Katie Lunning, of the 33rd Airlift Wing, was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross on Jan. 7 at the 133rd Maintenance Group North hangar in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
The second nurse ever presented the award, she earned the DFC for her exemplary service during a six-month tour based in Qatar that began in the summer of 2021, according to a Department of Veterans Affairs release.
Lunning is an intensive care unit nurse manager at Central Iowa VA and a Minnesota Air National Guard air transport nurse.
She was a member of a critical care air transport team, a three-person unit meant to pick up the most critically injured or ill and fly them to the higher echelon of care.
Lunning helped evacuate and care for patients coming out of Kabul during the final days of the American evacuation from Afghanistan when an engineering student, turned Islamic State militant, strapped 20 pounds of explosives to himself and killed more than 160 civilians and 13 American service members at the entrance to the international airport.
“We were pulling them out as they are getting injured,” she said. “August 26th, when the suicide bomber exploded at Abbey Gate, we were the first team in. It was the largest medical evacuation out of that coalition hospital ever and very dangerous on the ground. We had to leave the airplane to go get our patients as well.”
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Lunning and other members of her team worked around the clock to evacuate more than 20 patients out of the chaos as Afghanistan fell to the Taliban.
“In that moment, I was really just focusing on the job,” she said. “We came up with a mantra. We would say, ‘We can’t control what’s happening on the ground and what we can control is our jobs.’ We focused very much on getting people home. We all have kids right around the same age that we wanted to get home to.
“We just focused on getting everybody home to their people because everybody’s going to have a why, right? We talked about that and how it was our role to get them back to their reason for being there.”
Lunning has a nine-year-old daughter with her husband, Joshua Lunning, the command sergeant major of the Recruiting and Retention Battalion at the Iowa Army National Guard.
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Lunning joined the Minnesota Army National Guard as a combat medic right out of high school and then switched to the Minnesota Air National Guard to pursue nursing, receiving a direct commission as an officer.
She began working at Minnesota VA as a student nurse in 2009 while she attended Bethel University in Saint Paul for her Bachelor of Science in Nursing. After graduating in 2012, she worked as a registered nurse in the intensive care unit where she stayed until moving to Iowa.
Lunning is now an ICU nurse manager at the Central Iowa VA in Des Moines.
Reach Julia LeDoux at Julia@connectingvets.com.