Novice weekend warrior awaits the call

Lea Acord is a weekend warrior — four weekends, to be exact.

When Acord joined the U.S. Army Reserve in March, it had been more than 20 years since a reservist had been called to active duty.

In Germany, plans for unification were gaining speed; in the Soviet Union, voters got their first look at contested elections; in Nicaragua, Contras and Sandinistas were laying down their arms.

“Everything looked peaceful in the world. Who knew?” she asks.

Acord joined the reserve for a chance to do some hands-on nursing, to meet some new people, and she liked the benefits the Army offered. “Somehow it never really entered the forefront of my brain that I would be called up,” she says.

Now, along with the rest of Bangor’s section of the 1125th Army Hospital, she hangs on every scrap of news coming out of Baghdad, Kennebunkport, Saudi Arabia and a dozen other exotic locales. The conflict in Kuwait is now part of her life.

“I really didn’t want to face it. But the more it was discussed, the more I realized I couldn’t deny it anymore,” she says.

About 10 days ago, she saw a television interview with a physician in the reserves, and suddenly she realized that the call could come for her.

Acord immediately telephoned her brother, a toxologist in the reserves, for advice. He told that if anybody would be called up, it would be him. The next day, he got the call.

The 1125th has not been called to active duty. If it is, Acord’s transition from civilian to military life will be dramatic.

The work does not worry her. Acord, the director of the University of Maine’s School of Nursing, has been a nurse for 24 years. She has plenty of experience supervising and in administration.

But her military experience is limited to four weekends. She has not yet had her basic training. She has only one uniform, her dress uniform.

“I don’t have a dogtag. I have to get a dogtag, and an identification card,” she says. “They are really starting from scratch with me.”

If the call comes, she will have to take care of a myriad of personal details: making out a will, arranging to have her military pay deposited directly, an endless stream of paperwork, packing.

She will have to find out if the university will augment her pay, or if she will have to adjust to the substantial paycut her U.S. Army Captain’s salary represents.

She will have to make arrangements with her supervisors at the university, and plan for her assistant and faculty to take over her duties in her absence.

“We have some really exciting things going on at the school this year,” Acord says, and it is hard for her to imagine missing them.

She will have to sit down with her husband and say all the things that have gone unsaid in recent weeks as the Persian Gulf crisis has simmered.

“I’ll really be leaving my husband very much alone,” she says, with her daughter away at college and her family in the Midwest. “We have been married 25 years and we’ve never really been apart for any length of time.

“It really is unspoken. It’s hard to deal with until the call comes,” she says.

“There is a little excitement. There is anxiety, but there is also excitement about doing some nursing in an Army hospital,” she says.

But that excitement does not outweigh her memories — even civilian memories — of what a war would mean.

“That’s just horrible, not just because of me personally, but because of the futility,” she says. “What really gets me is at the end of the national news when these young men say hello to their families — they are all gung-ho, but they are babies. They don’t know about war. They are too young to remember.”

For now, Acord tries to go on with her life as normal, and she has some success. She still makes appointments, she still makes plans, she is still preparing for a seminar in Florida at the end of September.

If the call never comes, the last three weeks will, nonetheless, leave their impact on Acord. “It will change my whole perspective about what I’m doing. My drill weekends will be a lot more important to me,” she says.

And if the call comes?

“I joined the reserves, and I know this is part of it,” she says. “I am willing to accept it if I get called. My preference is not to get the call.”