HMForces.co.uk

SAMANTHA Bremner still remembers the day in 1988 when the taxi dropped her off at the front gate of the army camp at Aldershot, where she was to do her basic military training.
“I had to walk up this big long drive with two hold-alls and a rucksack,” she says. “I couldn’t understand why the taxi driver wouldn’t take me to the front door.” The reason was security – most military camps don’t allow taxis in close proximity – but the incident marked a dividing line in Ms Bremner’s life: it was the moment she stopped being a civilian and became a member of the Armed Forces.

Now, 21 years later, the 43-year-old from Edinburgh, who is unmarried, can’t imagine life as a civilian. Yet having dedicated her career to working as an Army nurse, caring for wounded soldiers in conflicts including Northern Ireland and Iraq, she is now being cared for herself at the new Army Recovery Centre in Edinburgh for a debilitating back injury sustained over her many years of nursing, and is facing a return to civilian life next year.

“I have a certain amount of apprehension because I’ve been in the army for so long,” Ms Bremner admits. “It’s the fear of the unknown. I’ve got to find a job, and I really don’t know what I’m going to do yet.”

Ms Bremner’s back injury has meant she has been unable to work since June, and she has received help from Army Welfare and SSAFA – the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Families Association, as well as training and access to a gym at the Army Recovery Centre.

She has also just received the keys to a veteran’s home near Edinburgh. “It’s been fantastic,” she says. “If it weren’t for that, I’d just be sitting at home at my mum and dad’s, worrying and getting bored out my mind.”

She says society’s attitude to the forces has changed in the time she has been serving. “I think the younger generations are becoming more aware of what the poppy means,” she says. “Afghanistan is on the news a lot more now, and I think they are becoming more understanding of the job we do. They might not want to do it themselves, but they’re more aware of what it involves, particularly when they’re seeing young lads go out to Afghanistan.”

She says she doesn’t often wear her uniform in public, but when she does the reaction is minimal. “Sometimes people will say: ‘Well done, you’re doing a good job’, but often there’s no reaction at all. It’s just not the British way to treat Armed Forces in the manner the Americans do.”

Bremner takes a sanguine approach to the inherent dangers she has faced in her job. She says: “When I went out during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I just thought: ‘Well, that’s what you have to do’. You know when you’re in the army that this is what you join up for. It’s part of the job.”

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