When Samantha Courson’s young son asked to wear something military-related for a school spirit day, she handed him her Navy uniform top.

He practically disappeared inside it.

“He just swam in it, but the pride you could see emanating from him made me feel pretty good,” she recalled.

It was a moment that reminded Courson her military service had shaped more than her own life. It was helping shape her son’s, too.

Years earlier, she had been a 23-year-old mother looking for something beyond the life she already knew. What she found in the Navy Reserve was confidence, discipline and a sense of purpose that would follow her long after she took off the uniform.

“Being a veteran is still very much a part of who I am,” Courson said. “It shaped who I am and how I do things now. It gives you that sense of pride only someone who has served can have.”

Her decision to enlist began with something relatively simple: watching her brother’s military graduation.

“The organization of it really appealed to me,” she said. “They had a military performance with the guns and it really drew me in.”

Her brother had chosen active duty. Courson, already a mother with a young son, decided the Navy Reserve would be a better fit. She wasn’t chasing a particular career or even certain what she wanted from the experience.

“Honestly, I kept an open mind about it. It was something new,” she said. “As cliché as it is, it was joining something bigger than yourself.”

But the military didn’t give her much time to second-guess her decision.

After taking the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, Courson learned her strengths were in hands-on, engineering-related work. She was assigned to welding and fabrication, a field traditionally dominated by men. She also found herself moving through the enlistment process considerably faster than expected.

“I fit a box they needed to fill so they just shipped me off,” she said. “I thought I was going to have a little more time to wrap my head around it, but I also think having less time to think about it was probably good.”

Within two months of signing up, she was gone.

Courson spent approximately six months at Naval Station Great Lakes near Chicago, completing basic training and specialized instruction.

The hardest part wasn’t the physical demands or learning a new skill. It was being separated from her young son, Josh, who was about 2 or 3 years old. There was one moment when the weight of her decision finally caught up with her.

“I had a pivotal cry about the decision for about a minute,” she said. “I got called out in front of all the females in my bunk by the drill sergeant,” she recalled. “Those tears dried up really fast.”

Training pushed Courson outside her comfort zone and into a field where women were in the minority. She didn’t feel she needed to prove herself because she was a woman, but she wanted to demonstrate that she could perform just as well as her male counterparts.

“Because my job was typically a male job, I didn’t necessarily feel like I had to prove myself, but I wanted to do better to show them I could,” she said.

After completing training, Courson joined a Reserve unit based in Wichita near McConnell Air Force Base, but the transition was not quite what she had expected.

She was the only newly assigned woman in the unit, leaving her without the immediate camaraderie she hoped to find. Still, she grew to love the experience.

“I spent eight years in the reserves and loved it,” she said. “I miss the people. I don’t miss the governmental portion of it.”

Reserve service generally meant one weekend a month and two weeks of annual training, but Courson’s commitments sometimes took her much farther from home.

Her assignments included trips to Bahrain, a small island nation in the Middle East near Saudi Arabia. Because of the lengthy travel, she chose to extend those assignments to approximately a month at a time.

“We basically did whatever needed done, painting offices, construction projects, whatever,” she said. “The people in Bahrain were friendly but the people in Saudi Arabia were less so.”

While walking around with a group of people, Courson recalls an unsettling encounter when a carload of men stopped and shouted at her group that they didn’t belong in the country.

It was the only time she remembers feeling genuinely threatened.

But the overseas experience also brought one of the most influential people of her military career into her life.

Courson met Carolyn Leake, who she said later became a chief in the Navy, while the two were assigned to the same unit traveling to Bahrain. Leake’s leadership left a lasting impression.

“She’s such an amazing leader,” Courson said. “She was willing to take people under her wing and encourage you to use your voice to not be walked all over.”

Having a strong female leader was especially meaningful in a military environment where Courson often found herself among relatively few women.

Over time, the lessons she learned became part of the way she approached challenges, relationships and motherhood.

“Trust but verify,” she said, describing one principle that has stayed with her.

But the biggest change was harder to measure.

“I carry myself with a little more pride and confidence,” she said. “Just having the training, even just as far as basic training, knowing things and having that sense of pride, it builds you into this person you’ve become.”

She believes military service fundamentally changed how she sees herself.

“I would still have the same respect for those who served but without the empathy of knowing how it feels,” Courson said. “I wouldn’t have the same confidence. I wouldn’t have found that in myself the same way.”

Those lessons carried over into raising her son.

Organization, discipline, respect and personal responsibility became expectations in their household.

And sometimes, Courson’s approach to discipline looked a little different from that of other parents.

“I don’t know many people who would punish their kids with pushups, but he has been,” she said. “He learned pretty quickly.”

As Josh grew older, however, balancing her military obligations with motherhood became increasingly difficult.

Serving in the Reserve often felt like juggling two jobs, one full time and another part time. After eight years, Courson decided it was time to step away.

“My life needed me to focus more on what was going on at home,” she said. “Josh was in travel sports and I just needed to be home more.”

She doesn’t regret that decision, although she sometimes wonders what might have happened if she had enlisted earlier.

“If I had joined sooner, I would’ve stuck it out to retirement,” she said.

Now, the little boy who once disappeared inside her uniform has grown up and left home.

Josh recently departed for college in Ohio, about 14 hours away, where he is studying high-performance engineering at a school with connections to NASCAR. He is also a member of the college bowling team.

Courson is proud of the independent young man he has become, but that doesn’t make the separation easy.

“I love it because I see the independence, but it’s so hard,” she said.

There is something familiar about the experience. Years ago, Courson had to find the strength to leave home and serve her country while her son was still young. Now, she’s learning to let him build a life of his own.

And although her Navy years are behind her, she still encounters reminders that women veterans are sometimes overlooked.

At work, Courson wears a badge identifying her as a veteran. She is occasionally surprised by the response, particularly from older women.

“They’ll say, ‘You’re a veteran? Of what?’” she said.

She believes some of that surprise reflects a generation that grew up when women serving in the military were less common.

“Women in the military is much more common than you think,” she said.

Her own feelings about Veterans Day are complicated.

Although she knows Reserve service is important, she admits she sometimes feels the holiday belongs more to those who served on active duty, particularly veterans whose service left visible reminders.

But her appreciation for fellow veterans runs deep.

She enjoys attending veterans’ breakfasts and luncheons, listening to older service members share their stories and participating in funeral details honoring those who served.

“I love hearing the old timers that have served and the stories they tell,” she said.

She also wishes more young women in smaller communities had opportunities to learn about military service.

“The recruiting in small communities is basically non-existent, especially for females,” she said. “Having had a female recruiter would’ve made a huge difference.”

For Courson, the experience wasn’t always easy. There were missed holidays, difficult separations, moments of doubt and the constant balancing act between military obligations and family.

But there was also something she hadn’t known she needed when she first watched her brother’s graduation.

Confidence.

The kind that comes from being challenged, discovering what you’re capable of and realizing you can handle more than you ever imagined.

“I’m thankful for the tearing me down and building me back up situation of the military,” she said.