“Growing up, I'd always enjoyed military thinking and what [the military] stands for,” said Dr. Liu, who is now a neurosurgeon at Northwestern. “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.”
So, he underwent basic training at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, and he 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 and work with equipment that you might not have in a well-funded hospital in the United States.”
He noted that the toughest part of being an active reservist during wartime is not knowing when or where you may be deployed.
“They can call you up and say, 'We need you here,' “said Dr. Liu, who is married and has four children aged 1–18 years. “As a family, we've held off on making any type of major purchases right now. We don't want to buy a new house or anything like that because if I get redeployed, financially, we could certainly take a hit.”
Balancing his military and civilian obligations is “like anything else,” he added. “You have to multitask the best you can. I was very lucky in the sense that, when I was deployed, I had full support from my colleagues in the department of neurosurgery here. That was very helpful.”
Dr. Liu said that that when he returns home from military service he feels “regrounded.” We Americans “live in a very materialistic society,” he explained. “I usually come back with a sense that certain things just aren't that important. In the current Iraq war, a lot of young soldiers are hurt, and hurt badly. It regrounds you [to the fact] that the most important things in life are your family and your career.”
Military reserve service “is not for everybody, but it taught me [a great deal] in terms of discipline and working together as a team,” he said.
When colleagues learn about his role in the Army Reserve “they tend to act positively,” he added. But it hasn't always been that way. “In the past, I've had people say, 'are you nuts? You could be killed or hauled away for a year.' I've heard a variety of reactions.”
From Resident to General
Military service doesn't run in Dr. Jamie S. Barkin's family either. In 1977, he joined the U. S. Army Reserve during his first year as an internal medicine resident at the University of Miami because he wanted to serve his country.
“We all need to make some contribution back to our country,” said Dr. Barkin, a Florida native who has been chief of the division of gastroenterology at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami since 1985. “It doesn't have to be with the armed services. It could be with the Peace Corps, or inner city work, or teaching people forestry in the Civilian Conservation Corps.”
Before he retired from the Army Reserve with the rank of major general in 2004 after 27 years of service, his assignments included stints in Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, Kuwait, and in other Persian Gulf states.
Practicing overseas “taught me that in medicine, we've had the opportunity of bringing first-class medical care to our troops, no matter where they're stationed, whether it [is] in southwest Asia or downtown Savannah,” he said.
The most challenging aspect of his service was learning leadership and management skills, which “for the most part in medicine are not taught,” noted Dr. Barkin, who also is a professor of medicine at the University of Miami School of Medicine and governor of the Florida chapter of the American College of Physicians.
“What we learn in medicine is the science and the art. We must realize that dealing with people as a supervisor or as an employee requires management skills. … Once you learn those skills, they are incredibly valuable to you and to your employee or employer. The benefits are amazing to both society and to medicine. There's a cross fertilization.”