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Autumn Hansen still remembers that day clearly.
DURING HER LAST DEPLOYMENT, HER PATROL WAS HIT WITH AN IMPROVISED EXPLOSIVE DEVICE. THE IED HIT THE HUMVEE IN FRONT OF HER, BUT THE IMPACT OF THE BLAST ALSO CAUSED INJURIES TO HER RIGHT SHOULDER AND KNEE. DAZED, AT FIRST SHE DIDN’ T REALIZE THAT SHE’ D BEEN HIT.
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In my mind, I was still in the battle,” she said, and it took the insistence of several MPs and a nurse back at the base to get the medical help she needed.
“ You hear stories, but until you actually experience it, it’ s something totally different altogether,” Hansen said.“ You’ re just on automatic. … My last deployment, I saw a side of humanity that I thought only existed in the movies or in a book. It’ s a side of humanity that I really wished I hadn’ t seen or uncovered. I still have nightmares about it to this day.”
Hansen served on active duty in the U. S. Army for 21 years, as well as being a wife and a mom to five children. But she doesn’ t see her role in the military as anything but her commitment to her job.
IMMERSING HERSELF IN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
As a Sargeant First Class( E-7) serving in the intelligence branch of the U. S. Army directly with Major General John Maher, Hansen was hand-picked for her role. She was an electronic warfare intercept specialist and was crosstrained as a human intelligence collector.
As a private, she completed her formal language training at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language
Center in Monterrey, California, and finished her intermediate training at the same time. Her primary language was Russian, but she also caught on quickly to the Slavic languages.
“ It was really easy for me to pick those up,” Hansen said. While serving in the Middle East, she also picked up a little bit of Arabic languages, including Farsi, Tagalog and more.“ I probably couldn’ t have taken any kind of a language test, because I just picked up certain words and phrases,” Hansen said.“ It was total language immersion.”
Hansen studied for eight hours per day in the classroom, but outside the classroom she experienced cultural immersion, as well. For her, cultural roles were very traditional at home, but the linguistic and cultural immersion in the military helped her see things in a different light. Fresh out of high school, this was a whole new experience for her.
“ Growing up, I thought that everybody was the same, and that’ s not even true in America, let alone outside of our borders,” Hansen said.
‘ WE HAD A JOB TO DO’
After serving in the Gulf War during Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm in 1990-91, she came home, then was deployed again during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom and other smaller campaigns in Kuwait and Baghdad.
“ The deployments were at first very difficult because we didn’ t have the infrastructure that we needed – especially not only for female soldiers, but for the amount of military that came over,” Hansen said, of Desert Shield and Desert Storm.
Not only that, but the deployments came in waves, which also made it difficult for the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers and those who were tasked with setting up tents, bathroom facilities and more for female and male soldiers alike.
This kind of rushed preparation hadn’ t happened since World War II.
During Operation Desert Shield, Hansen lived in a type of shipping container called a Conex container with her fellow soldiers, then moved to living in a large canvas tent with 50 other soldiers. Sand slipped in everywhere and the heat was a constant. Often, her cot was right next to male soldiers, but she said she never saw her fellow sol-
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