Judy Winkler grew up around the military. Born in North Carolina while her father ran an Army barrage balloon battalion in World War II, she spent her teenage years in San Diego as a USO girl, dancing with sailors and Marines on liberty. She married a sailor, had three children by her early twenties, and moved to Salt Lake City. When money got tight she went to work, and one opportunity led to the next: beauty school, then surgical technician training, then an associate degree in nursing, then a bachelor’s degree, each paid for with a scholarship she found herself. By her mid-forties she was an operating room educator and assistant director at Salt Lake area surgical centers.
At a nursing conference, Navy and Army recruiters told her the military urgently needed operating room nurse instructors. Judy had been thinking about how much her country had given her, and she decided to give something back. She chose the Navy, she laughs, for the uniform. At 46 she was just under the age limit, and a childhood asthma diagnosis nearly kept her out until she wrote to the Secretary of the Navy and signed away her retirement benefits for a waiver. In January 1991, she was one of five Utah Navy nurses activated and sent to Saudi Arabia for Operation Desert Storm.
Her first day in country ended with a concussion after a fall from a Saudi bus. Two days later she was back at work with Fleet Hospital 15, a reserve unit that turned bare sand near Al Jubail into a 500-bed tent hospital in 12 days and nights, working alongside the Seabees. Because of her rank, Judy was kept out of the operating room and put in charge of sterile processing. The prepackaged instrument sets had sat in storage in Norway for years and were mislabeled and no longer sterile, so she and her team rebuilt them using Vietnam-era field sterilizers that handled two packs every hour and a half. One night a warning came over the loudspeaker: incoming. Judy and six others lay on the floor of their container, holding hands in a chain while Scud missiles came in and a Patriot battery fired back. Some cried and some prayed. She just waited, ready to pick up the pieces if they were hit.
The ground war began on February 24 and was over in days, with far fewer casualties than feared. Soon after, a chaplain told Judy her father had died, and she flew home that afternoon on a plane full of Marines, the only woman aboard. When they landed in Cincinnati, people lined the corridor applauding, a welcome she still can’t talk about without thinking of the Vietnam veterans who never got one. At home, though, she couldn’t taste food for six months and spent three months barely able to function. She compares it to losing your place in the sand: you can come back close, but you have to make a new place. Only recently did she recognize it as PTSD. She wrote The Warrior Family: When a Reservist Goes to War for the families who served at home, and a children’s book, Pinky Goes to War. Asked if she has regrets, Judy doesn’t hesitate: “I gave back to my country, and I’d do it again.”
Watch Judy’s full episode, and every episode of Ask A Vet, on YouTube, or listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1vnvypN6Kspck3NnBiUSxw
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4UvdMjkOkOgoHM2yIckhlh
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ask-a-vet-podcast/id1854840136
JUDY’S BOOKS:
- The Warrior Family: When a Reservist Goes to War by Judy Little (2008): https://a.co/d/0cy4nJMb
- Pinky Goes to War: https://a.co/d/063CKcD1