Retired Army Staff Sgt. Maria Osorio, born and raised in Brownsville, was among the more than 800,000 troops who have served in Afghanistan over the last two decades.
She was stationed there for two tours, in 2007 and 2011, the first tour lasting 12 months and the second lasting 13 months. That’s 25 months total that Osorio, who served with the 92 Yankee logistics unit, woke up every morning in a heightened state of alert because she was in a dangerous place, and didn’t let her guard down until she went to sleep at night. That doesn’t include the tour she did in Iraq.
Interviewed a few days before the 20th anniversary of Sept. 11, the reason the United States went to war in Afghanistan, Osorio said the experience was difficult, painful and scary but that it was necessary to block all that out in order to do the job and stay alive so she could see her family again.
“When you’re a service member serving your country you put that in the back of your mind and focus on what you’re told to do, and making sure we focus on safety as we’re doing our mission,” she said. “The moment it clicks and boots are on the ground, you feel scared. But the brain starts going into what is it that I can do here? What is it that I can help with? … Because without this you’re never going to get back to your family.”
Osorio was in command of a group composed entirely of males, and while she strove to “meet people in the middle,” she said she experienced a great deal of push-back from some of those under her who had trouble taking orders from a woman despite Osorio’s higher rank and qualifications.
She tried not to take it personally and asked them to put those issues aside, reminding them that “we’re fighting the same war and I’m here to do my job, not to take away your job,” Osorio said.
“Hey, my uniform says United States Army,” she said. “I am government property just as well as you. Let’s focus on this so we can all go home and be safe, which is the priority.”
Osorio was keenly aware such distractions could lead to disaster and that, as tough as it was to have to deal with, she was determined to make sure everyone in her group survived, which they did.
“I knew that was going to endanger my mission, and I had to think about the rest of the soldiers I had under me, because they had families as well,” she said. “I didn’t want to be the leader losing someone and going back to give explanations to the family.”
Besides a sense of trepidation, Osorio said she went to war also with a sense of purpose, of defending America.
“I do love my country and my family, which are the most important things that I always focus on,” she said.
Osorio said she’s proud to have served and felt she needed to “give back” something to the United States, the country that had helped her parents and two sisters, all from Mexico originally, to achieve the “American dream.”
Besides the pride, there’s also the pain, she said. All politics aside, Osorio said she feels pain for those who lost loved ones during the war, and still feels the pain of having to say good-bye to fellow service members who didn’t live to see their families again.
“The pain is the same, it doesn’t matter what type of service you served in, even if you were a contractor,” she said. “You feel it.”
Osorio said she feels pain for the service members who took their own lives, struggling under the weight of too much hurt. She said it’s essential that the veterans who served not be forgotten or left to cope on their own.
“We have to continue to give them the help they need,” she said. “We have to be available for them.”
Osorio said the tendency among veterans is to keep the bad feelings locked inside even when talking about them is the best thing they could do. The importance of veteran support groups can’t be overstated, she said. Osorio is a member of Veteran Females United. Joining the group was the best decision she ever made, she said.
Angela Burton, a retired Army Sergeant First Class who served during Desert Storm and was called back to active duty 10 years later to provide logistics training to troops bound for Afghanistan, is president of VFU. Osorio said she knows she can reach out to Burton anytime she needs to talk about something.
“I know she’s somebody I can talk to because she’s a sister in arms, because she understands it,” Osorio said. “We understand that level of commitment and the pain that we went through.”
Burton said VFU’s members have each others back, or “six” in military lingo, in a way that only fellow veterans can understand.
“It’s so important to folks that are either transitioning or just need a support mechanism,” she said. “The struggle is real.”
Burton concedes that it was exhausting traveling every weekend to give logistics training stateside while holding down a full-time job, which is what she did after being called back to active duty, but said it didn’t matter because “it was very, very important to me to make sure that the troops were well trained and ready to go.”
For soldiers like Osorio, who served in-country and had to be on their toes every waking moment for an extended period of time, such an experience “can wear on you,” Burton said.
Burton, who now serves as director of the Lower Rio Grande Valley District Office of the U.S. Small Business Administration, said she’s “absolutely” proud to be a veteran.
“I would never change it for anything,” she said. “I can’t say the experience was the best, but I can say that it provided me life experience that has rolled over into my civilian world.”
