MAJ Christina Anne Helferich-Polosky, USA Ret. Oral History

title:

MAJ Christina Anne Helferich-Polosky, USA Ret. Oral History

creator:

Helferich-Polosky, Christina A. (Lenio) (1973 May 19 -

subject:

Army

description:

Christina Helferich-Polosky was born on May 19, 1973 in Dayton, Ohio and graduated from Northmont High School in a small town right outside of Dayton. She was commissioned in the Army in 1998 from the Virginia Commonwealth University ROTC program. She chose the Army because her mom had been an Army nurse during Vietnam and her grandma had been in the Cadet Nurse program during World War II, and she needed a way to pay for college which is an option that the ROTC program offered. She figured if her mom and grandma could get school paid for through these programs, she could try to do so as well. She was commissioned as a transportation officer after graduating college and went to training at Fort Eustis, Virginia. She selected transportation after she had her son, wanting to make a pragmatic decision for where she could realistically get promotions that would help her take care of herself and her child. The transportation corps happened to have every pathway to promotion equally open to women as to men. Her first duty assignment was the Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, Georgia. Before 9/11, most of the missions in and out of that base were for Bosnia and Kosovo, but after they were very busy working with Fort Stewart, Georgia and out to Afghanistan. In 2002, she went to her Captain's Career Course at Fort Lee and Fort Eustis, returned to work at Fort Eustis working in operations, and she was deployed in February 2003. This was in the first wave of deployments, so it was only meant to be for six months, and everyone seemed to think it was going to be in and out like the Gulf War had been. She was in Kuwait for a month before going to Iraq in March with the team going into the country first. In May, she was called back to redeploy at Fort Eustis and had taken command of the 508th Transportation Truck Company by July of that year. She was the 2003 Transportation Officer of the Year, and her company won Best Truck Company of the year in 2004. In 2005, Christina went to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California for two years. She and her husband then went to Fort Campbell, Kentucky in 2007, where she was career field designated into information operations, which she calls "wordsmiths". She became the strategic communications officer for CJTF-101, and deployed in 2008 to Afghanistan. While she knew generally that the burn pits she'd been exposed to in 2003 weren't good for her health and body, she didn't realize the full extent of it until her deployment in 2008 when the different environment triggered her body to attack itself upon re-exposure to other contaminants. While there, she had two anaphylactic reactions that sent her to the field hospital, but no one really knew why. The third time, she woke up on a transport plane after her husband (who was deployed with her) had found her unconscious, covered in hives with her throat swollen shut. She was sent home and medically discharged in 2009 because she had a condition called exercise anaphylaxis, which came from an exposure to something while deployed, but they didn't know what exactly it was that caused it. In the years following, the VA came to believe it was from burn pit exposures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it has caused years of immune issues for her since 2003. More recently, the military has reexamined the health conditions that are connected to service in Iraq and Afghanistan, and her own bronze star narrative lists three of the six high burn pit exposure areas. She considers herself lucky, in a way, that her paperwork makes this exposure so obvious, because a lot of the symptoms can be very easily dismissed by the VA as in someone's head. Because of how long these claims of chronic pain and fatigue in connection to exposure to burn pits overseas have been dismissed, Christina is not surprised that suicide rates among post-9/11 veterans is as high as it is. Since her discharge, she found art as a good release for her to handle her chronic illness from her service, and since she couldn't pass her GI Bill benefits on to her kids, she used it to go to art school. She saw art as a way to say what she couldn't say in words, and it gave her something to do on days where she couldn't really do anything. Christina served during Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom in Kuwait and Iraq, and OFF in Bagram, Afghanistan; and she was part of CJTF-101, 101st Airborne Division, 260th Quartermaster Battalion at Hunter Army Airfield in Georgia. She left the service with the rank of Major, and had been awarded the Bronze Star, Meritorious Service Medal, Afghanistan Campaign Medal with a campaign star, Iraq Campaign Medal with two campaign stars, and Joint Service Achievement Medal. No transcript of this interview is currently available.

publisher:

Military Women's Memorial Foundation

contributor:

Gill, Dennis

date:

2021-08-29

type:

Moving Image

format:

Born Digital

identifier:

1346; 2021.011

source:

Voices of Freedom Project - SWTA

language:

English

relation:

566319

coverage:

Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan)—2001-2014 | Operation Iraqi Freedom (Iraq)—2003-2011 | 1998-2009

rights:

Unrestricted