Christine Westrich — Marine, artist, Milwaukee County emergency management boss

If you want cool, you've come to the right place, the office occupied by Milwaukee County Emergency Management Director Christine Westrich.

U.S. Naval Academy graduate, former Marine, broke barriers by taking the back seat in an F/A-18D Hornet, worked at the White House and the Pentagon, did some consulting, made a big life switch by going off to art school in California, and now she's back home.

How she got here is a long life story, wedged into 44 years.

But know this: If there is ever an emergency, Westrich has your back.

Like the time she and a pilot were in an air combat exercise with an opponent over the Atlantic Ocean off Beaufort, S.C. The pilot lost control of the jet and suddenly they were dropping and swinging down to the water. As the pilot struggled to regain control, Westrich calmly relayed the altitude figures. Down they went.

The jet flipped upside down, then right side up.

"It's like a living being," she said. " 'Come on, recover.' It just has to catch the right air, the right attitude. We were like a rock torpedoing to the Atlantic Ocean."

They were still falling, below ejection level, and she kept reading the numbers.

Finally, the jet recovered.

They landed. Got back to the squad room and someone casually mentioned something about an afternoon flight.

"It was clear we're going to go back to fly," Westrich said.

And up they went.

By comparison, running Milwaukee County's emergency management department is a bureaucratic job of planning and execution. It pays $120,000 annually. Westrich oversees 65 full-time employees.

Her department is an umbrella for the 911 operations center, emergency medical services, radio services and emergency management.

According to its mission, the office is in "the business of urban resiliency..."

County Executive Chris Abele said Westrich is among several military veterans in leadership positions in county government.

"What they all have in common is they are very comfortable with and respectful of accountability and respect of government. It's not a game and they take it seriously. They all have a can-do attitude," he said.

"The first time I saw Christine's résumé I thought, 'I can't believe I have an opportunity to hire you. It's pretty impressive,' " Abele said. "She has a really good way to build consensus. I've watched as she has earned the respect of mayors and village presidents around the area. She's frank, she's earnest, she's clear. I know because I work with her. She genuinely cares about public service."

Meet Westrich and you notice her tattoos, what she calls skin art.

On her left hand is a stained glass window design from Frank Lloyd Wright's Susan Lawrence Dana House. Up her left forearm is an image of Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer's "The Lacemaker." And on her right wrist and arm is a classic "Windrush" replica from English designer William Morris.

"They remind me to maintain a creative attitude," Westrich said.

A 1990 graduate of Waukesha South High School, Westrich had the grades, the drive and a push in the right direction from her aunt to get into the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. In college, she ran track, studied and got a degree in ocean engineering.

She said she didn't have an ambition to "break the glass ceiling." Instead, she was "driven by transcending stereotypes." As she focused on whether to vie for a Navy or Marine Corps officer commission, she said that at the Naval Academy in that era she did not recall seeing any women Marine Corps officers.

"I thought, 'Can you be a woman and a Marine Corps officer? Can you do both?' I thought, 'Well, I'm going to try.' "

She set her sights on Marine Corps aviation. From July 1998 to January 2001, Westrich was a F/A-18D Hornet weapons system operator.

"I was a navigator, just like Goose in 'Top Gun,' " she said with a smile, recalling the 1986 film.

Steve Ganyard was her squadron commander and lauded Westrich as a ground-breaker, among the first two women to fill the weapons system operator position in the Marines. She also became the first female air combat tactics instructor in the Corps.

"Being the first woman in a fighter ready room was fraught with potential danger," Ganyard said. "Probably because of her Naval Academy background she handled any challenges based on her sex with flair and good humor. She was in every good sense of the term one of the boys."

Westrich's call sign was "Mulan," after the Walt Disney film.

"The warrior princess fit her well," Ganyard said.

About halfway through her assignment, Westrich discovered that she didn't meet the minimum weight for the F-18's ejection seat, which was designed for men. The upshot: she stood a significant chance of being killed or seriously injured if she had to eject.

"We had a closed-door chat," Ganyard said. "I said if I were your father, I'd tell you that you need to stop flying. But as your commanding officer, I'm going to leave it up to you."

Westrich kept flying. But eventually, she gave it up, fearing that her situation could jeopardize pilots.

She later was assigned to U.S. Naval intelligence as an air defense analyst, worked in the White House as a liaison to the president's and vice president's military aides and did a stint at the Pentagon working for the secretary of defense. All of her work was the highest degree of classification.

Westrich left the military in 2006 and worked for nearly four years as a defense contractor.

But she found herself pulled in another direction. The passion for art ran in her family. While in the military, she designed squadron T-shirts and painted murals. But she wanted to go deeper into the subject and eventually enrolled at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., where she earned a bachelor's of fine arts degree.

"I like academics. I wanted formal training," she said. "Let me have the experience and see where this takes me."

Her student work was heavy on illustrations, where she told stories through pencil drawings and oil paintings. She also branched out to hand embroidery. In one unique item, she embroidered a nude self-portrait tucked inside her flight officer's jacket. Recently, she painted a portrait of Gary Wetzel, a Medal of Honor recipient from Oak Creek.

For Westrich, art is a way to leave a mark.

With her degree in hand, she returned to Milwaukee, where her twin brother, older brother and sister live. Her parents are deceased.

She landed a job with Milwaukee County in July 2013, just in time to help rewrite the government's continuity of operations program in the wake of the courthouse fire that cost $19.1 million in damages.

In 2015, four previously independent divisions were combined to create the emergency management department. Westrich became director. She even designed the logo.

"We're in a really good place right now," she said. "I'd say we're pretty steady, still making a lot of changes. Doing anything new in county government really takes that type of heavy lifting."

The aim is to be prepared and make sure that whatever the emergency, the county can carry on.