2024 National Nurses Week

Killeen resident has decades of nursing under her belt

BY JOHN CLARK HERALD CORRESPONDENT

A recruiter’s visit to her high school convinced Atlanta native Lisa Williams that the U.S. Army might be a good fit for her but when she hurried home and ran the idea by her family, they were not nearly as excited.

“My family was, like, uh-uh, she is not going in the military. No way,” the Killeen resident said. “I was one of those students who didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I never saw myself going to college. That was not for me. We didn’t have that kind of finances. I hadn’t done anything as far as scholarships; I was a mediocre student.

“When I was growing up, I would always see this (Ar my) commercial on the news: ‘Be all you can be. We do more before 9 a.m. than most people do all day.’ Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was, like, I want to do that. The recruiters came to the high school and did the exam there, and I scored fairly well. I thought, OK, I can do this thing.

“My mom and my aunt would not sign the papers, but I was determined. I was ready to get out of Atlanta, Georgia, and that was my ticket out. I had to wait

until I turned 18 in order to sign for myself. That’s what I did, and then I found myself at Fort Jackson, South Carolina.”

Fort Jackson is where she went to basic training shortly after graduating high school in 1981. For the most part, Williams enjoyed boot camp, but things got off to a bit of a rough start.

“Oh, my Lord, that was a whole different world for me,” she said. “The first thing that happened (was) I got to the

MEPS (Military Entrance and Processing) station and they were giving me all these injections and shots. I thought they were trying to kill me

“I just knew something was wrong. At the time, they had those guns that they were giving the shots with, and they were coming at me. I was crawling up on the tables. They were saying, ‘What’s wrong with this

PLEASE SEE NURSING, A5

Editor’s Note: This feature about Killeen resident and veteran Lisa Williams, a longtime nurse and military spouse, originally ran in Fort Cavazos Herald last year.

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Retired U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Lisa Williams served 20 years in the military and retired from Fort Hood, now Fort Cavazos

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Lisa Williams became a nurse a er joining the military and continued working as a nurse in the civilian world.

NURSING

person?’ Every time they would show up at our unit with more shots, I was a complete wreck.

“Other than that, I thought I was a great soldier. If you’ve seen the movie ‘Private Benjamin,’ I think I was that type soldier. I was a girly girl when I came in, and I was a girly girl throughout the military. I always tried to maintain my femininity. I didn’t want it to be this ‘maley’ persona that people saw; I wanted to portray the softness of being a soldier, and I think I did that.”

After advanced individual training at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, where she trained as an ear, nose and throat tech, Williams headed to her first duty station at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, followed by a tour in Korea.

Aside from meeting her future husband later in Ger many, being stationed in Korea proved to be a defining moment in not only her career, but her life after the military, as well.

“I spent two years in Korea,” Lisa said. “While I was there, the doctors I ended up working with were pretty persistent about me going on and doing something different with my skills, because they thought I was a better person than what I thought I was. They saw something in me that I couldn’t see in myself

“One doctor said, ‘Lisa, I am not leaving Korea until you sign these papers to go to nursing school.’ He was quite serious. I left before he did but I reenlisted and signed up for nursing school. I graduated in ’87, and I’ve been nursing ever since.”

Nursing school was at Fort Lewis, Washington. After that, she worked for four years at Walter Reed National Army Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, then headed over to Augsburg and Nuremburg, Germany. It was shortly after her arrival in Augsburg that she met a fellow soldier named Kevin Williams They hit it off pretty much right away and have been married now for 30 years

“I always say he got me right off ‘the boat,’” she said, laughing. “One of his friends who would go and pick up all the soldiers from the replacement center, he picked us up and brought us back to the barracks. Next thing I know, we meet and four of us played some cards — and he cheated.

“We played Spades and they won. He cheated. But we’ve been together ever since.” After they were married, the couple

headed to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, and eventually landed at Fort Hood (now Fort Cavazos). Lisa retired as a staff sergeant in September 2001 after 20 years’ service Kevin left the Army in August 2010 as a chief warrant officer 4 after serving 22 years.

During his career, Kevin was deployed twice to Iraq (2003-04 and 2005-06), and also went to Bosnia four different times in four years. Lisa also served overseas, but never in a combat zone.

“I was fortunate,” she said. “When I was stationed in Europe, I had just had my son, and they said we were going to go to Bosnia. I took the baby back to Houston to his grandmother — Kevin was in Korea at the time — but instead of going to Bosnia, we had to shut down two hospitals in Europe. As it panned out, I never had to go.”

When she retired, Williams set aside her role as an active duty soldier and became a military spouse. In her case she says, nothing much changed.

“I don’t think there was any difference,” she said. “I did the same thing both ways. When he would deploy, nothing changed. From the moment I walked out of the military — I was already working at a nursing home in Temple —

I went to work.

“I got out right as 9/11 happened, so 9/11 was going across the television screen. I’m watching it and my husband is deployed, and that was probably the most stressful time for me because everything happened so fast. You’ve got the kids at home and you’re trying to make sure that they maintain some level of normalcy while he’s gone.

“We had this understanding that basically, you do what you do and I do what I do, and we’ll meet in the middle and kind of keep things going. We both understood the assignments we were given, and I thank God we didn’t have any issues. Things just seemed to work themselves out.

“A lot of soldiers go away on these deployments, and they come back and all kinds of things are going on in the household. Fort Hood was known for divorces. Fort Hood was known for domestic violence. We never had those issues. Yes, we missed each other and sometimes there was a transition coming back. We had to figure out a way to coexist, but it never took a long time.”

One adjustment Lisa did have to make after 20 years of military life was settling down and staying in one place. Both she and Kevin wanted stability for their two sons, but Lisa struggled a little making the transition to working in the civilian world.

“I moved around a lot. I worked at Scott and White. I worked at a couple of nursing homes. I worked at Darnall for a minute. I worked at CTC (Central Texas College, where she was an LVN program instructor). I worked for several nursing agencies.

“My thing was, I felt like once I came out, there was a level of institution that I couldn’t find myself clocking in … settling in. I’d stay somewhere for a couple of months. Kevin was always saying, ‘You need to find somewhere to settle down.’

“I might go and be a temporary (employee). I might sign up for a job with the intention of staying for a while, but then it got to be where, you know, this kind of feels like another institution and I don’t need to stay here.

“I moved around a lot, but I think everywhere I went, I could have moved back, if I chose to.”

Now working in home health care, the mother of two grown boys says she thoroughly enjoyed her military career. She does not think things could have turned out any better

“The military was great,” she said. “It prepared me for where I was going, and for where I am today. It prepared me for some situations I never knew I was going

to need it for

“I wouldn’t change a thing. Not a thing. I’ve met some great people along the way Dr. Michael Novia, when I graduated nursing school and made it to the ICU in (Washington) D.C., at Walter Reed, he came to visit me. He said, ‘See, I told you. Now, what you gonna do next?’ We’re still good friends to this day “I think the Army is what you make it. I had soldiers who hated it, but I always said, ‘It’s what you make it.’ I think I spent a lot of time helping a lot of soldiers get to be … I think they would come back and say, great.

“I still see a lot of them in the community and they say, ‘Sgt. Williams, you did right by us. You did really, really right.’ Some of them, I put out of the military because the military was not right for them. Some of those went on to become nurses and — even some of my students at CTC — we’re still friends to this day because I think I was able to show them what they could become. I’m amazed at some of the things they say about me to other people, about things I’ve been able to help them accomplish.

“It’s been a good jour ney. I hope, on some level, that I was able to help someone along the way to become a better person.”

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Lisa and Kevin Williams met while serving in the Army and have been married 30 years.