Work

It started out we were within two miles of an enemy prisoner of war camp that had 14,000 soldiers that had surrendered and then during the Shite uprising in Southern Iraq we started to get families and kids from Shatrah and Basrah that the infantry would bring down in the Chinook helicopters and what happened was the Republican Guard went in and were taking over the hospitals and the schools and the buildings and they were throwing out these patients.  So the infantry would bring them down and we took care of them.  We were pretty busy.  But it was good.  We lived in a tent.  It was pretty—you know, sometimes the tents would blow down, it would rain.  We were in a desert, but it would pour.  There was mud, there was grit everywhere.  But you just developed such a good relationship with the other 15 women in the tent.  Everybody eats together.  Even when the physicians weren’t on call, if there was a mass casualty they just put it out over the PA system and everybody would come and help.  It was really a cool bonding experience.  I remember when I went into a field hospital my mother said to me, “Jan, I can’t believe you’re going into a field hospital.  Remember you never even went to Girl Scout camp because you hated bugs and dirt and dust.”  [laughs]  You grow and change when you need the maturity.  So I look at it as a highlight of my life.  A really good experience.

So initially I went over [to Iraq], I couldn’t believe I got picked to do it, but myself and an infantry guy, they’re the guys who do the damage, like knock down doors and stuff.  So he and I went over as ADVON [ADVanced EchelON-advance party] way before the rest of the Stryker brigade and then we came back with intelligence on how they use their Strykers [armored combat vehicles], how best to use trajectory with mortars, what the other guys did—Al Qaeda at the time—their strategies, their TTPs—tactics, techniques, and procedures—how to defeat them.  So between the infantry guy and myself, which I operated more in a—we both went out into raids and stuff, but it was good to have both sides of it.  So he played the blue force which blue force means friendly, and I was red force so I was the enemy.  And so, I was looking at the enemy and he was looking at us and we would talk and it was pretty neat.  And so I brought that back to now Major General Shields.  He was our command at the time, Colonel Shields.  And we figured out how best to deploy all our assets because it’s billions of dollars in assets that we were bringing over and then, once you got there, how to up-armor them, what kind of armor to put on.  And so I thought that was very interesting.  I don’t think I’ve ever talked about that to anyone because it just slips my mind because after that I was over there for almost two years straight because of the surge.  We got stuck there.

I think it’s an amazing time right now because I think that the playing field has really never been more level than it is right now.  I think there is just amazing opportunities that I don’t think were necessarily there 30, 40, 50 years ago for women to be just as successful as men traditionally have been in business. I think you are going to see more and more female COO’s, more and more female CFO’s, and more and more female CEO’s of companies, more and more women on the board of directors.  I think it’s a really exciting time.

Be yourself and explore.  Be open to opportunities knocking on your door or drifting into an area to see if you might find it interesting.  Enjoy.  Enjoy the adventure because it is an adventure.

My work has been very rewarding in this job in that I’ve been able to see change happen in a community that I love and be a part of that change which is really exciting for me. I was just talking with a group of students a couple of weeks ago and they asked why I liked my job and I said because I love being able to be a part of something that you can see. And I always say that I don’t know that I would be able to do my job as it is today in Boston. Because I have lived in Boston, but I do not have that type of connection to Boston. I grew up here and being able to improve an area where you grew up, that’s something special. That is one of the highlights of my job.