Page 19 - QARANC Vol 20 No 3 2023

“We were on call pretty much all the time,” recalls Mary. “We would go out at any time of the day or night in helicopters to either ladies who were pregnant and in labour or retrieve paratroopers who had been injured during live fire incidents.” Mary did jungle training and parachute courses – “anything I could get my hands on” – showing her
capacity to push her boundaries and try new things. During a 20-year career with the Army, Mary gave service in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Northern Ireland. She took charge of a Field Mental Health Team out in Afghanistan in 2008, which she describes as her favourite overseas posting. “It was austere, a really difficult environment and a lot of soldiers were killed, which we had to deal with. But I was able to put all
my training into practice.
“We had to deal with captured Taliban who were
brought into the Med Centre and because of our Geneva Convention responsibilities we had to make sure they were okay and treated with respect and dignity. At one point, we treated a Taliban fighter who had just shot one of our guys. And that was that was very hard.”
Mary used up another of her nine lives when an Afghan employee, who had slipped through the vetting process, drove a jeep at her late one night. She dived to the side of the road and thought she had escaped with nothing more than bruises. However, in the shower a few days later, Mary found a large