The missions can be dangerous, but when Jean Youngblood is flying a mission she’s thinking about the men and women she’s picking up. She also knows that as medical personnel caring for wounded soldiers, they are well-protected. They have been fired upon, but they are accompanied by other military aircraft in the combat zones who protect them.

Youngblood wasn’t looking for adventure, but she got it -- two decades as an Air Force reservist that has included four tours of duty in Iraq.

As a nurse, Youngblood helps people every day, but she always felt compelled to do more. So, when she was 27, she joined the military and has been serving as a flight nurse caring for injured troops for the last 22 years.

“It’s something I really wanted to do straight out of high school, but I got married and just sort of put that on hold for awhile,” Jean said. “When I got divorced from my son’s father, that’s when I began to pursue it.”

She never wanted to serve full time, but joined the Air Force Reserves, intrigued by the chance to work in an airborne hospital.

She worked at a hospital, but thought there was more she could do. She wanted to fly and she liked her work, and enlisting as a flight nurse was a way to combine those interests.

“You’re on a time crunch, because you’re in a combat zone,” Youngblood said. “The aircraft has to be maxed out ... in other words, utilize the whole plane. In some situations you would fly into a combat zone, you would get a load of patients, sometimes you would get some cargo and then other times you would get what we call H.R. (bodies).”

Then the plane takes off and the crew of nurses and medical technicians take care of their 60 or more patients - some seriously injured and others with fractures or more minor injuries. It’s like running a hospital in the air, she said. Unless there is a critically injured patient on board, the nurses are the authorities on board. It takes a lot of training to be competent in that kind of environment and a lot of stamina to work a 16-hour mission, she said.

The crews train for two days and fly for one day a month.

Reservists like Youngblood can be called up for tours of 60 to 120 days.

Shortly after she joined the Reserves, Youngblood married her husband, Mike. The two have four grown children from previous marriages and two children, John, 19, and Tara, 12, together. The tours can be hard on the family, but Youngblood and her husband work hard to plan and organize the time apart to maintain the normal schedule and make it easier on the children.

“The first time we did it, it’s an adjustment,” Youngblood said. “We sit down as a family and we go through what’s going to happen while mom’s away, so that we can make arrangements.”

If there’s going to be a birthday during the deployment, they celebrate it beforehand. If there are events coming up, they make a plan to handle the details before she leaves. It’s not easy, but it is doable, she said.

“It’s a privilege to serve,” Youngblood said. “You just go do it and when you come back you have life experiences that are priceless.”

Mike Youngblood is proud of his wife’s second career.

“I’m a military brat myself -- my father was in the military, his father was in the military,” Mike said. “I think it’s a patriotic duty that we should support our country.”

Right now, he is doing that by taking care of home duty while his wife is taking care of our country’s wounded. He has received help from members of their church, who have provided transportation for his daughter when needed or even an occasional meal, he said.

“Some of the ladies began to feel sorry for Tara having to eat my cooking,” Mike said. “They’ll bring us something just to keep her from having to suffer too much.”

The family, which is active in the Bowdon Baptist Church, relies on their faith to get them through the trial of the separations, he said.

Pastor Mark Standridge said the church members try to step up to help its members in need. The families don’t need to ask, it’s just something that the members want to do to help. For instance, the church will arrange to get meals to a family who has a new baby for at least the first week. The church also has about 12 or 15 members who are serving in the military that it includes on its prayer list.

“Some are in the reserves, like Jean,” the pastor said. “We have at least half a dozen or so who are on active duty and deployed right now.”

Mike and Jean Youngblood teach Sunday School and are involved in the youth program in the church, so when Jean is deployed, the members know it quickly. They volunteer to help quickly. It’s part of their mission as a church, Mark said.

Despite the vocal opposition to the war, Mike has never heard any negative comments about his wife’s service.

“She brought me a jacket home one time,” he said. “On the back it has a map embroidered of the areas and all the combat zones and I’ve had a lot of people ask me, ‘Did you serve?’ And I always have to tell them, ‘No, my wife got it for me.’ Invariably, they are always very grateful and very nice to say how much they appreciate her efforts and even mine.”

Jean Youngblood doesn’t think her service is extraordinary and is grateful for the opportunity to do it. She wants other nurses to know that the opportunity is there and the experience is very rewarding.

“The cool thing is this, in this country the United States of America would launch a multimillion-dollar aircraft to pick up one patient if that needed to be the case,” Jean said. “I’ve been literally sitting on the ground in Bilad, Iraq, with a plane load full of patients getting a phone call from 40 miles north in another city and say ‘Can you all wait 30 minutes? I’ve got an urgent person that needs to get there.’”

And they wait.