Alumni Spotlight

When Marie Berry, BHS’86, began her nursing career in a Boston hospital after graduating from Northeastern University, a military lifestyle may have been the furthest thing from her mind. She had a love for nursing, medicine, science, and patient care, and how it all came together.

But she soon became disenchanted with hospital politics, of how nurses – who provided so much of the primary care for patients – were not truly appreciated.

“I found nursing to be very political, and I was not prepared for that,” Berry said. “It was not a comfortable place to be.”

“Leaving Northeastern, my goal was to be head nurse of a floor at a hospital. But it wasn’t long before I was wondering if nursing really was what I wanted to do.”

The Braintree, Mass., native had considered returning to school to pursue a career outside nursing but her older brother made a suggestion that changed her perspective.

“He was in the Air Force and he said, ‘Why don’t you come out to Colorado?’” Berry recalled. “He introduced me to an Air Force nurse, and I listened to what her experiences had been. I thought, a three-year (military) commitment? Five years at Northeastern went by so quickly; three years shouldn’t take very long.”

Twenty years later, now-retired Lieutenant Colonel Berry looks back on a military nursing career that went by in a flash. She spent her last three years of active service, beginning in September 2004, as Specialty Care Section Chief for the U.S. Army’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. The hospital served as the primary medical treatment facility for injured Army, Navy, Marine, and Air Force personnel who were evacuated from Iraq and Afghanistan.

It was a nursing position that “just sort of happened,” Berry said.

When she first arrived in Germany, Berry served as the head nurse in the recovery room. But after the battle of Fallujah and the suicide bombing of a mess hall in Mosul just before Christmas in 2004, the intensive care, recovery room, same-day surgery, and pre-procedure units were put under the command of one officer.

“Because of my rank and experience, I kind of fell into it,” Berry said. “It wasn’t why I was brought over there. It just kind of grew and I did the best I could do while I was over there.”

Berry supervised 125 personnel, including 74 nurses, and she and her staff treated over 6,800 soldiers and airman involving around 9,600 surgical procedures.

“Of all the jobs I had in the military, that was by far the most challenging, but also the most rewarding,” Berry said. “It’s such an important mission over there and there are so many dimensions to it. It was a great assignment for me to finish my career.”

It was also a very emotionally draining time, Berry said. For most of the airlifted injured soldiers, it was the first time they realized not all of them made it out alive.

“The first thing many of them ask is, 'How’s my buddy? How’s he doing?'” Berry said. “They just have this incredible spirit. They’re not concerned with themselves, they just want to make sure their buddy is OK.”

Berry and her 5-year-old daughter had been separated from her husband, Col. Warren Berry, Commander of the 78th Airbase Wing at Robins AFB in Georgia, for 16 months when she decided to retire from active duty in November 2007.

“Twenty years was enough,” said Berry, who was also deployed in Somalia, Haiti, Kenya, and Saudi Arabia. “You get hooked; you can’t stop giving. It’s how we’re wired as nurses.”

These days she can look back on how her education at Northeastern prepared her even for a career she never expected.

“I worked in a different hospital for every co-op so I could get different experiences,” Berry said. “All of that prepared me to be a better nurse because I thought I had analytical skills that were a little different than my counterparts at Boston University and Boston College and some of the other smaller nursing schools.

“The variety of the experience, the entire education, it was an awesome way to go through college because we applied the knowledge almost right away and I thought that was a much better way to learn. We had the clinical experience like nurses at all schools do, but the co-op piece allowed you to do that much more. You had a bit more experience, and that put you ahead of the field.”

As it turned out, those experiences were nothing like Marie Berry envisioned.