After 20 years as a combat medic, vet sets out to become a registered nurse

After 20 years as a combat medic, vet sets out to become a registered nurse
Miami Herald
By CAROL ROSENBERG
November 16, 2013

MIAMI — Staff Sgt. Victor Arvizu has spent 20 years as a U.S. Army combat medic — from the Middle East to the South Pacific. He has pulled glass shards from soldiers' chests and taken blood samples. He has inserted chest tubes and sutured wounds.

Today, he tends to retired soldiers as a health tech at the Veterans Administration clinic in Pembroke Pines.

But he has long had ambitions of doing more. "All along I've wanted to be a nurse," he said of an aspiration that crystallized into determination during a 2004 stint in Iraq. There he saw nurses knowledgeable about medicine soldier alongside doctors at a combat hospital inside Baghdad's Green Zone.

Now, Arvizu, 38, is winding up his career with a Florida National Guard unit and getting ready to embark on a transition that's a sign of the times:

Starting in January he will leave his day job and use the post-9/11 G.I. Bill to plunge into a new program at Florida International University — with a study plan to become a registered nurse in just one year.

The program seeks to tap the talent that has come home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and help likely mostly male, battle-tested medics fine-tune their skills for civilian life. And help stem the national nursing shortage, too.

Rather than study side-by-side with FIU's first-year nursing students, the program will evaluate these veteran medics and corpsmen and give them credit for both formal schooling and life experience.
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