VA nurse awarded Distinguished Flying Cross

Katie Lunning, of the 33rd Airlift Wing, was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross January 7 at the 133rd Maintenance Group North hangar in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Lunning is an Intensive Care Unit nurse manager at Central Iowa VA and a Minnesota Air National Guard air transport nurse.

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.

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, Afghanistan, amidst active conflict.

Left the airplane to get patients

“We were pulling them out as they are getting injured,” said Lunning. “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.

Katie Lunning

“We took injured Marines and Afghan civilians who really weren’t flight worthy, but there was no choice. We just had to get them out of there. A lot of medical events occurred on the airplane, but we ended up being able to safely deliver everybody to Landstuhl, Germany, for further medical care.”

Evacuated more than 20 patients

These events surround the harrowing 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 in Kabul.

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.

Lunning humbly describes her experience as a matter of circumstance and says she was glad to be in the right place at the right time to be able to help civilians and fellow service members in desperate need of evacuation and care.

“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.

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.

Nurse passionate about caring for Veterans

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.

“I appreciate all of my experience at VA, my VA training and my VA ICU nurse experience,” she added. “That was really where I got the training it took to accomplish the mission. My whole background has been at VA so I’m appreciative of everything VA has given me. I’m very grateful to not only take care of Veterans on the front end but I’m also very passionate about working at VA and continuing the care for Veterans here at home.”