MOODY AIR FORCE BASE, Ga., Dec. 7, 2016 — What are the odds?
After eight years of separation, sisters-in-blood turned sisters-in-service are being reunited in the same unit here.
“I was only 12 when we were separated,” said Air Force Airman Elizabeth Davis, a 23rd Communications Squadron knowledge management technician. “I felt like I lost part of me. She was always the person I looked up to, and then I didn’t have that anymore.”
After their parents’ divorce, Davis lived in Florida while her sister, Airman 1st Class Ashley Moody, a 23rd CS client systems technician, lived in Kansas. They saw each other less than five times over the next eight years.
“Having a relationship virtually, as opposed to face-to-face, is always harder,” Moody said. “I was really sad when I’d miss once-in-a-lifetime experiences, like seeing her get married or go to prom. The separation kind of just makes you realize it’s a, ‘never really know what you have, until it’s gone,’ type thing.”
Joining the Air Force
Although the sisters missed some of each other’s milestones, they fantasized about something bringing them together.
Davis joined the Air Force in February 2015, while Moody reacted by telling her sister she’d never join the military. But in May 2016, Moody made the decision to enlist.
“I saw the success that my sister had created for herself at such a young age and I wasn’t really going anywhere in life I guess,” Moody said.
Moody entered basic training as an open-electronics trainee, leaving the decision to the Air Force to assign her a specific electronics job.
“My sister and I discussed jobs that would be good if we got stationed together, but it honestly was just a dream,” Moody said. “One of the jobs she said I should [pursue] was client systems.”
Getting Together
Although the job would help their chances of being stationed together, the sisters knew the odds were stacked against them.
“I knew that it would be a really slim-to-none chance for her to not only end up here, but [to be] in the same unit as me,” Davis said. “Honestly, it doesn’t even feel real right now. We’ve been separated so long that it hasn’t fully hit me yet that we’re actually going to be living at the same place.”
Though they won’t normally work together, the sisters said they’re happy being together here, and are looking forward to making up for lost time.
“There’s so much that I want to do, and it starts with the simplest things like watching movies together or just catching up and doing things that we didn’t really have the opportunity to do, like having dinner or shopping together,” Moody said. “I’m probably going to annoy her because I’ll be at her house every day.”
“I don’t think this happens often,” Moody added. “When I explain this to people I’m in tech school with, they’re like, ‘What, how?’ and I just have to tell them that I don’t even know, it’s like the luckiest thing.”
