2008.02.19: Brazil RPCV Susan Luz recounts life in Iraq

Peace Corps Online: Directory: Brazil: Peace Corps Brazil: Peace Corps Brazil: Newest Stories: 2010.06.17: Col. Susan Luz, a registered nurse, decorated soldier and author of The Nightingale of Mosul, served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Brazil : 2008.02.19: Brazil RPCV Susan Luz recounts life in Iraq

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Brazil RPCV Susan Luz recounts life in Iraq

Brazil RPCV Susan Luz recounts life in Iraq

Luz, the second oldest of four children born into an Irish-American family in East Providence, joined the Peace Corps with her best friend from college, Donna Manion. They both set off for Ceara, Brazil, a rural village near Fortaleza where Luz served as a public health nurse. During her years in Brazil, Luz said she got her first taste of poverty and violence. She remembered walking into a house where eight people had been butchered by another family member. Luz returned to Brazil two years later after earning her master's degree in public health from Boston University, serving on the U.S. government-sponsored humanitarian aid ship known as Project HOPE. She returned to the states in 1978 and took a job as a nurse in the Providence School Department, serving in Central High School and in the district's Student Registry Center on Prairie Avenue. Central High School was in a lot of ways like a war zone back then, Luz recalled. "There were 2,300 kids, and there were shootings, stabbings, rapes and riots." As school nurse, she saw "a little bit of everything," she said. She met her future husband, George, and they married in 1985, but her desire to serve in the armed forces never really went away. She joined the U.S. Army Reserves in 1983, at the age of 33. She was put into the 455th Field Hospital, based in Providence. When that unit deactivated in 2000, she was transferred to the 399th Combat Support Hospital, in Taunton, Mass. The unit is currently headquartered at Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, Mass.

Brazil RPCV Susan Luz recounts life in Iraq

Scituate nurse recounts life in Iraq

01:00 AM EST on Tuesday, February 19, 2008

By Philip Marcelo

Journal Staff Writer

Susan Luz, an Army public health nurse who was stationed in Iraq last year, now works in Johnston with adolescents. She was awarded the Bronze Star for "exceptional meritorious service" in September 2007.

The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

One month into her stay at a U.S. Army base in Mosul, Iraq, Col. Susan Luz got her first taste of what happens when a frontline hospital takes on the dead and wounded from a major attack, or what they call in the service a mass casualty event.

Luz was the base's public health nurse, and her role during a mass casualty - whenever more than eight soldiers or civilians are hurt in an attack - was to look after those near death, the "expectants."

A 56-year-old nurse from Scituate, she administered morphine to ease patients' pain, and dressed wounds. She thought back to her 35 years as a nurse, a career that has taken her from the rural outskirts of Brazil, across South America and to the inner city schools of Providence, and realized that all of that had been a precursor to this.

"When you've been a nurse as long as I have, you train for these things," she said.

Luz didn't know it then, but there would be more of those kind of days in the weeks and months ahead.

Now nearly four months back from her one year stay in Iraq, Luz says that that first major attack was the most daunting because it brought home the fact that she was going to be doing what she has done for all these years - but in a war zone.

The highest ranking woman in her unit - the 399th Combat Support Hospital - she was awarded a Bronze Star for "exceptional meritorious service" on Sept. 30, 2007, the night before her unit returned home.

"I felt very proud of myself" at receiving the medal, said Luz, now a nurse at Gateway Healthcare in Johnston. "But the real heroes are the combat soldiers - like my father, my father-in-law, and the boys out there in Iraq."

THE IDEA OF SERVING as a wartime nurse goes back to Luz's college days, she said.

After graduating from the University of Rhode Island's school of nursing in 1972, Luz - born Susan Corry - said she wanted to tend to soldiers serving in Vietnam.

But her father, Patrick, who served in the Army during World War II under Gen. George S. Patton in Europe and earned a Silver Star and a Purple Heart in the Battle of the Bulge, discouraged her.

So Luz, the second oldest of four children born into an Irish-American family in East Providence, joined the Peace Corps with her best friend from college, Donna Manion. They both set off for Ceara, Brazil, a rural village near Fortaleza where Luz served as a public health nurse.

During her years in Brazil, Luz said she got her first taste of poverty and violence. She remembered walking into a house where eight people had been butchered by another family member.

Luz returned to Brazil two years later after earning her master's degree in public health from Boston University, serving on the U.S. government-sponsored humanitarian aid ship known as Project HOPE.

She returned to the states in 1978 and took a job as a nurse in the Providence School Department, serving in Central High School and in the district's Student Registry Center on Prairie Avenue.

Central High School was in a lot of ways like a war zone back then, Luz recalled. "There were 2,300 kids, and there were shootings, stabbings, rapes and riots." As school nurse, she saw "a little bit of everything," she said.

She met her future husband, George, and they married in 1985, but her desire to serve in the armed forces never really went away. She joined the U.S. Army Reserves in 1983, at the age of 33. She was put into the 455th Field Hospital, based in Providence.

When that unit deactivated in 2000, she was transferred to the 399th Combat Support Hospital, in Taunton, Mass. The unit is currently headquartered at Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, Mass.

LUZ ARRIVED IN KUWAIT with the 399th in September 2006.

The unit, a successor to the Korean War-era MASH unit, comprises mostly civilian nurses and medical professionals. Approximately half of the 209-member unit hails from New England, while the rest come from units based in Cleveland, Ohio, and Spokane, Wash.

In their time in the Middle East, the unit treated more than 30,000 U.S. soldiers, contractors, Iraqi civilians and detainees.

Their mission was to upgrade a hospital on a U.S. Marine base in Al-Assad, Iraq, in preparation for a planned troop surge, the largest increase of soldiers and most controversial of the war at that point.

The unit was to take an existing Level II military hospital and turn it into a Level III military trauma center - with 24-hour in-house coverage by general surgeons and specialists for orthopedic surgery, neurosurgery, anesthesiology, emergency medicine, radiology, internal medicine, oral and maxillofacial surgery, and critical care - or everything that is expected in a civilian Level I hospital.

But before they worked on that hospital, Luz's half of the unit was sent to Mosul, in northern Iraq.

Luz spent five months on the base there, serving as the base's community health nurse. She was responsible for general health of the soldiers, a job that included holding public flu clinics and classes on anthrax treatment.

The role of the community health nurse is new to this war, Luz said.

"It's all about keeping the soldier prepared for war," she said.

Mosul was a tough base to be stationed at because there were daily reminders of how close the unit was to the war itself. The base was regularly shelled, and Luz says it was an almost normal occurrence to have to duck into one of the base's many bunkers during an attack.

But on the bright side, Luz said she was able to connect with Christopher Manion, the 24-year-old son of her friend from college.

First Lt. Manion was assigned to the Army's 27th Calvary unit, from Fort Bliss, Texas, and she says she became close with Chris and his fellow officers. "I felt like I could watch over him there," she said.

AT AGE 56, things like dry heat approaching 150 degrees or carrying armor - flak jackets and helmets - weighing 35 pounds are a challenge.

Luz said keeping herself physically and mentally up to the task of being on the base and surviving in the desert environment was tougher than she expected.

There was one time when her body failed her.

In June 2006, the unit was in Qatar, in the United Arab Emirates. Luz was unloading equipment from the roof of a supply van with another officer when something heavy fell on her. She broke her right arm and had a full arm cast for six weeks.

"I got right back to work the next day. They wanted me to stay in that hospital but I said ‘no,' " she said.

Luz never went beyond the base with troops during their missions, but she traveled from to Baghdad and Tikrit for conferences and hospital visits, she said.

After all the reports of military planes shot down over the capital city, Luz said she dreaded those flights to Baghdad. "I always said my Hail Marys," she said. While nerve-racking, the flights went off without a hitch.

Luz's unit returned to the states in October. At the welcoming ceremony at the unit's base in Bedford, Mass., Luz was greeted by her husband. "One of the toughest things was missing things, like our anniversary, and Valentine's Day," she said.

Today at Gateway Healthcare she works with adolescents with psychiatric problems. She doesn't see herself retiring from nursing anytime soon. She expects to retire from the Army when she turns 60, though the Army is mulling whether to lengthen the retirement age for nurses to 62, which would prolong Luz's military career.

As far as Iraq, she doesn't expect she'll be back there, at least not as long as this war is going on. But, she says: "If World War III breaks out, I'd be there tomorrow."

pmarcelo@projo.com




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Story Source: Providence Journal

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