Mom was mentor for first woman to head Texas Guard
CAMP MABRY — Long before Tracy Norris made history as the first woman to head the Texas National Guard, there were signs of ambition, a hunger to do great things. It started when she was 4. “She was sitting on the couch, and she had this great big animal book laying in her lap,” said her mother, Linda Norris.
“It was a grown-up book, not a children’s book, and she was sitting there with these big ol’ tears running down her face. And I said, ‘What in the world is wrong with you?’ She said, ‘I want to know what these words say.’ ”
Too young to read, Tracy Norris nonetheless sat in on a class with older children. She became a voracious reader and an energetic student. She competed in ice skating. She worked as a janitor to help pay for her high school tuition. She earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology, then master’s degrees in urban and regional planning, strategic studies and business administration.
Twelve days into 2019, Norris, 54, took command of the Texas Guard, the nation’s largest. Her achievement was a first in the Lone Star State and a rare one for women in a military long dominated by men. There are only five women heading the nation’s 54 guard organizations. Thirteen women have been adjutant generals since 1997, when Maj. Gen. Martha Rainville led the Vermont National Guard.
How Norris made it to the top is a story that is to a large degree about her mother, who raised three kids after a divorce while working a job that required her to travel. It’s about women’s larger part in the workforce after World War II, as well as expanded roles in the Army. And it’s about Norris marching at the tip of the demographic spear, with her mother as a guiding star.
“Even when I didn’t have female mentors I could look up to, my mom has always been a phone call away,” she said. “One of her best phrases that she always tells me is, especially if I’m fired up about something … ‘Do you really want to use your energy on that?’ ”
Changing demographics
Norris, a two-star general, was installed during a Jan. 12 changeof-command ceremony at Austin’s Camp Mabry after being appointed to the post by Gov. Greg Abbott. She replaced Maj. Gen. John F. Nichols, an F-16 pilot and Gulf War veteran who had led the guard since 2011.
“Gen. Norris exemplifies the values of service and sacrifice, and her record is nothing short of impeccable,” Abbott said.
Norris worked her way up the ranks to head the guard’s 20,873 soldiers and airmen, serving as deputy adjutant general and commander of the Texas Army National Guard. She also led the 176th Engineer Brigade and served as the 36th Infantry Division’s chief of staff in 2010.
Norris was a rare site in the command group that oversaw Iraq’s nine southern provinces. During her initial visit there with a Texasbased command team, she met the American commander, Gen. Lloyd James Austin III. He was at one end of a V-shaped table, with Norris opposite him.
“He comes in, he stands here, everybody sits down, and then he looks around the table ... and he sees me and he goes and does a double take,” Norris recalled, laughing.
She thinks Austin, the first African-American to lead the U.S. Central Command, wasn’t expecting to see a woman in the room, but she added that there was more to it than that. The 36th, she said, was only the third National Guard division to deploy to Iraq.
To be sure, the Army’s demographics were changing.
Women were on the battlefield from day one of the invasion, serving as medics and mechanics and as guards at makeshift prisoner-ofwar camps. But as America’s role in Iraq and Afghanistan deepened and combat rotations became routine, more and more women deployed as well.
Some played increasingly important roles. Enter Norris, the 36th’s chief of staff. But, she wasn’t the only woman who’d held a serious job either in the war zone or back at Camp Mabry.
“I think on division staffs you probably started seeing more women, especially for military intelligence and some of those (in) signal, those key support things,” Norris explained. “It was who had the best talent. … And I can tell you now I think our signals section, which was, again, we had male and female, they ran circles around the other division’s signal people.”
‘Beer on our cereal’
Norris was a “latchkey kid” long before the phrase became popular. Her parents divorced when she was 5. The family moved from Mississippi to Atlanta when Linda Norris went to work for the U.S. Labor Department at a job that involved inspecting migrant worker facilities in eight states. Often, she was on the road.
At first, Linda Norris left Tracy and her other children, John and Brandy, with an elderly couple when she was gone for days or a week at a time. The couple took the kids to school, picked them up, fed them and helped with their homework.
The kids later lived on their own, with supervision from afar.
Self-reliant, the kids weren’t without a sense of humor. One day Brandy, the youngest, called her mom’s boss on the phone. It was a Friday, and Linda Norris had been on the road that week. The kids were wondering when she’d get back.
“‘Well, I hope she gets back soon because we’re having to put beer on our cereal,’ ” Linda Norris recalled her daughter telling the supervisor, adding, “They were out of milk, but they weren’t having to put beer on their cereal.” It was a gag.
The family did most everything together. On camping and field trips in the woods, the kids learned about geology from their mother, who took college classes on the subject. When Tracy Norris decided to compete in ice skating, the family was all in.
“Tracy was very serious, a selfstarter. She wanted to ice skate. The whole family just said, ‘OK, we’ll support that.’ We got up at 4 o’clock in the morning and went to the ice rink,” Linda Norris said.
The sisters skated. Mom and John slept.
In doing it all as parent and camp counselor, Linda Norris challenged the kids to think. She often took the opposite position on a discussion topic “to see if we would broaden our minds instead of getting locked into one type of view and not look around and see what are the other possibilities that it could be.”
Obstacles sometimes clouded those possibilities.
Norris recalled that early in her career, a soldier once walked by and patted her head, saying, “Good second lieutenant.” Initially shocked, she walked out of the room after he left.
“I don’t know if I ever had anything in my face as far as ‘you’re a woman.’ I think through time, and I probably missed some of them, there were subtleties. I know there were times not being included at meetings that I thought maybe I should be in, but it was very subtle,” she said.
The solution? Work through a respected person.
Seeing it happen
When she came to Texas, most of the women were majors. These days they’re in the higher ranks, serving as lieutenant colonels and colonels, and in larger numbers. That’s also true of the senior enlisted side; there are more female sergeant majors.
Role models, Norris said, are important. She recalled a female colonel she worked for at the National Guard Bureau who showed her that it was possible to rise through the ranks and helped her get a company command as a captain.
Col. Marilyn Munsney, one of the first women in the bureau to get a battalion command in her state, later went to the Army War College. She opened a world of possibilities for Norris, who wanted to follow in her footsteps — and in time did.
“I think looking at the soldiers and the airmen or the airwomen in the force, like captains and majors,” she said, “when they see women at lieutenant colonel and colonel level, and even being nominated for general officer — the same on the enlisted side, when a sergeant sees a sergeant first class being promoted or selected for first sergeant and sergeant major — then they know that can happen.”