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GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba — Volunteerism takes a special kind of commitment. You don’t get monetary compensation when you’re done. You are often donating your spare time: the few hours you have to yourself after work or on the weekends. Sometimes all you get is a pat on the back. None of this matters to Army Staff Sgt. Katherine Baker of the 193rd Military Police Company. She’s been volunteering her entire military career.
“When I was a private, I was the first soldier at Pensacola, in like 30 years, to receive the STRAC award which is an award where you have like a high GPA, you have to serve in a leadership position, you have to have no negative counselings, and you have to do over 100 hours of volunteer service while you’re in [Advanced Individual Training].”
Baker went the extra mile during her time in AIT and started the Blind Assistance Program where she and several other volunteers took blind children on activities that they wouldn’t normally engage in because of their disability – swimming, bowling, and driving golf carts, just to name a few.
“When I was 18 years old I volunteered for everything on the face of the planet,” said Baker about her time in AIT. “I actually [volunteered for] Saturday scholars where you go into inner city schools and you help children that have poor grade averages whether in math, English, science, whatever. You sit there on your Saturdays and you tutor them.”
Baker is still friends with the then 8-year-old boy she tutored every Saturday. It’s not just about exceeding volunteer hours for her. It’s something more personal. Like when Baker and a number of others soldiers from the 193rd MP Company volunteered to cook breakfast for service members visiting Guantanamo to participate in the soldiers Undertaking Disabled Scuba program.
“That was my proudest volunteering moment here at Guantanamo Bay,” said Baker. “It was early in the morning on a Saturday. It wasn’t an organized volunteer function. It wasn’t something put out by the battalion. It was soldiers who just wanted to give back to service members who had sacrificed more for their country than most of us will ever do.”
Helping others is just about that – helping others. Baker has even used her own vacation time to go on volunteering adventures. While she was stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wa. (JBLM) she took leave to volunteer for the Warrior Adventure Quest, or WAQ.
According to the Army Morale, Welfare, and Recreation website, WAQ is “designed to introduce soldiers to activities that serve as alternatives to aberrant behaviors often associated with accidents involving recently re-deployed soldiers. This tool presents coping outlets to help soldiers realize their own new level of normal after deployment and ‘move on’ with their lives.”
Baker’s passion is the Army and its soldiers, so using her earned leave time to help fellow soldiers was an easy decision. She loves being around soldiers and helping them so much so that after leaving the military as a staff sergeant in 2007 and taking a job with a military contractor she soon realized that she’d rather be a soldier again.
“It’s a really satisfying career but it’s weird going in for set hours,” said Baker about her civilian job at Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE) school in Fort Rucker, Ala. “When you go in and you just punch a clock, and at the end of the day it’s the end of your day, it’s a weird feeling. It made me miss the military; it made me miss being 100 percent involved all the time so that’s why I came back on active duty.”
Baker re-entered the military at the beginning of 2010 as a specialist and quickly made her way back up the ranks to staff sergeant. During her second stint with the Army she met her husband, Sgt. Matthew Baker, who some of you might remember from a previous “Trooper Focus.” The duo is lucky enough to be stationed here at the same time and in the same MP company.
The Bakers met at Joint Base Lewis-McChord while… what else? Volunteering. In between taking leave to help WAQ, Katherine drove back to JBLM to volunteer at that year’s Army Ball.
“He was going to be the Spanish-American War soldier,” said Katherine about the first time she met her now husband. “He needed black leather boots for his uniform. I met teaching him how to spit shine black leather boots at a volunteer function that neither of us was supposed to be at!”
The couple fuels each other to do better. They are always trying to one-up each other, in a good way. Katherine pushed Matthew to go to the U.S. Army South Best Warrior Competition, which you might recall he won, and Mr. Baker supports Mrs. Baker in whatever she does, like going to Joint Task Force Guantanamo’s NCO of the Quarter board, which she won.
“They’re both very competitive and they want to try to push each other the best they can,” said 1st Sgt. David Taylor of the 193rd MP Company “The ones who benefit from that are the soldiers that fall under them because as they’re working harder and harder to be better than each other they’re pushing their soldiers to be better and better.
Baker is the first to say that she is a tough NCO and some of her soldiers fear her when they first meet her. She says she does it for them – she wants them to live up to their full potential. When they get that they stop being afraid.
“She’ll do whatever she can for her soldiers,” said Taylor. “You talk to her soldiers and her soldiers love her to death. They would do anything for her; follow her anywhere.”
| Date Taken: | 08.30.2012 |
| Date Posted: | 08.30.2012 14:01 |
| Story ID: | 94048 |
| Location: | ALABAMA, US |
| Web Views: | 66 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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