“If You Wear the Uniform, You’re on the Same Team”: Jessica Garrett on Life as an Army Medic
Jessica Garrett served almost 13 years, first as an Army combat medic and then in the Air National Guard. Today she is Chief Marketing Officer at Uplift Investors.
Jessica Garrett ran mass casualty drills so many times that she lost count. Some came with no warning. She would pull her Humvee ambulance in for gas and get sent across the lot to a soldier who had supposedly just been shot. Over and over, until the steps were automatic.
Then one day on the flight line, it was real. A soldier’s door-mounted .50-caliber gun went off while he was loading it, and his leg was badly hurt. Jessica was a private first class. The only other medic on site was someone she had never worked with, and no one more senior was there.
It didn’t matter. Medics are trained to talk out loud as they work, so the two of them fell into a rhythm almost instantly: control the bleeding, stabilize the leg, get him ready to move. “You just go back to your training,” she said. “You do the same things over and over until it’s second nature. You don’t even have to think about it.”
The shakes came once he was evacuated. “I’d done it a million times in practice,” she said. “But that was the first time it was real. You’re jittery, and you’re thinking, did that just happen?”
The medic beside her was a stranger, but a teammate anyway. “You don’t have to earn the right to be a teammate,” she said. “If you wear the uniform, you’re on the same team.”
Military service runs through her family. “We have a legacy of it,” she said. She wanted to be a doctor, and when the Army offered to make her a medic, she didn’t think twice. She enlisted in 1996 and served as a combat medic with the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Texas, then spent about 12 more years in the Air National Guard, deploying to multiple overseas locations.
After the Army, she started college, still planning on medical school. A local politician’s campaign changed that. He needed help getting his message out on Facebook, which was then open only to college students. She learned it on the fly and “fell in love with the marketing aspect of it.” She finished her biology degree and went into marketing.
Her first marketing job was at TransUnion, where the sales director was a veteran too. He knew the move from military to civilian life isn’t one most people make well on their own, so he made sure she didn’t have to. She spent hours in his office, with the sun pouring through the windows and the room always a little too warm, while he talked through situations with her, decoded them, and gave her feedback on how to handle them. Sometimes that meant translating. “The Army might have taught you this,” he would tell her. “This is not the way you need to do it here.” She maybe could have figured it out alone, she said, but it would have been a lot rockier and a lot slower.
Today, Jessica is Chief Marketing Officer at Uplift Investors. Carried Forward is Uplift’s way of honoring the more than 50 veterans and military spouses across the firm and its portfolio companies.
Brad Skaf, Managing Partner at Uplift, says it this way, “The courage, sacrifice and commitment to serve something greater than themselves is the ultimate embodiment of our Humble Partners core value. We honor our veterans not just as a gesture of gratitude, but as a reminder of the sacrifices they made that afford us the opportunity to do what we love.”
For Jessica, Veterans Day isn’t a celebration. It’s a day to think about her grandfather, who served 20 years in the Marines, through World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. So, when someone thanks her for her service, it always catches her a little off guard. “I feel like I barely did anything compared to what he did.”
Jessica, thank you for your service.
This is the third of three Carried Forward stories from across Uplift and our portfolio companies. Read Penny Schultz’s story from Engage fi and Jaclyn Mosley’s story from IMS Legal Strategies.