Shifting Gears: Iraq Deployment Refocuses Priorities

Management student Michelle Dryden spent a year on active duty in Iraq. Now she's leading ROTC cadets at UML.

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For many reasons, students sometimes decide to take a break from college. For Michelle Dryden, that decision was made for her.

Back in 2003, Dryden, a Windham, N.H., native, was a general business major in the College of Management, and had been serving part-time as a member of the Army National Guard. She was with her unit in Germany on a routine training mission when she heard rumblings that the 200-person group would be called to active duty. Two weeks later, they got word: the 110th Maintenance Company, based at Devens, was headed to Iraq.

She didn’t know it at the time, but she would spend 15 months on active duty – including a year in a combat zone – before she would be able to return to school. The experience not only motivated her studies, she’s now using her experience to lead others as the cadet colonel of UML’s Air Force ROTC program this semester.

“It was so different,” Dryden says of her life as a soldier in Iraq. “On one hand, it’s so scary being somewhere where you don’t know what to expect. On the other hand, life was so simple.”

Most days, Dryden says, the routine was set: sleep in a tent, eat at the mess hall and work. Her role was in logistics, making sure that the right equipment got to the right place at the base where the unit was stationed. Although the course of her days was established, she still had to contend with high heat without air conditioning, portable toilets and military food.  “I don’t want to say the food was terrible,” Dryden says, “but it was terrible.”

There were other reminders that the comforts of home were far away, too. Just to take turns in a two-minute shower in a tiny tent, Dryden’s unit had to be driven by truck to another location, only to end up coated with the flour-fine desert sand on the trip back to their quarters. Dryden was briefed on Iraqi customs in case she left the base, including how women were not to make eye contact with men.

The biggest adjustment during her deployment, Dryden says, didn’t have anything to do with the conditions or customs. “Just being away from my family was probably the hardest thing,” she says, explaining that she was able to e-mail her loved ones at times and at other times, waited in line for up to an hour to sit on the dirt floor of a makeshift cubicle to talk to them by telephone. Care packages of food from her parents were a welcome taste of home, especially when she spent the holiday season in the desert.

Dryden says there were times while in Iraq she felt she was in danger, but not on a regular basis. Her most frightening experience, she says, came when she was driving a tractor trailer in a convoy across the desert and the vehicle broke down in a remote area. This happened shortly after PFC Jessica Lynch had been taken as a prisoner of war during an attack on a convoy in which several other soldiers were killed. Dryden describes the tense time while she and others from her unit hurried to make repairs to get the truck back under way.

Although there were hardships “it felt like I was doing something worthwhile,” Dryden says, adding that she often worked with Iraqi nationals who were positive in their attitudes toward the American troops. “I felt like we were really helping out.”

Her deployment took her away from her studies until the fall semester of 2004.  But even though Dryden, now 25, had to make up for lost time once she returned to school, that time away gave her a new energy when it came to her studies. She’s since declared her major as marketing and added minors in economics and legal studies. 

“It wasn’t someone telling me, ‘You should go to school,’ ” says Dryden, whose parents convinced her to go to college back when she was a new high school graduate. “I wanted to be here.”

Even with her deployment in Iraq and her focus on education renewed, Dryden didn’t give up her military service. She served as a recruiter’s assistant during summer breaks, and also spent two days a week on active duty working for the National Guard at Devens. This semester, Dryden is serving as the wing commander and cadet colonel of the Air Force ROTC detachment at UML. In that role, Dryden oversees approximately 50 student cadets – and they salute her. “It feels like a huge honor,” she says.

As a veteran, Dryden strives to set an example for the cadets in her new role as wing commander.  “I’m really looking forward to being a leader" this semester, she says.

She’s also looking ahead to opportunities after graduation this spring, and using her military logistics experience in the civilian world.

“I feel like I learned a lot and I can really apply it to business,” Dryden says. “Every business has a supply chain.”

The impression serving in Iraq made on her goes beyond skills she will use on the job in the future.

“I feel like I am a different person because I went and did that.”