No Looking Back

Release date: May 14, 2008 |

By Kory Dodd

When Coach Ange Bradley reminisces about former Goucher College lacrosse player Mary Kim ’95, she conjures the picture of a small woman with a ready laugh and endless determination. Those traits frequently are still in evidence, though 1st Lt. Mary Kim has traded the lacrosse field for a global arena.

Kim, who majored in management with a focus in premedical studies, has been stationed in Iraq since July of last year. In 2002, in response to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, she joined the Maryland Army National Guard, becoming part of a group of citizens-turned-soldiers known in military circles as the "9/11 Responders."

Now Kim, who is on a 12-month tour with the 58th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, provides intelligence support and serves as a liaison between her unit and the others that operate on the same base.

"I had no idea I would react emotionally the way I did to 9/11," Kim says, speaking by telephone from her Baghdad office. "I thought, ‘What am I doing to help the cause?’ . . . I couldn’t just sit back. I had to do something." 

A typical day for Kim may include hours spent on the phone or in front of the computer conducting research and coordinating intelligence. Although the blinds in her office always are drawn for safety, her location is relatively secure, she says. Sometimes, the 34-year-old feels more like an office worker in a foreign country than a soldier in a war zone. "I have it very good. Our mission is more administrative than combative."

Kim’s decision to join the military initially shocked her friends and family members, who didn’t understand why she would leave a successful career as the director of business development at Anne Arundel Medical Center to join the military.

Growing up in Ellicott City, MD, Kim, the youngest of three children, dreamed of becoming a doctor like her father. Her parents, who emigrated from South Korea in 1964, instilled in her a deep gratitude for the privileges and freedoms offered by life in the United States. And they stressed the importance of education.

At Centennial High School, where Kim was an honors student, varsity cheerleader, and a cellist in the orchestra, college was touted as the inevitable next step. "When she was young, she wanted to be a medical doctor, like her father," says her mother, Young Ja Kim. "She was so smart and so sweet and nice. But she is also very, very strong."

Kim recalls that when she was trying to choose a college, Goucher’s admissions counselors convinced her that the opportunities at the school were endless. "I just wanted to try everything, and when I interviewed, they said: ‘You can.’"

Kim became one of the first Goucher students to receive a Trustee Scholarship, an honor given to academically outstanding high school youths. The now-defunct program was launched in 1991; under it, five students each year were awarded full scholarships to the college.

Goucher’s small-school atmosphere emboldened Kim to try new things--whether a new team sport or a challenging course. The year she spent studying at the University of Exeter in England was a pivotal time in her life, she says. "Studying abroad completely opens your eyes to the entire world and gives you an appreciation for what you have, and what’s out there."

Kim’s experiences while traveling--grappling with different languages, making new friends, encountering new ways of thinking and living--gave her insight into her parents’ experiences as immigrants. While still abroad, Kim wrote a letter in which she thanked her father for the sacrifices he and her mother made when they came to the United States in search of a better life.

Her path toward hospital management began when she was fulfilling Goucher’s premedical studies requirements by volunteering at the University of Maryland’s Shock Trauma Center.

"The doctors told me about the public health program at Johns Hopkins University," Kim says. "They said, ‘If you’re doing management and pre-med, why don’t you do both and go into hospital management?’"

It turned out that Annette Leps, one of her advisors at Goucher, was married to the dean of operations at Johns Hopkins University. Through this and other contacts, Kim discovered her professional calling. 

"Everything was just a perfect fit," she says. "It was as if things happen for a reason, and you end up where you need to be."

When the World Trade Center was attacked, Kim had just begun working as a business analyst for Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis, MD. Her older brother, Gene, quickly joined the U.S. Army Reserve, but Kim hesitated, initially reluctant to leave her promising new job for the unfamiliar challenges of military life.

But her former lacrosse coach is not entirely surprised by Kim’s eventual decision. "When you see her and meet her you’d just never think that [joining the military] was something that she would do," says Bradley, who is now the head coach of Syracuse University’s field hockey team. "But she always had that fight inside of her."

Bradley met Kim when the younger woman joined Goucher’s women’s lacrosse team as a freshman. Kim now credits much of her determination to succeed in the National Guard’s officer training camp to lessons learned on the lacrosse field.

"Most of us hadn’t even played a sport in high school," she says.  But by her senior year, the team was nationally ranked. "[Coach Bradley] had a passion for the sport, and it was contagious. She was one of those constructive, positive coaches. You wanted to lead the way she did."

When Gene finished basic training, he told his sister that it was about as strenuous as preseason lacrosse, a
sport he had also played. Kim knew then that she could handle it.

"I attribute that to Ange Bradley and the mental and physical strength that she taught us--and the example she set in leadership," she says.

One of only two women in infantry-based officer training school, Kim was one of the first women to earn the title of Distinguished Honor Graduate, the highest recognition awarded by the Maryland National Guard Officer Candidate School in Reisterstown, MD.

"It was kind of a no-looking-back, no-regrets decision," Kim says. "You’d think there would be a lot more thought put into it, because it has now consumed the last five years of my life, but there really wasn’t."

At work, Kim’s bosses supported her decision to enter the Army National Guard. She took extended leaves for training, and when she learned she was being deployed, she left her job.

"What I did in the health care world is conceptually what I am doing now as an intelligence officer," Kim says. "I made sure the CEO and the CFO knew what was going on competitively around us—keeping them informed so they could make informed decisions."

She remains confident that joining the military was the right decision. "I feel like I’m helping," Kim says. "I feel like all the sacrifices I’ve made were worth it."