I want to welcome to the first episode of our new podcast, “Careers At A Glance!” Our mission is to explore the career paths of everyday people to better understand what they do, how they got there, and what they’ve learned along the way!
I’ve been asked a lot about my own experience in the Military so, I figured the best place to start was with myself! So here is a brief overview of who I am and how I ended up joining the military. I grew up in southern Idaho where my I spent most of my childhood roughhousing with my three older brothers. We spent a lot of time camping, fishing, and just being in the outdoors. I started working pretty young doing the typical babysitting, weed pulling, and farm hand work until I turned 15 and a half. Then, I started working at a small local fast-food restaurant and that was an amazing experience! I worked there all through high school.
When I was in Highschool, I was active in a lot of different activities, like drama club, cross country, choir, and FFA. I took welding and a small engine shop class and highly considered becoming an underwater welder. So much so, I applied and was accepted to the Divers Institute of Technology in Seattle. My boyfriend and I were planning on moving there for school and that was the plan. It was a 7-month program and cost about $30,000 to complete not including housing and the basic necessities. Money was a big issue and ultimately became the reason I didn’t pursue it further.
I had a lot of friends who joined the military after high school, so I went in and talked to a Navy recruiter about being a Navy diver. They were pretty honest with me, which I’m grateful for. They essentially told me because I was a female, I would not really see a lot of actual dive time. To kind of expand on that, underwater welding and diving at deep sea levels can involve living in pressurized chambers for a couple weeks or maybe a month or more at a time. It’s called saturation diving and it essentially limits the amount of time you have to spend decompressing.
Which, when you dive down to 200 or 600 feet or deeper, you are breathing pressurized air and the weight of the water compresses all of the gases and stuff inside you. Think of it like your ears needing to pop when you fly. The pressure builds up, you yawn and then you are good to go. With deep diving for long periods of time, you can’t just yawn and pop to the surface without getting horribly sick or even dying. You have to take it slow and allow time for your body and the gases to diffuse. Typically, that’s about 24 hours for each 100 feet down you dive. So, 600 feet would take 6 full days to decompress from. Living in a pressurized chamber allows the job to get down without having to go through the decompression process repeatedly.
The recruiter was quite honest and essentially said that because I was a female, I would not be allowed to live with males at the bottom of the ocean for a month at a time. If something were to happen, like a sexual assault, it would take days to be able to get me or anyone else out of the chamber safely and the risk was too high. More likely I would be stuck topside, and I wouldn’t actually be diving and doing what I wanted to do. So, the Navy wasn’t for me.
One of my best friends’ dad was a National Guard recruiter at the time and I went and talked to him a little bit. Which lead me to talking with an active-duty army recruiter and because I’d had experience working with small engines, I thought maybe I should go into that instead. I decided I wanted to be a helicopter mechanic and unfortunately at that time, there weren’t any openings.
The way it works with the Army, is there are a certain number of slots open based off of the needs of the Army for different jobs. Once a person leaves that job or exits the military, their slot opens up. I was waiting for a long time trying to get an opening and I then I finally got a call from the recruiter. He said there was an opening for military police which we had previously discussed as a potential option. It didn’t seem like there was going to be a mechanic opening anytime soon, so I decided to go military police as a 31B.
What do the Military Police do?
There are really two sides to being military police, one is the garrison side and the second is the field side. which is focused on community policing for military installations where you act as first responders, investigators and provide installation security. The second side is the field side, where you focus on the tactical aspects of being a soldier in combat operations.
A primary factor on what you will spend your time doing is based on where you are stationed. In Hawaii, there was an entire Battalion of MP Companies. That meant the duties and deployments were rotated between them. We typically went through 6-week cycles of patrolling, providing security at the gates, and working on our tactical combat readiness. These were known as red, amber, and green cycles.
In Germany, we were a separated platoon whose sole purpose was to provide constant community policing. There was no other unit close by that could easily step in to fulfill that duty so, there was little chance of being called up on a deployment there. We very rarely spent time working on the field side of being an MP and never worked the gates there.
What did a typical workday look like?
When you are working on the road, the DA6 runs your life! And it felt like the schedule changed almost every day so you were never really sure when you would have a day off. We typically worked 8 hours shifts on the road. But then you add in the hour or so of physical training either before or after shift. And the time it takes to draw out your weapons and ammo, conduct guard mount and shift briefings and physically take over the patrols. But that’s not all, once your shift is over, you must finish any paperwork and case reports that are open and turn in your weapons and ammo back at the arms room. That 8-hour shift is typically at least 12 hours if not longer. The ideal schedule was to work five days on and have two off. But the Army ran the show. If shifts needed to be covered, your work week would extend to fill the need.
If you were working the gate, you could expect to check countless ID cards as people came on to post. You might conduct vehicle searches or handle people who were intoxicated or where a potential threat to post. If you were on patrol in a law enforcement setting, you could respond to domestic disputes, loud noise complaints, sexual and physical assaults, larcenies, neighbor disputes, just overall smaller crimes. You also would assist with fire alarms, and actual fires, medical emergencies, traffic accidents. You also might issue parking tickets or speeding tickets or pull someone over for drunk driving. It really just depends on what happened day to day.
If you weren’t working the road and were on Platoon Duty, you had first formation at 0630 for flag call and accountability. Then you would conduct physical training until around 0730. After that you had time to conduct personal hygiene, eat, and get dressed for the workday. Then work call was at 0900. If it was a Monday, we would go to the motor pool and conduct PMCS’s or preventative maintenance, checks and services on any Humvees, LMTV’s, or ASVs’. If we weren’t at the motor pool we would come in and see what work needed to be done, some time it was specific taskings or we had time to work on training the various solider tasks. Most of the time, it was a hurry up and wait for orders to come down the chain. The typical schedule was Monday through Friday, 0630 to about 1700ish every night.
When were where in our field cycle, it was very much go, go, go. My first unit made sure we trained as we would fight. They made sure we took full advantage of any time and opportunities we had to train. We would go on field OPS where we would go out as a squad or a platoon or even the whole company and practice combat scenarios and operations. We focused on dismounted patrols, mounted patrols, reacting to an ambush, conducting an attack, searching building for an HVT, all those types of things. My leadership made sure that we knew our roles and steps for what would happen in various combat scenarios.
What was your experience in the Military Police?
I joined the Army in 2011 as a private and attended one-station unit training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. Which is basic training and advanced individual training, or AIT, combined into one massive training known as OSUT. Which means we had our same Drill Sergeants the entire 20 weeks not just through the basic training phase.
After graduating from OSUT, I was stationed in Hawaii I spent time as a gunner and as a driver. This phase of my military career was all about learning as much as I could and becoming the best soldier I could be. We went through additional training once we arrived at our unit. I had to get OC sprayed and Tasered in order to be certificated to carry them on patrol.
In spring of 2013, I was promoted to Specialist and then shortly after, became a team leader and took over my own team of soldiers. Then in 2014 I went through my promotion board and got my “p” status and was promoted to Corporal which was my original goal when before I joined the Army.
My initial contract was for 5 years but, I ended up extending my enlistment so I could be stationed in Germany. After three years in Hawaii, I PCS’d to Germany in 2015. In October 2015 I was promoted from Corporal to Sergeant. And started working at the patrol supervisor on various shifts.
In the spring of 2016, I took on more of an operational role and no longer really worked as a patrol. I stepped in as the Arms Room NCOIC, the Barracks NCOIC, the Alcohol and Substance Abuse Program Manager and the Unit Prevention Leader. For those of you who don’t know, and NCOIC is just the Non-Commissioned Officer in Charge.
I never deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan and am lucky to have never experienced combat. Most of my time was spent focusing on community policing in the garrison environment. All in all, I ended up serving 5 years and 7 months on active duty and left the service as a Sergeant in 2017.
One of the hardest things for me was –
This was a hard time for me as I was still developing as a leader and honestly didn’t know what I was doing in order to help soldiers. My team was once referred to as the ASAP team which means the Army Substance Abuse Program because my soldiers were really struggling.
I think a defining moment in my military time was when one of my soldiers was intoxicated and we were on a dry status we were on a QRF status where we could be called into up and deploy and the Pacific region at any point in time. We just gotten off mid shift and found out that he and his roommate were intoxicated. Essentially it came down to, do we push paper and go UCMJ or do we handle this in the moment and sober him up so that if something were to happen we could do what needed to be done. We ended up having a large smoke sessions with both of them.
I was kind of lingering back and being more passive and the other NCO’s told me you need to do this or they’re not going to respect you. It was like flipping a switch and I went started yelling at both of the soldiers. It was hard for me to figure out a medium ground on which to be leader. It took me way too long to kind of really come to terms with how I wanted to be a leader and set an example for my soldiers.
What was the worst scene you ever responded to –
One that I think about was a sexual assault that happened. We received the call that it was in ongoing, and still in progress. Another patrol and I responded, and we could not find the right address. We were running through this cul-de-sac, which is essentially a big circle, trying to find the right address. We ended up figuring out what was wrong, and by the time we arrived on scene, the suspect had already fled. I do think about would have happened if we had found the location sooner or what may not have happened.
What was the funniest scene you ever responded to –
I think one of the funniest calls looking back was actually when I was working the gate. On post there’s a policy that you have to wear shirt to be able to come on post. And in Hawaii a lot of people will go to the beach, and you know, they don’t wear a shirt coming back on post. It was a couple from the Navy and coming on to post, and he did not have a shirt on. I asked him politely to please put on his shirt so he could come on post, and it touched a nerve apparently because he lost his mind. Both he and his wife started screaming there you know just throwing a temper tantrum about it. It escalated from that because I was the only person on the gate, I was by myself traffic was backed up. I got them to pull off to the side while they were doing their freak out so he could put a shirt on. I was continuing to let people through, checking IDs and he got out of the van, and he walked to the back.
So, he’s standing across the pathway to me he was wearing basketball shorts, and he took them off and he put it on like a shirt. So, he’s just standing there in his underwear with shorts on his head and his wife is screaming at me. Needless to say, it was just incredibly frustrating because my I was trying to call on the radio to get support over to the gate. I couldn’t leave the gate; my primary job was to keep the gate secure. I was calling for help and I wasn’t getting a response, and no one was coming to assist. I was able to get them both back in their vehicle and they pulled around to the other side of the gate where the outgoing traffic is. Then they started yelling at me from that side and essentially it came to a head, and I yelled at them to get off the post and I threw their ID cards at them and they drove away. I look back on that and the dude lost his mind over that I took off his shorts and put them on his head walking around in his underwear and I think things would have been a lot different if I would have had a patrol with me.
What was the most boring scene you ever responded to –
I spent almost an entire shift watching over a hole someone cut into the chain-link fence around post.
Did you ever work with other military branches or countries?
Yes, in Germany we were able to work with the German Forces a little. We also conducted a training exercise with the Macedonian Military. When I went through WLC or BLC as it’s called now, which is just a leadership school. We had some of the Ghana military join in. We spent the entire time learning about each military’s different leadership techniques and I worked closely with someone from their Navy branch. It was a really good experience.
Would I change anything?
Yeah, I was going to school almost my entire time in the military. Some days on the was to the PMO, I would have my nose in my textbooks studying. I feel like I missed out on moments that I could have experienced. I think if I could go back, I wouldn’t go as hard with college and would have tried to be more in the moment.
Do you have any advice for someone considering joining the military?
I would say do it. If you join, just go all in and put everything you have into being the best solider you can be. Train hard, study hard, and max out your PT and you will do great! It’s been a really good experience for me and has made me into the person I am today. I don’t regret joining at all.
Resources:
https://www.diversinstitute.edu/
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