Reasons I Chose to Serve My Country

Major Sarah Hinds
Student, Command and General Staff College
US Army Combined Arms Center
Fort Belvoir, Virginia

"The views expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the US Government."

The reasons I serve my country numbered only a few at the start of my career and, happily, have increased during my tenure as an active duty service member.

It wasn’t until I began veterinary school as an older student matriculating among the twenty-somethings and married only 2 years that I discovered the Army offered advanced training to veterinarians. With the Army’s option to potentially pay for vet school under a scholarship program, my husband suggested I look into this. He was a prior US Navy medical corpsman who had served on the aircraft carrier USS Kittyhawk during the last few years of the Viet Nam war; he knew the educational benefits the military offered, having used them for himself. The health professions scholarship program and potential for quality advanced training was the first “hook” to get me to see what the military offered; it was, to juxtapose President Kennedy’s line, what my country could do for me. Answering the call itself derived from other motivations. I realized, largely from discussions with my husband, that I grew up not ever really learning the importance and significance of the freedoms we enjoy in the United States, freedoms largely gained through efforts of the American service member. If I had to answer Kennedy’s question on what I could do for my country, my response was “I can now give something back.” While I never did get the scholarship, I was able to collect enough information to make the decision to volunteer my service, become a commissioned officer, and give something back.

I also learned, in large part through my mother’s own history of not realizing her dream to become a pilot because she was a female, that the concept of women as Warfighters has only been embraced widely in America as recently the 20th century. Growing up, I may not have known much about the war in Viet Nam, but I certainly knew about women’s equality and the societal changes marked by the sexual revolution. The Army is largely egalitarian; it is one of the few employers where men and women with similar background, training, and years of experience are paid the same. I supported this concept without qualification and wanted to support an organization that understood this.

I stayed in the military to complete my advance training. For most of us, we serve roughly 9-10 years when we finally complete the training. As many as half of my colleagues have chosen to leave at this “half-way” point, citing various reasons, to include feeling as though their efforts were never fully recognized and they were superseded by people who are praised for doing unoriginal or less than stellar work. A common joke is that a slipshod job is good enough for government work, and this is demoralizing. Active duty service obligations notwithstanding, for me staying in and going forward means upholding excellence as well as setting and even exceeding the standard in my field, hopefully in a manner that takes away some of the tarnished corporate image some people joke about.

As an extension of the concepts of setting the standard and giving even more back, my newest reason for serving my country now includes nation building. Serving currently in Bangkok, Thailand, I have made close connections with members of the Thai laboratory animal medicine community. Thailand is on the cusp of increasing its involvement in biomedical research, to include standing up new animal research centers. In an almost exclusively Buddhist country, the concept of taking a life weighs heavily on the collective consciousness, and Thais are never quite certain about a decision to euthanize even the sickest of animals. They nearly exclusively look to the success of the United States with its extensive history of creating regulations to govern the use of animals in research. I am one of the very first to offer training and education to Thai PhD students who are studying to be principal investigators, teaching them (among several things) their roles and responsibilities as future principal investigators. This puts America out in front of others, in one of the best ways possible.

I serve my country to make a difference—for Warfighters, for people. Serving as chief of busy veterinary medicine department I acknowledge the progression of creating a vaccine or therapeutic may take more than twenty years, but I also acknowledge that small steps will get us there. I am the vet who takes care of the mouse or monkey who serves as the control who gets the disease from the agent for which we are creating a vaccine that will go into Warfighters to protect them. It’s possible to go to work every day, happily, knowing this much.
The evolution and expansion of my reasons to serve my country seem a natural progression. Giving something back, setting the standard and supporting collective excellence, and making a difference are laudable reasons to work for any organization. Serving a country for which a fundamental, basic concept includes bettering the world while improving oneself leaves one wanting little more.