I was assigned in Ramadi, Iraq, on an embedded provincial reconstruction team. We were part of President Bush’s surge strategy into Iraq. Even though I was a registered nurse, I was cross-trained in civil affairs. We were to use our professional expertise, in my case as a nurse, to help the civil affairs team to rebuild Iraq and its necessary infrastructure. The embedded provincial reconstruction teams were originally set up with three members. The lead member was from the U.S. Department of State, the second team member was from U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the third member was a senior military officer.

When the U.S. invaded Iraq, most of the wealthy and professional people left the country. So, about 90% of Iraq’s physicians left. Many of the nurses in Iraq left, too. The directorate general for health was an industrial engineer. The cities were left with mostly working class and poor people. When I first got there and got a tour of the city it looked like post–World War II Berlin. Most buildings were damaged, and there was raw sewage in the streets. The hospital had no electricity or running water. They used emergency generators at the hospital when they had to. I learned a lot while I was in Iraq. I think it changed me by giving me a whole different perspective about the challenges of rebuilding after a locality is devastated by war and what war does to a population center and its people.

I came back in late February 2008, to Fort Benning, Georgia. I was lucky that my husband was also an Army Reserve officer who was on active duty at the time. He was my greatest support. I could not have done this without his support. I came back, again I was very blessed, that the army gave my husband the time off to drive from Florida to Fort Benning, and my husband was in the reception area when I got off the plane. It took me like five days to travel in Iraq to get on the Freedom Bird [flight] for the trip home. You are almost kind of “shell shocked” to finally be back on U.S. soil. When I got off the plane they had a band playing, they had big banners saying “Welcome Home.” I had never experienced anything quite like this in my life. When I walked in the hangar, I saw the band playing, the banners flying, and my husband standing off to the side. I got to give him a hug right away and then we were ushered to the bleachers and got some type of briefing. That was my initial welcome home. I did my out-processing at Fort Benning, filled out lots of forms, turned in my weapon and all my other gear. It was kind of a blur, I want to say I was there for five to seven days. My husband actually left me a vehicle to get around. Then, he came back to Benning and we drove together to where he was assigned in Florida. I came off active duty to be in the reserves again. My homecoming could not have been better and I was thankful to be home safe and sound with my husband.

My initial homecoming was great. My family had done all kinds of nice things. My husband had gotten a big Welcome Home poster and they put lots of flags all around the sidewalk. [She starts crying as she tells me this and her voice is all choked up.] Now he knows that I cared about all the things they did [because he’s listening to this phone interview] and now he’s gonna make fun of me all night long for crying and getting choked up as I tell you this [she starts laughing]. They really made a nice homecoming for me with decorating the house and all that stuff.

And this is true of both of my deployments. Your command wants to know when you are coming home. I felt strongly that I didn’t want them to know when I was coming home. I didn’t want the command at the airport. You don’t want to be anything other than the mom or the wife. I didn’t want to be the family nurse practitioner or the lieutenant commander. I didn’t want to do that or be in that role. I just wanted to go home. I think I just told my husband not to tell them.

I was deployed in 2011 to Kabul, Afghanistan. I was assigned as an IA (individual augmentee) to an imbedded mentoring team. I was deployed for 6 months. I mentored the director for the Afghan National Army Nurse Training Program. I mentored the director as well as a cadre of instructors.

I had a very good reunion with my family. The kids had missed me a lot and they welcomed me with open arms. I had really good support from home, and I was able to communicate almost every day with my husband while I was gone. So I was pretty well informed about how everyone was doing and what activities the kids were engaged in. It was a pretty easy transition back into our family. I had quite a bit of notice that I was going to deploy, so we had time to put the necessary supports in place so that my husband wouldn’t be overwhelmed with his job plus being a single parent with kids. I would say that I had almost a year’s notice to get myself and my family ready for me being gone. Our youngest kids were 6 and 8 when I deployed and we had a 14-year-old at home and a 21-year-old in college.

My homecoming was great. I was able to talk to my husband every day I was gone. I was able to call him on the regular phone. We couldn’t rely on Skype all the time because it was inconsistent. My husband didn’t like Skype because it tended to be in and out, not a good connection. I would call him on the regular phone and we had a set time. It would be a 2-minute phone call because if you talk every day, there’s not a whole lot to talk about [laughing].

My husband is military and he’s deployed before so he understands the situation. He’s in the air force, too, but we’ve never been deployed at the same time. We don’t have kids. The homecoming was good and I flew into Sacramento. We’re stationed at Travis AFB. My husband was there, some friends were there, and some coworkers were there. They had a big “Welcome Home” sign. It was wonderful. There’s a funny story and it kind of makes me a little teary-eyed when I think of it. When I was coming down the escalator, my favorite song is “Dancing Queen” by Abba and everyone makes a little joke about it, it’s even on my email. Well, my husband has this little tiny itty-bitty speaker thing, I don’t even know what it is really called, it is about 6 inches long and you hook it up to your iPhone and it plays music. Well anyway, so when I was coming down the escalator, I see him with this thing above his head because we’re a product of the 80s and we love 80s music and movies, so it was like John Cusack holding up the boom box in the movie Say Anything, telling his girl that he loved her. So, my husband is standing down there holding up that thing playing “Dancing Queen.” I was like “I love it, it’s great” [laughing]. It was precious, adorable, and when I think of it, I get a little teary-eyed. It was sweet.

My husband was in Hawaii with our kids. It was planned that they would not come to San Diego. I wanted to be able to come back to our home and have them be there. I think I was in San Diego for about 2-1/2 days. Then, in preparation for coming back to Hawaii, I told them that I didn’t want a big homecoming. I just wanted to see my family and have it be low key. I’m not someone who likes to be the center of attention. It makes me feel uncomfortable and embarrassed. So, I traveled in uniform and during the flights some people made positive comments like, “Thank you for your service.” It was nice and it was helpful to be recognized in that way.

I arrived at the airport in Hawaii, I got through security, and then [laughing] there was a huge group of people to greet me. It was my husband and my daughters and one of our best friends and her family and ten of my coworkers. We’re in Hawaii, so there were leis. My initial reaction was “Oh, no” [laughing]. I wanted a small group. I was tearful; I was hot; I was tired; I was emotional. But, it was interesting because as we walked down to the baggage claim together, this huge gaggle, and then other people were there, and they saw that I was being welcomed home. More people said, “Thank you for your service” [laughing], and then I realized, I really did need this. I needed it to be a celebration and a welcoming full of excitement. It was mostly people I knew. It was my coworkers and my immediate boss. It wasn’t the whole town. No one was a stranger. I was OK that I was crying [laughing as she told me this]. Everyone just wanted to be helpful. My boss said, “Your job now is to spend time with your family and take time.” It was actually a really good experience. We lingered after the bags were gathered. We took pictures. They brought Martinelli’s sparkling cider and we’re toasting. It was such a funny random thing, toasting at the airport [laughing]. It was joyful!

Later, my husband said, “I didn’t tell them to come.” [Laughing] I said, “It’s OK, it really is” [laughing]. Ahead of time, I wouldn’t have known this would be OK with me, but it was [laughing]. Maybe if it had just been my husband and daughters, it might have been less celebratory. We still talk about it to this day. So, my immediate homecoming was celebratory and joyful. I got home in November, just a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving and the whole Christmas season. I was excited about that but was also worried. It can be such a “false” time for people—being stressed, but at the same time you are supposed to enjoy and be thankful.

I was in the Army Nurse Corps. I was active duty and now I’m in the inactive reserves (individual readiness reserves). I had 4 years of active duty. I deployed to Iraq in April 2006 to April 2007. I was assigned to a combat support hospital in the beginning of the deployment at Abu Ghraib, but then we shut down and moved all the detainees to a new location near the airport and that was Camp Cropper. My whole deployment was the detainee care mission.

My homecoming was very successful. I feel like I coped and transitioned very well. One of the biggest reasons was because I was well-supported by my family. I kept in contact with them a lot through e-mail. I wrote them letters, particularly my parents. I also had two of my close friends at the time from my duty station in Germany deploy with me at the same time. I had a good network of people—men and women who I either went to college with or went to officer’s basic with or were stationed with. When I was done with my deployment I flew back to Texas and went on leave. I then went home to my family in Washington state. I think the first few days back in the States were the hardest. It was hard to realize that I was not going back to Iraq; to realize that I wasn’t there anymore. It was hard, too, because I was in a relationship with someone who was still in Iraq. The realization that we were no longer close was hard. Flying home from Texas to Washington, I was really weepy. Once I got there it was better. They were very welcoming. My dad had been in the military in Vietnam and that helped. My mom had siblings who had gone to Vietnam. So, I think they had prepared how to handle me. I think they put a lot of thought into things. I spent probably about 15 leave days with my family and then I left to go back to Europe because I had been stationed in Germany. Then, I went to Iraq to see my fiancé at the time. We ended up spending time in Turkey. Then, I went back to work in Germany. I went back to work taking care of soldiers who had just gotten injured in Iraq or Afghanistan. I was around a lot of people who had been deployed and they understood where I had been and what I had been doing. My work was similar except for the fact that I wasn’t taking care of detainees anymore. However, it was very much the same type of injuries we had been seeing.

I spent another year in Germany before I got off of active duty. During that time my fiancé and I got married. We were in Germany together and it was just him and I. We were able to deal with any stress that might have been left over from Iraq and our war experiences. We came back and reintegrated into my family and community here in Washington state.

I’m a first lieutenant on active duty in the air force, and I deployed to Afghanistan in December 2012 and returned to my California base in late July 2013. Everything we did in Afghanistan was quite different than what we were used to. It was a really awesome experience. Over there we kind of worked at everything. I was an ER Triage nurse. I was actually the blood bank officer. I stabilized patients in the emergency room. Once we stabilized patients we would bring them to our operating room. In the operating room, they had a permanent staff assigned, so that was about the only place that I never worked in. I recovered patients in a recovery room ICU setting as well. So, my role over there was ER, triage, trauma stabilization, recovery room, and ICU. I would say about a quarter of the patients we treated were American soldiers and the remaining three quarters were local civilian Afghan men, women, and children. Our hospital was on a FOB, which was quite small. I think the perimeter of our FOB was only about 2 miles. The hospital was fairly small and made of plywood. It was not the most secure location because we did have rocket attacks some nights. Even though I’m air force, I was assigned as an individual augmentee to an army unit. We went for training with the army prior to deployment. There were 28 of us air force personnel coming from different bases and different specialty occupations going for training on an army post. Only one other air force officer coming from my base in California was in my group. Once we got to Afghanistan, all 28 of us were dispersed to other FOBs. We never saw each other again until we were reunited at the end of our deployment when we were leaving Afghanistan.

When I got to my hospital they were set up as a Forward Surgical Team [FST] and I was replacing one person on that team. That way you don’t have 28 new people coming to a unit at the same time. They incrementally add new people and take out the old people so as to control the flow of experienced versus inexperienced personnel. I walked in with one medical technician, so we were the “newbies” for this unit. It was a pretty easy transition because the team that was already there was still intact. They gave us very good guidance. The first day we got there had a mass casualty event about 4 hours after we arrived. This is when we have more patients than we can handle at once and we need all staff to come in, even if they are off duty. They just threw me in the mix of everything. They said, “Here’s the chart, fill out what you can, and do a head-to-toe assessment.” I said, “OK.” I guess that is the best way, just kind of jump right in and get your hands wet with the job. I think this was a good way to get oriented to the facility and how the patient flow works. I was an ICU nurse and used to ICU care, but not trauma ICU. I was used to critical situations with patients that could crash at any moment. I was used to ventilators and blood pressure medications and various IV drips. Of course the deployed environment can be very chaotic and overwhelming because you know you are in a war environment and you can be attacked while you are taking care of patients with critical raw trauma injuries.

When we left Afghanistan we stopped in Germany for about 4 days. We attended a 3-day reintegration program just to kind of decompress and go over things we might have seen, and get emotions expressed. The program described helpful ways to deal with things when we get back, like driving a car, or taking public transportation, and having more freedom since we had been confined to such a small space for almost 7 months. This program in Germany was at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, where all the air evac flights from Afghanistan come in and where most troops redeploy to the U.S. from. This is where I met up with the 28 air force people I had done the army training with before deploying. It was nice and very comforting to meet up with those 28 air force people again. Everyone made it through the deployment safely, and we all shared stories and experiences. I kept in touch with five or six of them through our deployments to various FOBs in Afghanistan to see how folks were doing and to see what kind of patients they were seeing. It was nice to sort of “compare notes” over the 7 months. It was so comforting to recognize familiar faces again that you had been with prior to deployment and I have to admit those 7 months went by really fast. We all took commercial flights out of Germany to the U.S. commercial hubs near the bases we were assigned to in the U.S. We all went our separate ways out of Germany. For me, I took a commercial flight to Los Angeles, and then connected to a flight into Sacramento. Other folks were stationed in Texas, or Florida, or Washington, DC.

When I landed in Sacramento, one of the OR techs, that I had met while deployed, was also stationed at my base in California. She came home 3 months before I did, and she agreed to come to Sacramento and pick me up when I came home. She picked me up at the airport and we went out for a nice dinner before she dropped me off at my apartment. I had kept my apartment while I was gone and let someone from the base live in it till the week before I came home. It was nice to be back in my place in familiar surroundings and not have to start all over finding a place to live.

I didn’t want a crazy, over-the-top homecoming party. For me, I was deployed to do my job, which is what I trained for. Deploying is part of what military nurses and other military people do. So when I got back to Travis AFB, I had to inprocess through the base to just make sure my medical clearance and personnel records are up-to-date. Since I came back alone, the next day I did the inprocessing and met with my supervisor. We also did computer-based training where we did several questionnaires asking about our experiences and how we were doing mentally and physically. It was kind of a self-assessment to see how we were doing. My supervisor also met with me to assess how I was doing and to see what I needed. I didn’t have to go to a psychiatric evaluation, it was a computer-assisted program where I answered a bunch of questions about my temperament, such as “was I angry, depressed, wanting to hurt myself, wanting to hurt others, etc.” Another computer questionnaire asked about nightmares, flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, etc. I didn’t have any issues. I enjoyed my deployment. It was a truly awesome experience. I’d go back in a heartbeat, it was that good. I guess if people answered the questions that they were having issues, they would be seen by the mental health folks before they were allowed to go on R & R [rest and relaxation]. We got 2 weeks of R & R. It was nice, but you can’t leave the local area. Since I kept my apartment while I deployed, I didn’t have to go house hunting or do anything stressful like that. I was able to sleep in my own bed, and my surroundings were the same as what I had left. It’s not like I had to worry about finding a new apartment or buying a car, or any of that stressful stuff. So for my 2 weeks I had my mom and my stepdad come out and visit me. We did stuff in the area and visited San Francisco and Napa Valley and got reacquainted. It was a nice visit. It was good but we weren’t allowed to fly home to Connecticut to visit family or anything like that.

After my 2 weeks of R & R I went back to work at my hospital in California. I wanted to go home to Connecticut, but people’s schedules and vacations were already programmed. So, I decided to work for a month and then go on leave to Connecticut to visit family. My unit gave me 3 days of orientation even though I was returning to the coronary ICU that I have left 7 months before. The orientation was good and it was totally more than adequate to get back in the groove. I quickly got refamiliarized with the charting and routine, and then went back working the usual 12-hour shifts. We had some new people on my unit, but many people I had worked with before. That is just the way it is in the military and I was used to that. I think my transition back was pretty smooth and uneventful.