Maj. General Clara Hawley-Bowland, woman in charge!

Military medicine

By NOELLE STRAUB
Star-Tribune Washington bureau
Saturday, March 1, 2008 11:20 PM MST

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."
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