By Doug Brunk, San Diego Bureau
United States military service does not run in Dr. Iffath Abbasi Hoskins' family. She grew up in Pakistan and attended medical school overseas. But when she enlisted with the U.S. Navy as part of her obstetrics and gynecology residency at the National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda, Md., in 1979, she did so eagerly.
“The hospital had an excellent reputation,” said Dr. Hoskins, who is now chair and residency director of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. “Secondarily, being raised with certain values in a family that was very involved with community service and politics, it was a way to serve the country.”
Dr. Hoskins remained in Bethesda as an active-duty Navy physician until 1987, when she switched to the Navy Reserve and relocated to New York City with her husband William, who is an ob.gyn. oncologist. Since then, her reserve assignments have included a stint as a member of the Secretary of the Navy's Policy Board; chief of professional services with the U.S. Marines 4th Medical Battalion in Camp Pendleton, Calif.; chair of medical credentials for the entire U.S. Navy, both active duty and reserves; and training family practice residents at the Naval Hospital Jacksonville (Fla.).
Balancing the demands of her civilian life with those of the Navy Reserve “has not been easy,” she said. “The military expectations are that you will focus on the needs of the military. Over the years, those needs have become far more than just a weekend a month.”
This includes completing online training courses to keep up to date on topics such as biological warfare. This training is “going on in parallel to our civilian life, in order to remain a credible, deployable military officer or enlisted person,” she said.
The impact on family life is tempered by the fact that her husband was in the Navy for 20 years, so he can identify with the culture and the requirements that come with military service. In addition, her two grown children were very young when she started her service.
“They didn't know any other life,” she said. “They just knew that their mother gets out there and wears a uniform and floats all over the place.”
One personal reward of her role as a reservist, she said, is a sense of serving the country. Another is learning to become an effective leader. “Everybody who trains in the military is force-fed leadership skills,” she said. “There is no way that anybody can rise up through the ranks of the military without learning—either painfully or easily—leadership. You have to mentor people and work with disparate groups of people.”
In the reserves, “if my unit or my team or my company is not successful, people don't blame the person, they blame the commanding officer. It is his or her responsibility to make it all successful. My success in the military, every time I got promoted, every time I got a medal for leadership, was because somebody else said, 'she did a good thing for her area of responsibility, whatever she was in charge of.' Because, in the military, there is no such thing as personal success; it doesn't even exist. That's what has been one of the best rewards for me … to learn that concept.”
Today, when she counsels young physicians who are considering joining the Navy Reserve Medical Corps, in which she is a captain, she doesn't sugarcoat it. She tells them, “if you're looking for personal glory … you're not going to find it. … It's a lot of personal sacrifice, a lot of time away from family.”
Didn't Want to Miss Out
Dr. John C. Liu's father, uncle, and cousins fulfilled obligatory military service as citizens of Taiwan. However, Dr. Liu broke the family mold in 1992, when as a citizen of the United States, he elected to enroll in the U.S. Army Reserve during his first year as a surgery resident at the Northwestern University, Chicago. Operation Desert Storm had just ended.
“I was in the first generation of my family that was not required to serve in the military. I've always thought that by not doing that, I kind of missed out,” said Dr. Liu, a neurosurgeon at Northwestern.
So, he underwent basic training at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio and currently is assigned to Brooke Army Medical Center in that city as a reservist neurosurgeon. He spends a minimum of 2 weeks in service there each year. In 2004, he spent 3 months at Brooke filling in for neurosurgeons who were deployed to Iraq. During that stretch of time, a reservist vascular surgeon, who was being deployed to Afghanistan, phoned him to ask him the basics of how to do a craniotomy. “As a surgeon who does not normally do any type of brain operation, he would be called upon to do a brain operation should that need arise when he's in Afghanistan,” said Dr. Liu, who was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 2005. “So you tend to be a lot more resourceful.”