This episode is sponsored by Transcend, a veteran owned and operated performance optimization company that I introduced recently as a sponsor on this show.
Well, since then, I have actually been using my products and I've had incredible success.
There was initial blood work that was extremely detailed and based on that, they offered supplementation.
So I began taking DHEA, BPC 157 for inflammation based on the fact that I've been a stump man and martial artist and a firefighter my whole life, lots of aches and pains,
dihexer to help cognition after multiple punches to the head and shift work and peptides.
Four months later, they did a detailed blood work again and I was actually able to taper off two of the peptides because my body had responded so well to just one of them that it was optimized at that point.
So I cannot speak highly enough of the immense range of supplementation that they offer, whether it's male health, female health, peptides to boost your own testosterone, which I would argue is needed by a lot of the fire service,
or whether it's exogenous testosterone needed, especially after TBIs or advanced age.
Now, as I mentioned before, the other side of this company is an altruistic arm called the Transcend Foundation,
which is putting veterans and first responders through some of their protocols free of charge.
Now Transcend are also offering you the audience 10% off their protocols and you can find that on jamesgearing.com under the products tab.
And if you want to hear more about Transcend and their story, listen to episode 808 with the founder Ernie Colling or go to Transcend company.com.
Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast. As always, my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show
US Air Force Trauma Nurse and the author of Memoirs of a War Nurse Service Honor and Sacrifice, Christine Collins.
Now in this conversation, we discuss a host of topics from her journey into the military, the medical training she received,
the slew of trauma patients she encountered immediately after deployment, the kindness and compassion she saw from her fellow men and women in uniform,
the inability to save, compassion fatigue, her own mental health journey, catharsis through writing and so much more.
Now, before we get to this incredible conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment, go to whichever app you listen to this on,
go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and leave a rating.
Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for others to find.
And this is a free library of almost 1000 episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so I can get them to every single person on planet Earth who needs to hear them.
And just as a side note, I just released my own second book, Kinda, which is available on ebook and paperback on Amazon.
So with that being said, I introduce to you Christine Collins. Enjoy.
Well, Christine, I want to start by saying two things.
Firstly, thank you to Tom for connecting us.
And secondly, I want to welcome you onto the Behind the Shield podcast today.
So where on planet Earth are we finding you this afternoon?
Well, we are in the United States, in the United States, in the United States, in the United States.
And we are here in the United States, in the United States, in the United States.
So I'm here for a few weeks doing some business and then in a couple of weeks, I'll be back in D.C.
Fantastic. Well, I would love to start at the very beginning of your timeline.
So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what your parents did, how many siblings?
Oh, I was born and raised in a very poor family.
And I was raised in a very poor family.
So tell me quickly what was your decision to move to D.C. and tell us about your family, what your family did, how many siblings.
Oh, I was born and raised in a very small copper mining community in Miami, Arizona.
It's about an hour and a half east of Phoenix.
It's nestled in this quaint little mining community.
Mountains are everywhere.
It snows, believe it or not, during the winter time and the monsoon season is absolutely brilliant.
My parents were from my mom, Patsy Rivera Elmer.
She met my dad in high school.
His name is Clyde Elmer.
And for a stint, he was also a firefighter.
So it's kind of neat how it comes full circle there.
My dad and mom met in high school.
And it's a funny story because they were actually neighbors to one another and started dating
in high school, ended up getting married, having my brother, Tony Elmer, who's a principal
and lives here in Mesa, Arizona, or Gilbert, Arizona, really.
And then shortly after that, not even a full year later had me.
So my brother and I share the same month.
We're about the same age for, I would say, eight days.
And then he turns a year older than me.
So very much like Irish twins.
Very connected to the community, family environment.
My mom is Hispanic.
Her family's from Mexico.
And of course, my dad is Caucasian.
So growing up, we were very much cared for in our Hispanic tradition.
Family was extremely important.
Saying goodbye when we would leave a loved one's house took an additional 20 to 30 minutes
because you're hugging everybody on the way out.
And so that's where I was born and raised.
Talk to me about the family dynamic.
I think one of the things that seems to be the case in 2024 is once you hit 18, you should
go out, you should get your own apartment.
And then you go out and obviously get into student debt and then you can't afford an
apartment.
You're setting our young people up for failure.
And I feel like there's a stigma about still being in the home.
But when I look at some of the Hispanic cultures, the Indian cultures, you see this and it actually
makes a huge amount of sense financially, taking care of children.
So what did you experience in that dynamic?
Oh, yeah.
My mom was a homemaker.
That's what she wanted to do her whole entire life.
She knew that she wanted to be married and have kids and create a very beautiful home
to her.
That was the dream.
And I commend her because that's really one of the hardest jobs in life today is being
a homemaker, taking care of all the chores responsibilities and raise children as well.
So it's a nonstop, no reprieve, 24 hours, seven days a week.
To her, I think that because she wanted that so much for her, that then having a daughter,
that that would be something that her daughter would eventually roll into and do herself.
That just wasn't my direction in life.
I knew at a very young age, just from our challenging dynamics with our family, the
arguments between my mom and dad and kind of what reality was for them.
At one point, it was a very harmonious mother, father, family environment.
And then there was a significant change with my dad.
He was roughly about 21 years old and then had a copper mining accident to where he ended
up losing his arm.
And back then in the 70s, PTSD wasn't a thing, but truly as an adult suffering from PTSD
myself, looking at how he then eventually lived out his 20s into his 30s, there were
a lot of issues there.
So watching my parents kind of dissolve right in front of my eyes and seeing the challenges
that my mother had in trying to support my brother and myself and to figure out what
she's going to do next without that stability with my dad was quite a nerving for a young
child and a young person.
And so I think at that point, I knew I won't put myself in this position.
I need to go to school.
I need to go to college.
I need to do something for myself so that I will be self-sufficient and not have to
rely on any one person to live.
And so my senior year graduating high school, I said, okay, I want to go to school.
To my dad, I want to go to college.
And my dad looked a little confused and he said, well, I wish I would have known that
sooner.
We just don't have the financial resources for you.
And my brother, an amazing, amazing baseball player.
He was kind of the hometown pitcher and received scholarships and broke a lot of the records
here in the state of Arizona for his pitching and won the junior college world series back
in 90, I think it was 92.
So he had everything at his fingertips to be able to go to college and do well.
For me, on the other hand, it was very, very different.
I wasn't top of the class.
So for me, learning was a little bit more challenging as well.
And I just had to figure out my own way.
Moved to Mesa after trying to figure out, okay, well, what does one do when one is trying
to go to school?
Understanding that I'm so far behind, right?
I'm far behind on looking at colleges, where should I apply?
And I just kind of fell into the same routine that most of my other friends did.
Went to Mesa Community College, figured out through a great admissions officer, started
getting loans, going to school full time, working full time to try and pay for my apartment
and other necessities.
It was extremely exhausting.
After the first year, I was just like, I can't do this.
This is a lot of work.
I got to kind of regroup and figure out what's going to be next.
And that's when a good friend of mine came to me and said, hey, the Air Force is paying
for college, we should go.
And no sooner than she said that, I was at a recruiter's office, signed paperwork and
said, okay, I'm doing this.
And then I would say eight weeks later, I was on the first bus out of there going into
the Air Force.
Well, going back to your dad for a second, because I mean, that's a pretty catastrophic
injury.
Did the mining company take care of him?
Was he, you know, yeah, was he, was he enveloped after that?
Or was it, as we hear sometimes in even first responder professions, was he kind of disregarded
after that injury?
You know, it seems from the dialogue that I've had with my dad, at one point in time,
they did provide support to him, right.
And I don't think that in today's means that it would be support like what we see at times,
depending upon what profession one is in.
It, as a child, again, we're very skewed, because we don't know what we don't know.
And they paid for all the medical bills, of course, but then the follow up care after
that was extremely limited.
Again, we live in a very small rural community.
And my dad was a very stoic individual, didn't want help from anyone.
And when it was time to start going through that physical therapy, he's like, no, I'll
be fine.
I'll be able to do this on my own.
The injury was so significant that it completely severed his forearm off of his left arm to
the only thing that was attached was a small piece of skin, one of the main nerves and
one of the arteries.
And that was it.
And when he was brought to the hospital, there was a contentious conversation between two
physicians, one that came up from Phoenix to do time in our small town and then one
that was local.
And the local provider just said, we're just going to cut it completely off.
To whereas the other provider from Phoenix said, no, no, no, we can save this.
And the provider from Phoenix is in fact the one that put together his arm and saved it.
He has still probably about maybe 25% of capacity in that left arm and still has issues.
But is there any support now that he receives from that mining?
No, absolutely not.
That came and went a long, long, long time ago, unfortunately.
And what about the mining industry themselves?
If you look at Wales and other areas of the UK, where there were thriving mining towns
once, not that that's obviously the ideal profession for a human being to have a long
healthy life.
When these industries are closed down, the steel industry, the auto industry here in
America, you see this gaping void.
And then sadly, more recently, you see an opioid epidemic filling Ohio, West Virginia,
etc.
What's the, is it still mining in Miami, Arizona?
Yes, copper mining is the number one job for individuals there.
Yes, it's still very live, active and well.
Brilliant.
All right, well then let's walk through.
So I know we're going to talk obviously about military medicine, but that wasn't the hat
you wore initially.
So walk me through the role that you found in the Air Force.
In order to leave so quickly, the recruiter said, hey, I know you want to go in medical,
but you're going to have to wait six months if you want to go in anything medical.
And I said, okay, well, what do you got?
And she says, we have a job as security police officer.
I said, done, sign me up.
I'll do SF.
And that was probably at the time back in the early 90s, the least job that anybody
wanted.
Because you do the shift work, you are on the firing range all the time, not to mention
all of the other training that has to go along with it.
I didn't know.
I was young.
I was looking for an adventure.
I went to college paid for, and I thought, hey, my dad used to be a volunteer sheriff.
You know, this kind of resonates of who I was or who I am and where I think I'm going
in my life, especially being able to stand up for others that didn't have a voice.
I just felt like that was the space that I needed to be in at that moment of my life,
of being this security forces, security police individual, being able to protect people.
That's where I wanted to be.
And so that's kind of where it took me.
Went to basic training, of course, in Lackland Air Force Base, then went on to the law enforcement
academy on Lackland, and then on to air base ground defense with special forces with the
army in Fort Dix, New Jersey.
And then my first duty station, which would be Peterson Air Force Base.
But that environment of everything that one learns, right?
And what it taught me was if you think you're at the end, you're not.
You could be pushed further and you really then become to know yourself, who you are
as a person, what you have to offer, and really what's important to you.
Being part of something that was so much greater than myself was important for me.
It was a mission that I could get back behind and support that mission and then support
my brothers and sisters in arms.
So it was a great moment in my life to teach me a lot of lessons.
And I was at Peterson Air Force Base for three months, 90 days.
And then I was forward deployed to support the tail end of the Desert Storm War in Operation
Overwatch.
So deployed to the Middle East already.
Primary duty weapon was an M16A2, M9, of course.
But we're trained in all sorts of things, M60, M2OKs, which was the grenade launchers.
And I just felt very capable at that point in time in my life as a cop.
What about the old school prejudice as far as a woman in uniform, especially in a military
police position within a group of alphas.
I'm doing air quotes because I hate that word.
But I would imagine there was an element of disrespect.
I know there's a story that gave you your nickname.
So overall, firstly, how was your physicality in training?
How did that allow you to hold that presence?
And then feel free to talk about any stories that you want to elaborate on.
It was very much alive and well in the early 90s.
And going in as SF, security police, you didn't have a lot of females in the cop shop, cop
squadron.
There just wasn't.
There was just a lot of guys.
And I already knew going in that that would kind of be the base of the population with
anywhere that I worked.
And even maneuvering through the different training at through the law enforcement academy,
I had always emerged as a leader, even through those environments.
And I worked on gaining the respect of the men that I led.
And of course, of the women, I was fair, I was impartial, and I was a straight shooter.
And that worked very, very well for me.
When I moved into the Fort Dix training with special forces and the army was leading that
training, it became more evident of the way that women were treated.
And there were a couple of instances where there was a sexual assault happening.
It was very prevalent in that particular training.
These individuals that were the instructors were also the same ones that were trying to
get with the female cops as students.
And so I walked a very fine line because these same individuals had control whether you graduated
or not.
I stay far away from that particular environment and had challenges that I faced with that
and handled them very, very well.
And the fact that I stood my ground, right, especially with a sergeant major, which it
was challenging.
There was one episode where we were cleaning our M16s.
We had just finished a 10-mile rock through the sand.
We called it the sand pit.
And we were doing patrol.
We were low crawling in the sand.
So you can imagine we had sand everywhere in our body, in our mouth, hair, ears, all
over our M16s.
And we were brought back and a lot of the sleep deprivation, right, because they were
trying to train us how we were going to be able to remain mentally sharp, especially
with little to no sleep.
So that was one aspect of the training that I really grasped onto and I enjoyed because,
again, you're challenging yourself.
You're challenging your inner mental capacity as well.
So once they brought us back to the armory, the instructors provided us four hours to
clean our M16s.
And I spent probably two and a half hours with dental tools cleaning every piece of
granule sand off of my M16, where you would see other people taking in their M16, trying
to turn it in.
And it was a no-go.
So you would have to drop, do push-ups, and then go back.
And then it would take you that much longer to re-clean it to get past, to be able to
turn in your weapon.
Once you turn in your weapon, it was a free day.
You were able to go and take a shower and just kind of sleep and get caught up on just
personal-related items.
And so as I was watching this, I just thought, you know, I'm going to spend the amount of
time I need to to make sure that this weapon is clean and I can turn it in once and be
done with it.
Like I said, two and a half hours into it, I felt that the weapon could not be any cleaner.
Ended up proceeding to the armory to turn in the M16, and they accepted it.
The armor accepted my weapon.
And as I was walking away from the armory, there were a couple of steps, and there was
a Air Force trainee as well, and he made a couple of comments and basically said, how
the fuck are you able to turn in your weapon?
You're nothing but a dumb bitch.
And I remember turning at him and looking at him, and I just said, you know, watch your
fucking mouth.
And he just said, you know, what are you going to do about it?
And I just kind of put up my hand and just turned my head and walked away.
The next thing I know, I feel someone push me to where I catch myself, but I almost fall,
and I spin around and it's this guy that wants to engage into a fistfight in front of everyone.
And it just wasn't 10 people, it wasn't 20 people, it was like 60 people in the lawn
in front of the armory, and he wants to fight me.
And at that time, I'm like, I don't see that I have an option, right?
Because one, he's testing me in front of all these people, the majority of them are males.
I think at that time, there might have been maybe six females in total that were sitting
on that lawn.
And I'm just like, all right, let's go.
And popped him really hard in the face, busted his lip.
We got into a fistfight.
He was a lot taller than me, a lot stronger than me.
The next thing I know, he's on top of me trying to choke me out.
I kick my legs over, get him, and we just start rolling in the ground.
And the next thing I know, and I'll never, ever forget this, I was with a platoon leader
for my squad of 12 members.
And my platoon, one of my guys on the platoon who was a huge, huge dude, his last name was
Robinson, he comes up, grabs this guy that's on top of me, pulls him up and just said,
you're not going to fuck with our platoon leader.
And the next thing I know, my entire platoon is standing around me and they start going
off.
You fuck with her, you fuck with all of us.
And I was so blown away.
And I knew at that point, not only did I earn, which is crazy when you think about it, you
earn someone's respect by going into a fist fight.
But not only did I earn everybody's respect that was watching, like she's not going to
back down, she's going to hold her own, even if she gets her ass kicked, she's going to
hold it.
But then the level of support and the brotherhood that I developed with these guys, it was like
nothing else.
But I realized at that point, that's going to be the common theme of me being security
forces.
That's what it's going to be.
And when I got to my first duty station, the guys are very clear.
And I hate even saying this.
And I hope it's changed now.
Because like I said, this was in early 90s, either you were a bitch and you weren't one
to fuck around.
And that's what they said.
You're either a bitch or you're a whore.
One of the two.
Either you sleep with everybody or you're a bitch and no one really likes you.
And I said, okay, well, I know what I'm going to choose then.
I'll just be the one that no one likes.
And that's kind of how it was.
But the great thing about it is the guys that I had been stationed with, we all got along.
I was one of the guys.
So they knew not to mess with me, but I was one of the guys and well respected.
And I really respected the guys as well, because we always had each other's backs.
And then moving on into the Air Force Academy, by this time I was a E5, a staff sergeant.
And I was on patrol.
I worked late night shift.
And I had a younger airman with me.
We were on patrol.
And during nights, the staff is limited and we get a call to respond to the non-commissioned
officers club.
And of course, all of the enlisted guys and women are there drinking, having a good time.
We show up and there is this particularly rowdy group.
And again, another larger staff sergeant there creating a huge scene, being very belligerent.
And we show up and I'm telling him he needs to leave.
And he's just not willing to budge.
And he wants to try me.
And of course, the bar is full of people.
And there's a lot of interaction with him on asking him to leave and then telling him
to leave.
And escalating, right, escalating up to the point where we were at that time.
And he comes up to me and says, what are you going to do about it?
And in an instant, I'm thinking to myself, I'm going to tag this guy.
He's going to get throat punched.
And to me, there is nothing worse than losing your airway for just a few seconds to think,
what the fuck did I just do to not be able to breathe?
So punched him in the throat.
He grabbed his throat immediately, fell to his knees.
And the guys around him that were with him all start having a visceral response.
Of course, they're now making fun of the friend.
And I strongly said, who's next?
We have all night, right?
Who's next?
And at that time, their hands were up, no, no, no, we're good, we're good.
And I go to the staff sergeant on his knees and I tap him on the back and I said, hey,
buddy, we got to go.
You're out.
And he's like, I got it.
I got it.
And I said, you want me to give you a ride?
And he goes, no, no, no, I'm good.
And him and his buddies left.
And there was this crazy uproar.
It was almost like it was a movie.
But again, it was not only standing my ground, letting people know, yeah, this is not going
to work for me.
And then also I look back at that young airman, female airman that was with me that was terrified.
I was terrified.
But that she knew, okay, this is a good role model as best as she could probably get.
But also to give her the courage to not back down, right?
Because she was a newer airman, new to the base.
And I'm sure it's scary for the females coming in, or at least it was back then because you
really didn't have a lot of support, your leadership, there were really no females in
leadership.
It was all male, predominantly male figures there.
I've had a few people on the show.
One guest specifically received several sexual assaults and other people have been in military
police positions and all these different perspectives.
And of course, we're still talking about a very, very small group.
However, I don't think people understand the level that actually goes on or has gone on
historically in the military to certain people in certain mismanaged groups.
With you having that lens of experiencing the two columns that you're allowed to be
in, and also having the law enforcement in our uniform on, how pervasive were sexual
assaults towards men and women back then?
The men, I've only seen just a handful of sexual assaults with the males, right?
Females they were pervasive.
There was a lot that was going on and a lot that was swept under the rug, which was extremely
unfortunate, right?
And that I could not tolerate that kind of behavior.
I couldn't tolerate if there was a situation happening in our squadron.
I had to step up, even if it was the non-popular thing to do.
And I created a, my character and my place for people to see was if Collins is raising
a flag or if Collins is saying something, there must be something here, right?
And that would be for anyone that I would stand up for.
Even myself, right?
There was a situation to where I experienced sexual assault at one of the bases that I
was stationed at.
And I went to my commanding officer, explained to him what had happened.
They brought that other person in and what was told and the other person was a very well
liked individual, highly respected, highly regarded, and he was a higher ranking person
than I was.
So they bring us both in, they set us down and the squadron commander at that time said,
Christine, if I hear one more word about this, you will be restricted to base.
You will be made to move out of your apartment off base and be placed in a dorm room and
I will remove one of your stripes.
I had just made Airmen Below the Zone, C Airmen Below the Zone, which is kind of a big deal.
And not everybody obviously gets that opportunity.
You have to compete for it.
And I was really surprised and shocked by that.
And I had no recourse, right?
I just thought I'm going to have to sit with this.
I am literally going to have to eat the shit and this person is going to get off.
Long story short, with that, that individual later on ended up not getting off and was
court-martialed and spent time in a military confinement.
But the lack of support for me there, I see it.
You know, it was there and I've been so far removed from that environment.
So I would only hope that it's gotten better.
There's more females now that are immersed in that career field.
Expectations are different.
The training is better.
But I would be an absolute idiot, completely daft if I said it didn't exist or it doesn't
still exist, right?
It does exist.
And it's a matter of people being able to go and support one another.
Absolutely.
Well you mentioned as well about the tail end of Desert Storm.
It's a pretty kind of unique lens because obviously that conflict was relatively short
compared to the god awful 20 years that the allied nations went through in this millennia.
What did you see?
What was the country like?
What were some of the kind of takeaways from that short glimpse that you had?
So we were at Prince Hultane Air Base, right?
So when we all forward deployed there, part of us went to Kuwait for the Kuwaiti liberation.
Part of us went to Dakhuran because I think it was shortly after I got back that the Qobar
towers in Dakhuran had been blown up by a terrorist.
And Riyadh was a little bit more of a safe space, but then we were bussed in and out
an hour one way to Prince Hultane Air Base where we had the Patriot missiles.
So as a law enforcement individual there, my job was to guard AWACS aircraft and the
Patriot missile launchers.
So that meant that the AWACS aircraft are the planes that do all of the PsiOps, any
kind of intel high, high above in the air.
But it was an interesting place to be.
We were still able to go to town and that's why I say that it was more of a safer environment.
Still we had to follow all the rules as a female, right?
So if we took one foot off base, we had to dress in a bias.
We had the black garb over our hair, the black dress to cover every ounce of skin that we
had.
So it was still very segregated in that way.
The perception of the other guards that were local national guards, part of their military,
of the thought that we, the females that were there, were there to service the men, active
duty men.
That there was no way that a female, one, could drive a car, two, carry a weapon, and
three, be even on the same level that they were.
So I think that there was a lot of surprise and shock of others seeing females there serving
in a war campaign alongside the men.
Isabel's crazy, I don't know about Iraq specifically, but I know Afghanistan, some of the cities,
and again, there's a difference between the cities and some of the rural communities.
But when you look back at the 70s, 60s, 50s, it'd be hard to tell which was Paris and which
was one of these cities in the Middle East and the way the women were dressing and obviously
driving and going to school and all the things, and how quickly it devolved to this extremism
and oppression.
I know some people in that community say, I'm more than happy to wear hijabs and whatever
the garments that are told to them.
But I think arguably there's as much, if not more, that would say, well, no, we used to
be able to do all these things and now we can't.
And I think this is one of the things that I respect about the Western militaries that
went over there as part of that was obviously the liberation of women.
Absolutely.
And I would see that too while I was deployed to Afghanistan for that war.
You see every walk of life from every providence of Afghanistan, right?
And Kabul, same thing.
Women were being educated.
They were speakers.
They were leaders.
They were bankers.
It was phenomenal to see that.
And then the farst remote providences of Afghanistan, we would get patients in that were females,
right?
Girls.
And the thing that I loved about being there is when we had a patient that was a child,
I'm talking eight years old to 10, 12 years old, unfortunately they were injured by the
war as a bystander.
But when they would come in, they would have so many questions for us.
Myself, my commanding officer, Elizabeth Coddington, my great friend, Olivia Jackson, they just
found it fascinating that we were women and what were we doing there?
And when they would be with us for a prolonged amount of time, it was taking them under our
wing to show them what you can do, what you can be, that this is a possibility.
But I go back to these girls are coming from a providence where they don't even have running
water, right?
They have open fire pits in their house to cook on.
They don't know really how old they are.
They go by the moon and the sun.
They go by charts.
They don't understand the hours and time like we do.
And it's such a huge leap of connection of how do you get a person from there to then
this is what you can do and go to college.
And it's very reminiscent of there was a major, army major, that was doing outreach with the
Afghanistan local college.
And she would bring in a surgeon, a nurse, OR individual.
So and it's not that these individuals were classically trained in that like we would
have here in England or the United States, it was whatever their training was, right?
To make them competent.
And so what she wanted to do is she wanted to start having us teach these little teams
how we do our work in the trauma ICU.
How is an arterial line set up?
Where does it go?
How does it work?
How does it monitor the internal blood pressure?
Rapid intubation, we're using an LMA.
What does that look like?
How do you do it?
Is that easy versus an ET tube, endotracheal tube?
What are all these things on the monitor?
You're measuring intercranial pressure, CVPs, all of these things.
She wanted us to train these individuals on that.
And I'm like, this is exciting.
I am all about this.
I would love to share our knowledge base with these guys.
The first thing I realized is their time of learning revolved around their tea time, right?
So where we were very focused and if we had a moment, and I'm sure you understand this,
James, you could go to the bathroom.
And that's only if it fit within your schedule.
So to have a group of individuals that their tea time revolved around their education was
an eye opener for me.
The second, I started talking to them about the equipment that we had in Afghanistan.
I started talking to them about the monitors, how the monitors work.
And they were very confused.
I asked them about, are you accustomed?
Because the patient that I had was intubated.
He had an open belly due to a gunshot wound to his belly and both his lower legs had been
blown off.
So I started addressing the open belly and those types of things that would go along
with that mechanism or that injury, right?
And they still weren't really getting it.
And I was very in tune to their body language, their facial expressions.
And so I said, let me ask you this first.
Do you have equipment like this?
They said no.
Okay.
Do you have hospital beds?
They said no.
Do you have antibiotics?
And I'm showing them on the IV pump of things that we hang.
No.
And they said, okay, this might be a silly question, but I have to ask it.
Do you know what is the number one way to help prevent infection?
And they said no.
I said, okay.
Now I have a baseline of where we truly need to start from.
And I said, the next question is, do you have running water?
And they said no.
I said, okay.
I said hand washing is one of the most important pieces to prevent infection.
And where do you get your water?
And so that's the level of conversation that I then decided to have with these individuals
is the basic concept of spreading infection, how to disable that and disarm that.
Met with the major about a couple of hours later and I said, do you realize they don't
even have the basics within their hospital?
And that's where I kind of shifted in my willingness to help support this.
And she says, yeah, we know we're just trying to check off our numbers.
And that's that politics.
I don't like to do politicking, right?
If you're bringing these people because we have this amazing opportunity to teach them,
we need to teach them at their level so that they can do what they can do with the resources
that they have.
They will never see this type of equipment until they're ready to use that equipment
and it's given to them.
But we need to teach them at the basic level.
So yeah, there was a lot of frustration with growth and then devolving from that growth.
That's interesting.
I never really thought about it that way.
But I mean, even I had a guy, Rasool Rasek, I think I got that right.
He's an alias anyway, but he was Moushe Hadeen and then now he's trying to be one of the
voices to help unite Afghanistan.
But he was underlining as well what a lot of us didn't understand early in the war is
that Afghanistan isn't a united country.
It's all these tribes, some of whom get along, some of whom don't.
Like you said, some are in a city like Kabul, some are in the mountains.
And we forget that means there's a massive spectrum in understanding technology, all
the things.
That's correct.
We saw it all the time.
And that is a challenge.
And trying to pull everybody together in that country, it has its own set of problems.
And could it happen?
I mean, after the fall of Afghanistan, that sent me into a very, very dark place in my
life because as you were deployed to the front lines, seeing your brothers and sisters being
injured, seeing coalition members, guys and females from England, from France, from Romania.
You see these lives that are in front of you and you work so tirelessly to do your job,
your part among that trauma team to save their life.
And they're not just a person.
It's a human being.
It's someone that somebody loves.
And you just can't do enough to save them.
Everything you do is just not enough.
And then the emotional grappling with that, not only what could I have done different,
but God, he's going home in a box and his loved ones or her loved ones are going to
be at the end of that.
And the destruction of the loss of this life, what that does for that whole family that
is at home waiting for that person is, I think that's what was so hard for me with the fall
of Afghanistan because I start going through the pictures in my head of all the men and
the women that died.
And it's like, what was that for?
What was it for?
And this is something that again, I've heard so many people now, so many people from the
military being on the show.
And obviously most of them were in Afghanistan.
Specifically, some of them were in Iraq.
But undoubtedly, they did so much good and this is what they got to look in the mirror
and say.
And normally, our whole conversation is going to be these two things.
But I normally ask the military members a question and I preface it saying that our
media is very polarized and the civilians either kill them all like God sort them out
on one channel or they're all baby killers on another channel.
And the reality is we got to ask the men and women that were there, simply that.
And so I ask, what are some of the things that they witnessed when they got over there
that justified hunting certain human beings?
And then what were the moments of kindness and compassion that you witnessed?
And obviously, we're going to explore many stories with that.
So that's why I didn't ask you that one specifically.
But what I've also asked and I parallel this with the pharmaceutical industry.
If you have a profit based health care system like we do in America, where are the checks
and balances to make people healthier?
And there was no better example than COVID, not talking about vaccines because that was
a slice of the conversation.
But what a beautiful moment to address the obesity epidemic and the opioid crisis and
the mental health crisis and do the proactive things to get people healthy again.
Well, there are certain companies that are going to make a lot of money if we don't do
that and what happened?
Nothing.
And I think this is the same thing is if we are going to ask our men and women, arguably
children to put American patch on their shoulder and go, you know, and fight for our freedom,
for other people's freedom, there needs to be that checks and balances to make sure that
only happens when it's absolutely necessary.
But when people are making billions, if not trillions of dollars on weapons and uniforms
and MRI, MREs and planes and all the things, again, I think we need to hear these stories,
these raw, raw stories, because otherwise it's all pomp and circumstance and, you know,
everyone's saluting the casket when it comes back to an airport.
But that doesn't bring that child back to their parents in one piece.
And so this is, I think, a really important conversation is making sure that we only send
our military members over there when it's absolutely necessary.
We support them 100% when they're out there.
And we don't fucking withdraw like we did in Afghanistan.
I agree.
I absolutely agree.
And you know, it's so political based, right?
And living and working in DC, only on one sliver of a piece of government and then being
able to look behind the curtain to see if Wizard of Oz is real.
And you find out the Wizard of Oz isn't real.
It's extremely disappointing, right?
And then you start figuring certain things out with the politics of who's really running
things and making these decisions.
And I absolutely agree.
If it's absolutely necessary, yes.
And when you say that, James, and as I agree with you, even to get to that piece, there
has to be a complete overhaul of what we do and how businesses are rewarded by how they
support, right?
Because it is all about the money.
It is about who's making the money, who's really in charge, right?
Who's backing who.
And I don't think now at any rate that America would even be at that place to say, should
we really weigh into this war or not?
Right?
Because everyone in the government has an agenda.
And if someone tells you Christine's full of shit, no.
Everybody in DC, whether it's on the Capitol, whether it's in other agencies within the
government, all of the political appointees have agendas that they're trying to push forward,
right?
Afghanistan.
There was a movie that, oh my gosh, I wish I remembered the, it was with a congressman.
It was about his life.
His last name was Wilson.
And he was part of the Afghanistan support back in the 80s when the Russians invaded.
That movie resonated with me so much.
And I think it was because of the message that it sent with Wilson, Congressman Wilson
was trying to get, I don't, I can't remember exactly how much money to support maybe another
few years with Afghanistan because they were right at that point of turning a corner of
then becoming independent, right?
And he was disapproved.
Congress had disapproved his request and he was working all angles to get this approved.
And you just wonder, had a decision, a different decision been made by allowing Wilson to do
and finalize the business in Afghanistan?
Would we have gone where we went over the last 20 plus years?
And it takes a generation, right, to fix what Afghanistan is.
And I would say that the current, the leaders that are there now with the Taliban and pushing
back the devolution of women going to school and all of that, we still have 20 years of
devastation that these people were caught in the conflict, the cross wires of war, right?
And or being told that America is horrible and bad and evil.
It would require us to do a full generation of education and training and teaching, really,
I should say teaching that we are there to help and to make a change, right?
There are some kids that we cared for that loved and appreciated our countries.
And I say ours because it was a united front with England, United States, with France,
all of these partners that were helping to fight this war.
I don't think that those kids would ever be naysayers of the United States, whereas other
people that are born a certain way to be contentious against the United States and look and feel
we would never be able to win over there.
We would have to, it would start at a very young age to change that perception.
But it goes to the current wars right now with Russia and Ukraine.
How do we support them and do we support them, right?
I'm just asking that question.
We have to be very careful in what we decide to dive into and how long we're going to stay
there.
And if you look at any kind of war campaign that we've ever been in, we still have people
there.
We still have people left, right?
And it's true.
You go back to any place that we've supported a war front and still have people there.
I think this is what's sad.
I had spoke to Jeff Nichols, who's a Navy SEAL when we were talking about the withdrawal.
I think Jeff came on shortly after it happened and he was saying that this is another thing
people don't understand is all those weapons that are over there, they're already paid
for.
Those weapons companies have got their money.
The same ones that we see the air shows and parades with the Taliban for the third year
now, parading through all the things that are going to be used to oppress their people
and maybe invade neighboring places.
But then this is my personal opinion.
I don't understand why the centrist view is the most censored perspective, but the atrocities
that are going on in Gaza, the people that were murdered in October 7th, not a single
human is saying anything other than that was horrendous.
The fact that people were held hostage is horrendous.
I think that one of the Israelis was just released recently, which is phenomenal.
But the children and the women that are being murdered and a lot of the men have nothing
to do with that.
The same way as a lot of Irish people when I was growing up, when the Catholics and the
Protestants were fighting each other and the loyalists and all these little factions and
these poor people and the British people on the mainland were getting blown up, they have
nothing to do with that conflict.
I don't understand why that is the most hated voice is these people are dying and it's not
collateral damage.
They're being targeted and we're sending weapons.
Everyone's complaining about illegal immigration.
Where's the complaints about sending all this money to Israel to carry on what's going on
there?
And then you're complaining that your schools aren't staffed properly.
That's our money going to a place that's not a victim society that's trying to protect
themselves.
It's the other way around.
I don't think that the people of Israel agree with that.
I think it's again extremists trying to execute whatever their plan is.
But 16,000 children, they were all Hamas members.
This is what has disgust me and we are funding that left and right.
It's interesting when we talk about the funding of things like this and a lot of people don't
realize that the buckets of money to fund certain things are different colors.
When we talk about why are we not doing hospitals and even as a firefighter, there is never
enough staffing at hospitals.
Nurses, there's just not staffing and they're doing a lot that put their license on the
line that can be taken away.
And so we're talking about how do we fix this, the staffing at hospitals, let's say, and
yet we're still sending millions of dollars over on this side.
And it all comes down to what color of money is it?
And you can't mix the money.
This bucket of money for this endeavor here is purple or orange.
And the money to support our schools is in a green bucket.
But there's billions of dollars in the orange bucket, but there's only $10 in the green
bucket.
And because there are different lines of government services, there's this area here where there's
unlimited money to support the things that you were talking about.
To where there's hardly any money, the right color of money to support these other things
that are here near Dera that need to be handled and taken care of here at the home front.
But you're right.
It just comes down to why is it that we're not we but the leadership that's in place
allowed to do the things that they're doing.
Absolutely.
I had Tulsi Gabbard on a few months ago and we were illustrating all the money that's
gone to Ukraine.
And again, what happened in Ukraine was horrendous again.
But I don't think that most Russians wanted to go into Ukraine.
So again, we're talking about extremism.
But then you look at the poor people of Hawaii, a check for 750 bucks or whatever it was.
There's your equation of the value of the American people versus clearly the money that's
being made if we keep perpetuating these wars.
Yeah.
I always tell people follow the money.
That's will tell you the real answer.
If there's a question about why something's being funded and this other thing's not, you
follow the money trail and that will show you how it's all politically connected.
And sometimes, you know, the folks that are doing the stuff in questioning, they do very
good at setting up shell companies and things like that to kind of hide where that source
of funding is coming from.
But I always like to follow the money to see where it truly leads to.
And sometimes we're very surprised.
Yeah, I think these are just important conversations.
I mean, the first responders, our view on homelessness and the addiction crisis and
obesity crisis is raw and visceral because that's our battlefield.
That's behind the curtain that we see.
And for you, especially in the medical side, you see the collateral damage, the immense
collateral damage.
So you have a right to be able to talk about the industrial military complex and some of
these perspectives because you're the ones out there knee deep in death and destruction.
So these voices need to be heard.
Yeah, absolutely.
That's a great way of saying that.
Well, I want to get back to the medical side and we'll talk about healing and obviously,
you know, the inability to save, which is just such a crushing weight, I think, for
a lot of us.
So you're in the military police role.
You have gone to Iraq Desert Storm, walk me through the opportunity to go on to the nursing
side and let's talk about the actual training that you got in preparation for obviously
the you know, your pretty jarring introduction to it in Afghanistan.
Yeah.
So finished up, did 10 years as security police and then decided to transition into the reserves.
And the reason why I did that is because I was going then to a full time nursing program.
And and the way the nursing program works is you start with your class and you finish.
It's not that you could take classes here and there.
It's a full time commitment that you make.
So I ended up going into the reserves, went to nursing school, I was able to get accepted
into a accelerated program because I had two other degrees.
And so it was really kind of for prior degree holders program was was 19 months.
From there, I ended up getting accepted into the Mayo Clinic's critical care fellowship.
And that's where I ended up getting my training at Mayo Clinic as a ICU.
And then at that point is when the discussion came up of, you know, I already served 10
years.
I just need to do 10 more and then I can call it done and I can retire.
And so that was kind of the impetus behind going back into the Air Force.
So ended up going back in and stationed at Scott Air Force Base, started there and then
moved on to Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, Nevada.
That I was there for maybe the first year.
And then my number came up to deploy.
And I was super excited, right?
I knew things were going to be different.
The training that we got, you know, we didn't get any special training as far as going to
a pretend war or anything like that.
We got your basic training to be a soldier first or an airman first, meaning how to do
gate guard duty, installation security duty.
And the other schooling or education that we got, of course, is renewal of all of our
certifications, ACLS, BLS, PALS, and TNCC, of course, the trauma nurse care course.
And then one of the training that we received was a neonatal training, which was phenomenal
because during the time I was receiving that training, it was like a three, four day course.
I thought to myself, why the hell am I taking this neonatal training?
I'm not going to be doing neonate.
And I'm not a neonatal nurse.
I am an adult critical care trauma nurse.
But what I would find out later is that neonate training came in extremely handy, as well
as the PALS and everything related to a NICU and PICU.
So ended up leaving the, we were supposed to leave December of 2008 and it was being
pushed back, pushed back, pushed back.
And then we ended up leaving my team, the team and I left at the very beginning of January
of 2009 and went multiple challenges, of course, with logistics and travel plans and filled
aircraft.
So it took us a few days to get there and ended up showing up middle of the night, dark.
I remember getting off the flight.
The plane, it was a C-130 that we flew in on and everybody was in the back of it.
And it was just complete chaos, right?
Absolute chaos.
No one really knew where to go.
The smell was different.
The air was different.
Everything was different about that place.
And as I start coming into focus with my eyes of looking, okay, we're on the flight line,
but we're all being moved and relegated over here, it looked like just this small shanty
town, right?
The Army would call them dog candles.
And it's basically what it is.
The storage containers, the big shipping containers, the Army would put them on top of each other,
secure them and they would turn them into dorm rooms.
And so, and they would have makeshift lights to light up the area.
And it seemed like a very interesting and quaint, but beautiful place, believe it or
not, at least that's what I thought.
And we get shuffled, we grab our things and we get shuffled to the hospital and then it's
nonstop absolute chaos and nonstop.
We're trying to get registered in processing.
We get sent to our rooms.
We sleep for a few hours and then we show back up.
We're trying to figure out who's going to go to what shift.
I was supposed to go to night shift, sent me back home to sleep to get ready to go for
the following day.
And then I get called back in, know you're going to work days.
It was just like this controlled chaos.
And then there I was on my first shift when we received a Romanian soldier that just was
absolutely blown up all over the place.
And everything in me thought this is exactly what I was born to do.
And the level of care and attention that this person needed, I gave everything that I had
to him.
And then at that moment, I just knew that my whole life would be different coming home
and that I needed to figure out a way to express my thoughts and my feelings during my time
here really for my husband, Clinton, that wasn't going to get the same person home that
left.
And then that's when I started journaling and writing down every thought, every feeling
of every patient that I encountered there.
And what I noticed is over the span of time, every person that I cared for, I gave away
a little piece of myself.
And I think if someone were to tell me today, had you not given away yourself to these people,
if you had to do it over, would you do it?
I absolutely would have, even though the pain and the sacrifice and coming finally full
circle after 15 years, absolutely.
It's made me value sacrifices that people make and understanding that it's a process.
It is you want something so badly, what are you going to do?
You have to give something to get something.
And I always tell people it's not without sacrifice, right?
Because in life, that's the decisions we have to make.
There are sacrifices we have to make.
Nothing comes free.
But I always tell my kids not without sacrifice.
They'll ask me if they could do something not without sacrifice.
What are you willing to give up?
Are you going to have to clean the bathroom to get another couple of bucks?
So are you willing to sacrifice your time and doing that to get the money that you want?
When you first arrived in the medical unit, at this point, obviously you've been doing
the security side, then you go to civilian nursing school.
I'm assuming that in the trauma training and the Mayo Clinic, you must have had some pretty
extensive amount of patients come through those doors.
But now obviously you're in a war zone where it's trauma after trauma after trauma of allied
nations and indigenous people and enemy combatants.
With that fresh set of eyes, what was your perspective of the compassion fatigue of maybe
some of the people that have been there too long?
Yeah, you could see it.
The way that they care for their patients was totally different than the way the fresh
set of eyes would take care of patients.
And I even started going down that trail as well with the compassion fatigue.
I think towards the end of the six months, I was so depleted, but I would always try
and find that light at the end of the day to then get me refocused because you had to
be.
Being there not caring or being tired of seeing the same shit every single day, right?
It's not okay because that's still a human being.
This is their first time getting blown up or is their second or third time getting blown
up depending upon how many times they've been outside the wire and going out, right?
But you still are required, I think, to give everything you have to that human being.
This is the worst place in that person's life that they're going to be.
And showing that humanity and that compassion is what they're going to remember most.
And I remember telling my team when we all got there, everybody was just really kind
of taken aback by what we were seeing, what we were getting, what was coming in.
The kids, no one prepped us for that.
No one said you're going to get a bunch of kids coming in and your adult trauma ICU is
going to turn into a PICU and a NICU.
I remember before I left, I talked to one of our medical technicians and I asked her,
I said, what is the one thing that you wished someone would have told you or prepared you
for that you would give someone else advice now?
And she said, and I just had a hard time believing her, she said, once you get there, you will
wish that the kids that come in, you hope they don't make it.
I was just like, no, there's no way.
I can't even understand that.
I am thinking from the lens of the United States running water, health care at my fingertips,
health care at my children's fingertips.
The benefit package that I have with the military transcends down to my kids.
So whatever they need, if they're sick, if they're hurt, they get taken care of.
If there's follow-up action that has to happen, they have follow-up care, they have specialists,
they have home health, they have physical therapy, they have everything.
So her, Amelia telling me that, and not being able to have something to compare it to where
she had been and what she saw, that just didn't make sense to me.
I had a hard time picking that apart and being able to digest that mentally.
But then when I got there, oh my gosh, that was probably the best advice that she could
have given me because I was then, it was already in my head and I had thought about it so much
that it's like, okay, I got it.
This is what she's talking about.
These kids that end up getting blown up, run over because the rules of engagement are if
there are kids in the way of your convoy, you can't stop.
You have to run over them.
And you think about mentally how that's going to fuck up that young 18-year-old driver.
They have to run this kid over.
And then getting those kids in and seeing their arm off because the convoy had run them
over or their legs run over and now we have to amputate both their legs.
Meaning that these are poor kids from a very poor providence.
There's no running water in their house.
They don't have physical therapy.
They don't have specialists.
So we're going to take these kids in, get them well.
And what we saw there is, and we would say, well, they're going to be discharged to the
ditch.
And that meant that depending upon the level of effort that it was going to take to take
care of that child and what kind of medication we would give them, the family members would
then leave their kid on the side of the road and walk away.
They will take all of that medication and go sell it on the black market or they'll
get more money for that because they can't do anything for their kid.
They can't go to physical therapy.
There is no follow up.
The one amazing thing that Bagram did is that they allowed follow up visits for that child
through the course of the time that we were there with that hospital.
So revisions, if scar revisions needed to be made, they would come back and we would
provide that for them.
But if they can't get to Bagram and they have to go back to their village, they don't have
the capacity to be able to get that follow on care.
And it was really sad.
And you knew some of these families what was going to happen to these kids.
And that was hard.
That was hard to accept.
It was unfathomable.
Well, I mean, these are the stories that again, we need to hear to add weight against going
into conflicts.
Now, are people being preyed upon by their own Taliban, Al Qaeda, etc.
Yes.
And of course, there's that balance between what do you do?
But for example, a lot of the special forces soldiers have had on here, a lot of them seem
to have the same thing.
When the towers first fell, it was get in there, hit all the key leaders, shut down
the training camps and then get out again.
And obviously what we saw, and I think it seems to be a pretty accepted kind of philosophy
now is the longer you stay, the more enemies you make.
And how many of our soldiers or military members were simply it was IEDs over and over and
over and over again.
But the collateral damage, 16,000 in Gaza, one of those 16,000 children is exactly what
you're talking about.
One family devastated and in that particular country, like you said, discarded because
there's nothing they can do.
And it's kind of ironic that we were talking about your dad's injury earlier.
At least that didn't end his life.
If he was a little boy in Afghanistan, he wouldn't have survived that injury.
Right.
And you said it perfectly, James.
What I just spoke about is one child.
You talk about Gaza, you talk about one child, 16,000.
There are thousands of more stories like mine, like the child in Gaza that permeate the field
of war.
Right.
And these are unintended consequences of going to war.
And the other piece to that, which I was also very naive to, is that the military, the United
States government, would pay the Afghanis money for their injuries.
Right.
So if their child was injured, there was a percentage of whatever the injury was, and
that's based upon how much money they would get.
So then you had some people that wanted to get injured so that they have this windfall
of Afghani dollars.
It was just a very bizarre and crazy place to be.
Nothing made sense, but then everything made sense, if that's weird.
But it was true.
Just the different way of life there.
What they valued versus what we as Westerners valued.
Well, I've heard that too.
And obviously, all kinds of things, throwing gays off the roof.
I think gays is the right plural, but homosexual men and women off the roof, special needs,
family members being chained in the backyard.
And I've heard a lot of those stories too.
When I talked about the kindness and then the horrors, one of your stories, one of your
patients really resonated.
It's both those combined.
So talk to me about the 14-year-old abortion.
Her father had befriended another guy.
The father was a farmer up northern area of Afghanistan and in the mountains.
And the friend that the father had befriended had raped this young 14-year-old girl.
When six months had passed, the mom realized that she was pregnant and the father went
out of the village for some reason.
And the mother and the girl's brother took her behind a cowshed and proceeded to cut
the baby out from her abdomen.
Again, when we think about Afghanistan in this place, there is no pain medication.
There's no IV.
There is no clean, sterile environment.
It is a dirty old knife out on their property.
It's filthy.
And they proceed to slice her abdomen open.
The brother is able to take the baby from her uterus and bury the baby behind the cowshed.
And then proceeds on to sew her gaping wound shut with yarn.
They wrap her up.
They put her by the fire in their house, in their hut.
And the dad comes home realizing that she's not doing too well.
She's not feeling well.
He realizes that she's not communicating, level of conscious, obviously has completely
changed.
And he realizes that she's hurt.
She is not well at all.
And proceeds to take her to the nearest medical outpost that our partner staff.
And two days it took them to get there.
I'm surprised that she didn't die.
And initially when she got to the outpost, they thought she was already gone.
She was completely septic.
And they flew her in to Bagram.
And that's where she was intubated.
We took her to the OR very quickly.
Started doing abdominal washouts.
Of course, they had to take out her complete uterus.
And so now she's non-childbearing.
And she was intubated for days.
And it was myself and a few other handful of nurses that really leaned in to be her
primary caregiver.
It was atrocious.
She was such a fragile, sweet, beautiful little girl.
And then when she was extubated, you could see into her beautiful brown eyes.
And that there was this innocence that she was robbed of.
And all I wanted to do is bring her home.
Bring her to the United States.
And just show her a different life.
Give her a different opportunity.
And over time she ended up getting better.
We were doing hourly dressing changes, wet to dry, 24-hour antibiotic care for her, IV.
Everybody wanted her to live.
And she did.
And she recovered.
And she just really blossomed into this beautiful soul that we all had this amazing opportunity
to spend with her.
And to get to know her on a personal level.
And tell her stories about my daughter.
Show her pictures.
And just become an integral, important piece in her life of this particular journey that
she was on.
She was big news in Afghanistan, right?
Her family, that was a big thing that a lot of the community members wanted her dead as
an honor killing.
She got pregnant.
And the only way that you can make this right is you need to kill your daughter.
And the other half of the community was, no, we need to protect her.
And that's where that trust comes in with your interpreters.
What we found is some of the interpreters that we had were feeling, pooling information
and selling it to either one of the Taliban or to other people to make money.
And some of the interpreters were very loyal supporters and would help us at all costs.
And for this one, one of the interpreters let a lady in who was trying to take her,
the child's picture.
And I was just like, no, you got to leave.
I don't know who you are, but you're not supposed to be here and escorted her out very, very
quickly.
And at that point, there was a real strong feeling that this girl's life could be in
jeopardy.
And so then we restricted the nursing care for her.
And then we were armed every time we took care of her because you just, you never knew.
It was such a volatile situation and you didn't know who was who, who was trustworthy, who
wasn't.
Could they slip or something?
Could they not slip or something?
And so we all just kind of came together as a unit to really protect her.
And then it was time for her to go home.
There was nothing else that we could do for her.
She was completely healed.
And we were talking to her about going to Kabul to stay at a girl's home, to go to school
and to become educated and to be independent.
And I and she decided not, right?
She decided that she was going to go back home to her village.
And that I still struggle with that because what we ended up finding out later through
secondary third source is that when she got home, the compromise was that she was married
off to the guy that raped her.
And I just wonder where she is, how she is.
And then to that end, I think of the opposite of had she gone to become educated, right?
She was 14.
When Afghanistan fell, she would have been in her late 20s.
So old enough to make a decision on whether she was going to stay there or move and go
somewhere safe or was she had stayed there and then been killed by the Taliban anyway?
You know, you just it's this toss of a fucking coin makes no sense.
Staying on that theme.
One of the things I think that was the greatest weight as a paramedic here is I was a black
cloud and in 14 years as a medic and then before that in EMT, I never had a single code
save.
So if you went into cardiac arrest and I was your medic, you were fucked.
And even last year I was on a flight home from London and on the tarmac before we pushed
off one of the passengers had a cardiac arrest.
And you know, no one really kind of was from an emergency background at all.
I ended up leading the code and there were a couple of people that knew CPR.
So you know, there were some extra hands, but the cabin crew bless them.
They wrote they had to ask for permission for every single piece of equipment, the AED,
the BVM.
I mean, it was insane and I never even got my hands on drugs or anything.
And anyway, that gentleman, the fire brigade first came and then the paramedics because
they're separate in London, ended up working in the galley, you know, and then eventually
it was time to have to pass off the chest and stepped away.
But again, he didn't make it.
And then I read of a person who had a heart attack and there was like 20 cardiologists
on the plane and they made it and they all had this fucking celebration together.
But my point being, as you can tell from my frustration is I never had that.
And so the inability to save, which I think is taught so poorly in medical training, well,
you know, ACLS, you do this, this, these drugs, this, you know, these jewels.
And then the person jumps up and brings a cake to the station.
So I think that's, you know, the, the side for us and the civilian side.
And I can imagine that must be brutal, you know, in the combat zone too.
So we've talked about some of the saves.
What about the inability to save?
How did you deal with that?
Has that just started compounding?
Yeah, I, wow.
I think that we just beat ourselves up over it, right?
Could I have done something different?
We start questioning our skills.
We start questioning our judgment.
And I'll never forget the major first, first loss that we had.
It was on January 17th, 2009.
The soldier's name was Carla Robinson.
And he, there was a, there was a, a suicide bomber that had a fuel truck that detonated
it in Kabul.
And he came to us, he wasn't even supposed to be my patient.
The nurse that was supposed to be a patient, she was a hot mess.
And I was just like, I'll take them, you know, go do what you have to do.
And he had already come out of the OR.
He was already obviously intubated and he was just wounded from all over, you know.
And as soon as he came rolling into the American Bay, he starts coding.
One of our technicians jumps and is on his chest and doing CPR.
I'm giving the med cart, rolling it over.
We were taking turns doing chest compressions.
And as we are cutting off part of his shirt, I noticed he had two tattoos or one tattoo
of two small children.
And I'm like, shit.
We can't, we can't let this guy die.
He's a dad.
Those must be his kids.
And everybody's looking and we are doing everything.
We have a Belmont, you know, level one transfuser.
We are infusing fluids.
As soon as, and it was Olivia Jackson and Justin Hogue.
Hogue was the technician and Olivia was the trauma nurse, critical peer nurse.
As soon as she would spike the bag and put it in, Justin would undo the clamp.
That sucker was in.
I mean, it was in seconds.
The patient had a huge cordis in his IJ.
And as quickly as it came in, they were switching it out.
So it literally took the two people to manage the level one.
And they're just slamming in product after product.
And we realized that the epi that we're giving is not, it's just not doing what it's supposed
to be doing.
So then the physician decides to start injecting them in the heart.
Well then that led to a cardiac tamponade.
And so we have to now open the chest wall and relieve the cardiac tamponade.
And then we then have to start doing the heart massaging.
We get a shockable rhythm.
We're doing the internal paddles.
We shock him.
We think he's doing okay.
Like okay, he's going to make it.
He's going to make it.
Regardless of how fucked up everything is, right?
He is really injured.
And it just wasn't enough.
I think that everything that we were putting in him was all coming back out in the holes
and the wounds and all over the floor next to his bed, all over my shoes.
And this white floor just turned into this puddle of blood and failing.
And I don't think that anybody wanted to stop because we all knew he was a dad, right?
And finally when the trauma surgeon called the code, everybody was in tears.
It was quiet, very, very quiet, but we all had tears rolling down.
And that moment with all of us as a team, that solidified everybody together as a team.
From there, everybody just connected.
It's hard to explain.
But yeah, no one wanted to give up on him.
We just wanted him to live.
And that was a hard one.
That was really hard for everybody.
That was for the new team that just got there in country.
We'd only been there for a few days and that was the first major, major loss.
You know, and then it just progressed from there.
We saved a lot, but we lost a lot.
And just kind of think if I would have noticed something sooner, maybe the outcome would
have been different.
If we got them sooner, what if we gave this drug instead of this drug?
You just go through it over and over and over in your mind and it's hard to let go.
It's really hard to let go.
Someone came on the show recently and they made a comment and I'd never really looked
at it this way before.
They started off in fire and then they went to law enforcement.
And the reason was they said in fire, everything is reactive.
We're just responding to someone's worst day.
In law enforcement, yes, there's that element, but also you're enforcing rules on the streets
and other areas where you're also preventing things from happening.
And I was a lifeguard before I became a firefighter.
And if you're a good lifeguard, you hardly ever do a rescue.
You can certainly in a smaller area where you can actually oversee it properly.
But I think that's one of the maddening things that I saw and it really sent me down the
podcast, the books, all the things is if you just stand in a field hospital in the middle
of a war zone, you just keep getting the same people over and over again.
And you don't realize it at the time in the back of your mind, your brain is saying, when
is this going to fucking stop?
When is someone going to stop the reason that all these people are coming in there?
When are we going to fix this?
And I think that's one of the things that really beats us down and creates that compassion
fatigue and down the road, even PTSD and God forbid suicide is again, you're taught almost
to be a superhero in these medical environments and no one's labeling us that way, but you're
the person between the patient and death supposedly.
And you fail and you fail and you fail and you fail.
And again, like you said, you save some people.
I had pre-code saves.
Don't get me wrong, but you know, there's so many people that don't survive.
And I think it's really that lack of logic that why are we not preventing this happening
in the first place, whether it's starting a war in the first place, whether it's the
tactics, whatever it is, and our doctors and nurses and paramedics and EMTs are on the
front line and they're the ones just turning these patients over and over and over.
Yeah, no, that's it.
That is well stated.
It's true and it goes back to what you said earlier on wellness, right?
Prevention.
Is it, should we focus more on prevention rather than the money being thrown at diabetic
medication?
It's okay.
Well, how do we prevent type two diabetes in the first place, diet, exercise, so on
and so forth.
But yeah, how do you prevent that?
And to even get to where we were in the first place with this whole thing.
The compassion fatigue, I think, you know, many of the times that I was there in Afghanistan,
I was the charge nurse and God, and I even took a picture of this and I have the picture
somewhere.
Our board, our ICU board was packed with patients and we had overflow patients.
And by this time, it was the standard instead of everything was X fix, IED blast, you know,
I just started finally writing broken body, broken body, broken body, broken body, broken
body because that's what it was.
You know, you get to this point, it's just like, I am so tired of writing the same stuff
for every single patient because they're all broken.
And I remember telling my team because everybody was struggling, everybody was struggling.
They were struggling at the beginning of seeing and being part of what this was.
I was too, don't get me wrong.
But I remember I was always the one that looked at the positive side, right?
And I would always make fun of everything.
And I have such a crazy sense of humor now that people on the civilian side that are
not medical, that they just kind of look at me and think, oh my God, she's too much for
me.
She's weird.
But that's the way that I cope with things is I joke and I laugh.
So I remember telling them, listen, it's about how we start this mission that people are
going to remember us by.
So focus on that.
We always have to put our best foot forward and be a good example.
If you don't know something, say you don't know it.
It's okay.
And because people would make fun of me, I would have my critical care quick checklist
book that I had.
I think her last name is white.
She sent us a bunch of books for free, which I loved.
I carried that thing everywhere I went.
I had different colors of pens, my markers, my trauma shears, tape, anything I needed
I had on me.
And people would be like, damn, Collins, you carry like a whole reference guide.
I'm like, that's all right, because I know where to go.
I don't know everything and I shouldn't know everything, but I know where my resources
are.
And so that was kind of a funny joke.
So I would tell them, again, as long as you know where your resources are, you can't know
everything all the time.
So it's how we start out is how people are going to remember us.
And so that was kind of like the theme for a while.
And you hit midpoint of this deployment and people are tired.
They're compassion fatigue.
They're just like, I can't do another broken body again.
I can't see another baby.
I can't see another child with ball bearings stuck in their brain and their chest because
some asshole decides to blow up a market with ball bearings that go and shatter, you know,
and kill all these people.
I just, you know, I just can't do it.
I can't do it.
And then I can't do it either.
I'm tired.
I am frustrated.
And it's like, okay, listen, it's how we persevere through this is how people are going to remember
us by.
No one cares how we started off now.
Now we're in the thick of it.
It's how are we going to take care of each other and persevere to the end.
So we're going to do this.
We're strong.
We got each other.
We're going to make it.
It's going to be fine.
We're all here for one another.
We're going to, we're going to persevere through this.
And it's that pep talk, right?
And they're like, yeah, okay.
Yeah, it's you're right.
It's how we're going to get through this that people are going to remember us by.
And at the end, they're like fucking done.
They're over it.
They're, they're tired of everything.
All of the bullshit there.
They're over it.
And they're like Collins, I don't think we could do another day.
All right, guys, listen, it's how we finish is what's going to matter the most and how
people are going to remember us by.
And they're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, you said it's how we're going to start.
It's that people are going to remember us how we persevere.
And now you're saying it's how we finish.
Hell yeah, it's how we finish.
Are we going to finish walking across the finish line or are we going to finish breaking
down and pulling our weapon out and wanting to shoot everybody here in the hospital?
Because that in fact did happen with one of our nurses on our med search side.
I said, and we just had one of our technicians, solid, solid individual, really sharp, really
good and she was told she was going to go home, I think like a month early.
And so mentally she shifted her mental set and she was ready to go home in a month.
And they came back and said, no, no, no, it's going to be two weeks.
You're going to have to wait two weeks.
And she waited that two weeks.
And for her, it was almost like no matter what she had done for the first six months,
everybody looked at this person as all she could do was cry.
She couldn't work anymore.
She couldn't function anymore.
All she did was was ball and had to be sent home or back to her, her, uh, where she, uh,
dorm that.
And I use that as an example.
I said, we have to finish out strong.
Look at so and so this, you hear what, what other people are saying.
It shouldn't be true.
And it's not true because she was amazing.
She, she was solid all this time, but this whole mental shift here, we got to stay true
to the mission.
We got to finish this out strong.
And then once we're done the last day and we walk out of this fucking hell hole, we're
done.
We all can cry.
We could all hug.
We could all do whatever we need to do, but it's how we finished this mission is what
people are going to remember us by.
Was it the right way?
I don't know.
You know, hearing it now sounds really kind of fucked up.
Um, but it got us through, right?
I think the unsung heroes of the military and the first responder professions are our
families.
Now you have deployed to Afghanistan, you know, for, for nine months, you've mentioned
Clinton, your husband, and I'm right.
And thinking you had two little girls where that point three, three little girls.
Yeah.
So talk to me about that.
A lot of times we hear, you know, the father deploying, but I mean, there's no question
with all these unusual conversations now of genders and all the other stuff, but you know,
the mother is the one that carried the child.
So there is that bond that is different being the father, even though we adore our children.
So talk to me about that.
You being away from your family through your lens, but also the strength of your husband,
you know, holding down the fort while you were gone as well.
Uh, no, he, he was amazing, uh, early on, uh, gosh, he was in the air force.
So he and I met in the air force.
He was a security forces, uh, air force cop as well.
And that's where we met.
And then he ended up leaving the service after eight years to go work for the federal government
with Homeland security.
And he did that for, I want to say probably almost five years.
And that's when I finished my nursing program.
And at that point in time, we had already had our second daughter and we were discussing
what we wanted for our life, for our children.
He was raised with a stay at home mom.
I was raised with a stay at home mom.
And that's what we wanted for our kids.
It just, I couldn't be the one that did it because I don't have the personality for it.
I joke.
I think that I would probably like, I would not be a good parent to my kids if I had to
stay home with them.
But I know that true and true.
And it's okay that I state that because for me that's fact.
And so when we had this discussion, he said, I'll stay home.
I said, you'll be the stay at home parent.
He's like, yeah, you go, you do your thing.
I'll support you in your career and I'll stay home and I'll take care of the kids.
And we really kind of sat on that.
And I said, if you're willing to do that, I'm willing to be the breadwinner.
And we made that agreement and that's what we did.
And so he then stayed home.
I went back into the air force and the great thing about him is that he understood the
role because that's what that is, what he did.
He understood the role of a spouse of a military person and what was required of him.
And so he built this unsinkable ship for me and our daughters.
He was the mom and the dad, right?
When I couldn't be there.
And he created this solid foundation for our girls to really not want for anything emotionally
wise the comforts.
Yes, absolutely.
They wanted their mom and he couldn't fulfill that role.
And that was hard, right?
That was hard for me.
It would carry a lot of guilt for that.
But he just established this role and that's what the girls know.
They don't know any different.
They don't know what it's like to have a stay at home mom.
All they know in their life, even up till this day, is what it was like to have a stay
at home dad.
So it's not like they feel like they're missing anything.
I know that they wish that they had me more when they were growing up.
But when I got tapped to go to the war, I think I was, he was good.
We both were good to go.
We both understood our roles and the way we are as a family is we are a team.
Team first.
Everybody has their role to play.
My girls, they pick up their room.
They need to make sure that they keep up, take care, you know, pick up after themselves.
And the girls, it's funny, they're great kids, by the way, many adults rather.
And they knew that if one of us didn't pick up our role, that it wouldn't work as a team.
So they all encouraged each other to make sure that they did what they were responsible
to do, which I wanted nothing more than to help develop them into responsible good citizens,
right, that cared about the community, cared about people, cared about humanity overall,
regardless of skin color, regardless of country, regardless of element.
It didn't matter.
But that compassion and love towards other human beings was the most important piece.
And Clinton absolutely hit that home, right, when I wasn't there and around.
So then when I went off to war, he settled in and did everything he could to support
these girls and to support me.
I think my family had a hard time with it.
I'm Mexican, and the traditional way is that the husband works and the husband goes off
to war and the stay at home person is the mom.
But that wasn't our story.
That wouldn't have worked for us in a relationship.
But he would love my girls enough for the both of us at that time.
Still wasn't the same.
You know, I remember my daughter telling me, my oldest daughter saying, you know, sometimes
I just want you.
You're my mom and I want to tell you certain things.
And I just want you to hold me and tell me it's going to be okay.
When I cry, I want you to be there.
And I couldn't, right?
But that's the path that we chose.
He was an incredible father.
My oldest or our oldest, I should say, is now 27.
Our middle daughter is 20 and our youngest daughter is 17.
My youngest, Reagan, when I was gone, she knew me on Skype.
Back then Skype was the one that the way of communicating via computer.
She knew me on Skype.
She knew mommy, mommy, and she would point to the screen.
When I redeployed home, it was a totally different story.
She really didn't know who I was.
She wouldn't come to me.
I tried at the airport to embrace her and she kind of was like, no, I'm good.
You stay there.
Really not sure who you are.
But I want my dad.
And at one point she was calling Clinton mommy as well.
And that I tried really kind of preparing myself for that.
She wouldn't want to come see me.
And I mentally was trying to prepare myself for that.
But it still hurt.
No matter how much I prepared myself, it still hurt.
But she's a baby.
She doesn't know.
She had just turned two years old the month before.
And it took her quite a while to finally warm up to me.
At one point, because she wouldn't let me hold her, I remember going into our bedroom
in the back of the house calling the computer via Skype.
And I can hear her as soon as the chime of the tone came on.
She started running from her playroom to the computer yelling mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy.
And she jumps up on the chair.
I was watching her from around the corner.
She ran and Clinton says, you know, mommy wants to talk to you.
And she jumps up on the chair and she's leaning over the camera with her pigtails and she
flips up the computer screen and just this huge smile that she has.
I'll never forget it.
And you know, she's just trying to talk to me.
And then I come walking around from the hallway and I said, mommy's right here.
And then she looks up above and she sees me walking with my laptop and she looks at the
computer screen and it's this whole level of confusion for her.
And I remember closing the computer laptop and I looked at her and I said, mommy's right
here.
Mommy's here.
Mommy, the screen mommy's here.
And she looked and I just kind of picked her up and was trying to hug her really tight.
And she's just kind of still kind of halfway hugging, kind of pushing her head away.
But we eventually ended up getting there.
But that was a tough one.
That was really tough for me.
That must have been, must have been horrendous.
With the transition, excuse me, the transition itself, you did nine months in the combat
zone itself.
You've done a decade prior to that in the law enforcement uniform.
What made you to decide to transition out?
And then what was that transition like?
Because so many of our first responders are military struggle.
That's their identity, their tribe, their purpose.
And then obviously it sounds like you're going to an incredibly cohesive home.
So I'm sure that was a big part of the healing.
But what made you transition out?
And then what was the dynamic of yours personally?
Yeah.
So when I got home, redeployed home, a good friend of mine, Kristy Sherbrink, her and
her spouse, same thing.
Her spouse was a stay at home dad.
She was like the only other person that I knew that we had the opposites.
And she was, she had just had a baby.
Her son was not even six months old.
And he might've been only five months old, but he was a little guy.
And the, she was getting ready to be tapped to deploy for the same length of time that
I was gone.
And Kristy came to me and she's like, my, my, my baby.
And I'm like, I know, I just can't see you leaving so soon.
She was still breastfeeding and he still would have been an infant, right?
By the time she would deploy and it just, you know, and that, and that's the thing with,
with military service, the military didn't issue, issue you a family.
They didn't issue you a house.
They didn't issue you a car.
That's not their responsibility.
What their responsibility is you signed a contract you're serving.
And I think at that time, Kristy's contract was up and she had the choice to either stay
in or, or get out.
And, and she had told me, James, I was getting off the airplane when I redeployed home, said
hello to my husband, to my family, gave her a hug and a kiss.
Cause she was there when I, when I arrived home and she says, I know you need to see
everybody, but I'm telling you, we're getting out of the air force and we're doing it.
We're doing a cross-service transfer to the United States public health service commission
core.
And I'm like, what the hell is the commission core?
What?
She goes, nevermind.
I got it all figured out.
You go say hi to your husband, go say hi to your dad and your mom.
I'm going to tell you about it later.
And I'm like, okay.
So of course do all the hellos and stuff and, and about, I don't know, five days later,
like Kristy, what is this about?
Tell me, come over, let's talk.
And she's telling me about the United States public health service commission core that
it's a only officer service in the United States that is under the department of health
and human services.
A lot of people think that we're Navy because we have nautical roots like the Navy.
We wear the same uniform as the Navy.
People think that we're the Navy.
And because the commission core is so small, people just chalk us up over there.
They're part of the Navy instead of having to sit there and explain in a dissertation
what the public health services.
And so people just automatically assumed it was the Navy.
So she says we, the whole premise behind the public health service is that we deploy to
our needs, the United States is needs.
What?
She goes, anytime there's a manmade disaster, national disaster, if there is an epidemic
of some sort, if there's whatever is taking over the United States of America and there's,
there's been a declared a national emergency, we deploy and we support that initiative and
we help our own Americans.
It's not like we're going to Afghanistan, Iraq, wherever we support U.S.
Like I can get behind that.
Okay.
She says we can go, we can go and serve with the IHS, Indian health services.
Right now they're taking people at the Navajo reservation in Tuba City, Arizona.
That's where we're going.
Said that's where we're going.
And she goes, yep, we're, I've already set up a trip for me, you, we're going to take
the two boys, our husbands, we're going to drive to Tuba City.
It was like a six hour drive or something.
We're going to meet the nurse manager there and we're going to, we're going to do this.
And at that point I'm thinking, I can't leave my kids yet.
And when I had redeployed home, they had me, my leadership had me on a leadership track
to where they wanted me to go to this leadership conference and I would have only have been
home for like six weeks.
The leadership conference was for a month.
They wanted me to finish up a schooling that was going to take me away again for seven
weeks.
And then the potential of redeploying at the end of the year, because the resources were
so scarce for a critical care nurse across the United, across the air force as a whole.
So there were all these conversations about me doing like a chess piece, right?
A chess board piece where they could put me here and then here and then over here.
And I start thinking about the timeframe.
It's August, August, September, October, November, December.
That's five months, right?
By the end of the year, more than likely I will be gone for another three months out
of those next five months.
And the first thing I thought, I just got my youngest daughter to finally actually hug
me and tell me that she loves me.
It's taken, you know, a month and a half.
I'm happy to go and redeploy.
I just need a little more time with my kids.
I just need a little, I need to make up some time.
And that just, you know, wasn't an option.
And so when Christie started talking to me about this other option, it really resonated
with me, you know?
And then I went to went to Tuba City with Christie and I'm like, this is a wonderful
place to kind of heal for me anyway, from the journey that I've just been on, not only
to heal, but to to really connect with the earth and the elements and cry all day if
I want to cry all day, hide in the closet all day if I wanted to hide in the closet,
but that I would be supporting the Native American community and the Hopi community
and helping them with chronic care diseases, disease management.
And that sounded good for me.
And for the first time in almost 15 years, I now was choosing my family over the Air
Force when every time before it was always the Air Force over my family.
And that I knew that was going to be a hard choice, because even now I still get choked
up about it.
Sometimes you talk about a community, the camaraderie, the identity, that's who I had
been.
That's who I was.
The Air Force raised me, the Air Force molded me to who I was and brought out these really
good silver linings of who I was in my character and who I wanted to be and who I aspired to
be as a leader.
And then to have to pack all that up and make a choice that I now have to choose my family
over who I would become with the Air Force was hard.
It was really, really hard.
And I still grappled with that for many years after.
So I did the cross-service transfer.
I struggled mentally.
I struggled quite a bit and turned to drinking, drank a lot.
And at one point, my middle daughter at the time who was four years old found me passed
out in the bathroom and she's crying, calling me, mommy, mommy, wake up, wake up, get up,
get up.
And at that point in time, I realized I can't do this.
This is not the example I want to set.
I was taught better.
This is an easy cop out.
The pain was so real.
The struggle was so real.
Nightmares, the whole nine yards, it just wouldn't stop.
And the stigma with going and getting mental health is a real thing back then in the Air
Force.
You go get help and then there's this kind of a check mark by your name of, oh, well,
she's probably may not be mentally stable because now she's on psych meds or she's
seeing a psychiatrist or a psychologist or she goes to counseling.
Can we really rely on her?
Is she going to have a breakdown?
Even though I've never broke down at work before, but is she it's that level of second
guessing who I am and who I have become to now this stigma that's attached to me of,
well, she's getting help.
And I remember before I left the Air Force, that narrative was alive and well.
And I had told our he was a new I think our chief or a first sergeant.
I can't remember what his new leadership role was, but he was downplaying mental health
in our critical care unit.
And I literally went off on him.
I was like, you need you as an enlisted leader need to promote seeking help.
And I remember he hated me.
He absolutely hated me.
But it was because of what he was stating.
It just didn't resonate with me, especially going through this traumatic experience, not
only me, but all of my colleagues and having some guy that's never deployed once in his
life talk about how there's other methods of dealing with with depression or you're
really not depressed or you really don't need the help, you're fine, you know, was just
ludicrous.
It was just crazy.
You know, and I'm one that will speak my mind.
And that's exactly what I did.
And I said, you know, what you're saying is bullshit.
It is absolute bullshit.
So yeah, that's what I believe in.
And I would advocate for that even after I left, I found out that people that I deployed
with now, most of them, I shouldn't say most, a couple of them, and divorcing their spouses,
they just went down this whole black hole, you know, didn't get the help.
Another one officer, you know, amazing nurse got a DUI.
And you just start seeing and we start finding out that people are killing themselves committing
suicide.
I remember reaching out to some women, I said, you go get help, go talk to somebody.
Oh, no, no, no, I can't.
I'm like, fuck that.
Yes, you can.
I went and got help.
I'm on meds.
Oh, you are?
And that's all it takes is one person to say, I see a psychiatrist, I take two different
kinds of medication to help with my PTSD, anxiety and depression.
And coming from a person that an outsider may think, God, she has her shit together.
She's articulate, she shows up, she does what she needs to do.
And then she goes above and beyond.
She has a perfect life.
The fuck I do.
I take meds, I see a counselor, I see a psychiatrist.
There are all these other things that have to help me to be a better person for today.
I will be better tomorrow.
I'll be better the next day.
And that's where that conversation comes, right?
And so once I left Tuba City, I even further advocated when I ended up getting selected.
I was hand selected to be the United States Surgeon General's executive officer.
So I was plucked out of Tuba City, Arizona, and then moved to DC to then take this role
on.
And I have to say, when I went through, Public Health Service has their own boot camp.
It's very, very different than DODs and Air Force, Army, Navy, Marines, all of that.
But for the first time in my life, I wasn't judged on how well I took a test.
I was judged on my ability to lead people, to positively affect people.
And the people that were running our basic training or officer training school had a
real appreciation and value for that, right?
And that's where I found out that I ended up getting nominated to take on this role.
Not everybody gets selected for this role.
And a very, very good colleague, last name Trombley, I was calling him, first name is
Dean, Dean Trombley.
He's a captain now in the Public Health Service.
He and I just connected because he was prior service as well.
And for the first time in my life, I felt valued from these experiences and how damaged
I was.
And he understood that.
And I'm like, I really am in the right service, right?
There's not all this test taking because I suck at taking tests.
I'm horrible.
And it's all about the mechanics that you do, right?
And I was really good hands on.
That's just my, I'm good at hands on stuff, not book smart.
And so I ended up stepping in this role for the United States Surgeon General.
And then I stayed there for eight years.
I ended up supporting three presently appointed and Senate confirmed surgeons general, supported
two acting SGs.
And between those three did some amazing, amazing things.
But man, I was mentally suffering severely and was at Walter Reed and ended up, I think
was at the, at the end of my rope and I just wanted to die.
And I ended up getting hooked up with this doctor, Dr. Sharon Paul.
She changed my life and a lot of work, but she, as my psychologist and then a psychiatrist
that managed my meds brought me out of a really, really dark place.
But it took years, right?
And I'm a strong advocate of mental health support.
People most people don't like to take medication.
It's like, it's not forever.
It's probably just for a short time to get you from point A to point B and it's okay.
No one's going to look at you different.
No one's going to care.
If this works for you and your genetic makeup and your brain chemistry, you have to give
yourself a chance and get the help and support you need because you matter, right?
You matter to someone and you need to be here for a reason.
You still have a life purpose to carry out.
And that's what I believe.
I believe that everybody has a purpose in their life, whether they know it or not.
And once you meet that purpose, then it's your time, your time to go.
But the mental health piece is huge.
Absolutely.
Well, thank you for sharing that journey.
I think this is the, the, the lesser loan, excuse me, the lesser discussed element of
the mental health conversation is the toolbox is so much larger than people realize.
And I think this, what we need to see is the hope in the post-traumatic conversation as
well.
That post-traumatic growth, I think is so important because all of these struggles that
we talked about, whether it was as a little girl in your family home or whether it was
a military law enforcement officer or a nurse in Afghanistan is those can absolutely just
fracture everything inside or as the, you know, the Japanese analogy where they use
the gold glue to fix the vase, it becomes a strength.
And I truly believe that that's actually the case.
But the middle, the void in between is firstly identifying it before you get to crisis.
And I think that the feeling of burdensome is an element that we don't discuss enough.
This point, the people's brains are broken.
And I say that with empathy.
It's physiologically broken and your reality is distorted where so many of these people
have had on the show believe that they were the reason for their family's pain.
You know, we don't hear that in the mental health conversations and on the posters.
But then the other thing is the toolbox.
And I agree completely that psych meds can absolutely be a bridge from A to B. The problem
is obviously in America, you know, there's not that conversation of, okay, what's the
next plan?
What's the exit strategy for my medication?
It's just that you're on it forever.
But then when you factor in, you know, psychedelics and some of these other things that are being
incredibly effective as well, you know, there's so much hope.
But then you obviously have the FDA working against the very things that are working for
our service members.
You know, there's a real stumbling block there, the same FDA that approved Oxycontin that
caused the opioid crisis.
But putting, you know, making someone realize that this toolbox is so vast and you have
talk therapy and EMDR and canine therapy and equine therapy and fishing and surfing and
all the things.
And that the other side, you're going to be a beacon of light.
You're going to have this resilience where now you have a purpose.
You use your story to help other people, just like you have in the book.
I think those together really elevates this entire conversation.
But if it's just I'm going to be on pills the rest of my life and I've got my dog and
I have to live with my PTSD, then that's not going to inspire others to have the courage
to reach out and ask for help.
But I think, you know, your story now and where you are now is exactly what we need
to hear.
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
And I love your story as well.
The amount of people that your voice has the outreach is phenomenal.
And again, it goes back to the cross-secting of the various first responders, military
officers.
It's beautiful to see that, to see that a firefighter, first responder, paramedic, medic,
has very same similarities of experiences with trauma, right?
And to be able to sit down together and have a conversation because both of our narratives
and your other guests that you've had on your show, it all comes down, it is so similar
to where we should convene in larger groups, right?
And have these conversations and even further support that mental health piece because there
still is that stigma in firefighting.
You have the big strong guys that are, you know, that may be afraid.
And it just takes that one person to step up and say, okay, I'm not going to be afraid.
I'm not going to be afraid of any kind of attachment that this is going to give me.
But I'm doing this because I care about my brothers and sisters, of other firemen and
women.
Absolutely.
I think another thing that I've started to realize is that the biggest naysayers are
people who just didn't have the courage to deal with their own mental health.
And arguably, if you look at extremes, and I've said this on the program before, if you
look at the head of Purdue Pharma, if you look at the head of, you know, the Stanley
Mori, I'm getting the name wrong, but the cigarette companies, you know, the fast food,
the big sugar that are killing millions of Americans, if they can sleep at night, then
I would argue that there's a mental health issue going there too, you know?
So a lot of the resistance that we meet, I think, are from people who happen to find
themselves in positions that are probably still unfulfilling despite the zeros on their
paycheck.
And if we can actually have that conversation and the leadership and mental health, maybe,
you know, a lot of that stigma will go away finally.
Yeah, I absolutely agree with that.
Well, let's talk about the book then.
So you just touched for a moment about journaling early on in this conversation.
Your book is phenomenal.
Service honor and sacrifice.
So what's beautiful is obviously you kind of set the scene and then, you know, we read
your journal kind of as we progress through those nine months and then your transition
out.
So what made you write the book?
And then we'll get to where people can find it at the end.
Yeah, the biggest thing was I wanted to write these experiences while they were fresh in
my mind as a way of coping with what my eyes had seen and then to help my brain kind of
process what I had seen.
And then I thought, you know, I would love to share this with my husband, Clinton, because
I need him to understand what this environment is like every day.
What is it that I'm seeing?
What am I doing?
The feelings, the thoughts.
And really kind of wanting out who I was because I knew at the end of this journey, I had this
weird feeling that more than likely I'm going to find myself lost somewhere.
And then to be able to go back and read from day one is almost like a breadcrumb to find
myself again.
And so as I started journaling and emailing Clinton my journals, he then decided to share
them with my mom and my brother and his mom and his dad and his stepmom.
And then that community that would read the journals then started growing and growing
and growing and growing far beyond what I had ever thought anybody would want to read
or really care about.
A lot of the journals I would add pictures so that it even further solidified the story
of, okay, this is what I'm reading and holy shit, this is what happens.
I can see really with my own eyes of what happened here.
And so that was just a cathartic way of ending my day.
And some days I just couldn't, right?
I was too overwhelmed with emotion and thought that I just couldn't put pen to paper.
But before I knew it, my mom would reach out and said, okay, well, everybody, all the family
relatives and friends in California are waiting for the next story when you're putting it
out.
I just chuckled.
I'm like, these aren't stories.
They're real life.
And so my mom said everybody's calling them the novellas, kind of like soap operas for
the Mexican side.
And then I felt this sense of this is a burden that I know I'm going to carry and I want
to share it.
Right?
It can't be mine solely alone.
And when I finally got back, I had thought about writing a book 15 years ago, but I just
wasn't there yet.
I didn't have the mental capacity to do that.
And every year since then, tell me I got to write this book.
I want to put this in a book format.
I want to do this.
And finally, a year and a half ago, I just said, okay, I'm doing it.
I worked with a good friend of mine and I said, I just need, it is going to be really
emotionally hard for me, but I need to do this.
I can't wait anymore.
I have to do this.
And so within nine months of that, I had deadlines for myself.
In May of this year, I went to a hotel here in Arizona, locked myself in a room, my hotel
room for almost a week and just polished it off and finished it.
And sent it to the guy that I was working with and the publisher and they pushed it
out and it was published June 1st, I believe.
And I think at this point, from all of the help and the support and the resources that
I had used along the way with my PTSD and anxiety, what I wasn't expecting is this
sense of solace after I was done with it.
The night that I came home after sending everything to the publisher, I remember feeling so free
and the one thing that was incredible is all of the space that this whole journey took
was now gone.
I had so much space in my head.
It's hard to explain unless you've been through it yourself to where I had all of this fog
and a ton of just shit in my brain and it just like there was no vacancy at all for
anything.
And once this was put together on paper, I felt really good about it.
It was no longer my burden to carry.
And I finally, truly, for the first time in 15 years, felt this overwhelming sense of
peace.
And I think to myself, God, I've really held onto this way too long.
I should have done this sooner, but I couldn't have done it sooner.
It would be too much.
It would have been too much for me, too great of a challenge or too emotionally, I think,
mentally and emotionally would have been, I wouldn't be, I wasn't ready.
That's what I'm trying to say.
I wasn't ready then.
And now I was finally ready to share these stories and share the truths and the rawness
of what truly happened.
And it goes back to that.
You look at the movies, right?
You go to a movie, you see a war movie and you see the guys that are in battle.
They get blown up.
The next movie scene cuts to they're in the hospital or they're getting out of the hospital
and they're sitting in front of a VA healthcare center, right?
When you look, there's a whole section missing of that storyline.
And every story in the movies is like this.
There's that one section that is not told.
And this book tells that section about who are these people that are in this section
that are never talked about, who are trying to save that person that was just blown up
in the field, what that narrative looks like in the middle.
What is happening during that moment of the most important moment of that person's life
to then when they go home and they're sitting in front of a VA clinic or they're somewhere
else, right?
Out of the military and they're looking for a job as the movie script dictates.
But it was to really unzip that middle piece that tends to get overlooked where those first
responders are.
It's the same thing with that, right?
Firemen, firemen, firefighters, EMTs.
And to then be able to share that with the world, whether they liked it or not.
It's the raw truth.
It's looking at pictures that might be disturbing to people.
It's talking about being home as a child and your dad and your seven brothers and sisters
and your house gets hit with a white phosphorus bomb and you're now totally incinerated with
white phosphorus and you're burnt close to 50% of your body.
And the survivability of that is likely zero, but yet you survive, right?
And how war just changes everything.
People's lives and your family's lives, extended family's lives, your friends' lives.
But that's really kind of where I felt this book needed to be is to look at the medics
of the job that they do every day and what they've done overseas in the war.
People that I talk to now had no idea that we were charged with taking care of a Taliban
and they just thought that was just insane.
You don't think about that when someone tells you, okay, well, you're going to war to be
a nurse.
The first thought of your mind is not taking care of a Taliban member if they were not
secured to the bed and or have a weapon, they would kill you, right?
And so it was mind boggling for a lot of folks and in the amount of children that we took
care of, the injuries, the mechanism of injuries for the small kids and what that looked like.
So just people I think like to be in the safe space of their home, maybe want to know about
it, but really don't want to know about it because there's a level of that ignorance
is bliss that you can continue to live your life a certain way and not really have to
care about it because you don't know about it.
And it goes right back, James, to the mental health, suicide awareness, right?
All of this takes a toll on a first responder.
It does.
When I was reading it, I was reminded of a scene in the Band of Brothers and funny enough,
I had the actor on the show, Shane Taylor, but I don't know if you've ever seen that
series, but there's the one that's in Bastogne and there's one moment there in Belgium where
he's able to go to this neighboring town and he walks into a church that is a field hospital
and he has this amazing interaction with this nurse and that's what I felt as a civilian
paramedic firefighter in America reading through your eyes in war.
It was the same.
And like I said, our books, there's a huge parallel.
I'm just finishing my second one now and again, I can totally relate to that weight because
I'm almost done.
I just got to get my cover art sent back and then I can use that.
But yeah, I mean, this is the thing is in my profession, we have Chicago fire and I've
had the guy behind that, the real firefighter who he tries to put these raw stories out,
but Hollywood then polishes them up and everyone looks like a model and every rescue is successful.
So there isn't a thing out there to actually show what we do.
And I hope that my second book will become a show, a TV show for that very reason.
But this is what we need to see because these not only show the immense sacrifice of all
our medical people in the military, obviously the casualties of war from the allied nations,
but then the humanity even amongst the Taliban.
I mean, the poverty and the threats towards families and even the nuances there.
But it's such a powerful look inside that.
And that's kind of what I was thinking is that combat medic and that nurse at that moment
kind of realizing that the same exact person.
Yep.
I know exactly what scene you're talking about.
And I loved Band of Brothers.
Great series.
Absolutely.
Well, I want to finish on one thing before we go to where you can find the book and you.
You mentioned Carlo Robinson being your first victim.
I know there's a kind of full circle moment with his mother.
So let's finish with that.
Part of those dreams and nightmares that I had had coming back home and Carlo Robinson,
I would think about him often throughout the rest of my time in Afghanistan.
And he's kind of speckled throughout a few of the stories that are in the book.
And when I came home, I was dreaming about him all the time.
And I just couldn't figure it out why.
And it would be certain moments with him.
And I remember every time I would have that dream, I would wake up immediately and I would
tell Clinton, I dreamt about Carlo again and we would sit and talk about it.
And one night and morning that I woke up, I sat up in bed and I just said, I need to
find his family.
That's what I think this is about.
I think I need to find his kids.
And Clinton, he's great.
He's just like, whatever you got to do, you let me know how I can help.
What do we need to do?
I don't know.
I don't even know where to start, but I'll figure it out.
And so it took me about a month to finally find someone that knew his contact.
And I was sworn to secrecy that I would never say who gave me the contact.
And the person was just a dear to allow me that opportunity to call in.
Tried one number, didn't work, tried the next number.
And I was at work on the res at Tuba City Medical Hospital.
And I was in my office, made the call, this sweet, gentle, meek voice answers.
And she says, Jumpin' Jacks, this is Jenny.
And I was frozen.
I didn't know what to say.
And that's really not like me.
And I finally get enough courage and my words together.
And I say, I'm Captain Christine Collins.
I was an Air Force trauma nurse in Afghanistan.
I'm trying to reach Carla Robinson's family to that effect.
And all of a sudden, she just started crying.
So I realized I have the right person.
Just don't know who Jenny is, but I have the right person.
And she knows definitely Carla.
And from that point, as she cries, I just said, I'm so sorry.
I was one of the nurses that held Carla's hand.
And I just feel this need that I need to call his family and let him know that he did not
die alone.
He was surrounded by people that cared about him and loved him.
And I said, I'm so sorry.
And she just cried even harder.
I said, I'm so sorry, who are you to Carlo?
And that's when she had stated, I'm his mother.
I'm his mom.
And then the gut-wrenching cries and screams that she made, those will always be with me.
And she went on to say, my only son is gone.
He's dead.
And I just told her, I said, I just am compelled to reach out.
I'm so sorry of the loss of your son.
And I started explaining to her who was around him and that we loved him, that we loved him
enough for her because we knew she couldn't be there.
And I ended up finding out that this whole relief and sadness for her was when she said
my son, my son is dead, is when, and this is now later on, because I went to go, Ladies
Home Journal did a story on us and they flew me out to meet her for the first time.
And this is when I realized that she had always been under the assumption that Carla was alive.
And that he was just captured and lost in Afghanistan.
And the reason why that was is because when Carla passed away and was sent back to the
United States, the plane that brought Carla's body brought another casket as well.
And so when they dropped, when they flew into the airport, there was a huge plane-side services
by the Army Guard, color guard, and there was a huge parade.
Like the streets were lined with people to bring him home.
And there was a caravan that took him from the plane-side services where the honors were
presented to him and the family and then took him to the local mortuary.
Mind you, it's Hope, Arkansas.
So Hope is a very small place.
So they get to the mortuary and the Army guy opens up the casket to do the whole checklist.
And the mortician there went to school with Carlo and she knew it wasn't him.
And she said, this is not Carlo.
You have the wrong body.
And needless to say, kind of under the cover of darkness, they take this body back, have
the plane turn around because it's already taken off with the other casket, come back,
exchange the caskets quietly.
No one sees, no one notices, and then takes the right casket back.
And then by that time, Jennifer was completely beside herself because she had just talked
to Carlo the day before.
So to her, she didn't understand how did he die?
I just talked to him.
There's no way.
They bring the wrong casket to her and she just doesn't want to believe that he is actually
in fact dead.
And so it wasn't until I called her and told her that I was there and then gave her, told
her about the tattoo on his forearm, talked to her about how big he was and tall and all
of these things that finally led her to believe that, my goodness, he has died.
And in that cry, she just said, God has answered my prayers.
And so had I not made that call, she would have continued to have been extremely restless
right and thinking that her son is still alive, which is tragic.
One could never move on from that.
And we've become amazing friends, right?
More like family.
He's part of my family, I'm part of their family.
I fly out to see her.
I stay with her when I go and visit.
But once I made that call, James, to her and confirmed that in fact he did pass away, it's
been 15 years.
I have not had one dream about Carlo since.
And the crazy thing is that we never said two words to each other, right?
Because when he came to us, he was so far gone.
He went through surgery, had to have one of his kidneys removed because it was blown inside
out.
And when he came to me, he was intubated, right?
So there was never one point that I looked at him in his eyes and he looked at me and
we nodded or said a code word.
It was none of that.
It was just this connection with his soul and my soul that then became this whole other
journey with his family.
So yeah, they're a very, very special part of my life and they've been in my life ever
since.
Well, I think that's a beautiful place to round this off.
So people can obviously hear all the mentions of Carlo in the book amongst many, many other
stories that we didn't go into deliberately.
So there's a lot more people can get from the book.
Where are the best places to find the book itself?
And then what about you on social media or anywhere else?
Yeah.
So Amazon, of course, just published or pushed out an audible through Amazon.
Amazon has the paperback and the hardback and the Kindle.
Also I have a website at combatcarewarrior.com, again, www.combatcarewarrior.com and you can
purchase the book on that site as well.
I do do speaking engagements.
So I've done a few of those.
Excited to speak with veterans, non-veterans, first responders, to have that dialogue and
that discussion about mental health and traumas that we really work through based upon very
similar experiences or same like experiences really.
And social media, I'm on Instagram, just Christine Collins RN on Insta.
And that's pretty much it.
I'm not very huge on social media.
I probably should be, but I'm not.
A lot of it's overrated.
I like Instagram when I'm not shadow banned, which seems to be all the time because I talk
about the middle of the road stuff.
But anyway, but I just want to thank you so much.
It's been such an incredible conversation as obviously there's a lot of parallels between
our two careers.
But as you said, it's a lens that people need to see.
These are stories.
These are the links in the chain that we don't get to talk about.
You've got your field medics and then you've got Walter Reed and then Germany usually.
So I want to thank you so, so much for being so generous with your time and coming on the
Behind the Shield podcast today.
Thank you very much.
I really appreciate it.