“I wanted to be a modern-day Laura Ingalls Wilder.”
That’s how Diane Diekman (’87, ’92) a retired Navy captain, describes the unlikely path that took her from a one-room schoolhouse on the South Dakota prairie to the decks of Navy aircraft carriers and eventually to signing books as an author.
The Farm Girl Who Outgrew the Farm
Diekman’s early life was steeped in self-reliance. Raised on a working farm, she attended a one-room country school and dreamed of teaching in one—until a new state law shuttered those schools for good. “I didn’t want to teach in a town school,” so she changed course. Her mother had served in the Navy’s WAVES program during World War II and that inspired her, along with her sister, to choose the Navy.
“I was the boss of mechanics. My job was to make sure they had what they needed and that someone had their back.”
Diane Diekman (’87, ’92)
It was a career plan that initially presented limited choices. “There wasn’t a whole lot that women could do,” she recalls, “but I didn’t want to do the ‘women jobs.’”
In 1978, she became one of the first women in naval aviation maintenance. That made her a green shirt—the color-coded designation for flight deck technicians. She wasn’t a mechanic, but she led them. “I was the boss of mechanics,” she says. “My job was to make sure they had what they needed and that someone had their back.”
The Joy of the Job
For Diekman, leadership was about people, not power. “I loved being a leader,” she says. “That was a learning process, but I still occasionally hear from sailors who say I made a difference in their lives. That was always my goal.”
She wasn’t drawn to staff jobs or political positioning. “I wanted to be with sailors and airplanes,” she says simply. For as long as the Navy would let her, she stayed in the fleet. When she did eventually transition to straff roles, it was with the same ethos: lead with integrity, advocate for your team and let your work speak for itself.
Even her overseas assignments—two years in Guam, three in Japan—offered not just challenge but joy. “Every duty station felt like an adventure,” she says. “New people, new job, new place. I never once dreaded going.”
“When I was in college, I never spoke in class. By the time I went back for my master’s, I couldn’t wait to join the discussion.”
Diane Diekman (’87, ’92)
That steadiness of spirit gave her the resilience to navigate a Navy that didn’t always make space for women. She was passed over for graduate school by an assignment officer who thought she had no future in the service. Instead of protesting, she quietly got not one but two master’s degrees from Embry-Riddle—first in aeronautical science, then an MBA in aviation.
“I didn’t say a word,” she remembers. “But I thought: I’ll show him.”
Her education was about growth more than collecting credentials. It reflected her own transformation. “When I was in college, I never spoke in class. By the time I went back for my master’s, I couldn’t wait to join the discussion.”
What she learned on the job and in class became the spine of her memoir Navy Greenshirt: A Leader Made, Not Born. It’s not a typical military memoir. There are no combat missions, no grandstanding. Instead, the book tracks how she grew into command and confidence, detailing the moments that made her a better leader—from a painful early dismissal by a commanding officer to the hard-earned respect she eventually won.
After almost 30 years in uniform, Diekman took on another mission: single motherhood. At 50, she adopted two young sisters from the Los Angeles foster care system. “God matched me up with these girls,” she says. “I would’ve taken them regardless of who was in the pictures they showed me.”
“God matched me up with these girls. I would’ve taken them regardless of who was in the pictures they showed me.”
Diane Diekman (’87, ’92)
The adoption took four years and coincided with her final command posting. She feared the logistics might derail either her parenting or her performance—but both fell into sync. “Everything fit,” she says. “It was intended.”
That journey became another book—this one quieter, more personal and suffused with faith and late-in-life resilience. Like her military memoir, it prizes growth over glamour.
Diekman didn’t set out to become a writer. Her first manuscript began as an exercise in documenting her rural childhood. She enrolled in a children’s literature course but quickly discovered her voice wasn’t built for fiction or simplification. It was plainspoken and exact. She wrote her first memoir in third person because she didn’t have the facts for first person. As she explains, “I’m a stickler for nonfiction accuracy.”
Her second act as an author found her chronicling the lives of country music artists, starting with Faron Young. “I didn’t want him to be forgotten,” she says. That led to biographies of Marty Robbins and, most recently, Randy Travis.
Each project begins with the same gut check: Will I ever get tired of listening to this person? Will I ever get tired of talking about them? If the answer is no, she knows it’s a book.
Still in Service
Today, Diekman is back in South Dakota—still in uniform, in a way. She serves as president of the Battleship South Dakota Memorial, leads the state’s Navy League Council and is organizing a Navy Ball to mark the service’s 250th anniversary. She is active on the funeral honor guards for both the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars.
“You never begin to earn back the amount of money you spent. You do it because you want to see that book on the shelf.”
Diane Diekman (’87, ’92)
She also continues to write. Her next book, inspired in part by the USS South Dakota, is a biography of Calvin Graham—the youngest U.S. military veteran of World War II, who enlisted at age 12 and served on the battleship.
She’s not looking for fame. “You never begin to earn back the amount of money you spent,” she says about writing a book. “You do it because you want to see that book on the shelf.”
That philosophy could sum up her whole career: measured, meaningful and built to last. She may not have become a country schoolteacher, but she is still teaching, in every page she writes and every memory she preserves.