CENTER TWP — After 35 years in the Air Force, much of it spent watching the Russians, a Knoch High School graduate has returned to Western Pennsylvania to retire.

Cheryl Kearney's retirement as a brigadier general was effective Dec. 1. She moved to Beaver County in mid-October in the midst of her terminal leave.

Kearney, the oldest daughter of William and Karen Lynd of Saxonburg, graduated from Knoch in 1979.

She's still remembered by one of the teachers at Knoch.

Fred Bernard, who retired in 2003, was the girls track coach in 1979 and has strong recollections of the future general.

He said, “I remember her very well. She was one of my track statisticians. She was the best statistician I had in 30 years of coaching.

“She was always thorough and you could always depend on her. It was important for the girls to have their results,” said Bernard.

“I signed up for ROTC at the University of Pittsburgh in December 1983 and was commissioned in the Air Force on Jan. 6, 1984, as a second lieutenant,” Kearney said. “I majored in legal studies.”

Then she took career field training at Lowery Air Force Base's intelligence training course. She had two powerful motivations for signing up, she said.

“They offered $100 a month, and I was a poor college student like everyone else,” she said. “My boyfriend was already in the Air Force. He enlisted and left the day after he graduated from Knoch.”

They were married and divorced, she said.

While her marriage may not have lasted, her Air Force career did.

Asked how an initial four-year commitment stretched into, as Kearney said, 35 years, 10 months and 25 days, she points to the schooling she got through the Air Force.

“So when I came up on my first opportunity for extended active duty commitment, I was in a master's degree program. I was living in Monterey, Calif., which was a pretty cool place and the Air Force was paying.”

Kearney was studying at the Naval Postgraduate School and the Defense Language Institute. The program combined national security strategy and Russian, though she said she now doesn't remember “a word of it.”

She spent two years at Scott Air Force Base in Belleville, Ill., as an analyst watching and analyzing Soviet air lift capabilities.

Her career took her to Belgium for a two-year stint as an intelligence analyst, three years as an instructor in political science at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., and then Georgetown where she finished her Ph.D. in three years.

“That's a tough row to hoe,” Kearney said. “I got a lot of education.”

She then was assigned to the Pentagon where she was named executive director of the secretary of defense's defense policy board which advises the secretary on national security issues.

“There was a change in 2000 and I was assigned to the secretary of the Air Force's office and I prepared the secretary for congressional testimony,” Kearney said.

When 9/11 happened she was in the Air Force secretary's office in the Pentagon when the jetliner hit.

“I was on the opposite end of the building,” she said.

Her truck was stuck at a Pentagon parking lot, so she walked home.

“The next day I went back to work, and the building was still burning. It was a crazy couple of weeks,” she said.

She became a casualty assistance officer, helping the survivors of 9/11 victims with arranging memorial services.

“The family of Reuben Ornedo, he was a passenger on the plane; his wife was pregnant. His daughter never met him. I stay in touch with the family every year. I call them my 9/11 family,” she said.

She earned a second master's degree in national security from the National War College.

Kearney said she then went to Japan as a deputy commander of an intelligence group.

Then she went to “Colorado's Buckley Air Force Base, working intelligence missions again,” she said. “In December 2007, I became permanent professor and department head of political sciences at the Air Force Academy.”

She decided to retire as a brigadier general because “12 years is the right time to run an academic department.”

She was sent to Baghdad in 2011.

“It was a little crazy; everyone was leaving the country, and you are all staying to try and set up the office of security cooperation,” she said.

She was named a Supreme Court fellow in 2016, one of only four named annually.

“The four fellows spend an entire year at the court, seeing every single argument and decision and spending time with each of the justices and then you do a research paper,” Kearney said, adding she thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

Upon retirement, she said, it was “time to come home after being gone for 35 years and living all over the world. It was time to come home.”

She has been married to Daniel Kearney for 27 years, who himself is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel.

They have three adult sons and four grandsons.

“I have no idea what I am going to do next,” she added. “We have four grandsons that we love and we are going to spend more time with them.”

She would recommend a military career as an option for other young women.

“Absolutely, it gives you the one place where you are paid the same amount of money. There are standards and expectations, and it's really up to you,” she said.

There have been changes since she enlisted 35 years ago.

Kearney said, “There are a lot more opportunities and a less gender bias.”

“Intelligence work presented unique challenges. It is hard to believe it went by that fast,” she said of her military career.