Sonya Quijada, 53, Army Lieutenant Colonel (Retired)
Sonya Quijada joined the Army in 1987 serving as the first woman paratrooper in her unit. As a woman, she rapidly faced extra obstacles. Once her squad was called to Panama, she was left out of the aircraft roster and notified that she couldn’t go due to her gender.
“That was my job,” Quijada said. “They took my weapons, they took my guys, but they wouldn’t let me go. It was definitely one of the toughest leadership dilemmas I’ve had in the army.”
One year later, she was sent to Iraq to support Operation Desert Storm as a member of the Signal Corps. She was allocated to support antennas at relay sites in the desert.
“It was thrilling,” Quijada said. “Often we got confused, and sometimes it was frightening, and we’d come across other groups”. She was later hired to work with the Special Operations Agency with 10 years before she returned to the Army, now as a mother of two kids. It was when she was conducting special programs at the Army Physical Fitness Research Institute that she found the next chapter.
“This was the beginning of integrating my spiritual interest and my professional intent as a yoga instructor with the military requirements,” she said. “Awareness of the mind-body connection and that taking care of our troops; taking care of ourselves was as necessary or maybe more necessary than taking care of our weapons.”
“I look back, and I realized that in the beginning, there was that pioneering sense, although I wouldn’t have said it then. The Women’s Army Corps, they were the pioneers. They were the ones that toughed it out before they were even allowed in the men’s army.”
— Sonya Quijada
In the end, Quijada, having attained the rank of Army Lieutenant Colonel, resigned to raise her kids as a single parent.
“I have opted to promote and mentor and teach and model life skills for my two future citizens of the United States,” she clarified. “So I have selected this instead of a promotion that would entail deployment.”
Quijada is currently working as a fitness coach and yoga instructor in Tampa, Florida.
“From the start, I was taught to be a strong paratrooper, to jump in and take no hostages,” she said. “Then at the end, I was trained then sort of flipped around and say, ‘Let’s bend a little; let’s be resilient.'”
Reflecting on her time in the army, Quijada said; “It’s important to remember that for most of us, women who were told ‘No, stay out,’ we weren’t satisfied with just being a girl. We needed a shot for women who could do it. I didn’t want the standards to change, as it would put us at risk and jeopardizes everybody.”
Reference: https://www.aarp.org/home-family/voices/veterans/info-2020/women-veterans-day.html
