Linda Henry, Desert Shield and Operation Iraqi Freedom

Air National Guard nurse served in Desert Shield, Operation Iraqi Freedom

By Tamara Stevens, Special to Emmet County

Standing at the front of a large conference room before 40-plus people, Linda B. Henry, Lieutenant Colonel (Retired), a flight nurse with the Oklahoma Air National Guard, certainly looks like an officer. Her lapel and shoulder patches mark her as a Lt. Col., and the left side of her uniform is ablaze with countless colorful ribbons, distinguishing both her and her career.

But Henry wastes no time telling the enraptured audience who have come to hear her at North Central Michigan College in Petoskey talk about her three tours of duty in the Middle East that she may look like an officer, but in her mind, she was, and is, a nurse first.

“The Guard wanted us to think of ourselves as officers first, nurses second, but I was a nurse before I joined the Guard, so in my heart, I’m a nurse first,” Henry said, almost apologetic to the National Guard and its training.

Her three tours of duty began with Desert Shield in 1991, which became Desert Storm, and then came Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. During her talk earlier this summer, she highlighted her career in the military and discussed her experiences of caring for patients being transported on a C-130 aircraft, as well as the rigorous, in-depth training she and her unit underwent.

Linda Henry, Lieutenant Colonel (Retired), a flight nurse with the Oklahoma Air National Guard, stands next to a table laid with souvenirs and mementos from her three tours of duty in the Middle East. Henry gave a presentation to about 40 people at North Central Michigan College in May 2013.

Her program was stimulating and filled with interesting photographs of her tours in the Middle East, but it wasn’t until we were alone on the shaded deck of her home, in a tranquil setting of a wooded subdivision southwest of Petoskey, that she opened up and shared more revealing details about being a woman in the Middle East, a nurse in combat situations, and her 20-year military career.

A nurse at heart

Henry grew up in North Platte, Nebraska. She earned both a Bachelor’s degree and a Master’s degree in nursing.

“I knew from the time I was a little girl that I wanted to be a nurse,” Henry said, recalling how she would play nurse to her family’s cats and dogs.

While working at the Oklahoma Medical Center hospital, she became a specialist in treating patients with complex pulmonary issues and diseases of the lungs. She gave lectures and began teaching other nurses on pulmonary issues. As she climbed the career ladder, her expertise in these areas was highly regarded, yet Henry was constantly looking upward and reaching for the next rung.

“When I’d go to nursing conferences, there was often a National Guard recruitment booth,” Henry said. “I had a fascination for how I could give back to my country. I always had a desire to join the military.”

She didn’t have a word for it at the time, but years of perspective have allowed Henry to define what she felt as “patriotism.” Her father served three years in World War II, but otherwise, no one in her family had a military career.

“I was wondering, ‘What’s the next challenge?’” she said. “There weren’t any wars going on at the time, and I thought I’d be able to serve my country by volunteering in the National Guard and using my nursing skills to help others.”

By chance, she knew a fellow nurse whose wife was a commander of the unit that was the Air National Guard Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron located in Oklahoma City. When Henry applied to the Air National Guard (ANG), she was connected with that unit. She explains that the Guard had a cut-off of eligibility of 35 years of age for all its recruits. She received her commission and was sworn in on June 3, 1988, exactly on her 35th birthday.

After she received her commission as an officer, Henry and others in her unit entered Officer School, a “crash course in marching, protocols, how to salute, compass navigation, how to set up a tent, etc.,” Henry said. Back then, Officer School was a two-week program, but now it’s six to eight weeks, she added.

After Officer School, she was on to AE (short for Aeromedical Evacuation) Flight Nurse Training, a six-week course in San Antonio, Texas.

“We learned how flight at altitudes affects patients,” she said. The wounded can be affected by many aspects of flight, from temperature, to vibration, to oxygenation, and cabin pressure, all can create stressors on patients. Henry learned all the problems that can occur and how to diagnose them and the best form of treatment while in flight.

“We learned how to configure the aircraft, how to get it prepared for patients,” Henry said, showing a photograph of the inside of a C-130 with her and other nurses equipping the aircraft. A C-130 aircraft has identical medical equipment to a civilian ambulance, and all of it had to be tested to be sure it would withstand a rapid loss of cabin pressure and wouldn’t malfunction during a flight, she said.

A major part of training involved learning how to operate straps on stanchions that would lift up the gurneys, or “litters” as they were called, so that several injured soldiers could be stacked in a bunk bed-type of lay out. The injured could be stacked five high in order to fit a maximum of 70 patients per load.

Henry and the other nurses learned how to safely carry a “litter” with a patient on it up the cargo ramp, load them in the aircraft, properly raise them on the stanchions and secure them for flight. Through her training, Henry became tri-qualified on aircrafts, meaning she was able to perform similar duties on C-130s, C-117s, and the KC-130 tanker.

“The Air Force doesn’t use helicopters for transporting patients, the Army does, like we used to see on MASH (the television show),” Henry said.

She showed photographs that illustrate the stanchions, litters, and straps used to secure the litters.

“There was a lot of physical work,” Henry said, admitting that by the end of her tours in the Middle East, most of the other nurses in a group photo all had suffered either shoulder or back problems. Considering the average size of a flight nurse compared to the average size and weight of a soldier, it’s no wonder.

During Flight Nurse training the students also learned the effects of low oxygenation by taking off their oxygen masks while in an altitude chamber.

“We learned about hypoxia and the symptoms,” Henry said, “the same training pilots get.”

Henry developed a health problem during training that plagued her for a few years. She wouldn’t be able to clear her ears by yawning the way most people do. She got blood behind her ear drums every time she underwent training in the altitude chamber. Henry refers to this condition as “a difficulty,” nothing more.

Even with ear plugs, the C-130 is a loud aircraft, she said. “It’s dirty, there’s fuel exhaust, it’s physically demanding, and we were required to rapidly configure the aircraft,” Henry said. Yet she kept up with her training one weekend a month, plus flying in a C-130 practicing all skills several times a month, and two weeks each year. She takes pride in achieving physical feats she never thought possible.

“I wasn’t an overly athletic person,” Henry said.

She described water survival training in great detail. Henry had to swim to a life raft in a pool, all the while being sprayed with cold water from a powerful hose. She had to climb into the raft, erect a canopy with tent poles and secure the cover.

It was in the hills of San Antonio where she spent four days and nights with a few other nurses on their survival training mission. Dropped in the woods with few supplies, a very small amount of food, they had to build a shelter, find water, build a fire and “survive.”

“I remember we had one wool blanket, and maybe a Swiss Army knife,” Henry said.

The training program also prepared her for flight. She had to learn how to do a briefing with her crew. Based on the patient load, what would be the best configuration, location for equipment, loading sequence, and much more.

Henry did go on several live peace-time AE missions.  She went to Panama on a regular scheduled mission picking up United States’ military personnel with illnesses and transporting them to the U.S. for medical care.

During this time, she was working full-time at the hospital and flying with the crew once a week for training to become proficient. Usually the training flights lasted two hours, but they required hours of preparation, sometimes taking four hours. She would finished training flights about 10 p.m., then drove home and go to work the next morning.

“I’d be tired, of course, but other nurses had two-hour drives to get home, so it wasn’t so bad for me,” Henry said.

Operation Desert Shield begins

The National Guard saw Henry and her crew as a “training unit,” until Desert Shield began. In August 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. Five days later, the U.S. began Operation Desert Shield, sending U.S. forces to Saudi Arabia. Nurses trained like Henry and her crew and technicians saw their designation change from “training” to “involuntary activation.”

Henry and the other 25 members of her crew were activated by the President, she said.

“We got our orders,” Henry said. “I had about one month notice.”

Her parents traveled from Nebraska to Oklahoma City to stay with her for Christmas before she left. They had lost their son, Henry’s only sibling, in 1989. A year later, they were sending off their only remaining child to war.

“I didn’t do all the things I did (training) to get out of the commitment I had made,” Henry said, when asked if she could have received a deferment.

It was a tense time for her and her family. She didn’t know exactly when she would leave for the Middle East until she actually got the call.

“Families were accustomed to sending off their sons, but this was the first time in U.S. history that women received involuntary activation,” Henry said. In previous wars, women played many valuable roles in the National Guard, but mainly as volunteers, she said.

Early in 1991, Henry was given her assignment. She arrived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, one day before the war broke out. Scud missiles (ss-1 Scud ballistic missiles) began exploding over the city the next day. Even today, all these years later, when she watches Fourth of July fireworks, she remembers vividly the sight of the Scud missiles.

“We spent many nights in a hot, dark bunker in full chemical gear,” Henry said. When the Scuds came in, Henry and the crew had to wear sealed chemical warfare suits. They carried chemical masks on their waistbands at all times.

“We knew the likelihood of chemical warfare was very real,” she said. “It was very frightening. Alarms would go off and sirens would ring. We’d all run down into the bunker and sit in the dark.”

Henry and her crew of five women merged with 15 men from Pittsburgh and a group from Florida to form one unit. The Guard kept together units that had trained together, but would assign them to form with other units to form larger units. They were called the 1611, Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron.

Desert travel was an interesting challenge. When she first arrived in Riyadh, her unit flew from the city to the Persian Gulf on a C-130. But there were no plans for how they would get to their assigned base, a Marine camp about 20 miles to the Kuwaiti border. They finally arranged for a Saudi bus to travel in across the desert to the Marine camp. When they arrived at the Camp, Henry was discouraged by what she found.

“It was in the middle of the desert, it was so ugly and bleak,” she said. “It was sandy and just bleak.”

The Marines had dug out a camp in the sand and covered all the tents with camouflaged netting. Henry remembers spending a lot of time filling sand bags.

“We never had a day off,” she said. “We worked seven days a week sandbagging.”

Initially, they filled sandbags at the site near the packed sand airstrip. Then they erected tents for living quarters, patient care areas, radio tents and supply tents. Henry said the bathroom facilities were quite unique.

“They showed me the bathroom, it was a diesel barrel cut in half with a plywood board on top with a hole cut out,” Henry said. There was diesel fuel in the bottom. Every week or so, the enlisted men were required to “burn the stuff.” Out in the desert, there was no other way to get rid of garbage than to burn it.

The camp had a landing strip and was labeled LZ 55, for “Landing Zone,” but the personnel based there called themselves “Runway to Recovery,” she said.

Patients were flown in from a Navy hospital made up of tents. The Navy provides medical care for Marines, Henry said. Patients then arrived at Henry’s location by bus. Henry thought she would be flying the patients received from the Navy hospital, but the C-130s that flew in had AE crews on board. She became a self-proclaimed “ground nurse.” The camp was technically a Mobile Airstaging Facility.

Most of the patients Henry saw were military soldiers or personnel who had on-the-job injuries such as hernias, back injuries, eye injuries or appendicitis. When the Navy had medical patients, they would get them stable, then bus them to the camp where Henry and others would get them ready for flight; then they were transported to other locations for surgery or further treatment.

By the end of her stay at the camp, the patients that were being seen were Iraqi prisoners of war who needed translators for the medical staff to treat them. Kuwaiti medical students were their interpreters.

Within about two months after her arrival, a cease fire occurred on April 11, 1991. Henry was on her way home.

“It was an exciting time,” Henry said.

Next: Operation Iraqi Freedom

Her next assignment came when Operation Iraqi Freedom commenced in March 2003. Henry was assigned to an air base called Al Udeid in Doha, Qatar.

“Qatar is a wealthy country,” Henry said. “The citizens do not work. They bring in labor from other countries.”

Henry first moved into tents on Camp Andy. The camp was named after a civil engineer who was the first casualty of the war. While there, Henry estimates that she left the base maybe three times, mainly to go to a large shopping center.

“It was a big deal to leave the base,” she said. “You had to get a vehicle signed out through the commander and go through security. A member from our unit received driver’s training to drive in Doha.”

From Camp Andy she was moved to Coalition City, which had dormitory-style housing rather than tents. Henry and her unit found themselves sleeping in bunk beds with air conditioning and refrigerators and electrical power. From there they took flights to Mozel, Kirkuk and Tikrit in Northern Iraq to pick up patients, mostly at night.

“Night missions were safer and little cooler, but it wasn’t, it was still really hot,” Henry said.

One memorable patient was a humanitarian worker who had been ambushed.

“We knew that she didn’t know that her husband didn’t survive,” Henry said. The patient was critically ill and sedated quite heavily.

Another time, she recalled, a construction worker was badly burned in a welding accident. With patients such as these, Henry’s role as a flight nurse was to tell the patient what to expect while in flight and keep the patient comfortable during the flight.

“We had narcotics on board if needed,” Henry said.

They also had food and cold drinks available. One patient who appreciated this had his arms wrapped in thick bandages and he couldn’t use them. An IED had exploded in his vehicle. He wanted to walk onto the plane, Henry remembers. That was important to him. Once seated and Henry secured his seatbelt, she could tell that he was really uncomfortable. He needed to lie down. The patient was fairly disappointed and depressed, until Henry asked him if he would like some warm pizza and cold soda pop.

“He lit up,” Henry said.

She was worried that she couldn’t wash her hands to feed him. The planes and their equipment were quite dirty and there weren’t hand-washing facilities on board. The other crew members told her that the patient wouldn’t care, so she hand-fed him pizza and a soda.

Henry met servicemen and women from many other countries. The Australian Air Force supported the coalition forces by providing their aircraft one day a week. Henry and her unit always wanted to fly with the Australians.

“They had the aircraft configured for us, and they offered us hot tea when we arrived on the aircraft ready to fly to Northern Iraq,” she said.

The Australians had a philosophy to fly low and fly fast. They were often only 1,000 feet above the ground. Henry was able to see quite a bit of the landscape from the aircraft. She was amazed at how much greenery there was, not everywhere was sand and dust.

Most of the desert flights were short, about 45 minutes to an hour to the next stop. When the patients were flown to Germany, those flights could be six to eight hours, she said.

Cramped quarters

A C-130 aircraft can carry a lot of cargo. Henry said they could do three types of missions: cargo, troops or patients – all on the same aircraft at the same time. There were days when she could be on a plane all day long, making stop after stop.

Henry developed a deep appreciation for the C-130. After spending more than 1,000 hours in them, she is self-described as “passionate about them.”

“You start with a shell, then we would add equipment to it and build it into what it needed to be,” Henry said. “We would install the seats, the rollers, the litters, everything. It wasn’t your mission until you built it.”

Her respect for the large aircraft endures to this day.

“I would know the roar of its engines overhead if I ever heard it again,” she said. Even after all those days of smelling the fuel in her uniform and in her hair, Henry has a fondness for the powerful aircraft.

Time for fun during life on base

While at Al Udeid airbase, Henry took part in a walking event called “The Back of the Pack.” Participants carried 20 pound packs and walked 5 miles, a strenuous challenge in the desert. Henry enjoyed the camaraderie and sense of accomplishment of group activities like this one.

“The Del” was the name of a bar on the base, where they could get three drinks per day, if not on flight alert. Photographs show Henry and others sitting at white patio furniture under large, white tent material that from the air looked like a giant “bra,” as she describes it. They could be almost anywhere in the world having a cool beverage on a sunny patio.

At each of the camps and among the flight crews, there was a strong sense of camaraderie. Henry made some fun friends, and she keeps in touch with four or five of them still today.

Birthdays while on tour were always a cause for celebration. One time, Henry had her mother send her plastic Easter eggs which she filled with candy jelly beans and arranged an Easter egg hunt for her unit. Bingo was also a favorite pastime for many of the troops and personnel.

On her third deployment, she was in an administrative position as the chief nurse, which included overseeing a liaison nurse in Djibouti, Africa (Horn of Africa). During this time, she made three trips to the Horn of Africa. The last trip, Henry relieved the liaison nurse while she was on R&R (Rest and Relaxation) for five days.

“Not much happened,” Henry said, but the accommodations were the most luxurious of all of her experiences. She stayed in CLUs, Container Living Quarters, with private quarters, including showers in her room.

“I didn’t have to walk a block to take a shower,” Henry said.

Privacy was a luxury while on deployment. Usually there were so many people around, all day, all night, a constant flow of personnel, all working six days a week.

While there, she was able to see the camel races in Doha, which use robots now instead of human riders. The robot’s arm hits the camel to make them run faster. She also was able to leave the base and see some local culture. They were able to get off base and dine on authentic Ethiopian food.

The Asian Games took place in Doha in 2007. Similar in scope to the Olympics, the Asian Games drew thousands of spectators. She and her unit were told they could go attend the games, but Henry felt uneasy in the huge crowds.

“I don’t do crowds, not that size,” Henry said.

The only time Henry ever felt unsafe was in Djibouti at a market. After shopping for baskets at a market in Djibouti, Henry and a few others were in a vehicle heading back to base when a group of young men approached the car. The men wanted to wash their windows. The women had spent all their money on baskets and couldn’t pay for the unwanted service. One of the men got quite angry and after a few tense moments they were able to drive away.

While on assignment, Henry and the others were required to carry a weapon during the AE flights. Through her training, Henry was qualified in an M9 handgun.

“It was always on my side,” she said. She never fired it, though.

As chief nurse, Henry flew to Djibouti three times, each in a small Navy aircraft used for D.Vs, which was a military term for distinguished visitors. The private jet was well appointed and Henry found herself flying in style. She developed a good relationship with the Navy and flew with them several times from Camp Lemonair, a French colony.

“I was able to get some R&R,” Henry said.

Career achievements and life in Northern Michigan

With all of her accomplishments, Henry refers to one event as the highlight of her career. Henry was one of 30 women hand-selected from the Army and Air National Guard to march at the dedication of the Women in the Military Memorial in Washington, D.C. in 1997. She is very proud of that experience.

Other highlights include meeting the Blue Angels at the Oklahoma City Air Show.

Henry retired from the Air National Guard in 2008, after 20 years of service to her country. She attended a reunion of 15 to 20 of her unit members in 2012 in Oklahoma City. She continued working until her retirement from nursing two years ago at McLaren Northern Michigan in Petoskey. Now she does volunteer work, mainly for the Christ Child Society in Northern Michigan.

Henry and her husband, Bill, a radiologist and Chief of Staff at McLaren Northern Michigan Hospital in Petoskey, have lived in Emmet County for 11 years. They met in 1997 when he was in his fourth year of medical school in Oklahoma City. They married in 1999. Bill grew up in Kansas City, she grew up in Nebraska. Yet they moved to Northern Michigan and own a sailboat.

Henry’s father grew up in a farming community outside of Lansing, and she spent a lot of time sailing with her parents on Lake Michigan. After she and her husband moved to Petoskey, they moved Henry’s parents from Nebraska so they could be closer. Both of her parents died two years after moving here, her father in 2007, her mother in 2008.

Bill’s son is a major in the Air Force Reserves and is married and provided the Henry’s with their grandson. Their three cats and small dog (which she inherited from her parents) keep the couple busy at the house with many birdfeeders to keep watch over.

Henry enjoys talking to groups about her experience in the Air National Guard. She is a strong believer in using one’s skills to help others, and the Guard allowed her to give back. She told the audience at the college that after reflecting on 20 years in the Guard, she sees the colors of the flag more brilliantly now.

“It teaches valuable skills for life,” Henry said. “It gives you training, allows for travel, gives you a sense of discipline and accomplishment. And for many, it gives them an education with no school loans to pay back.”

When she joined the Guard, there weren’t any active wars. Then, it was understood that being deployed was always a possibility. Now, though, it’s a given, she said.

Henry is deservedly proud of her contributions to the Guard, especially after the rigorous training, which she experienced at an age that was older than the average Guardsmen.

“I was able to go through something that was way beyond my comfort zone,” Henry said. “It gives you a great sense of accomplishment and camaraderie.”