Woman’s Dreams Come True with Iowa National Guard Deployments

IOWA CITY - Tessa Poppe never let being a girl stop her from playing baseball rather than softball.

She never let being a woman prevent her from joining the Iowa National Guard - she's served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And, if Tessa has her way, her gender won't stop her from working counter terrorism with either the FBI or the military.

To see her on the University of Iowa campus, you'd be hard-pressed to pick out this sweat shirt and blue jean wearing student with shoulder-length light brown hair from any other co-ed. But, visit Tessa's apartment in an old Iowa City house and the clues are there, from a world map on the wall to photographs of her in Army fatigues to a playful Central Asian Shepherd mix dog rescued from Afghanistan.

"To this day," says Tessa, 24, "I'd rather go on a run than a walk."

And Izzy, that rescued puppy who is approaching 60 pounds, would be right at her side, a symbol of the toughness, the trustworthiness and the compassion women like Tessa can bring to the armed forces.

"Women in the military have definitely come a long way," she says. "I think ‘no women in the infantry' will be overturned in the next few years."

As a home-schooled student in Marion, Tessa not only played sports, she excelled at Tae Kwon Do and rose through the ranks in the Civil Air Patrol.

In 2005, before her senior year at Marion High School and Kirkwood Community College, she enlisted in the Iowa National Guard.

"Both my parents didn't want me to go," she says, "but they supported me."

Since she couldn't be in the infantry, Tessa chose the next best thing - Military Police. She would perform security for convoys, personnel, even prisoners of war.

"I wanted to get deployed," she says. "That's something I wanted to do right away. I wanted to be out in the field."

In 2007 her wish came true. She carried "The Saw," a 17-pound automatic machine gun during a 9-month "boots on the ground" tour in Iraq.

In 2010, Sgt. Poppe was in Afghanistan, hauling around 65 pounds of equipment including a grenade launcher and ammunition for an 11-month tour that ended last June.

After interrupting college twice, Tessa is now back in class studying Russian and international studies as a "super senior" - a student who takes more than four years to earn a degree. "I'll graduate, cross my fingers, in May, 2013," she laughs.

At 5-foot-5 and 165 pounds, Tessa stays in shape jogging three miles a day and lifting weights three times a week.

"If they asked me to go again, I would," she says. "I'll always want to go back to Afghanistan. I'd like to visit it as a peaceful country."

As a photograph (left) of her that appeared in the online version of the New York Times shows, she did her part. Taken by Capt. Peter N. Shinn, the public affairs officer, it shows Tessa talking a little Afghan boy out of throwing a rock at a convoy.

"We're driving ginormous vehicles through their villages," she says. "What little kid isn't going to pick up rocks and throw them at us?"

And she has Izzy, a once malnourished puppy that was the victim of young rock throwers before being rescued with beef jerky, loving companionship and a new home in Iowa.

Having re-enlisted for a year while in Afghanistan in order to remain "in country," Tessa now faces a similar decision this August. Undecided at the moment, she'll never forget how much military life has meant to her.

"The people, the friends you make in training and in deployments," she says. "you can't get those relationships anywhere else."

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