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 occasional 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.”
She went on to explain that 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, like, 'I'm going to get out there and do this heroic thing or serve the country, and I love the uniform,' you're not going to find it to that extent. It's a lot of personal sacrifice, a lot of time away from family.”
The military “is a different culture,” she said. “It's a different world, language, and behavior. I was constantly worrying that I was forgetting pieces of my uniform while I packed my bags and ran all over the country. There were a lot of issues like that. But, in general, it's the best thing I ever did.”
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.