Casper native rises through ranks to command Army docs, hospital
NOELLE STRAUB Star-Tribune Washington bureau | Posted: Sunday, March 2, 2008 12:00 am
WASHINGTON - In 2005, while commander of the Europe Regional Medical Command, Carla Hawley-Bowland received an e-mail asking general officers to reply if a child of theirs had deployed to Iraq, because Newsweek magazine was doing a story on military families.
What the e-mail failed to mention, because it didn't seem necessary, was that they were looking for dads.
"They didn't say it was a Father's Day article, but they didn't know that they had a female general that had kids," the Casper native recalled recently. "I don't know if I'm the first one to have kids, but there's very few of us."
Her son Scott had deployed to Iraq in 2003-04, serving as a medic at a battalion aid station at the Fallujah airfield. She replied to the e-mail, and she and her son were included in the article.
Now a two-star major general, Hawley-Bowland in December took command of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the U.S. Army's North Atlantic Regional Medical Command.
Hawley-Bowland is the first female physician who has risen to the rank of general. "We've had nurses and medical service corps female generals, but not a doc," she said. "So I'm the first one there."
She has found the Army to be very fair to women when it comes to career progression.
"I don't think I was ever discriminated against," she said. "There were individuals you always had issues with like anybody else does, but as a whole, as an institution, I felt that actually, in comparing what my career would have been in academic medicine and that of the civilian sector, I progressed probably 10 years faster in the military than I would have in the civilian sector."
Asked if female officers ever tell her she inspired them, she laughed and said, "Yeah, and there's some that say, 'We're glad you made general so we don't have to do it, Carla.'"
"I don't know," she added. "I've just done the jobs they gave me, and had fun and just kept doing it. Never saw a reason to change."
Climbing the ladder
Born and raised in Casper, Hawley-Bowland graduated from Natrona County High School in 1970. She doesn't have any family left in the state but returned most recently for her 30th high school reunion.
After graduating from Colorado State University, Hawley-Bowland wanted to go to medical school but couldn't afford it. So she joined the Air Force under its health professions scholarship program. It paid for her tuition, books, equipment and a living stipend, in exchange for spending time as a military doctor after graduation.
She did basic training and met her husband, Warren Bowland, in medical school. He was a West Point graduate who had served in the Army in the Vietnam War. They married two days after graduation in 1978.
He began a general surgery residency at Walter Reed. She transferred to the Army and, after a time as a general medical officer at Fort Meade, Md., began an OB/GYN residency at Walter Reed.
"So my husband and I both graduated from here 25 years ago, in 1983," she said. "So this was like coming home, this assignment. I have found my old call room in the hospital. It has the same bunk bed in it."
They were stationed at bases in Texas, training residents. She developed a "forte in pelvic surgery."
"We just kept having fun, challenging assignments," she said. "I got asked to then go up the administrative track in medicine, being the deputy commander for clinical services, which is basically the chief doc in a hospital, at Fort Bragg, and then got picked up for command."
She served as commander of hospitals at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., and William Beaumont Army Medical Center at El Paso, then became chief consultant and head of clinical services division at the U.S. Army Medical Command.
"Then, surprise, I got picked up for a star" and sent to Germany, she said.
As commander of the European medical region, she visited 11 countries in the first six months and had 27 clinics and three hospitals to oversee. She then went to Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii, where she commanded the Pacific Regional Medical Command.
"It was 18 time zones including the dateline, which made teleconferences interesting, and 52 percent of the earth's surface, is what I was over," she said.
'Full circle'
When the previous Walter Reed commander, Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker, was chosen to be surgeon general, Hawley-Bowland replaced him, after just 14 months in Hawaii.
"So Warren and I have come home, full circle," she said. "We started here, training, and we're ending up, this will probably be my last assignment, but I don't know."
Hawley-Bowland juggles three jobs: commander of Walter Reed, commander of all the Army medical facilities in the North Atlantic region, and chief of the U.S. Army Medical Corps.
The third job means she's in charge of all the doctors in the Army, making their assignments for training and for practicing medicine.
During her first 90 days she has visited medical facilities at Fort Drum, N.Y.; West Point; Fort Knox, Ky.; and Fort Bragg.
She describes Walter Reed, which receives casualties three times a week, as a "moving, active place."
"The plane flies in on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays from Landstuhl, (Germany), bringing the wounded here," she said. "It's like a well-oiled machine, offloading them and getting them into the hospital. It's very gratifying to take care of those patients which we consider the best patients in the world."
Walter Reed also provides medical care for active-duty military in the area, their dependents and retirees. It has the largest training program for residencies and fellowships in the Army. She acknowledges that some ongoing problems at Walter Reed that received nationwide attention over the past year must still be solved.
The facility is in the process of combining with the National Naval Medical Center, which is just a bit north in Bethesda, Md., to become a "huge" joint medical facility for the national capital region.
She also does administrative work and ceremonies, including graduation and awarding of Purple Hearts.
"And so it's moving targets, always exciting," she said. "Lots of stuff to do. I still plan to get in the operating room and train residents as well."
In the public eye
The biggest challenge in her new job is the public aspect, with questions from members of Congress on funding needs, construction needs, post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, the various posts, hiring civilians as well as retaining military doctors.
"This is my third region I've commanded," she said. "So I sort of know how to do regional medical command. And I've run hospitals, so I know how to do that part. But probably the biggest part is being in Washington, D.C., more in the public eye as well as all the congressional interaction."
Her goal for Walter Reed is to "perfect that caring for soldiers from the point of injury, which is in the battle zone, all the way through their rehabilitation and doing that as smooth and as sleek as possible and be able to take that with us as we join with Bethesda to become the national military medical center."
She said that through rehabilitation Walter Reed returns about 52 percent of its patients back to active duty.
"If you look at the cost of that, some may say it's too costly," she said. "But we're turning back the rank level of E4 to E8, which is a trained soldier with extensive experience. So even with two years of rehab, that's cheaper, because their replacement would be a private right out of basic training and wouldn't have the experience."
She also wants to keep Walter Reed as the premier place for graduate medical education and treatment for war wounds.
Ground should be broken in June on a center for traumatic brain injury, or TBI, at the Bethesda campus, she said. TBI runs the gamut from a concussion to a penetrating head injury, she said, and has been referred to as the signature wound of the Iraq war.
"They're starting to set up the staff now, and they'll be setting up a Web site and teaching tools, interactive tools and the whole education piece as well as evaluating best practices," she said.
The center will also focus on rehab, as those with severe TBI will need lifelong care. There are also pilot programs "where we pre-screen folks and then bring them back and retest them when they come back to see if there's any changes in their cognitive function," she said.
'She's from Wyoming'
Hawley-Bowland says one of her rules is to have fun, and her office bears the evidence. She has a pair of pink combat boots, and a wooden sign painted with a Y - as in Y chromosome, making her one of the boys - crowned with a pink tiara that "one of the guys" gave her when she finished residency. There's also a T-shirt on display bearing the slogan, "They're not hot flashes, they're power surges."
When her staff in Hawaii had a successful hospital inspection, she had a M*A*S*H party and dressed as "Hotlips Houlihan" of the TV show. "I had my blonde wig, my bright red lipstick," she said.
"For my fun, I go to the operating room," she said. "That is my stress management, is if I can go train residents and help out in the operating room. That means the office can't touch me. Everybody else is stressed out because the general is in the operating room."
She knits and crochets, and made sweaters for each of her four grandkids for Christmas.
She has two stepsons from her husband's previous marriage, and two children with him. She was the "soccer doc" for both her kids' soccer teams and went to games and tournaments, was a Girl Scout leader and was the cookie chairwoman one year.
"We tag-teamed it," she said. "We made sure we were not on call the same night, so always one of us was home with the kids. You found out if you were post-call that you couldn't sit down because then you would fall asleep and there would be a 2-year-old let loose in the house, so we didn't sit down until they were in bed."
On balancing her family life and work, she said, "You just make time. That's all, you just make it work. And you leave your 'me' time for now, when I don't have kids at home now, then I can do the stuff I like."
A proud Wyomingite, Hawley-Bowland recently ended a speech not with the traditional "Army strong" but with "Happy Trails."
"Somebody went, 'Did she just say happy trails?"' she said. "And the sergeant major goes, 'She's from Wyoming, you have to understand."'
When she made brigadier general, Vice President Dick Cheney sent a congratulatory note saying, "To a fellow NCHS graduate." When he was secretary of defense, his spokesman was Pete Williams, who now works for NBC News.
"Well, in high school Pete was the photographer for the yearbook, and I was the layout editor," she said. "It's called small world in Wyoming."