COL Meta Seltzer Ret. Oral History

title:

COL Meta Seltzer Ret. Oral History

creator:

Seltzer, Meta E. (Brown) (1935 April 23 - )

subject:

Army Nurse Corps Reserve

description:

Meta Seltzer was born in a small town in New Jersey on April 23, 1935. She remembers being a small girl during World War II and being afraid the Germans were coming to bomb them whenever they could hear a plane flying overhead. Her older brother served in Hawaii at the end of the war, and her mother was relieved to find out he wasn’t sent to the front lines. After graduating high school, Seltzer went to nursing school in Montclair, New Jersey and worked as an operating nurse for ten years. She then returned to school and got her bachelor’s degree, moved west, and got a master’s degree from Arizona State University. She became a psychiatric nursing instructor at a hospital in Phoenix. Seltzer then taught medication calculations at a local community college, which she published a textbook on. The director of the nursing division at this school was part of the Air Force Reserve and convinced Meta to join in 1974. She stayed there for four years but didn’t find it exciting enough, so she moved to the Army Reserve to work at the combat support hospital that was opening in Phoenix. Her unit was one of the first called up during Operation Desert Storm with the 403rd Combat Support Hospital, and they trained for about a month in California before shipping out to Saudi Arabia. They stayed in Khobar Towers for two weeks waiting for their equipment to arrive, and in this time she traveled to downtown Dhahran to find her son, who had also been deployed in Desert Storm. She eventually found out what base he was at and went that way, and while they were heading to the headquarters to ask where he was, she saw him walking by. They tried to correspond through letters while deployed, but their units moved enough that it didn’t work out. Luckily, she was still able to visit him again before returning to the United States. She remembers they all worked really well together while checking equipment and setting up their hospital, especially since the unit had been working together for so long. After setting up, they were told they’d set up too close to the Iraqi border but there was nothing to be done by then. Their tents would shake, and they could see bombs falling. Most of the patients they treated were wounded Iraqis, and she remembers how young they all were. After Desert Storm ended, she and a few others went over to Kuwait to go to the Persian Gulf. On the way back, they made a wrong turn and went on a highway into Basra that the Apache helicopters had bombed. She returned in 1991 and was promoted to Colonel before leaving her unit and teaching buddy training at the Army Reserve school in Phoenix. She left the service in 1998, and in her time she was awarded a Meritorious Service Medal, National Defense Service Medal, Southwest Asia Service Medal, Liberation of Kuwait (Saudi Arabia), and Liberation of Kuwait (Emirate of Kuwait). No transcript of this interview is currently available.

publisher:

Military Women's Memorial Foundation

contributor:

Grantham, Robin

date:

2011-12-01

type:

Moving Image

format:

CD

identifier:

1242; 2012.1242

source:

CLIR - Recordings at Risk

language:

English

relation:

082010

coverage:

Operations Desert Shield/Desert Storm—1990-1991 | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 1974-98

rights:

Unrestricted