Page 30 - QARANC Vol 20 No 3 2023

30 The Gazette QARANC Association
‘The Army takes you out of your comfort zone, and helps you find your niche’
Pat Gibson, chair of the QARANC Association’s Aldershot Branch, reflects on her life’s journey as a nurse, reservist, and volunteer...
“I remember when I was about 10 years old at school, they said, ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ and I replied: ‘I want to be a nurse.’ I had no concept of the different types of nursing at that time, I just knew that I wanted to be a nurse and everything I did after that was aiming towards that goal.”
Pat, who grew up in London and Kent, followed in the footsteps of her mother who was also a nurse. While at college she heard that the Army could be a route into nursing and thought it would be a “nice combination,” but she didn’t get the necessary O Levels at that time. Instead, Pat went to her local nursing school to do her training, while never completely giving up on her dream of the Army.
She became a state enrolled nurse (SEN) and one day she was sat with the ward sister she admired but whom had been there for 15 years. “I thought, do I want to stay here for 15 years? I decided I didn’t, and then I remembered I’d applied to join the army and perhaps I could try again,” says Pat.
This time she was successful. It was 1980 and she joined the Army as a nurse with dreams of going to Hong Kong via Northern Ireland – “I was told that if you went to Northern Ireland for a year, you would usually get the posting you requested,” she explains. She soon wondered “what the hell I’d let myself in for,” and cried for a few days after finding it much
I just knew that I wanted to be a nurse and everything I did after that was aiming towards that goal
harder than she thought.
“It was being away from home and the routine
of early mornings and doing all the marching but anyway I stuck with it and then got posted to the Louise Margaret Hospital (for soldiers) in Aldershot and after that to Northern Ireland – I was so excited.”
Pat really enjoyed her time in Northern Ireland, which had one of her reasons for joining the Army. “The people I met were friendly,” she recalls. “There were some really sad moments with our lads being injured or killed but we were so well briefed on dos and don’ts I felt safe.” She was on duty the night the hunger striker Bobby Sands died, and she could hear dustbin lids being banged in the distance. “That was a little worrying and I was concerned for our troops,” she admits.
Pat hoped her next posting would be to Hong Kong or Cyprus, but the Army had other ideas. “A letter arrived saying I was being sent to Germany. I remember at the time saying to the matron, ‘I don’t want to go to Germany,’ and her response was, ‘Well you’re in the army, so you’ll go where you are sent!’ I thought that Germany would be around forever, but Hong Kong was going to be handed back to China at some stage and would change.”
However, Pat loved her time in Germany and got married there, in 1983. Her husband, a paratrooper, was based in Edinburgh so the marriage was a long-