I was on active duty in the navy for 7 years when I was deployed to Afghanistan. I was a lieutenant in the Navy Nurse Corps. I was assigned to FOB Dwyer in Helmand province in Afghanistan, where there were mostly U.S. Marines. My hospital was a small combination shock–trauma and resuscitation unit. Once we stabilized patients we sent them to a Role 3 hospital at Camp Bastion or to Kandahar, or a local regional Afghan hospital, if the patients were locals.

I was there from April 2010 until the end of November 2010, and this was my first deployment. Our job was to treat, resuscitate, and stabilize injured marines brought to us. We would resuscitate them using blood products, surgeries, and get them prepared for chopper medevac. I also served as a flight nurse, so I would fly on the chopper with them to Camp Bastion. They had more services at Camp Bastion, so more was clinically available there.

I’m active duty navy. I’ve been active duty navy since 2003. I was deployed from September 2009 until May 2010 at Camp Bastion in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. That was my only deployment. I was an ER nurse by trade, so the ER at Camp Bastion was where I was assigned. Camp Bastion was run by the British Army, so we triaged patients and followed all the British protocols for caring for patients and resuscitations. We used their antibiotic protocol and their pain management protocol. We had a multinational medical team working there. It was pretty much U.K. and U.S. army and navy personnel, but we also had some Danish and Dutch military medical personnel, too.

We had eight beds in the ER. We also had an ICU. We had a multiservice unit that was always full. We had a pharmacy and a dental clinic, and our hospital was kind of a warehouse-type building. We had tile and linoleum floors, running water, air conditioning, and flush toilets in the hospital. We lived in a tent, but our tent had air conditioning. We had running water and flush toilets in an attached tent. We had eight women to a pod in the tent, and about eight pods came off like wings of this big tent. The attached bathroom tent had four showers and four toilets.

On our trip back to the U.S., we stopped in Kuwait for 4 days. I was left behind in Kuwait for 2 extra days by myself because my name was not on the flight manifest to fly home, so my entire unit left without me. Those 2 days were kind of lonely, but I survived. My flight landed in Dulles (Virginia) and then I was routed through Houston to my final stop in Chicago. I called my dad from Houston and told him my flight information. My dad met my flight in Chicago. I got home on Thursday and went back to work on Monday. I returned to my same navy job I had left as a clinical instructor at a navy school for young sailors learning medical skills.

I had to either take leave or come back to work. My best friend and I had booked a trip to Hawaii a month later, so I came back to work knowing that I had a month off coming later. Coming back was weird because I think people looked at me like I was different. Well, I was different because you grow in ways you don’t expect. People looked at me to see if I had become “nuts” from the trauma of war. I think some people were waiting to see if I broke down.

I taught a medical arts class right away about combat trauma, and it was hard for me to watch the video. I didn’t think it would bother me. I never gave it a second thought, but I found it hard to watch. It was a lot of emotional stuff that came up for me watching war trauma videos having been in that setting so recently. I went into counseling right away. I’m a big proponent for mental health. It is like cleaning out the “junk drawers.” So I didn’t wait for my war trauma memories to become a problem, I was proactive about getting a professional to talk with. I went for about 16 sessions of counseling and just talked about it and it worked out fine for me. When I came back there was construction outside of my apartment, and when I was in Afghanistan we would hear the explosions in the distance, so the construction sounds took me back to Afghanistan. It was upsetting and unnerving to have to listen to the construction noise and have intrusive thoughts about the explosions in Afghanistan.

I found solace in talking to people at my base that had also deployed. We could share and there was a bond. But then there was survivors’ guilt. I felt that I didn’t do enough. I felt in some ways we had it too easy, the camp was pretty decent and we weren’t out climbing rough terrain or being shot at regularly. Some of the navy corpsmen I worked with were deployed with the marines, so they were on the move a lot and in the thick of it in terms of danger. I found it difficult to have a conversation with people that hadn’t deployed because they really didn’t understand. My parents and my civilian friends looked at me as if I was going to be crazy when I came back, that was what they expected. I was 29 when I deployed and I turned 30 in Afghanistan.

As far as coming home, you knew that home was not going to look like Iraq [laughing]. That was a good thing! But not everyone shares the same experiences with you. So, as far as your family goes, my family knew that I was not in a safe place. They knew that there was a lot of risk inherent with that role. I think everyone was anxious. There was a lot of anxiety in terms of actually getting back home. There was worry about actually getting back home. When we did come back, we actually went to Camp Pendleton which was not where I was from. I had left out of Corpus Christi, Texas. When you come back there is a lot of military processing requirements that are not necessarily at your home. So that is a frustrating experience because mostly you don’t care about unloading your bags or getting on the next bus or waiting in a line or signing papers. I was pretty forceful and I was the most senior person in the group that was not from California. There were a lot of people who had deployed out of San Diego, so their first night home, their families were there and they put the unit on a “96,” which is a 4-day leave period. Well, the people who weren’t from California weren’t home yet and we didn’t want to be on a “96.” We still needed support services to work for us so we could get on planes and go back to Texas where our families were. So this was very, very frustrating. It required a lot of independence and advocacy as the senior person. I felt responsible for other nurses and corpsmen who were from my hospital in Corpus Christi.

So, I rented a vehicle, a passenger van because there was no transportation arranged for us to drop off all this gear. Camp Pendleton is a geographically vast base. There are a lot of miles. There were inadequate resources to expedite our actual homecoming. So, I rented a van on the base and helped people get their gear to warehouses so they could get through this as quick as possible. You are also on a completely different time zone. Your day is night and that takes a long time to get regulated. So when we got back, most of us stayed up all night. Then, when the morning came, we thought we could start processing our stuff. I remember going to some offices. I remember in one office we needed some signatures on a form and the poor guy at the desk told me that the person who could sign the forms had gone to PT [physical training] and wouldn’t be back till 9 a.m. and we were there at 7 a.m. when they were supposed to be open. So I said to him, “Well, I guess you are gonna sign these forms.” I ordered him to sign them and gave him my cell phone number and said, if your lieutenant or whoever has any problems, he can call me directly but we’re not waiting for him to get back from PT.

There was some frustration there. I probably was not the most patient person. I hope I didn’t shoot the messenger or yell at people unnecessarily [laughing]. I’m sure that I was not at my very best in terms of my behavior. Anyway, we got through that and we did eventually get back to Corpus Christi. We were able to leave Camp Pendleton within a few days. There were commercial flights but you were not able to book those until you had done all the other things.