ABSTRACT
Clarice was an active duty Army Major who was also a single mother of four children aged ten and younger. She was deployed to Iraq in 2005 with only 30 days’ notice to fill in for another soldier who became medically disqualified at the last minute. It was extraordinarily stressful, because most soldiers are given 90 days’ notice of impending deployment and Clarice had to relocate her children and their live-in nanny to her hometown 600 miles away at her own expense. Also stressful was that the children’s biological father was also on active duty and deployed to Iraq. Five months into the deployment, Clarice was medically evacuated to Landstuhl Army Regional Medical Center in Germany and flown immediately back to Walter Reed Army Medical Center for emergency abdominal surgery which required two full months of recovery.
