TYNDALL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. --
Richard Turner has been a forestry technician with the 325th
Civil Engineer Squadron Natural Resources flight for the past six years. He
monitors the forest, provides wildfire protection and helps with forest
enhancement and restoration.
“I like being outdoors and not tied down to a desk,” Turner
said. “There is a lot of alone time out in the woods and sometimes you need
time to think on your own. For me, getting on a piece of equipment is like
therapy. I really enjoy and like to see how the forest is changing over the
years and a lot of people don’t really stand back and look at the ecosystem of
the forest. I get to see that every day.”
Turner is from Albany, Georgia, and enlisted in the Air
Force in 1984 during his junior year at Dougherty High School.
After spending six years in the Air Force as an F-15 Eagle
electrician, Turner decided not to cross-train to a different career field and
got out of the Air Force. That’s when Turner’s career in forestry would begin
to blossom.
“It was a bit different being out of the Air Force and a
little scary because I didn’t know what I was going to do,” Turner said. “I
went to school for a bit and then starting working with air conditioners in
order to provide food for the table. I was just trying to figure out what my
next step was.”
After several months, Turner decided to call the cooling
business quits and became a forest ranger in Florida. He spent 15 years as a
ranger, helping prevent fires, performing aid missions after hurricanes,
tornadoes and floods, and operating bulldozers.
From all the missions he did, a mission to provide aid after
Hurricane Katrina stood out to him.
“When I first got to the site, we were still in the process
of body recovery, and we were still finding people,” Turner said about
providing aid during Hurricane Katrina. “The experience was really not one you
wanted to do, but I knew somebody had to do it. It was a pretty hard experience.”
Though this was a fearful experience for him, Turner feared
something else much more.
“One of my worst fears as a firefighter was running across a
body that couldn’t get away from a fire,” he said. “I always worried about that
kind of stuff.”
Fortunately, he didn’t have to.
After a decade and a half as a forest ranger, he still
reminisces about the lifelong friends he made and his time as a ranger.
“I miss working with all the people there because after 15 years,
I made a lot of friends,” Turner said. “When you work with people for a long
time they become family.”
Family is an important part of Turner’s life. He and his
wife, Lisha, have been married for 30 years.
"We tried having kids, but unfortunately we couldn’t,”
Turner said. “We prayed about it and tried to figure out a way that would work
for us but couldn’t. After that we decided that adoption would be the answer.”
Before adopting, they first became foster parents of a baby
girl.
People don’t understand all the things that go behind
adoption. There is always the chance that the child can go back to the parents,
but it just so happened this was a different situation, Turner said.
The judge signed the adoption papers and the Turner family
became parents of their new daughter Heather.
“It felt great. I knew she was mine,” he said. “But it was
hard. I was 43 years old when they handed me a baby and said she was my
responsibility to take care of. It was different. I was happy, nervous and
excited in some ways.
“Now she knows she is adopted and that ‘daddy’ works in the
woods with Smokey the Bear,” Turner added.
When Turner is not working with Smokey, he likes spending
time with his family, the outdoors, fishing and hunting and spending time in
his small ranch filled with chickens, ducks and turkeys. He also enjoys woodworking and making wooden
toys.
“Before my little girl came along I did a lot of
woodworking,” Turner said. “Now that I have her, I’m happy to give her all my
time.
“I know later when my kid grows up she is going to say ‘you
know, my dad probably planted those trees,’” he said. ”That makes me happy.”