'It was my honor.' Gainesville veteran reflects on service, travel as a flight nurse

Nov. 10—When thanked for her military service, Gainesville's Anis Shaw tends to reply, "It was my honor."

A veteran flight nurse, Lt. Col. Anis Shaw served 25 years between the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserves. For the final years of her tenure, she served in an Air Force hospital unit during Operation Desert Storm.

While some of her colleagues were deployed to Saudi Arabia, Shaw was setting up an intensive care unit in a Charleston, South Carolina, gymnasium awaiting patients coming in from the frontlines via medevac.

"Fortunately, we did not get very many, and they were not serious injuries," Shaw said.

Shaw and her team would treat the airmen's injuries and dress their wounds before transferring them to the nearest military hospital.

"Sort of like 'M.A.S.H.,' but we didn't have as much fun as they did," Shaw said.

For two weeks every year, Shaw's unit set out on active duty drills and missions that took them to various corners of the globe: Germany, where they toured castles and concentration camps in their off time; Greece; Italy; Austria; Turkey, where a trip to pick up patients was forever coined the "Turkey trot mission;" England and the British Isles.

"When I went to Germany and England, the pilots called me up to the cockpit — we were flying over the Italian Alps, and they wanted me to see it," Shaw said.

Among the many remembered highlights of her job, traveling was Shaw's favorite.

"The travel was excellent, and the benefits are good. You know, I never thought about retirement."

After a year in the Air National Guard, Shaw was named the force's flight nurse of the year.

"I was surprised and delighted," she said.

According to Shaw, reserve flight nurses were allotted up to 36 flights per year, which equated to three a month, and had the option to complete each one separately, or to knock out three at a time on overnight flights.

"I did all 36," she said.

Shaw's experiences furthered her love for travel as a civilian; she's traveled to Europe several times since and, once, embarked on a cruise solo.

Shaw was no stranger to air travel prior to joining the military, though — in fact, it was on a particularly turbulent commercial flight to Ireland that she vowed to never fly again. Then she joined the Air National Guard.

Turbulence isn't as bad on a military aircraft as a commercial plane, Shaw said, and she would know — during her service, she flew on the C-124 Globemaster II, C-7 Caribou and C-130 Hercules.

The C-124, Shaw said, was "a huge aircraft, about two stories and shaped like a pregnant guppy," while the C-7 was considerably smaller.

"When we did training missions, we had a briefing and then we picked up our equipment and configured the aircraft," she said. "In the C-7, it was a small aircraft, so we couldn't carry as many people as we wanted to."

The loudest of the planes was the C-130, Shaw recalled.

"We always wore earplugs."

Though shaken by turbulence once upon a time, Shaw clarified she was never afraid of flying.

"If the pilots felt safe, I felt safe, too," she said. "We had good maintenance and each plane had a loadmaster who would tell us how to unload and tie down (equipment) so that things wouldn't shift."

When she wasn't off on a mission, Shaw was building a 38-year career at Grady Hospital in Atlanta, where she worked as director of quality assurance and supervised two surgical units.

"I thought I had the best of both worlds," she said.

After Grady, Shaw went to work at Wesley Woods Senior Living in Atlanta for 12 years.

It was at Grady that military service became a real possibility for Shaw, thanks to a clinical student.

"She told me that she was in the Air National Guard and how much she enjoyed it, the people were really nice and it was something entirely different from what she was used to. Then the next week or two weeks later, someone else mentioned it. I thought, 'Maybe I should look into this.'"

Shaw paid a visit to the recruiter at Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Marietta and joined the Air National Guard in the late 1960s, serving five years before transferring to the Air Force Reserves, where she stayed till her retirement in 1992.

Shaw held several roles as she worked her way up the chain of command, from handling the scheduling of the flight crews' missions and ensuring everyone's qualifications were up to date, to being a standardization evaluation officer, which entailed "knowing what's required and making sure the student you're instructing follows all the regulations."

Shaw never had time to get married, she said, what with the demands of her career and travel.

In total, Shaw's career as a health care professional, both within the military and without, spanned 50 years.

She didn't feel particularly drawn to the vocation initially, but more or less stumbled into it with a shove from the husband of a close family friend — a doctor doing rotations at Grady Hospital.

"I didn't know what I wanted to do," Shaw said. "Most people I knew were either teachers, secretaries or salespeople."

None of those occupations piqued her interest, so she heeded her friend's advice and enrolled in a three-year nursing school program and the rest, as they say, is history.

Now in her 80s, Shaw sometimes finds herself missing the busyness of the work and the people she shared the experience with, though she did forge lasting friendships with some fellow flight nurses in Atlanta and Augusta.

The women continue to stay in touch, Shaw said, visiting once in a while at each other's homes or the North Georgia mountains.

While the travel was something to write home about and the salary wasn't half bad, Shaw considers those relationships the most rewarding aspect of her military experience.

"I enjoyed the company, and I just felt good about participating in the military," she said. "I felt like we accomplished a lot, we were patriotic and served our country."

Aside from organization and self-discipline, Shaw also credits her years as a flight nurse with teaching her "to be kind to everybody, because you never know when you might need somebody to be kind to you."