From Shasta County to NIF: Brandi Lechleiter's veteran journey

Air Force veteran and Lab employee Brandi Lechleiter has been on a true journey: from the countryside of Shasta County to a military career that took her all over the world and opened the door to a fascinating and mission-driven career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's (LLNL) National Ignition Facility (NIF). At a Women's History Month event in March, she captured the audience’s attention with stories of adventure, hard work and finding her own path. 

Originally from Northern California, Lechleiter spent six years in the United States Air Force, during which she was stationed in South Carolina and Japan and traveled to many other locations as a satellite communications technician. She joined the NIF Control Room in 2007 and is now the classified operations responsible individual for NIF Operations. She feels that the military helped her to prioritize her work ethic, expectations for success, patience, creativity and independence. 

Throughout her upbringing, Lechleiter’s parents served as important role models in their service to their community. 

Lechleiter’s father, Craig, spent his entire career with the U.S. Forest Service and CalFire. He rose through the ranks from a Hotshot crewmember, responding to the most dangerous fires, to the level of superintendent over a grueling and dangerous career. Lechleiter enjoyed the presence of fire crews in her family’s life throughout her childhood. 

“I basically grew up with a rotating group of honorary uncles and aunts that all shared a fantastic sense of duty, sacrifice and adventure,” she said. 

Lechleiter’s mother, Evie, worked at her elementary school and led early-education projects. After Lechleiter’s youngest brother was born, Evie entered school transportation, starting as a driver and eventually rising to become the Shasta County Office of Education’s director of Transportation. 

The three children enjoyed playing in a nearby creek in the summers and doing art projects in the winters. 

“We had nearly no local kids to play with, so we were creative to entertain ourselves and had lots of freedom to have fun,” she said. 

Finding her way to the U.S. Air Force

Lechleiter graduated from Anderson Union High School in 1992 with close to straight As, but no real plan for her educational future or career. Most of her peers were going to work or to community college and few were going to four-year universities or enlisting in the military. She entered community college to study fine arts, but after having a major art project stolen from the studio, she was heartbroken and decided to leave school and work full-time. 

She worked for nine years in retail at Mervyn’s and Macy’s, where she enjoyed the daily puzzles of retail logistics and was good at observing local trends. In several cases, she ran profitable departments in stores that were not profitable overall. But the work was difficult, poorly compensated, and customers were sometimes aggressive, even violent. Feeling a need for change, she started thinking about other options. 

Lechleiter’s family has been involved in the military for several generations. Her paternal grandfather, Tom Lechleiter, enlisted in the Navy at 17 years old in 1941 and served in the Pacific onboard the USS White Plains, which has a rich World War II history. Her father served in the Army starting in 1970 and was stationed in Germany and her brother Adam retired from the U.S. Air Force with 20 years in service.

When she visited Adam after he joined the Air Force as a high-voltage civil engineering technician in Sacramento, she was impressed by both his experiences and his financial stability. She was inspired to join the Air Force; she walked into a recruitment office and enlisted. Searching for the right role, she tested for job skills and aptitude. 

“I told the recruiter that I wanted the most difficult job that I qualified for that was not on the flightline and had 50% indoor, 50% outdoor activities,” she said. 

He gave her several options and a fit emerged: she chose Satellite, Wideband, Telemetry and Space Systems (SWATS), known in the Air Force as Satcom. 

Having taken the reins, Lechleiter’s life was about to take a dramatic turn. At 26 years old, Lechleiter was older than most of the other recruits in her Basic Training flight, and she brought to the experience the maturity and grit that she had gained in her years in retail. While other recruits cried themselves to sleep, she faced the challenge head-on. 

Six years in the U.S. Air Force

Coming into the Air Force as an airman first class (E3) on her first assignment in South Carolina, Lechleiter was promoted quickly to a senior airman (E4), then staff sergeant (E5), within just a few months. As an installer/operator/maintainer of a set of satellite ground terminals for the 9^th Air Force command out of Shaw Air Force Base, S.C., and then with the 18th Fighter Wing out of Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan, she was part of a small team designed to set up communications for a new base in the event that a base was lost to attack. 

A month after moving from Shaw Air Force Base to Kadena Air Base, she was deployed to Pakistan for Operation Enduring Freedom. She spent the fall of 2002 on a small, remote base working 12-hour overnight shifts alone in a tiny tent. While she didn’t enjoy the assignment, it taught her to appreciate life’s small pleasures. 

Highlights of her time in the military

In August 2001, Lechleiter’s youngest brother Travis also joined the U.S. Air Force, following in his siblings’ footsteps and overseeing the overall flightworthiness and maintenance of F-15 and F-16 fighter planes. 

Around the same time — a few weeks before September 11 — Brandi Lechleiter was chosen to be the personal communication staff member for Lt. Gen. Charles Wald, commander of the 9th Air Force, on an administrative trip to England and Kuwait. In an age before cell phones, she toted a huge suitcase that unfolded into a five-foot satellite dish on which she could make secure phone calls. The team met with royalty, heads of intelligence, allied leaders and hundreds of U.S. troops. Lechleiter and the general’s wife also interviewed many enlisted people, mostly women, about their work environment in a deployed setting. At the end of the trip, the general organized an “incentive flight” for Lechleiter in an F-16, where the pilot gave her the choice to break the sound barrier over the ocean or fly practice dogfights over Georgia. 

“He let me fly it for about an hour in practice dogfights. It was truly the highlight of that little E3,” she said. 

“All in all, I have been able to step out into England, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Oman, Japan and Thailand,” she said. “Each place has unique memories. I would have never had a reason to see these places without the Air Force.” 

Moving on from the military

Returning from Pakistan, Lechleiter began experiencing stress-related problems related to issues within her team. She changed teams and still did not feel a fit, which led her to decide that she was ready after six years to leave the military and return to civilian life. 

“Leaving the USAF in 2006 was very difficult. I wanted to be part of all the good things that the military represented. But after years in retail, I finally recognized the signs from the military that I needed another change,” she said. 

She soon found a job in Long Beach, Calif., at Panamsat, a company that flew commercial satellites as a ground control station and was part of a global team that observed and commanded satellites from launch to established orbit. 

She knew from the beginning that the job would be temporary as the company was being bought and layoffs were planned, but she wanted to gain civilian work experience that would build on her military service. In 2007, when the planned layoffs were about to occur, a representative from LLNL called the team’s control room in Long Beach, and Lechleiter happened to answer the phone. 

“I was suspicious at first, not having any idea what Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was or what NIF did,” she said. But working at a national lab sounded important, and she wanted to learn more. 

The representative interviewed members of her team who were interested and hired them on the spot. 

This marked another dramatic turn on Lechleiter’s path: she was now part of the team that would run the nascent National Ignition Facility. 

NIF and Photon Science

Lechleiter joined the Laboratory's NIF & Photon Science directorate in 2007 as one of its first target diagnostics operators/technicians. 

“NIF at the time was still very much under construction, and every day something huge was being installed or commissioned,” she said. “We had a great time building our own group from the ground up in a place where everything was new and exciting. We got to commission every target diagnostic in NIF and see NIF get completed around us.” 

Lechleiter was promoted quickly, and moved up to target diagnostic coordinator, which represented the group to leadership. Then she became the lead for the Target Diagnostic Coordinators and Operators and later the work center supervisor. 

Lechleiter has spent the last five years as the classified operations responsible individual for NIF Operations. She helps to clarify the security requirements for classified operations and implements an organized plan to protect those assets. In addition to her programmatic role, she is also a senior supervisor and helps represent the interests of the duty engineer and lead operator work centers for the NIF Control Room. 

Since coming to the Lab, Lechleiter has finished her associate's degree through Las Positas College. In addition, she earned her OSHA certificate, which is useful in her work as a supervisor in a dynamic safety environment. 

She is also part of several leadership groups, and she is passionate about helping veterans transition into civilian jobs that leverage their skills. As someone who studied fine arts and got to where she is through experience, attitude, and perseverance, she wants to show others that, like her, they can go beyond the obvious path that has been set before them and later look back with pride at how far they have come. 

“I feel that there are many people like myself who are getting to the end of their military service and want to get straight into the workforce, but may not have the classic educational background of other people at the Lab,” she said. “I want to find these people before they disappear into civilian life and show them that their military experience is valuable and we understand them.” 

Through it all, Lechleiter’s constant companion has been her husband, Jason Boesiger, whom she met in their first year of high school in German I class. The two married 10 years later as Lechleiter entered the Air Force, and Jason made certain sacrifices to accompany her as a military spouse. Now he is a valued member of NIF, in a group called Material and Radiation Effects supporting visiting scientific groups performing experiments. 

The two enjoy riding bikes around Livermore and building trails with Volunteers for Outdoor California. 

When asked what’s next for her, Lechleiter is open-minded. 

“I go where I am needed. I don’t know what my plan is, and I’m interested in where ignition will take NIF,” she said. “I like being part of a big picture and I like to solve problems, so wherever those problems present themselves, I will end up getting to be part of the solution.”

—Kimberly Moore