Dr. Danielle Tack

Photo courtesy of Dr. Danielle Tack

Dr. Danielle Tack talks about cattle medications during a veterinary outreach mission to Mali in 2008.

Veterinarians serving in the military once worked overtime caring for horses maimed in battle. Nowadays, they'll more likely be treating service dogs, whether injured while sniffing out explosives or just in need of a routine nail clipping while guarding a secure compound.

Modern-day military veterinarians also may find themselves focused on things alien to colleagues in the civilian world. When Dr. Danielle Tack served during the Iraq War, for example, she examined industrial plastics.

Ensuring that food and water supplies are safe — for support animals and humans, too — is a key job for practitioners who serve. And for Tack, that work included checking whether equipment used at water plants near Tikrit was made of "food grade" plastics that wouldn't contaminate her unit's drinking supply.

Even the more familiar work of looking after dogs came with unusual caveats.

"It was a mix of Groundhog Day and constant change in Tikrit," she recounted to the VIN News Service. "For instance, getting to an outlying base to assess how dogs were doing could take days, due to air asset availability, supply chain disruptions or changing military objectives."

Tack's experiences offer a taste of the broad range of tasks that military veterinarians can perform, at a time when armies worldwide are attempting to boost often-depleted ranks by touting the diverse career opportunities they offer. The U.S. Army, for instance, fell well short of its recruitment goals for the two fiscal years ending Sept. 30, 2022 and 2023, leaving it with the smallest active-duty force since 1940.

Officials argued low unemployment in the overall economy was chiefly to blame, since plenty of high-paying jobs were available in the civilian world. Still, the U.S. Army recently announced that it expected to exceed this year's recruitment goal after it bolstered marketing efforts and offered more assistance to aspiring recruits navigating its academic and fitness requirements.

The U.S. Army also is upping efforts to hire so-called Army civilians — folks who aren't enlisted but nevertheless work for the military. In May, it launched its first-ever marketing campaign focused on those careers, which it says encompass myriad fields, including finance, cybersecurity, engineering and veterinary medicine.

"A lot of people, when they think of the Army, only think about combat," said Dr. John Deaton, a serving veterinarian and one of the faces of the campaign. "We have so many opportunities. From a medical perspective, if you can't find it in the civilian world, we have it in the military."

For his part, Deaton's role as Deputy Director, Division of Veterinary Science, entails instructing veterinarians and veterinary technicians at a joint base in San Antonio. The Army's Veterinary Corps is responsible for all the veterinary training for the Army, Navy and Air Force, the last two of which don't have veterinary corps of their own.

"Every branch has military working dogs, and they all need to be in their best condition to do their mission," Deaton said. Veterinarians, he added, also "play a vital role in the readiness of our entire force" by inspecting the food they eat.

Changing priorities

Veterinarians have supported military operations since before the Civil War, when horses and mules were essential for moving men and artillery on the battlefield. However, the military veterinary profession wasn't formalized in the Army until 1916, according to Nolan "Andy" Watson, a historian at the U.S. Army Medical Department's Center of History and Heritage.

Today, about 550 veterinarians serve in U.S. Army active duty and 260 in reserve units, according to the U.S. Army Medical Department. Another 400 veterinarians work in civilian roles.

According to the Army website, pay in the veterinary corps is determined by rank and time served. For example, a captain with four years of service is paid $67,468 per year. A major with six years of service can make $75,442. In addition to base pay is a basic allowance for housing, which, for a captain without dependents in San Antonio, for example, would add $18,000.

The salaries lag America's national average. In 2023, the median salary of all veterinarians was $119,100, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Army offers other benefits, such as full medical and dental coverage, low-cost life insurance, 30 days of paid annual leave, plus 10 holidays and a retirement plan.

The U.S. military also provides college tuition assistance. After three months of service, an individual becomes eligible for a partial tuition subsidy. Those serving three years or more are eligible for 100% tuition coverage at public institutions. Partial coverage is available for private and foreign schools.

Those who take the plunge may not just find themselves serving the Army, Air Force or Navy. The Veterinary Corps also works with the Department of Homeland Security, which handles border enforcement, antiterrorism work and responses to natural and manmade disasters.

In addition to caring for military working dogs and horses, military veterinarians look after service members' pets. They also contribute to the fields of veterinary and human medicine by helping to test treatments such as vaccines and blood-clotting agents on laboratory animals like rats and pigs.

Their work can even extend to developing "medical countermeasures" to biological and chemical weapons, according to Dr. Kevin Armstrong, a long-time military veterinarian who once did a stint at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, an internationally renowned biosecurity facility in Maryland. "I have worked in clinics, but you aren't limited in what you can do," he said.

Dr. John Deaton

Photo by John Deaton

Dr. John Deaton, pictured here with Luna, trains military veterinarians and veterinary technicians at a base in San Antonio.

Military veterinarians have long been involved in medical research. According to Watson, the historian, research veterinarians in the 1800s would go in and out of military service, splitting their time between the Army and university research into diseases like tetanus, bovine tuberculosis and others affecting animals and the food supply.

One notable example was Dr. Raymond Kelser, a veterinary microbiologist who rose to the rank of brigadier general and, while serving in the Philippines in the late 1920s, developed a way to inactivate rinderpest, also known as cattle plague. His vaccine helped control the disease worldwide.

Food inspection has been a crucial function for military veterinarians since the Spanish-American War in 1898, when Congress was called to investigate scandals involving diseased beef and unhealthy horses being sold to the U.S. military, according to Watson. It increasingly dawned on officials that contaminated food could be as lethal to soldiers on the battlefield as enemy grenades or machine-gun fire.

"By World War II, food inspection was a chief mission for veterinarians," Watson said. "Inspectors would go to purchasing sites looking at turkeys and sides of beef, or they would be at packing plants and factories where raw materials were processed. They checked for bacteria and ensured that the animals were healthy. They might be overseas inspecting food processing plants."

Transferable skills

While in Iraq, Tack's duties extended beyond auditing water facilities to inspecting soldiers' food, including meals ready to eat, better known as MREs — the little individual ration bags for combat situations that, these days, contain everything from cheese tortellini to chicken burritos.

Tack's DVM at the University of California, Davis, was funded partly by the military, in her case, through the Health Professions Scholarship Program. She graduated in 2004 but started active duty in 2005 after completing a Master of Preventive Veterinary Medicine. Tack says her military experience taught her leadership skills, an ability to adapt to change and how to overcome challenging work environments.

"Formal trainings are often focused on traditional military operations, but the process can be applied to any situation," she said. "For example, clearly defining the problem to solve, identifying courses of action and pros and cons of each."

Once, in Iraq, when a stray dog bit an interpreter at an outlying military base, she coordinated euthanasia, preemptive treatment for the interpreter and rabies testing of the dog, sending the sample to Germany. "Luckily, it came back negative," she said.

She also broke with convention by facilitating the use of dogs in nontraditional Army roles. Although the practice was discouraged, soldiers liked to pet or play with working dogs. Tack went on to help establish a dog therapy program for soldiers dealing with combat stress.

"The program was a huge success," she said. "Once the dogs were no longer deployed, many went on to serve at U.S. military installation hospitals."

Now, Tack works for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where she's responsible for helping to standardize and harmonize data collection to meet patient safety goals in areas such as antimicrobial resistance, vaccine safety and infection control.

Dr. Kevin Armstrong

U.S. Army photo

Dr. Kevin Armstrong has served as a veterinarian in the U.S. Army for 34 years.

Coming back or staying on

For his part, Deaton's joint desire to become a veterinarian and a soldier came early in life. He got his first horse at age 5 and, beginning at 15, worked as a "kennel boy" for his family's veterinarian, eventually becoming a veterinary assistant.

Deaton's father died when he was 5, and his mother worked two jobs to keep the family afloat. After failing his first attempt at college because he was "having too much fun and getting Cs and Ds," his mother suggested he join the Army.

"I absolutely wanted to serve my country," he said, noting that his father had served in submarines in World War II, and his uncle was a Marine Corps Raider. "I wound up being a sniper in the 1st Ranger Battalion.”

Deaton said training was tough but rewarding, and the experience taught him the discipline and leadership skills he needed to master the demands of veterinary practice. Equipped with a veterinary degree from the University of Georgia College of Veterinary Medicine (partly paid for by the Army), he eventually bought his own clinic before working for the consolidator Banfield Pet Hospital.

Deaton has since come full circle, the pull of the military bringing him back to the Army civilian role he performs today in Texas.

For some, serving as a military veterinarian is a job for life.

Armstrong, the lab-animal specialist, has worked for the Army since he graduated from Tuskegee University College of Veterinary Medicine 34 years ago.

His career has included a stint at the Grand Forks Air Force Base veterinary clinic in North Dakota. Before the Gulf War, he worked with scientists at the Institute for Chemical Defense to explore ways of preventing exposure to chemical agents, such as skin protectants. He also took care of laboratory animals used in researching malaria, yellow fever and HIV, among other infectious diseases.

Armstrong retired from active duty in 2012. Now as an Army civilian, he supports training of combat medics and physician assistants in treating trauma. He's obtained an Expert Field Medical Badge, which qualifies him to function as a medic. As Armstrong points out, serving as a military veterinarian entails more than working with animals.

"I am airborne- and jumpmaster-certified," he said. "I can jump out of planes and am qualified to push others out of planes so they exit safely over the intended target. Not many veterinarians can do that."

— Ross Kelly contributed to this story.