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• 1 2022-12-13T21:57:42+00:00 Black Nurses in the Armed Forces Today 29 plain 2023-02-05T21:52:33+00:00 The efforts of generations of Black nurses and their allies have led to a vastly different position for Black nurses in the military in recent decades compared to 150 years ago, though they continue to face challenges.
  
  Major Sandra Webb Booker enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserves in 1985, after completing a bachelor’s and master’s degree in nursing. She provided nursing services and coordinated healthcare programs and training for soldiers around the United States and the world, including in Honduras, Panama, and South Korea. In 1999 she was chosen to join a NATO peace taskforce in Bosnia and Herzegovina as a public health nurse. The country had just survived a brutal ethnic civil war, and Major Webb coordinated efforts between different non-governmental organizations, international organizations, and Bosnian healthcare institutions to explore how to improve the state of healthcare in the country for patients of all ethnicities. For her services she received a Joint Service Commendation Medal and a NATO Medal. While serving in the Army reserves, Major Webb Booker worked for almost twenty years as the coordinator of the Chicago Public Schools Practical Nursing Program.
  
  
  Fred Brown, also enlisted in 1985, but in the Air Force Reserves. Like Webb Booker, Brown balanced military service and working as a nurse for decades. In 1990, Brown was called up from the reserves to serve in Saudi Arabia as part of Operation Desert Shield (later Desert Storm). Brown noted that his unit was split; most of the African Americans deployed to Saudi Arabia, while most of the white reservists were sent to Spain.
  
  This felt like a clear act of racism, sending Black reservists to serve in the more dangerous region. Having only recently earned his credentials as a registered nurse, Brown found his service in Saudi Arabia treating battle injuries extremely difficult. Yet he went on to have a 22-year career in both the Air Force and the Navy, rising to the position of commander and training officer.
  
  
  
  Since 1979, three Black women have served as chiefs of the Army Nursing Corps: Brigadier Generals Hazel Winifred Johnson, Clara M. Adams-Ender and Bettye Hill Simmons. Both Adams-Ender and Simmons joined the Army Student Nurse Program as young people because it provided a means of funding their college education, however it ended up launching their highly successful careers in the military.1
  
  In 2021, Army Colonel Clausyl “C.J.” Plummer, the Black chief nursing officer at Fort Belvoir Community Hospital in Virginia noted that he feels like he is standing on the shoulders of African American pioneers like Adams-Ender and Simmons. “These are persons who have made this possible and continue to mentor us,” he said.
  
  Fort Belvoir’s deputy chief nursing officer, Navy Captain Jamessetta Goggins, is also an African American and she recalled that when she joined the Navy in the 1990’s, there weren’t many Black nurses in the Navy. Indeed, she did not encounter a Black commander in the Navy Nurse Corps until she became an officer in 1999.
  
  Reflecting on the history of Black nurses in the military, Goggins noted in an interview: “We’ve come a long way, but we still have a ways to go.”2