She Never Stopped Dreaming: Vernice “FlyGirl” Armour got every dream a four-year-old ever asked for. The remarkable part is what she built while she was afraid no one would come.

Vernice "FlyGirl" Armour. Photo courtesy of Vernice Armour.

There was a trombone in the garage, and it did not have a mouthpiece.

The garage belonged to her father, a TV repairman, and it was full of the things a repairman collects. Her mother called it junk. Her father called it treasure. Somewhere in the treasure a young Vernice Armour found a case, opened it, and there it was, a bright shiny trombone with no mouthpiece. she played it anyway, and by her own account she made horrible sounds. One day her father heard those sounds and came out to stop them. That is a valuable musical instrument, he told her. Put it away. She says the line now with a little bass in her voice, doing the memory.

She put it away. She did not forget it was there.

Years later, ninth grade, at a public county school outside Memphis, she walked up to the band director and asked where the trombones were. There weren't any. Young program, he told her. She said she had one at home. He made her a deal. Take lessons, earn an audition, and if she was good enough she could sit in the concert band. That night her parents drove her to the music store before it closed, and she came home with a mouthpiece and a couple of books and started to practice. She practiced every single day. Months later the director gave her the audition and asked, amazed, where she had studied. Nowhere, she told him. She taught herself.

That year she made the all-West jazz band. The next year she made the all-state jazz band, the all-state orchestra, and a chair in the Memphis Youth Symphony Orchestra.

Hold that picture, because it is the whole woman in miniature. Before anyone gave Vernice Armour a seat, she gave herself the instrument.

You already know the other version of her, the one that has flown a thousand missions. Vernice “FlyGirl” Armour is America's first Black female combat pilot. She was a four-year-old in Memphis who announced she would be a police officer on a horse, then grew up to ride a Nashville motorcycle squad, pin on a badge in Tempe, earn her wings, and fly the AH-1W Super Cobra on two tours over Iraq. She told the story on Oprah, on CNN, on The View, then turned all of it into a seven-figure speaking and coaching brand sharing it from a thousand corporate stages. Every beat is polished to keynote shine, because polishing those beats is her job. Her own brand promises no masks and no fluff, just real. This is an attempt to take her at her word.

Armour with Oprah Winfrey on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Photo courtesy of Vernice Armour.

Because when you sit with the whole arc, the firsts stop being the interesting part. Look at the list her life actually makes. She wanted to be a police officer on a horse, and got the horse, and became the officer. She wanted a motorcycle, and rode one, and then rode one in uniform. She wanted to fly, and flew Cobras in combat. She wanted a child, and had her daughter alone through IVF. She wanted a family, and she is engaged now and blending two of them. Most lives run dream, then achievement, then a long quiet. Hers runs dream, achievement, new dream, over and over. The obvious question is how. The better one is why she never ran out.

The girl who gave herself permission

Trace the wanting back and it lands in Riverside, California in a subdivision built, improbably, around horses. The sidewalks were laid with sand instead of concrete so the animals could walk easy on their feet. Behind the family's house, past the pool, was a stretch where they kept a small farm's worth of life. Four horses at one point. A bull her mother refused to name because they were going to eat it, until she relented and called him Sir Loin, which the kids repeated for years without understanding the joke. Geese, chickens, a goat for the milk, a garden. And a pony named Tera, one brown eye and one blue, that young Vernice fed and cared for herself. She had wanted to be a cop on a horse because she'd seen mounted officers in Chicago and thought it was the coolest thing going. Then the pony showed up, and the dream had a body to sit on.

A young Vernice Armour on her first pony. Photo courtesy of Vernice Armour.

She was the only girl in a blended house full of brothers. The two oldest were a decade older, and for entertainment they'd lace boxing gloves onto Vernice and the younger brother she outranked by a year and coach the two of them into going at it. Sometimes he got her good. I don't like this game, she remembers thinking. She kept climbing back in anyway.

That is the pattern under everything. Whatever she wanted, she asked for it out loud and then went and got it, permission or no permission. Her mother said no scooter, you're a girl, so the first thing she bought when she got to college was a motorcycle, and she didn't mention it to her mother until after it was hers. Her parents didn't want her to be a police officer, because it was dangerous, and being a police officer had been her dream her whole life, so, as she puts it, that was not even a thought. She proved she could handle it more than once. On Nashville's motorcycle squad she got her bike two days before training started, while the men on the squad had been riding theirs for two weeks. When she asked her sergeant why, he told her the truth. They hadn't been sure she could handle the bike. She handled it.

Armour in uniform during her years as a police officer. Photo courtesy of Vernice Armour.

The clearest proof of the engine is a piece of math she still carries. It took her four years to be accepted into Officer Candidate School. Women could apply only once a year. Of the people turned away, only a small fraction ever come back and try again. “I was 12% of 12% of 12%. I'm an anomaly,” she says.

What if she had given up after the first year, she asks. Or the second, or the third. She once heard a speaker at an entrepreneurship conference put a number to it. Everyone knows the statistic that most businesses fail in the first few years. The speaker said it wasn't true. They don't fail. They give up. It stuck to her like a burr, because she has spent a lifetime being the one who reapplied.

“I was 12% of 12% of 12%. I'm an anomaly.”

Armour as an Army ROTC cadet in 1994.
Photo courtesy of Vernice Armour.

The Party Nobody Came To

Here is where the wonder earns its teeth, because Vernice Armour is not fearless and never has been.

When she turned sixteen, she threw herself a birthday party and invited everyone at her school. Her boyfriend came. Her best friend came. Nobody else did. By then she'd transferred to a performing arts school in the city, a long drive from the county where she lived. Back then she couldn’t see it, but now, she can imagine the parents who weren't about to make that drive. Understanding the reason didn't fill the room. From that day she has carried a small, exact fear that a decorated combat pilot has no business still carrying, and carries anyway. If she throws the party, will anyone show up?

Sit with the size of that. She flew a nine-million-dollar attack helicopter into small arms fire and took bullet holes and kept flying. Decades later, the thing that can still stop her cold is an empty room with her own name on the invitation. She'll tell you selling a keynote to a corporation feels clean, because they want the story. Offering herself as a coach feels like standing in that empty room again. Do they want me. Am I good enough.

Watch what she does with the fear, because it is the most instructive thing about her. She does not wait for it to leave. When she started hosting a monthly gathering she called Breakthroughs Over Coffee, the old question arrived right on time. What if no one comes. she answered it before it could stop her. If nobody shows, she figured, she gets two hours to do work she needed to do anyway. “If one person shows up, they get one on one time with me. How lucky for them,” she says. And if ten or fifteen show, it turns into an unplanned mastermind.

She decided, in advance, that every possible outcome was a win. That is the gutsy move she sells from stages, shrunk down to something she can practice on a Tuesday. It was never the absence of fear. It is the party you throw anyway.

“If one person shows up, they get one on one time with me. How lucky for them.”

The freedom she wasn't allowed to name

Pilots talk about their aircraft like people, so introduce yourself to the Cobra the way she does. Feisty. Fast in a way you only feel ten feet off the ground. It took bullet holes and kept her alive. It was not forgiving about bullets and endlessly forgiving about protection, which was the whole point, because between that aircraft and the ground were Marines who were somebody's entire world. She goes quiet and looks out the window when she talks about it.

Armour in the cockpit during her deployment to Iraq. Photo courtesy of Vernice Armour.

She flew all of it as a Black, gay woman during Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the years when the law itself required her to keep the truth of her own life out of her own mouth. Come Monday, when everyone traded weekend stories about a wife or a girlfriend, she'd say she went out with a friend. She used to make a joke of it. “They didn't ask,” she says, “but they could tell.”

Ask what it cost and she turns it around to what it withheld. A different kind of freedom, she calls it, the freedom to just be herself wherever she happened to be standing. She made a decision early about how it would go if it ever came to that. She'd watched others get pushed out and go quietly, and she resolved that she would not. She'd keep the media on speed dial and go out loud. Until then she would serve honorably, and once she was out she would say the thing from every mountaintop she could climb. If they had known, none of it would have been allowed to happen, not the wings or the missions or the Marines she brought home. And here is the part that still gets her. It didn't make a difference to the people who mattered. The Marines on the ground did not care one way or the other whether she was gay.

“They didn't ask, but they could tell.”

There's a scene she keeps near the keynote without putting it in. A commanding officer called her into his office and asked why the press wanted her. What makes you so special. She told him she wasn't, that she was a co-pilot who wanted to be the best she could be and get Marines home, and then she reached for something he might feel. When a family sends people to Harvard and Princeton for generations, nobody throws a party. When the first person in a family graduates from there, that family celebrates, even though hundreds of strangers walked the same stage before. She was the first from her community. People were just celebrating. Did he get it? He got it, she says. Did he sign off on it? He didn't, or she doesn't remember, and it doesn't seem to matter to her either way. What somebody thinks of me is none of my business, she says. She'd wanted him to understand. She said what was on her heart. Then she let the rest of it go.

Armour on the March/April 2007 cover of The Crisis.

The Weight, and The Women Behind Her

For twenty years, every room has announced her as America's First before she's said a word. She won't call it a cage. She calls it a responsibility and a privilege, the to-whom-much-is-given kind, a chance to be an example for young people especially. But she's clear about what going first can cost. A lot of the people who went first, she points out, weren't celebrated in their time at all. She runs through them without hesitation. The Tuskegee Airmen. The Montford Point Marines. The leaders who got a target on their back precisely because everyone behind them was watching. Being first can be like being the top seed in a bracket, she says, with everyone below you gunning to knock you off. Plenty of people didn't want the first Black president, and it wasn't because they wanted the job.

First implies a second, and she keeps up with hers. The second Black woman to fly for the Marine Corps is Miska Geter, and the two are still close enough that Vernice recently told the story of their friendship in an AARP piece. There's a third, in Nashville, Elizabeth Okereebah, who she says is now eyeing a run for office, and a little over twenty years later…a fourth who earned it about a year ago. In her telling these women aren't competition. They're the proof the door she pushed through stayed open behind her.

She Can't Sit Still

The most honest thing about spending an hour with Vernice Armour is that the next dream keeps interrupting the last one.

Ask about FlyGirl Construction, the general contracting company almost nobody asks her about, and she'll give you the unglamorous truth. She hasn't built it out yet. She's deciding whether to build it from scratch or buy one already standing. What she wanted was something traditional, a business that could run without her up on a stage, that keeps earning when she's out of the room. And right now, she's circling another company entirely, one that has nothing to do with construction. She likes having more than one of everything, she says, as long as it doesn't burn her out. She's an author, a coach, and a life adventurist on top of all of it, and she says plainly that she's having fun.

She's also, still, an athlete. She played professional football for the San Diego Sunfire and won Camp Pendleton's Strongest Warrior twice, and she'll tell you every hotel has a staircase and a floor, which is all you need. The discipline comes and goes and she knows it. Last year she lined up for a sprint triathlon alongside a group of entrepreneurs, a 750-meter swim, a 13-mile bike, and a 5K. Two months before we spoke she trekked to Machu Picchu, four days and three nights and twenty-six miles of it.

And the dream that mattered most in this recent stretch had nothing to do with any of that. She'd wanted children since she was small, a boy and a girl. Her twenties went to being a cop and a Marine. Her thirties went to deploying and building a company. Then one afternoon, leaving a nail salon with her mother, she fell into conversation with a woman in her early forties who'd started menopause early, and it hit her like an alarm. She had always assumed she had all the time in the world. She went through IVF single, on her own terms, and stepped away from the business for months to do it, a real cut to the revenue she'd spent years building. When I asked her, at the very end, for the gutsiest thing she'd ever done that had nothing to do with a helicopter, a badge, or a stage, that was the answer. Not the combat. The baby. Her daughter is ten.

Armour with her newborn daughter. Photo courtesy of Vernice Armour.

There's a family around that girl now. Vernice is engaged. The two of them were friends for about a year before her fiancee kissed her on her birthday in the fall of 2020, in the thick of COVID, and they've been together since. They met because their daughters were already best friends in the same class at school, which means the girls have effectively always been sisters and behave exactly like it, irritated with each other one minute and inseparable the next. The wedding date isn't set. The engagement, she wanted it known, isn't private. consider this the announcement.

Armour and her fiancee. Photo courtesy of Vernice Armour.

The Most Peaceful Thing She Owns

Near the end I asked her to strip away every title and every stage and tell me what that four-year-old actually wanted underneath the uniform. She didn't reach for anything grand. We wanted to live, she said. Wanted to have fun. And did the little girl get it? A resounding yes.

Then I asked what the most peaceful part of her life is now. Not the flying, not the stage, not even her daughter. She thought about it and gave the quietest answer of the whole hour. “The most peaceful part of my life,” she said, “would be my relationship with me.”

“The most peaceful part of my life would be my relationship with me.”

She accepts herself, she said, one hundred percent. She's the one person guaranteed to laugh at every one of her own jokes, and she does it on purpose. Of everything on the long list of things she ever wanted, that's the one she never had to be first to get. Nobody handed it to her and nobody could take it back. She just gave it to herself, the way she gave herself the trombone before the band ever gave her a seat.

The dreams were always the visible part. This was the engine underneath them. It's why, every single time one dream landed, there was already another one idling, ready to go. She never needed the room to grant her permission, because she stopped waiting for it a long time ago.

Her story, she wanted me to know, is not over. Not even close.

Resources

Vernice “FlyGirl” Armour | https://vernicearmour.com

The official home for Armour's speaking, coaching, and leadership work, including her book Zero to Breakthrough.

Modern Military Association of America | https://modernmilitary.org

The country's largest organization for LGBTQ+ service members, veterans, and their families, formed from the groups that helped end Don't Ask, Don't Tell