Cedar Rapids nurse, veteran continues serving her country decades after Army deployment, retirement

CEDAR RAPIDS — As the Vietnam War was getting hot and heavy in the 1960s, most of the boys in Connie Arens’ high school class were being drafted into the armed forces.

As most of the girls her age either stuck around or went to bigger cities, the 17-year-old, wasn’t content just waiting the war out. With a love of country perhaps more fervent than many her age, she wanted to do more.

So when the Army recruiter came knocking at her door, she took the tests and went through the recruitment process. The only step left was to get a signature from her parents on her enlistment papers.

“Connie, I love you so much, but I just cannot sign it,” Arens’ father said.

So she did what many women did as they grew up — got married, had children and became a nurse starting in 1979.

But 10 years later, the passion to serve her country was still there. In 1989, the mother of three enlisted in the Army Nurse Corps where she served until 2010, including an 18-month deployment overseas during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Now, 13 years after retiring as a lieutenant colonel, the full-time nurse and veteran volunteer still hasn’t stopped serving her country and her community.

While it’s hard to articulate why, the answer may just be simple.

“I just love our country,” she said. “I think service to our country is so important, and instilling that into teenagers and young adults is important too.”

A veteran, a nurse and a veteran nurse

With several decades of nursing experience and 21 years in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, Arens is both a veteran nurse and a nurse who happens to be a veteran.

The pursuit of both are rooted in a similar quality for the Cedar Rapids resident. Growing up, Arens always knew she wanted to be a nurse. And as a nurse, Arens knew for all of her adult life she wanted to serve her country.

“I grew up on the farm and always loved taking care of every animal,” Arens said. “I really think my calling is just taking care of my patients. I enjoy working with people, and that is a calling you have.”

With a career of nursing at both of Cedar Rapids’ major hospitals, her last 26 years have been at Mercy Medical Center in Cedar Rapids, where she continues as a house supervisor and patient placement nurse long after most with her level of experience would have retired.

“I absolutely cannot wait to come into work,” she said. “We work 12-hour shifts, but they go by so fast.”

Though civilians and soldiers all bleed the same way, her time in the Army Nurse Corps puts medical care into a new perspective. In 2006, well into her career, Arens deployed to serve Americans fighting overseas.

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For 18 months at the U.S. Army’s largest European hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, she saw the cost of war up close in a way that most people did not, outside of the front lines. As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan got hot and heavy, she got the chance to serve that she missed during the Vietnam War.

Each day, four planes delivered injured veterans to the charge nurse’s floor with a range of injuries unparalleled by cases at most civilian hospitals — amputees, young men with personal and life-altering injuries, and traumatized people with next-level pain.

There, her job was to provide safety and stabilization for those who worked to secure freedom. While the wounds and anguish were different overseas, Arens has provided the same services to every patient — a care punctuated by compassion.

“Just looking into the eyes of these soldiers, sailors, Marines, even the contractors, they were fearful, yet there was a calming effect for them being some place safe,” Arens said. “I received my strength from them being so strong.”

Serving her community

While the veteran nurse’s service today is more localized, serving veterans continues to be an extension of her service to the country long after she left the Army Nurse Corps.

Since 2015, she’s served them in planes, on buses and at memorials in Washington, D.C., with the semiannual Eastern Iowa Honor Flights. No matter the location, the central skills are employed all the same.

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There’s the surface level needs she goes above and beyond to cover in her spare time — talking to veterans before flights, addressing their medical concerns and attending to their routine and emergency needs throughout each trip.

“What Connie does for the Honor Flight is huge. Since our Honor Flight is made up of veterans, most of which are senior citizens, her help in evaluating the medical side is very vital to having a flight with no problems,” said Dick Bell, board president of the Eastern Iowa Honor Flight. “I don’t think we could do it without someone of her professionalism.”

Then there’s the need that most veterans don’t talk about. In addition to the physical needs, Arens is there to listen to veterans talk through wounds that still haven’t healed, decades after the wars in which they served.

“We laugh and cry together. You just have to be there for them and know what to say, or say nothing and listen,” Arens said. “The abuse (they endured as veterans) all comes out on the day of the Honor Flight, and that’s so healing for them.”

Whether emotional or physical, overseas or on the homefront, her work has served as a paragon of the simple quality most nurses strive to provide: comfort.

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What she gets out of it

For Arens, a lifetime of service has had relatively little recognition, until now.

In October, the Cedar Rapids Veterans Memorial Commission member was honored at the Women’s Memorial in Washington, D.C., for her continued service to the country. In April, she was named a HER Women of Achievement honoree.

The latter was thanks to a nomination by Frank Grizel, longtime photographer for the Honor Flight who has seen Arens’ vigor through the lens. For eight years, has seen her influence extend far beyond the Honor Flight twice each year.

“Her goal as a veteran herself is taking care of veterans,” Grizel said. “She’s there for them all the time.”

Arens doesn’t think a lot about doing things for herself. But she does get one thing out of giving back.

“I’m always learning. You learn from other people every minute of every day,” she said.

Comments: (319) 398-8340; elijah.decious@thegazette.com