'Ah, it's a woman in uniform' and you'd have a little interaction. It's not just women, it's the children, because they're the ones who are affected by the violence and left to manage when the men go away to fight."
Working alongside Islamic people and experiencing Ramadan in a country helped her to understand the problems better by actually living there.
"I've always been curious about different cultures and how they live and how they eat, and I'm always interested in getting involved in that and seeing it."
If she could go back anywhere, it would be to Africa.
"I need to calm down about the number of African ornaments in my home."
Her time in Mali was her last deployment and one where she got to speak French in the former French colony. "It sounds bizarre but it was very satisfying that time there, because you felt like you had done something. I wanted to stay but I didn't realise how tired I was after a year, it was tough," she says.
And it takes a while to transition back into normal life.
"It's hard actually because when you're back, you change. Every deployment I think I've changed a bit and just coming back you wake up and think, 'Okay, I'm not in Mali, I don't have to think about where my gun is.'
"For me, I discovered the person I could be through joining the military and I don't think if I had stayed as a teacher, I'd be the same person."
Navy: Lieutenant Emily Keat
She realises now she would hate to fly helicopters, because you can't jump out of them. "It could have been great, now I fulfil the aviation role by jumping out of planes every weekend. I love things that go fast, adrenalin is great," says Lieutenant Em Keat.
With both her parents and grandparents in the navy, Keat had a pretty good idea of what it was like.
"I liked the idea of travel, I never really had much interest in the ocean, but being on ships attracted me I guess."
She wanted to be a helicopter pilot but she got the observer role instead, so when she found out she wasn't going to be in charge of the helicopter, she knew she wanted to be in charge of something and became a warfare officer.
In hindsight, Keat says she should have taken the observer role, "I like flying and what I do now in my spare time is sky diving, aviation is what I love."
Now, she's the executive officer on HMNZS Wellington and second-in-charge on the ship. "If for some reason the captain isn't available to do something, I'm there to step up but my day-to-day job is personnel management. In a sense, to make it not quite so military, it's HR."
HMNZS Wellington is a protector-class offshore patrol vessel. The ship has a helicopter on board with three navy and eight air force people who maintain it.
"Our role is to protect New Zealand and our search and rescue area – up to the islands and down to the Southern Ocean, that's our remit," says Keat.
It's not the most spacious of vessels, with capacity for 80 sailors (but 70 is more comfortable) and patrol vessels roll. "The places we go to, you go to the Southern Ocean on any ship it's a rock-and-roll ride," Keat.
But that's not a problem, she's never been seasick.
Keat says if anyone thinks they want to be a pilot or engineer in the military, they need to do the maths, literally.
"They try to get 6th and 7th formers [years 12 and 13] to think about where they want to go in their life but they need to start earlier. Maths and physics. If you want to be an engineer, you need those."
The physical tests are age and gender-specific, with a ship piece for a body and fire extinguisher carry.
"Everyone should be able to drag someone out of a compartment, it doesn't matter if you're 5ft [1.5] or 6ft or if you're 20 or 60, and you need to be able to carry an extinguisher."
She doesn't want to be treated differently on the ship and says there's not much difference between how men and women work. The uniforms are unisex general working dress. A couple of years ago a question was put out to women asking if they wanted the uniforms tailored differently.
"Why you'd want them tailored? I don't know," says Keat. "They are quite big pieces of material, so I do understand why the question was proposed but our answer was no. One, it's comfortable and two, it then sets us aside again it does try to make us different."
On the ship, there are female toilets, unisex bathrooms and female-only cabins. "We don't share," says Keat. On HMNZS Wellington, they have a motto: "Run as one." The crew came up with it and it's a "look after yourself, look after your shipmates" culture.
"The ship's a safe place; we run as one, we really do run as one, it's such a cool culture."
Her longest deployment has been to Southeast Asia for five months in 2017, followed by three months at RIMPAC (Rim of the Pacific Exercise) in Hawaii on an Australian ship. Keat says it sounds cliched but you become a family on those trips. On her first trip down to Antarctica, there were only 65 people on the ship.
"Yeah, you get sick of each other now and again and you go off in your little groups but, it's almost like, I can't say a holiday, it's not a holiday because you're working hard but you get to travel with your mates for five months. You just make best friends and family on those deployments."
She says postings can be a challenge, "You just have to be good at change, you deal with change but it is a struggle, a lot of times you'll hear the term 'crash posting', which means you find out last-minute, usually within a month, that you're going somewhere. Sometimes it's the day before."
Thanks to movies like G.I. Joe, Keat says there's a perception that it's physically hard "but we've got programmes that make sure you are as fit as you need to be." And it's not how it used to be, with no communications for months and a letter now and then. "We've got email, Wi-Fi and phones."
Next on Keat's horizon are frigates. "When I say, 'Yeah, I wanted to be a pilot,' what I can do as a warfare officer is actually what I love and actually what I want to do."
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