How did you get into nursing?

I originally went to UCO on a football scholarship, but found that football practices interfered with my premed classes, so I gave up the scholarship but joined the Reserve Officer Training Corps.

Becoming a nurse wasn’t a major event like, “Hey, I have to be a nurse,” but more of a great opportunity. I was offered a nursing scholarship at UCO and took it. After graduation and a six-week orientation, I was commissioned as a second lieutenant and assigned to a cardiology/telemetry step-down unit and put in charge of a 28-patient ward supervising four nurses and 91 combat medics.

What was your last assignment?

I was a head nurse at the Emergency Medical Treatment Section for the 212th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital stationed out of Miesau, Germany. That was my unit. I wore two hats in that I also worked as a staff nurse at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center ER in Landstuhl, Germany.

All of the nurses of the 212th MASH unit worked full time at Landstuhl and were deployed with our units. I landed in Kuwait on Valentine’s Day of 2003 and returned after 3BD months, having been there from February until June.

Did you have any specialized training before you went there?
The Army offers specialty classes at many sites including Brooke Army Medical Center (BAMC) at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio.

Basically, they have a full year’s worth of schooling packed into 16-week courses. They have ICU, OR, and perioperative nursing among other things. I took the emergency nursing course in 1998 at BAMC.

How was nursing in Iraq different from stateside?

Many ways. One was that we were in a hostile environment so there was a constant threat of enemy soldiers coming into the area. We were the only Level 3 facility in Iraq during the actual war, so 98% of the casualties came through our EMT. In 19 days of combat, we saw more than 700 patients; 453 of them were combat casualties. We did 130 surgeries in those 19 days.

Not all the casualties were Americans. We treated both Iraqis and Americans. It was different in that we couldn’t just treat those we liked. According to the Geneva Convention, once an enemy has been wounded, we are required to take care of them. It doesn’t matter what their motivation, they are still human beings and we had to treat them just the same as Americans.

The enemy doesn’t care about the Geneva Convention. Many of the enemy soldiers we treated were shot by their own people. They were either surrendering or wanted to increase the workload and tie up our beds. We knew they were shot by their own because we pulled AK-47 rounds out of them in surgery and we don’t use those type of guns. We also had eyewitnesses who said they were shot by their own. It’s all part of enemy tactics.

Challenging situations?

A big thing was resupply, or receiving our class eight medical supplies. When the resupply routes were unsecured because of fighting, we didn’t get supplies as readily as needed.

Just because we’re a hospital doesn’t make us any less threatening to the enemy. We had 163 people on our unit and we had to carry on the day-to-day operations of a hospital while at the same time we had to have 360-degree security to prevent enemy infiltration.

Another challenge was the treatment of enemy prisoners of war (EPOWs) in the same facilities or the same ward as the soldiers they had been fighting against. We had a 36-bed hospital with three ICUs and one ER. We got a lot more EPOWs, but we weren’t the ones to decide who was friendly and who was not.

In the beginning, we had enemy soldiers next to our American soldiers but that was too dangerous, so we designated one ICU unit for EPOWs and the other two were divided up between American soldiers.

A personal challenging situation came when I was part of a convoy moving from Kuwait up to Iraq. We drove 78 hours straight with the convoy and had to stop several times because of fighting. We’d drive past the convoy while they were fighting then we’d wait for them to catch up with us.

My vehicle had a blowout during that time and because of the specialized vehicle we were in, there was no spare tire. The convoy had to go on without us, leaving eight of us out in the middle of Iraq at 2 o’clock in the morning with only medical supplies and little protective ammunition. Luckily, a second convoy was behind us and they came along about 30 minutes later, changed our tire, took us in, and we went on into Iraq.

What are you doing now?

Right now I’m working as a staff officer for the office of the Army Nurse Corps doing corporate-level administration.

I thoroughly enjoy what I do as an Army nurse, taking care of our soldiers. They put their lives on the line for us every day. That’s why I continue to do it. It’s not about the money. In a few weeks, I’ll be joining the 86th Combat Support Hospital out of Fort Campbell, Ky., and expect to be back in Iraq within the year.