SEQUIM — Four years after being shot in the head while serving with the Navy in Iraq, a Port Angeles High School graduate isn’t going to let a sniper’s bullet stop her from achieving her goals.
Retired Navy Chief Petty Officer Holly Crabtree, 34, now lives in Sequim with her uncle, Chuck Engel, and is a single mother to her daughter, Leah Crabtree, 9.
But in the spring of 2010, Crabtree had plans for a full Navy career and was assigned to a combined special operations forces unit as a Navy corpsman and Arabic translator in Iraq when she was targeted by a sniper.
Crabtree was shot in the head during a joint Navy SEAL/Army Special Forces operation in Iraq, a nearly fatal wound that earned her the Purple Heart.
“I don’t regret anything that happened. I love the Navy. I love my job,” she said.
Crabtree was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal four times during her 14 years in the Navy.
Today, Crabtree walks with a cane, is legally blind and has difficulty with her memory.
She retired from the Navy to Sequim in 2012, but she’s certainly not taking it easy as she continues to pursue her goals.
Crabtree takes online classes through Trident University International as she works toward a bachelor’s degree in environmental health that she expects to receive in 2016.
She eventually wants to earn a master’s degree that would allow her to work with injured veterans.
“I’d like to work for the Veterans Administration in Seattle or Oregon,” she said.
Crabtree achieved much during her career in the military and even more in recovering from her injuries.
But she said that if people meet her and know her story, she asks that they don’t thank her for her service.
“This is our job,” she said, and added that she is not comfortable with being thanked for 14 years of doing exactly what she wanted to do.
Her brother, Jason Engel, lives in Port Angeles, and her sister, Sgt. First Class Sarah Whatley, is serving with the Army in air traffic control at Fort Hood, Texas.
Crabtree enlisted in the Navy in 1997 as a junior at Port Angeles High School and participated in the Delayed Entry Program until her graduation in 1998.
The Navy trained Crabtree as a hospital corpsman — a job that can range from serving as a pharmacy technician to entering the field of combat serving as combat medical support for the Marine Corps, SEALs or Army Special Forces.
She earned the title of “independent duty corpsman” — the highest level of enlisted medical certification in the Navy.
These are typically assigned to the Marine Corps or ships or submarines that are too small to have their own doctor.
Once she completed that schooling, Crabtree was assigned to the Expeditionary Warfare School, which trains corpsmen and other specialists to work with special operations forces teams, and she earned a Navy Expeditionary Warfare qualification.
She also learned Arabic and was assigned to a mixed Army and Navy special operations forces unit in Iraq.
Although women were technically not assigned to combat units — and no woman has ever qualified for the Navy’s elite special operations unit — women are often attached to such units as “individual augmentees” to provide medical and other support services to soldiers and sailors and to be able to interact with Muslim women.
In addition to her duties in caring for the members of her unit, Crabtree was assigned a female partner from an Army psychological operations unit, and the two were sent to villages to trade medical treatment for information about enemy activity in the area.
“When we walked into a village, they would know I was medical because I had the big pack,” she said.
It was during one such trip, on April 15, 2010 near Ramadi in Iraq’s Anbar Province, that Crabtree was struck in the head by a sniper’s bullet, which she said hit her in the rear, left side of her head and came to rest behind her left eye.
She said she remembers being hit and her team taking care of her.
“I remember waking up in the Humvee,” she said.
When she reached the field hospital, her case was classified as “Hope Trauma,” which means there is little hope for recovery.
She went through a six-hour surgery at the field hospital, which she wasn’t expected to survive.
Against the odds, she survived and was stabilized and evacuated from Iraq to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland.
After about three months, Crabtree became fully aware of her surroundings and began recovering from the devastating injury.
In 2011, she was transferred back to her unit’s home base at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida for physical rehabilitation and discharge from the Navy.
The Navy told Crabtree that she would be given a medical retirement.
“I wanted to stay. They told me I would retire as a first class [petty officer],” Crabtree said.
She had relearned how to walk with the assistance of a cane, but her right arm and vision have not recovered to the same degree.
“It cut my vision in half,” she said.
The likelihood of returning to a level of health that would allow her to resume duty as a corpsman was less than what the Navy required, but Crabtree said she was not ready to give up on the Navy.
While waiting for her retirement paperwork to be completed, Crabtree, then a first class petty officer, she said she discovered that she was eligible to take the Navy’s exam for promotion to chief petty officer.
Since her eyesight had not returned enough to read, the Navy allowed a chief who had already passed his exam to read it to her.
She passed the exam and was promoted to chief hospital corpsman in 2011.
In 2012, with her daughter, she was flown to Naval Hospital Bremerton, where she was retired with honors in a large ceremony attended by Medal of Honor recipient Master Sgt. Leroy Petry, whom Crabtree described as “a close friend.”
Petry, who works with injured veterans in the Tacoma area, has been an inspiration to her, Crabtree said.
“I want to do what he does,” she said.
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Reporter Arwyn Rice can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5070, or at arwyn.rice@peninsuladailynews.com.
