Garry Higgins:  

I was drafted one year after graduation for Vietnam, but instead of going to war, I served at the Naval Hospital Boston where I took care of the wounded returnees in Intensive Care Unit. I moved on to become a laboratory technician and took evening courses while working full days at a weapons station in New Jersey. Stood duty every weekend with hundreds of Marines so I learned a lot about sewing guys up, setting bones, and putting teeth back together - Marines, yah gotta love em. I was hand selected to attend Submarine Medicine School for a year and served aboard nuclear submarines during the peak of the Cold War north of the Arctic Circle in the middle of the 1970's. I was an Independent Hospital Corpsman serving alone as the ship's doctor/dentist while the submarine worked directly for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We had an operation schedule of over 87% deployment time, which is 10 month at sea per year. I completed my Enlisted Service as an E-6 after 6 years. The submarine I served on is featured one of our patrols at the Smithsonian Museum as one of the critical missions, which changed the course of the Cold War. Leaving the Navy, I SUNY Albany for a biochemistry degree, but remained in the Naval Reserve. During my final days before graduation, I was activated for OPERATION EAGLE CLAW which was the abortive mission to rescue the Iranian hostages which ended in disaster on the desert. Fortunately, I was still airborne, and returned safely to the United States. I returned to the Navy full time and into the management of large-scale radiation health programs as a health physicist on a Destro...Expand for more