Wounded in War, Single Mother Ponders Wisdom of Risking Her Life

Tina Garrett’s education ended abruptly when her basketball scholarship did. Her college was cutting back, and Garrett says her subsidy was axed. A single mother, she went looking for work but found nothing. So she joined the Army.

Now Specialist Garrett sits in a wheelchair in an Army hospital here. She was severely injured when her squad leader stepped on an Iraqi land mine nine days ago. Now, she says, she is forced once again to reconsider the wisdom of a mother, a single parent, risking her life in combat support.

“I was just praying that we wouldn’t go to war,” Garrett said Tuesday, recalling what went through her mind when she enlisted. “ . . . I just had to take that chance. . . . My life wasn’t going nowhere at the time. And I had to start somewhere.

“I was living off my parents,” she said. “Financially, they were doing just about everything for me and my daughter. And I felt that if she was going to have one parent, she needed to have a responsible parent.”

Garrett, 25, one of five children of a Westbury, N.Y., custodian, is one of a small number of women wounded in action in the Persian Gulf War. Her story illustrates the clash of priorities that has brought more and more women close to the front line, often at considerable peril.

As a mother of a 5-year-old, Garrett would have preferred not to have risked her life in a combat setting. But as a soldier, she wants to be treated no differently than a man. Now injured, she says she wants only to care for her child. But as a soldier, she would go back into combat conditions if ordered.

“I’m just as hard-working as the next person,” said Garrett, a medic, meeting with reporters at the 98th General Hospital. “I want things for my daughter that I’m sure they would want for their kids. That’s all.”

At 5 feet, 11 inches, Garrett is a striking figure, even in a wheelchair and hospital pajamas. Her left arm and hand were heavily bandaged and resting in an olive-drab sling. Her left leg lay bandaged and supported in a vertical position.

Her injury occurred Feb. 25. Garrett’s squad crossed the Saudi Arabian border into Iraq. They drove on, into a zone thick with abandoned enemy bunkers, cluttered with what Garrett called “a lot of things that common sense would have told you: ‘Don’t go near.’

“That area, it scared me to death,” she recalled, “because it was reality. We hadn’t been that close to the war until that point. We hadn’t seen any bunkers like that. . . . It was just reality that scared me to death.”

The squad members stopped for the day in a place they believed was safe. They were unloading when the mine went off, injuring four. Garrett found herself suddenly on the ground, sickened by the sight of her own blood and unable to cry out. Medics were creeping toward her, hoping to avoid another mine.

The blast severed the main artery in Garrett’s upper left arm. It also broke her left thumb and carried off from it “a big piece o’ meat.” Shrapnel peppered her left leg in five places. She has lost sensation in three fingers, an injury that may affect her military future.

Garrett is expected to regain full use of her arm and leg, but the prognosis for her hand remains unclear.

“I don’t think anything had prepared me . . . to accept this,” said Garrett, who can move her left arm only painfully by lifting it with her right. “ . . . I never expected to be injured. I never would just sit out there and think that I would be injured. I didn’t want to think that way.”

Garrett was studying sociology when her athletic scholarship evaporated two years into C. W. Post College on Long Island. Unable to find work, she enlisted in November, 1988, for four years, hoping that the experience as a medic might help her eventually land a job outside as a nurse.

In principle, she disapproves of what she ended up doing. Just as she believes that no child should face the risk of being orphaned by having two parents in combat, she would also prefer that no single parents go into combat. But, she said, any single parents who enlist know what they’re getting into.

“When I joined, I told myself that it was the best thing for her,” Garrett said of her daughter, Kristina.

And now?

“Everything I do is for my daughter,” Garrett said. “That’s all I’m looking forward to, is taking care of her.”

And if she were ordered back into a combat zone in the future, would she go?

“If it was my choice, no. But like I said, I just do what I’m instructed to do.”