Jessica Banks, a master’s degree candidate in UGA’s Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, returned to Athens last April after a year in Iraq. She and her unit, the 1014th Quartermaster Unit of Athens, were among the first wave of soldiers to march into Baghdad in spring 2003. Her journey began in December 1998, when she and a friend went shopping at Georgia Square Mall.

“We walked into the mall, and I saw this giant poster of a soldier with an M16 rifle,” she says. “I turned to my friend and said, ‘I have to have that poster for my room.’”

The girls, then 19, walked into the recruitment office to ask for a poster. When they walked out a little while later, they were signed up for six years with the U.S. Army Reserves.

“We were so young, so stupid!” Jessica says now, 5½ years later. “We had no idea what we had just done.”

But that was 1998, and there was no hint of war on the horizon– not even a whisper. Jessica’s mother, a clinical nurse specialist at Central State Hospital in Milledgeville, was more than a little concerned when she heard the news. But Jessica continued her course work toward a degree in ecology and reported for duty with her unit near the Athens Airport one weekend out of every month.

In May of 1999, she survived 10 difficult weeks at basic training in Jackson, S.C., where she met future husband, Tony Banks, a parachute rigger. She ran into him again at Fort Lee in Virginia, where she spent another eight weeks in Advanced Individual Training. The two married nine months later after Tony completed a stint in Fort Bragg, N.C. Tony currently works as a senior police officer with the Clarke County Police Department.

Jessica completed her undergraduate degree in ecology in May 2002 and began working part-time at Sandy Creek Park as a park assistant. And in January 2003, she got a full-time job with the Clarke County Health Department. She had worked just six weeks when she got “the call” one Thursday afternoon.

“I’d always heard that you got 72 hours, but this call was to report at 8 a.m. the next morning,” she says. “I was in shock. Even then, we still didn’t really know what was happening.”

On Monday, her unit moved to Fort Stewart near Savannah, where they spent two anxious months, waiting for their orders.

“One day, we were issued new uniforms, and they were sand-colored, so we suspected we were headed for the desert,” she says. “But even as we loaded the planes, we didn’t know for sure.”

The plane flew to Kuwait, where her unit, which supplied water and fuel to combat units, headed to Baghdad.

“We had no toilets, no showers and no conveniences,” says Jessica. “The conditions were pretty awful. There were about 100 people in our unit, 25 women and 75 men, mostly teenagers. At 22 and 23, my friend and I were among the oldest, but those guys looked out for us, and we, in turn, were like big sisters to them.”

Last October Jessica got to come home for two weeks, “the best two weeks of [her] life,” and returned for what she thought would be only another month or two. “Every month we were there we heard we’d be going home the next month,” she says. “As I look back, it was probably good that we didn’t know we’d be there another six months. It would’ve been too difficult to face.

I had a lot of time to think out in that desert and decided then to return and study natural resources. And truthfully, the experience wasn’t all bad. We conducted some humanitarian missions while we were there, delivering water and supplies to the locals. Many lived in mud huts and had nothing. And I did meet my husband, Tony, and that was a very good thing.

People ask me now that I’m home whether we [the U.S.] should be in Iraq. And my answer to them is that it doesn’t matter now whether or not we should be there. We are there, and we have to deal with the situation the best we can.”