“Air Force medics need to know that we’re a changing military … We have different expectations now than we did ten years ago,” Jackson warns. “In other words, they need to be ready to pick up a weapon and go outside the wire when called upon.”
It was not long, in fact only a few days, before Jackson did just that, donning her body armor, grabbing her weapons and going on patrol outside the wire with the PRT again. When asked how she felt about the remainder of her deployment in light of surviving an IED attack, she replied: “I need to take care of my brothers, and now I know I can do my job … The rest of this deployment is going to be okay.”