- RankColonel, United States Air Force (Retired)
- Service28 Years Active Duty
- DecorationPurple Heart
- StatusCombat-Wounded Veteran
- BookHer Love Still Carries Us
- Based InSan Antonio, Texas
A life built in service — and rebuilt after it.
The Service
Kato Martinez spent 28 years in the United States Air Force, rising to the rank of Colonel. His career took him across the globe and into combat — the kind of service that demands everything and offers no guarantees. He earned the Purple Heart not as a symbol of sacrifice but as the literal record of what it cost him to show up. He showed up anyway.
That career was built on a foundation laid long before any commission — on a family's belief in purpose, in showing up, in doing the hard thing because it was the right thing. His mother Gail, after whom Gail's Dragonfly LLC is named, embodied that belief with a quiet force that shaped every decision he made in uniform.
The Wound
Combat injury changes the relationship between a person and their body, between who they were and who they are now asked to become. Kato doesn't speak around this. He speaks from inside it — from the specific knowledge of what it means to face recovery when recovery is not guaranteed, to choose growth when grief would be easier, to rebuild an identity that was built for a life that no longer exists in quite the same form.
Post-traumatic growth is not a platitude. It is a documented psychological phenomenon, and it is also a choice that gets made again every morning. Kato has made it. He speaks about what that looks like from the inside.
The Work Now
Today Kato brings that experience to audiences ranging from corporate leadership teams to military installations to healthcare organizations — any context where resilience, loss, identity under pressure, and the capacity to lead authentically are not abstract ideas but operational necessities.
His memoir, Her Love Still Carries Us, is both the account of his service and an act of witness to the woman who made his survival possible. It is the foundation from which the speaking work grows. Gail's Dragonfly LLC exists because she deserves to be remembered — and because the lessons her life taught are too important to keep private.