As I came across the following story it reminded, with a great deal of gratitude and satisfaction, of the tremendous commitment that our Naval Reservists have to this country and their branch of the Service. All over the world there have been and will be dedicated patriots who willingly give their precious time and special talents to helping others in time of war and peace. It is a tremendous sacrifice to go where your country needs you and often where less fortunate children, women and men need your skills and expertise. I pray that God will bless the lives of those who serve and their families.

By Matthew Artz

Oakland Tribune

Posted: 05/13/2011 12:00:00 AM PDT

Updated: 05/16/2011 11:58:24 AM PDT

FREMONT — For more than a quarter-century in the Navy Reserve, Cmdr. Dianne Capri was assigned no farther from her Fremont home than Oakland.

But that all changed for the 59-year-old woman not long after Sept. 11, 2001.

During the past several years, Capri, a nurse at the Fremont Surgery Center, has been deployed to military hospitals in Kuwait and Germany; she now is about halfway through a one-year deployment in Afghanistan.

Every morning, the Navy commander exits the safety of the Green Zone in Kabul armed with a 9 mm pistol and an M4 carbine and walks up a nearby hill to the Afghanistan National Army Hospital.

There, she is part of a team that trains Afghan doctors and nurses to “take care of their soldiers the way we take care of our soldiers,” she said.

The 450-bed hospital is fully equipped with MRI machines, CT scanners and electrocardiographic devices, she said.

In other areas, however, it is a world apart.

Capri has been responsible for helping implement modern sterilization and sanitation procedures, including separating syringes, surgical blades and bloody gowns from other trash, she said.

She also has worked to make sure that operating rooms are fully equipped so doctors no longer have to wait for supplies if something unforeseen happens during surgery.

The injured Afghan soldiers are generally a stoic group, who are more hesitant about taking pain medications, she said. “We encourage them that healing occurs more quickly when people are not in pain.”

that healing occurs more quickly when people are not in pain.”Capri grew up in a Midwestern military family, the daughter of an Army Air Corps pilot who also had three uncles in the Navy.

She joined the Navy in 1972 while in nursing school and served three years’ active duty at a naval hospital in Illinois.

In 1978, she and her husband at that time moved to Fremont, where they had four children. During the Gulf War, Capri was relieved when she found out that she had been assigned to Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland rather than deployed outside the area while her children were in elementary school.

Now that her kids are grown, she has sought out deployments in part because she knows that other reservists with families might be in the same position she was in during Desert Storm.

“If I can do the job and help some young mother stay home, that’s the right thing to do,” she said.

The deployment to Kabul is especially dangerous.

Typically, Marines guard Navy nurses deployed on duty. However, she is protected by generally less reliable Afghan soldiers because she is working in Afghanistan’s national military hospital.

Before her deployment late last year, Capri received firearms training in Fort Polk, La.

“It was a little awkward at first, but it’s become a part of me,” she said about carrying guns wherever she goes.

Nearly all of her time in Kabul has been spent either at the hospital or in the Green Zone.

Capri said she misses her family, which includes her grandson in Union City, but she is happy to be serving — and is willing to do it again.

“I don’t think there’s any better job in the world than taking care of our guys in combat, because we are taking care of people who have answered the call, who go out there to defend our country,” she said.

“They deserve people who are willing to make sure they make the same sacrifices to take care of them.”

 

 

After I had finished preparing the blog, news came in of an attack on the Afghan National Army Hospital. On Saturday a powerful blast killed at least 6 people and injured more than 20 others, government officials said. Gen. Zahir Azimi, a Defense Ministry spokesman, described the six people who were killed as medical students, but a doctor at the hospital said they were Afghan soldiers training to be medics.