Tara Phelps has been a nurse in a primary care physician setting for over a decade, including with Morris Hospital for the last two years, but her start came when she was in the military.

She was already in nursing school at the University of North Alabama when she and a friend decided to enlist together. It was August 2002.

“After my second year, I don’t know,” Phelps said. “I was just kind of restless and didn’t really have anything keeping me there. The military had always been in the back of my mind.”

She comes from a military family background. Her father and uncle were both in the Air Force, and her grandfather was in the Army Air Corps.

Phelps said when she got her assignment, she only knew that she was going to work at a hospital in Fort Hood. To that point, she’d gone to basic training and through EMT training to get nationally certified before completing her Army medic training, which she said was more like field training.

Then she got assigned to the hospital in Fort Hood, and instead of a typical Army medic position, she was assigned to help on labor and delivery of babies.

“I got put at the hospital, and I was excited to work at the hospital, but I literally showed up to the hospital reporting for duty, and they said, ‘Oh, let’s see where we’re short-staffed right now,’” Phelps said. “They were like, ‘Oh, labor and delivery is short-staffed. We’re gonna put you there.’”

She learned on the job, aiding with things like stimulating newborns and doing assessments like checking vital signs, blood sugar, and more. For C-sections, she’d assist the doctor with the surgery.

From there, Phelps was deployed to South Korea, where she worked as a medic in an ambulance evacuation unit.

“We weren’t really evacuating anybody, because it’s peacetime there,” Phelps said. “This was left over.”

She went from delivering babies to learning how to conduct checks on vehicles, put up tents, and hook up generators.

“The Army is the most fun I never want to have again,” Phelps said. “I had a lot of fun, made a lot of friends and learned a lot, and I think it’s good for anyone to do for a few years.”

Phelps said she learned so much in the military and it opened so many doors. It paid for her nursing school, and it got her a job in an ICU right out of nursing school. It also got her an opportunity to briefly visit the demilitarized zone between South and North Korea, and she was able to step foot in North Korea, albeit briefly.

Phelps now lives in Morris with her family, working at Morris Hospital’s Dresden Drive location in a doctor’s office while making sure her kids Logan, Grant, Jacob and Emily get to their sports and extracurriculars on time.