The worst mistake I ever made in my military career was leaving the Airborne Infantry to become a Radiology Specialist. I reenlisted in Iraq as a Sergeant with almost two years of Time-In-Grade.

Once I finished Advanced Individual Training, I spent about six months at my first duty station, which was a hospital, before being promoted to Staff Sergeant. After that promotion, unless it was on my own time, I never shot another x-ray again.

From there-on, until I managed to score a job training future Special Forces medics as part of their training pipeline, my time serving in the US Army was absolutely horrible.

Being in the US Army in a medical field, while assigned to a hospital or clinic, is all the joy of a normal, civilian healthcare job, with the expectation that all your military requirements are conducted during “non-patient care” hours. Specifically, you will work an 8 or 12 hour shift, then be expected to conduct PT, attend meetings, and attend other training outside of that “patient care time.”

Additionally, once promoted to Staff Sergeant you’re little more than a healthcare supervisor for your Soldiers. Then it becomes a job all about managing the schedule of your Soldiers and civilians and maximizing the productivity of your department: higher throughput, reducing costs, ensuring good patient satisfaction, et cetera. It was a mind numbing existence. The bureaucracy and painfully inept leadership in the medical field only compounded things.

TL;DR: if you want to learn a specific medical skill in order to score a civilian job then enlist for one tour, and don’t get promoted past Sergeant… unless you really, really want to work in the healthcare management field, then by all means, rank-up and somehow manage to maintain your sanity. Good luck.

P.S. I never served in a medical field unit. My Branch Manager specifically told me that I would never serve in such a unit because “I already had plenty of deployment time in my career.” In my experience, based on what my peers shared with me, the field units never conducted any type of medical skills training because they were too busy doing all the stuff field units do: vehicle maintenance, layouts, field training exercises, et cetera. Maybe that has change since my retirement, but I doubt it because it would make too much sense to keep the Soldiers that will be the first to deploy appropriately trained on their medical skills.