Sue Max believed she can cope
Military was an adventure
Sue Max was surprised to hear that she had been selected to serve with U.S. troops at Camp Victory in Iraq. When the call came in August 2006, she was nearly 60 with no former deployments in war areas. Because of manpower needs, reservists had been ordered to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan, regardless of whether they had served in war zones before. Sue’s role was not what she had signed up for, instead she ended up much closer to the fighting in a war defined by insurgency and suicide attacks.
“I have always embraced change, but I was stunned they would take someone like me,” Sue says. “I am not a very big person and I am quite old for deployment. My concern was whether I can compete, keep up.” Sue had joined the Army as a nurse in 1990, when her children had already grown. “I actually thought about joining in 1980, but my husband discouraged me, because of what was happening in the Middle East. In 1990, I thought it was safe. The Berlin Wall had come down and the Middle East seemed calm. I joined in May of 1990. And in August 1990, there goes Saddam into Kuwait and all the bets were off,” she remembers.
Adventurous by nature, she felt that serving in the Army as a nurse offered a different context from civilian life. She worked in a general hospital as a first Lieutenant. Monthly drills and training were hard physical work that focused on the operational issues, which was her strength.
Sue was called up in Iraq as a civil affairs officer. With her operational strength, she felt confident. “It is important working with the hearts and minds of the population. It is very specialized,” she says. “They thought nurses would be a good asset for diversity. I have been a nurse for 40 years.”
More problematic was the change she had to make from non-combatant to combatant during her five-month training in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. “Academically it was not a problem. I could understand conceptually what civil affairs was. There was a physical aspect to go from non-combatant to combatant. Training had a lot to do with that: guns and shootings and all that stuff.”
Military nurses in the reserves are normally not trained to fight during drills. Becoming a combatant meant she would not be safeguarded by the international Geneva Convention's guidelines that also protect nurses in the war areas.
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