Early Life, Education, and Air Force Service
Wilson was born in Keene, New Hampshire, the daughter of Martha Lou, nurse, and George Douglas "Doug" Wilson, a commercial pilot and member of the Experimental Aircraft Association. Wilson grew up around aviation and hoped to become a pilot like her father and grandfather before her. Her paternal grandparents were born in Scotland. Her grandfather, George Gordon "Scotty" Wilson, flew for the Royal Air Force (RAF) in World War I and emigrated to America in 1922 where he was a barnstormer and airport operator in the 1920s and 1930s. He served as a courier pilot during World War II and started the New Hampshire Civil Air Patrol where he was a Wing Commander. Her father started flying at age 13 and enlisted in the United States Air Force after high school.
The United States Air Force Academy began admitting women during her junior year at Keene High School (Keene, New Hampshire), and Wilson applied and was appointed to the Academy. At the Academy, she was the first woman to command basic training and the first woman Vice Wing Commander. She graduated in 1982 as a Distinguished Graduate (magna cum laude equivalent). Although she had planned to go to flight school, Wilson earned a Rhodes Scholarship to study at the University of Oxford during the sixth year that women were permitted to apply and continued her education at Jesus College, University of Oxford, earning a Master of Philosophy and D.Phil. in International Relations by 1985.
In 1990, Oxford University Press published her book, International Law and the Use of Force by National Liberation Movements, which won the 1988 Paul Reuter Prize of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The Paul Reuter Prize is awarded for a major work in the sphere of international humanitarian law. Wilson won the second Reuter prize ever awarded.
An Air Force officer for seven years, Wilson was a negotiator and political adviser to the U.S. Air Force in England, and a defense planning officer for NATO in Belgium, where her work included arms control negotiations.
Read more about this topic: Heather Wilson
Famous quotes containing the words early, air, force and/or service:
“We early arrive at the great discovery that there is one mind common to all individual men: that what is individual is less than what is universal ... that error, vice and disease have their seat in the superficial or individual nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The nonchalance and dolce-far-niente air of nature and society hint at infinite periods in the progress of mankind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“...here he is, fully alive, and it is hard to picture him fully dead. Death is thirty-three hours away and here we are talking about the brain size of birds and bloodhounds and hunting in the woods. You can only attend to death for so long before the life force sucks you right in again.”
—Helen Prejean (b. 1940)
“Let the good service of well-deservers be never rewarded with loss. Let their thanks be such as may encourage more strivers for the like.”
—Elizabeth I (1533–1603)