ROCHELLE – At the Rochelle city council meeting on January 24, Andy Rogde presented a flag to the city on behalf of himself and his colleague Jonathan Plaza after the couple returned last month from a deployment in Saudi Arabia with their Air National Guard unit from Madison, Wisconsin. .
“We wanted to bring back something the city could have and thank them for the support when we were gone,” Rogde said.
Rogde and Plaza departed for Saudi Arabia and Operation Inherent Resolve on October 4 and returned on January 14. Rogde’s rank is Technical Sergeant and while deployed he handled materiel management which involved aircraft supplies and replacement, ordering and issuing parts as well as supplying personnel with items like uniforms, flashlights, helmets and vests.
Plaza is also a technical sergeant. His responsibility on the operation included safeguarding the tools the crews needed to maintain and repair the aircraft. He has been a truck mechanic with the Air National Guard since 2014 and volunteered for the mission to experience something new and get out of his comfort zone.
“A lot of these tools are aircraft-specific and can be expensive,” Plaza said. “The way they maintain the planes is different. Each is assigned to a part of the aircraft. It was different for me because in the past I was solely responsible for an entire truck. It was quite an experience.”
Plaza was in the military for a total of 12 years. He started in the Air Force at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada in 2010. As a civilian, he works for Rochelle Municipal Utilities at their diesel plant.
Rogde has been with the Air National Guard since 2015 and the Wisconsin unit since 2016 or 2017. He joined the Air Force in 2010 and served four years of active duty in Little Rock, Arkansas. While on active duty, he was in Qatar on two deployments in 2012 and 2014. Here he is the storekeeper for RMU’s electrical department where he manages inventory.
“Overall it was a good deployment,” Rogde said of Operation Inherent Resolve. “We have done a lot in these 90 days. 90 is half of my previous deployments while on active duty. I had never been to Saudi Arabia. It’s definitely a different environment. We had a good group and did a lot of good things.
Rogde had never been deployed during the holidays before. He said it wasn’t easy, but it helped him to work nights in Saudi Arabia when it was daylight in Rochelle. He was able to video chat a lot and bought presents in advance for his family.
Plaza has a young daughter who made it difficult for her to go on deployment.
“I faced her a lot and had a hard time seeing her reaction when she saw my face on the phone,” Plaza said. “I thought it would be easier with her being so little, but it wasn’t. They’re trying to cheer up while we’re there for the holidays. We had Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations and ate turkey.
Rogde said the deployment was the last for the F-16 aircraft the unit has flown in 28 years. He found it interesting, in addition to discovering the Middle East during the winter for the first time. It has been there during summers when the temperature reached 120 degrees. This time the weather turned “rather cold”. He stayed in a tent for the first time on this deployment, which took some getting used to.
Plaza said he had the chance to visit and experience the culture of Al-Kharj, which was the local town near where the unit was stationed. He called it “totally different” from the states. He also found the logistics of the flight schedule intriguing.
“I found the way the plane was maintained and the flight schedule interesting,” Plaza said. “They flew around the clock.”
Both Rogde and Plaza said they enjoyed the experience and expressed a desire to return. When asked what they had learned from Operation Inherent Resolve, both men said their leadership skills had been enhanced by the deployment.
“Overall it was a good experience,” Plaza said. “Anyone who would consider joining the military or the Air National Guard, I would tell them that we consider ourselves one big family. We take care of each other and it’s full of really good experiences.
One of the reasons Rogde decided to donate the flag to the city council was the fact that he and Plaza had the same employer and were deployed together in the same unit.
“I thought it was cool that the city deployed two employees to the same unit,” Rogde said. “I was with Jonathan almost every night except for the nights off. I bet the last time the city deployed two employees in the same unit was during wartime. We are a nice little town. Something like that can’t have been common in the past.
