Things I've Learned, with the Blue Jay Battalion's Major Levy

Major Heather Levy has been awarded a Purple Heart, has demolished bridges, can disarm live land mines and has completed two tours of duty in Iraq.

She worked as an Army engineer until she came to Hopkins as an assistant professor of military science as part of the cadre of the ROTC Blue Jay Battalion.

Levy spoke to the News-Letter about the many places she has been stationed during her Army career and her experiences in serving in hazardous duty situations.

News-Letter (N-L): What made you decide to join the army?

Major Levy (HL): I think it was a combination of a couple things. I was a high school student, and like a lot of our students I was going to University of California at Berkeley on the west coast.

It was kind of a combination of a little bit of patriotism and wanting to give back to the country because I'd gone to public high schools and I was going to a state university system.

I thought, "OK, I can give something back." And I thought it would be a little bit of an adventure. I honestly figured I would do two years' active duty, put in my paperwork and go for a "real" job.

N-L: How old were you when you joined the army?

HL: I signed my ROTC contract when, I guess I would have been 20. Then I was commissioned in the army at 22. So I came in on active duty as a second lieutenant at 22, when I graduated from college.

N-L: What made you decide to teach at Hopkins?

HL: I had just come back - I was actually assigned to the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky. - and I was looking for work, a position that would be challenging and different from what I'd done before.

I had come from being a brigade engineer, [a position which entails directing] a unit of about 5,000 people at the time.

I was responsible for coordinating all of the engineering efforts. And that included things from route clearance of roadside bombs to reconstruction efforts to little things like "Can we build a soccer field for this family?" It was a totally different world.

I was looking for something different. One of the things I like about the military is they let you do something different.

When I was offered this opportunity or offered the chance to interview for this opportunity I thought, "I've never lived out here on the east coast and Hopkins has a great reputation."

I figured that coming out here especially to Johns Hopkins was a great chance. And I wanted to go for it and get the chance to work in the academic community.

N-L: How long have you taught here?

HL: I got here in January of 2007.

N-L: Where have you been stationed during your career?

HL: I have been many places. My first duty assignment [was] at CA Berkeley. I wound up serving as a second lieutenant recruiter.

I stayed on at my school for about six months, explaining the program to students and helping [to] bring people into the program there. We've got folks doing that here [at Hopkins].

Beyond that, I was in Alaska for three years. I went to Korea.

I've been to Bosnia, Missouri, I mentioned Kentucky, and I've been to Iraq. There are probably a few other short-term places I've been.

N-L: So how did some of these different cultures compare?

HL: The different locations? Well, I'd say probably of all the places I've been, Baltimore is the closest to where I grew up, where you have the coast and that kind of academic, maybe a little more intellectually curious type of environment than what I've seen in Missouri or Tennessee. [That's] where I've tended to meet folks who, in some cases, had never been out of the county they were living in who were very excited to meet someone who had been as far afield as Alaska or Korea.

Alaska's just a different world. They have definitely still a lot of that frontier mentality there and I thought that Korea was really exciting.

There was a big, not ex-patriot, but American community teaching English. A lot of folks are there [due to the growing] economy, or at least that as the case in the late '90s when I was in Seoul. So that was exciting. I've seen a lot of great things in a lot of different places.

N-L: What was it like to be stationed in some of these places?

HL: Well, I've been lucky. They say the standard line is, "Never volunteer." You know, there's always these warnings about it in the movies. I've been nothing but lucky in the assignments that I've either volunteered for or I know I could get out of.

I spent about nine months working on a civil engineering project building a road in a remote island in Alaska where it was all drilling and blasting and the only people living on the island were us and the Native American village we were building the roadway for.

That was just spectacular. We'd get up in the morning, we'd drive over this mountain to get to where the worksite was, and we would see the ocean and these little islands and clouds spread in front of us, and this huge panorama.

The people I went to school with, at this point their job was designing the doorknob of some skyscraper or running calculations for how thick a concrete beam had to be and had four people double-check their work. I was in charge of a chunk of this whole project. I thought that opportunity was just spectacular.

N-L: When and where did you serve in active combat roles?

HL: Well, the positions in Bosnia they considered hazardous duty, but really, by the time I went there, it wasn't a combat zone.

I've done two tours in Iraq. Each was for about a year. The first was during the invasion, so

I went as part of the 326 Engineer Battalion.

We crossed from Kuwait into Iraq in early 2003 and kind of worked our way up through Baghdad over the next couple of months.

[We] then wound up spending the last eight months or so in Mosul doing stability and support operations, doing a lot of reconstruction and a lot of de-Baathification, et cetera. And then my second tour was basically the end of '05 to '06 in Kirkuk with the First Brigade Combat Team in the 101st.

N-L: Can you describe those experiences?

HL: It's always tough to describe. I've heard combat described as long periods of boredom punctuated with brief periods of terror and excitement, and I think that's as accurate as anything.

There were definitely two distinct atmospheres on those tours. The first time, when we conducted the invasion, we were continually on the offensive.

We were surprised at some of the lack of military resistance that we met. We met a lot of people, especially when we rolled up north near Mosul. We had the kids cheering us, people trying just to touch our hands, welcoming the Americans into their area.

It was very welcoming, the response that we saw after the initial invasion portion was over and we started stability operations. That was definitely interesting.

You know, I'd say that [active combat] is probably like some extreme sports, to liken it to what students may be aware of.

You know, you get the same kind of heightened awareness, and then just hope to react in accordance with your training.

N-L: As an engineer, did you have experience dealing with explosives at all?

HL: One of the jobs of engineers is, and has traditionally been, a variety of explosives work. Most of the actual defusing of improvised explosive devices is done by the [Navy's] EOD [Explosive Ordnance Disposal], who are usually not part of the engineers.

Some of the training I have done is mine training. You learn how to arm and disarm live mines, which is always very exciting. You have on the other side of the mine a young private who is 18 years old - hands shaking, sweat dripping off his brow trying to remember which parts to turn and which parts to set up without initiating the mine. So that's part of the training we do.

I've done some bridge demolitions where we actually got the chance to identify from mechanics materials type perspective, "This is where you're going to need to drill your holes, this is how much explosive you're going to need, this is how you need to time the explosion to properly take down the bridge without causing any kind of other problems in your area." I think it's really fun.

I think it's the kind of job that 12-year-old kids look and say "Wow, I want to play with the big trucks and the explosives and get to run around with my M-4 and go after bad guys."

N-L: Where were you when you did some of the bridge demolitions?

HL: The only bridge demos I've done were in Missouri and one in Alaska. So I actually never did one in Iraq. I think most of what we did in Bosnia and Iraq was rebuilding.