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Ten-year-old Soledad Zdunczyk watched everything she had ever known slowly sink into the asphalt horizon of the highway, as her mom pressed the gas pedal to head deep into Mexico to outrun her alcohol-laced demons.
Before her impromptu road trip, Zdunczyk’s old life had been a mixture of city life in Phoenix, Arizona, and the cultural immersion of her extended family’s Native American heritage.
“My family is part of the Pima Tribe. We would go to the Gila River Reservation, where much of my family lived. We would go to pow-wows and things like that. Mostly, I remember loving the music and food as a kid,” said Zdunczyk, now Chief Warrant Officer 2 Soledad Zdunczyk, the 16th Sustainment Brigade’s sustainment automation support management officer in charge.
Once she arrived at her new home in Colima, Mexico, as a young girl, she was thrust into a new life filled with foreign voices and foreign routines.
“When I started school in Colima, I didn’t speak Spanish. For the first few months, I was lost. Every day, we would get up very early and take our corn to the mill to get it ground. We would then bring it back to the house and start the process of making masa for our tortillas,” Zdunczyk explained.
Additionally, family members would occasionally take Zdunczyk to the local hillside to spend the day with the backbreaking task of picking coffee beans or shucking ears of corn.
Initially, life was difficult for Zdunczyk. On top of all the new challenges she faced, her mother didn’t succeed in outrunning her drinking problem.
“I would say it was hard growing up. I had nobody helping me along. Nobody was pushing me to do well in school or encouraging me to learn things,” she said.
Desperate to find some meaning in life and a way to earn a little bit of money, she found a creative outlet. Zdunczyk found that she had a niche talent for drawing intricate patterns with an ink pen on white pants. Word spread of her artistic talents and other children in her community began paying her for her talents.
Zdunczyk continued navigating her remote life until one day as quickly as they had moved South, she relocated back to the Phoenix area.
With new prospects in her mind, Zdunczyk began to excel in 8th grade with her grades reflecting a mixture of As and Bs. Things were going smoothly until her sophomore year. Zdunczyk’s childhood fantasy of being a WNBA player had been dashed by not making the high school team.
“I got really depressed because they didn’t choose me. I felt like my hopes and aspirations were gone. My grades started slipping,” she said.
After a semester of poor performance, Zdunczyk found traction. With new goals in mind, her grades improved until graduation. After high school, a determined Zdunczyk enrolled at DeVry University and majored in technical management while working two jobs to earn her way through school.
With a fresh degree in hand, Zdunczyk set out to start her new career.
“No one wanted to hire me. I had absolutely no experience. Eventually, I exhausted my search in the Phoenix area, and I relocated to Washington State with my husband to continue trying to find work in my field,” Zdunczyk said.
While the couple were in Washington, an uncle suggested that she join the military. In 2010, Zdunczyk took that advice and enlisted as a 25F, network switching systems operator maintainer, and later reclassed to a 94F, computer/detection systems repairer. Zdunczyk credits her Native American culture to help her become the Soldier she is today.
“I truly thank God for blessing me with a family that has always been close-knit, spending time together and visiting the reservation where warmth and love were always present. Also, learning that Ira Hayes was a distant cousin filled me with even more pride, and following in both my uncle’s footsteps to serve and defend our county has been an incredible honor,” Zdunczyk said.
According to Zdunczyk, she was happy as a Soldier but had the hunger for something more. The idea of becoming a warrant officer became a consideration one day when a maintenance warrant officer in her unit started encouraging her to apply.
“I became interested and looked into the requirements. I found that my ASVAB GT score wasn’t high enough,” she explained. “At that time, I was an NCO. I kept putting off studying to raise my score for quite some time because I was busy taking care of my Soldiers. In 2020, I got to my assignment at SHAPE Belgium. COVID hit. I was able to use that disruption in my work schedule to put in the extra effort and raise my score,” she said.
Zdunczyk’s application was granted, and she went to Warrant Officer training where she received her designation as a 255A, data operations warrant officer.
Now as the 16th SBDE SASMO, she is responsible for teaching classes on the VSAT/Scout or the Caisi system, providing dedicated automation support to troubleshoot network issues, and supporting the U.S. Army’s Logistics Information System.
“It is a little surreal being here because of the stuff I went through to try to get where I am. Looking back on my life is interesting. I consider doing hard labor like I did as a child was actually easier than working with networks. It is like a complex puzzle. It is harder to figure out how the networks work than just getting up and doing labor, but I have no regrets,” she said.
Zdunczyk prides herself on being among the 8,000 Native Americans to serve in the military total force today, especially during National Native American Heritage Month.
“This is important to me because, as a Native American officer serving in the military, I represent a group that makes up just 1 percent, and within the total active component we only make 0.9 percent. It’s a chance to highlight our contributions and honor the strength and resilience of our people,” Zdunczyk said.
Zdunczyk plans to continue until retirement in six years and hopes to move back to the Phoenix area to get into politics. According to Zdunczyk, her ultimate goal would be to be elected as future Mayor of Phoenix.
As the U.S. Army commemorates National Native American Heritage Month, Zdunczyk wants to use this month to reflect on her early life and acknowledge the lasting contributions Native Americans make that will benefit the nation and the Army for many years to come.
“It’s an honor to represent my Pima Tribe (O’odham) and reflect on the painful chapters of our history. However, as we move forward, we can come together as a nation to celebrate our resilience, unity, and rich cultural heritage,” Zdunczyk said.
