Lessons from past conflict

Mary-Ann completed her military nursing degree at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Nursing. The teachers had just arrived back from the war in Vietnam, and the training was tough. “They wanted us to be able to handle stress. So they more than doubled the load of the curriculum on just about everything.” Half of the students dropped out. Mary-Ann persisted and graduated in 1976. She served on active duty for several years. As was common in those days, she chose to go inactive when she got married and had her children. When her children grew up, she joined the reserves again and started her monthly drills with the military. 

“There are lots of motivations. There is a good retirement package. I had a significant number of active duty years,” she says. “And I liked military nursing better than civilian nursing. It was more advanced than civilian nursing.” 

Mary-Ann was in her final year of military nursing in the reserve ranks and due to retire when she was called to Tikrit, Iraq, in 2006. When her orders came in, she was busy starting a new surgery center in her civilian job. She had only two weeks to deploy. First she was due for combat training in Wisconsin and then to Iraq. It was disconcerting. “We had been drilling all these years in the reserves. Now we were going to carry weapons with us, and we possibly had to use them. They wanted us to learn all of the stuff that the infantry learnt in three months.” 

She thought she could handle the assignment, since she had got excellent training from the Vietnam nurses. There was no option to refuse the deployment order. “It is not really a choice, even if people think of it as voluntary. It is voluntary only when you sign up. After that it is not voluntary anymore,” she says.