US Army captain becomes first female nurse to graduate from the Army’s elite Ranger Course

(CNN) — For US Army Capt. Molly Murphy, the hardest part of the Army’s grueling Ranger Course was the very first day.

“I did not sleep at all the night before, I was so scared, way in over my head,” she told CNN.

Murphy, who currently works as a pediatric intensive care unit nurse at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland, graduated from Ranger School on July 19, becoming the first female Army nurse to ever complete the course.

Over roughly 60 days of the school the Army hails as its “toughest course,” students “train to exhaustion,” completing arduous physical and mental exercises across three intense phases, taking them from the mountainous terrain of Georgia to the swampy conditions in Florida.

As of Wednesday, 143 women have graduated from the US Army Ranger Course, also called Ranger School, since the first women graduated in 2015, the Army told CNN. Murphy’s accomplishment is all the more notable given her nursing background, which stood in stark contrast to the majority of her Ranger School counterparts who served in combat.

“I was like, ‘I did these tactics eight years ago at ROTC, and I thought I would never hear the word “ambush” ever again, I am so lost,’” Murphy recalled, laughing. “But I’m a very good note taker, super type-A, you know, like any critical care nurse is. And so I was just writing everything anyone said down, and I had this, like, crazy notebook that the boys would flip through whenever they were freaking out.”

The first women to graduate Ranger School were Capt. Kristen Griest and 1st Lt. Shaye Haver, just two years after many combat roles in the military were opened up to women. Just months after their graduation, in December 2015, then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced he was clearing the way for women to serve in the roughly 220,000 remaining military jobs that were limited to men, including some in special operations.

Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga, commander of US Army Special Operations Command, said last year that having women in special operations is “not a nice to have, it’s a must.”

“If you just take the protection of United States and the most critical threats we have out there, we need everybody when you talk about defense of our nation, not just in the Army but at a macro scale. … It’s critical to our mission,” he said.

Murphy told CNN it was clear what kind of advantages women can bring to the table. For example, she excelled at the combat techniques training involving operational orders — what unit commanders send down to subordinate units outlining the mission they’re undertaking — so she would take on the brunt of that task while her teammates got a little more sleep.

Men and women working together “complement each other,” she said, “and that’s what makes us such a good team.”

‘Keeping up with the boys’

Murphy’s journey to Ranger School began when she was a child, she said. Her mother died in an accident when she was young, leaving her and her two brothers to be raised by their father, who served in the National Guard. Her whole life, she said, she was “keeping up with the boys,” constantly competing and carving out a place for herself.

That also led her to go into the ROTC program at the University of Nebraska, after her father encouraged her to serve as an officer to help pay for school.

From there, she continued to excel. While working as a nurse at Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii, she attended the Army’s Air Assault and Jungle Schools, and at the end of the latter she was encouraged to go to Ranger School for the first time by a teammate.

“I was like ‘No, that’s crazy!’ A girl like me, I’m a nurse, Jungle School is the furthest I’ll ever go,” Murphy recalled saying.

She was again told to consider it while competing in the Army’s Best Medic Competition last year, which tests competitors not just on their medical prowess but physical fitness and endurance, land navigation and more. As one of two women there, she said, more senior officers were regularly talking to her about her career. While she didn’t win the competition, she recalled that multiple colonels told her after watching her compete that she “needed to go to Ranger School,” she said, even going so far as to tell her leadership back in Hawaii to send her.

Her biggest hesitation, she joked to CNN, was knowing she’d have to shave her head. But just months later, her former Jungle School teammate began helping her train.

The first phase of Ranger School, called the Darby Phase, focuses on physical and mental stamina. It takes soldiers on ground patrols, foot marches, physical assessments and requires them to receive positive peer evaluations. It’s the phase where roughly half of students will drop out, according to the Army.

It’s not uncommon for students to recycle, or repeat, phases in Ranger School. And at first, Murphy was one of them — she had to repeat Darby Phase. Not having experience in combat arms like her teammates originally had her at a disadvantage, but she poured herself into studying and training for the 10 days in between retrying the Darby Phase, which she successfully completed.

Just hours after completing the first phase, soldiers move to the second — Mountain Phase — where they train on leading platoons on combat patrol operations across rugged terrain where the “stamina and commitment of the Ranger student is stressed to the maximum,” according to the Army.

Finally, in the Florida Phase, students continue training on leading small units during things like airborne and dismounted patrol operations, conducting 10 days of patrols during “a fast paced, highly stressful, challenging field exercise.”

While Murphy said she was surprised by how little medical training played a role in the course, being a nurse prepared her in different ways. Being on her feet for 12 hours a day, often skipping meals and having to be “100% sharp at all times, because someone’s life is in your hands … definitely gave me a one-up,” she said.

Because of a worsening infection in her foot, Murphy was forced to leave the competition on the last two days for surgery at a hospital in Florida. She traveled back to Georgia for graduation afterward but was hospitalized again for pain the day before. She begged her doctors to let her attend graduation and they eventually agreed — sending her on crutches, with nerve blocks to try to limit the pain.

“I was just so excited about how many of us from my platoon made it. … It’s just so exciting to be able to celebrate with them, that we were all able to pull each other there,” she said, emphasizing repeatedly that being able to lean on one another throughout the course made all the difference.

Now, going back to nursing, her biggest takeaway has been the leadership skills she learned, particularly how to keep pushing in the midst of chaos.

“It is so hard to lead in an environment where everyone is starving, and everyone is tired,” she said, “and my goal was to see if I could stay positive in those moments where you are at your lowest. … And I want to help people understand that your most difficult times are where you grow the most.”

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