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Shoot Like a Girl by Mary Jennings Hegar5/30/2023 ![]() ![]() My dad was an entitled, little rich boy who got into drugs and was very physically, mentally, and emotionally abusive. You write, “I credit a lot of my life’s success to my mother’s courage in getting us away from my biological father.” Talk us through your childhood-and how it affected your dream? Nobody ever said, “Girls can’t do that.” And as I got older, in high school, I started pushing toward that dream. ![]() No, that’s the beauty of the way that I was raised. It was a good description of who I was, at heart and soul. If you couple that with being raised with a real sense of duty and patriotism, then being a military combat pilot made sense. ![]() I was also always a bit of an adrenaline junkie. So helicopters were a natural fit for me. I don’t want the FAA telling me what altitude to fly at. It’s because of the rebel in me that doesn’t like rules. ![]() A lot of people ask why I don’t fly for the airlines now. I wanted to be a combat helicopter pilot after seeing Han Solo in Star Wars. I never dreamed to be a fighter pilot, because those guys are jerks. When-and why-did your dream of flying combat helicopters begin? When National Geographic caught up with Hegar by phone at her home in Austin, Texas, the Purple Heart recipient explained why she sued the Pentagon, how she would never have become a pilot if her mother had not left an abusive husband, and how, in 2009, in Afghanistan, everything she had prepared for came together when her chopper was hit by the Taliban. ![]()
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