This Air Force veteran's curiosity led her from a Sheboygan Falls farm to a 25-year military service that took her around the world
SHEBOYGAN FALLS – Col. Ingrid C. Kaat never lost the feeling of being a country kid from Sheboygan Falls during her 25 years in the U.S. Air Force.
As a recent retiree, she has reflected on a career that took her to places like Greenland, pushed her out of her comfort zone and put her in positions to emerge as a leader.
Paving her own path
Kaat decided to go to college after graduating from Sheboygan Falls High School, which she said was an atypical path coming from a blue-collar area and growing up on what she’d call a small farm with animals and fruit trees.
She started studying accounting at Lakeland University but then transferred to Marquette University, where she studied criminology and law.
To put herself through college and cut down debt, she drove to Sheboygan Falls on the weekends to work at Bemis Manufacturing for most of her education.
Kaat worked at Bemis and later Acuity for a few years after graduating, but she wanted to do something else.
She struggled to answer the age-old question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Kaat said she had great role models growing up, but couldn’t point to any women in leadership roles she could look to as an example.
At about 26 years old, she started thinking she hadn’t seen much outside Wisconsin and Germany, where her mother was born and raised.
"I was starting to wonder what else there could be out there,” Kaat said.
She quit her job at Acuity and left Wisconsin with nothing but a map to guide her.
“I literally packed up my car. I threw my skis in there. I put my bike on the top and ventured out West,” Kaat said. “I was so curious about Colorado and Utah.”
She landed in Spokane, Washington, where she met a retired Air Force pilot who shared all the places he’d gone in his career. It resonated with Kaat.
“I thought to myself, ‘Well, that just sounds exactly what I want to do.’ Not necessarily be a pilot, but I wanted to be an officer in the Air Force,” she said.
A country kid sees the world
Kaat tried to go straight into Officer Training School, which wasn’t typical for civilians to do, and she wasn’t accepted.
The recruiter said her last opportunity to join the Air Force was to enlist and get a plane leaving Wednesday, two days from then and five days from her 28th birthday — the cutoff age to enlist.
So, in 1996, she got on a plane for basic training in Texas.
She was quickly assigned a leadership role as dorm chief, where she was accountable for others and found herself supporting young women who struggled with stress and fear of leaving family and friends.
“The lights would go off at night and you could hear a couple of people crying because they're just scared essentially, and maybe second-guessing their decision or, who knows,” Kaat said.
She said it was a new experience, but it seemed like a natural fit because she had more life experience. Plus, she’d always been the first person to say "yes" to do something.
“If there was ever a kid who was always trying to be the fastest or raising their hand to say, ‘I'll do it,’ or eager to just jump in and do whatever, I was that kid,” she said.
Kaat went to Officer Training School almost two years after she enlisted. She said it opened a new world of opportunities, first moving her to Greenland.
“I found myself as a Second Lieutenant sitting up there near the North Pole, my mind blown because I think even today, I'm a kid from this little farm in Sheboygan Falls who had a hard time in high school with grades and everything, and now I'm in Greenland,” she said.
From places like Iceland and Ascension Island, the Air Force took Kaat all over the place.
She found structure in the military, which she struggled with in her early adult years, figuring out college and trying to find a job. She didn’t feel she was a spectacular candidate and wouldn’t know how to start that journey, she said.
“The military gave me that possibility of you jump into something, and then they take you, they train you, they send you somewhere,” Kaat said. “I didn't necessarily care where I went, I just wanted to go."
Pushing beyond her comfort zone
As her career progressed — holding roles like senior range evaluator and launch officer at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida and senior adviser to the commandant and director of the Air Force at the German National War College in Hamburg, Germany — Kaat was pushed out her comfort zone.
She's an introvert and said she’d often prefer to be listening in the back of a room, but her roles challenged her to lead because “more often than not, you’re going to be in the front of things.”
Kaat engaged in public speaking, communicated with generals and ambassadors and served as a conduit of information between federal departments and world leaders.
She remained humble through all her experiences, worked hard and strove toward her goals.
“People liked being around me because even though I was a kid going, ‘Yeah, I'll do it!’ I was also that adult going, ‘I'll do it!’” she said.
Kaat spent the last years of her military service in Hamburg, Germany, and then Hawaii, where she was promoted to colonel. She retired with 25 years of service at the end of 2021.
She paved her own way forward, but always with the support of her family and friends who cheered her on every step of the way.
Go after dreams 'fearlessly,' Kaat says
As she reflected on her military experience, Kaat said she learned she was capable of more than she ever thought possible.
“I surprised myself over and over,” she said. “The capacity for humans to adapt and change, it's more than I think sometimes we even know.”
Since retiring, she's been able to visit family in Wisconsin and Germany and find time in the mornings for herself, her favorite part of the day.
“I still get up super early at 4:30. I have a cup of tea, I stretch, take my bicycle out to this nature preserve. And then I go for a run, take the bicycle and I go to the ocean and then I go for a swim,” Kaat said. "That’s all before eight o'clock, and it's just beautiful.”
Living in Hawaii, Kaat is still figuring out what retirement means — a change many veterans face when they leave the structure of the military — and is adjusting to the minutia of civilian life.
“Figuratively, not so figuratively — there’s just a lot of unpacking to do,” she said.
Kaat is still finding ways to let that curious kid from the farm live on, with plans to build a wooden boat and take a trip to Antarctica.
For those reaching for a goal, Kaat said to go after it “fearlessly.”
She said, “I often found that if you want something, if you project into the future and into what you say, what you feel and what you believe … you're propelled towards it.”
Contact Alex Garner at 224-374-2332 or agarner@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @alexx_garner.
This article originally appeared on Sheboygan Press: Ingrid Kaat, Sheboygan Falls native, spent 25 years in US Air Force
