NATCHEZ &8212; Soldiers wounded or made ill by service in Iraq or Afghanistan have an advocate in Col. Lola Smith of Natchez, now on active duty with the Mississippi National Guard.

A Ph.D. nurse who teaches at Alcorn State University School of Nursing, Smith is a caseworker with the community-based health-care organization, overseeing medical cases of veterans of those two wars.

Assigned to Birmingham, Ala., along with other nurse workers, Smith has seen not only heartbreak and disappointment among the soldiers in her charge but also success and return to Guard duty.

Birmingham caseworkers care for Guard and Reserve soldiers in Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama. Most of Smith&8217;s patients are Mississippians.

&8220;These are soldiers who have either wounds or pre-existing conditions that got worse because of serving in the war,&8221; Smith said. &8220;My worst case is a soldier injured in a blast in which his vehicle was blown up.&8221;

That patient became Smith&8217;s case once he was stabilized and released from the critical care hospital in Georgia, she said.

&8220;He&8217;s from north Mississippi. It&8217;s been a complex case,&8221; she said. &8220;I had to get him orthopedic appointments and neurosurgery appointments; I had to schedule him with his primary care physician; and he&8217;s had numerous MRIs of the brain and lumbar areas.&8221;

This is a patient whose outcome may not be as desirable as some others. Smith does not believe he will be able to return to Guard duty.

Smith, a member of the Guard&8217;s Medical Battalion for 24 years, was called to active duty Aug. 30, 2005, as a result of Hurricane Katrina, which struck the gulf coast the day before her activation.

She served three months at an Air National Guard base in Gulfport caring for soldiers called up for Katrina; was released for the month of December and called back to active duty in January for the work she is performing now.

She misses her husband, Paul Smith, a Natchez employee of Mississippi Department of Transportation, she said. And she misses her job at the ASU nursing school.

But she is dedicated to the work assigned to her by the Guard. &8220;We&8217;re nurses, but we&8217;re also soldiers,&8221; she said. &8220;We&8217;re giving back to them what they&8217;ve given for their country. They&8217;ve all made tremendous sacrifices.&8221;

The work has its oddities. For example, she and the other caseworkers see each patient only once. &8220;I see the soldier only once, when I do the initial interview,&8221; she said. &8220;I make a picture of their military IDs to keep with the record. You get so many and you want to remember each one.&8221;

Though the face-to-face meeting occurs only once, the numerous meetings by telephone establish a strong bond, Smith said. &8220;You get to know them very well. And the soldiers know you very well and feel comfortable telling you anything on their minds.&8221;

One of the biggest challenges for these soldiers &8212; and maybe to an even greater extent to their families &8212; is coping with ways war has changed them.

&8220;The families think the same person is coming home, the same person who left them to go to Iraq or Afghanistan, but that is not true. They are not the same at all,&8221; she said.

Smith does counseling of her own but has spent many hours setting up counseling for husbands and wives having difficulty coping with the way war has changed their relationship.

With all the pain and heartache she deals with every day, the network with other workers is important, Smith said.

&8220;We&8217;re all a good network of friends,&8221; she said. &8220;Three who are working with me are good friends from my unit. We&8217;ve been in he Guard together for many years. We all are nurses and have a lot in common.&8221;

Also important is that her husband is supportive. &8220;He does not like for me to be gone, but he is supportive,&8221; she said.

And at Alcorn, her co-workers have stepped up to take over her classes during her absence.

&8220;Dr. Carolyn Dollar is teaching 18 hours of classes now. She took over my classes,&8221; Smith said. &8220;Van Chauvin helped for two semesters. I can&8217;t say enough about how Dean Mary Hill and Dr. Linda Godley, chairman of the graduate program, and Dr. Savina Schoenhofer have made a difference for me.&8221;

As she makes a sacrifice of her own by serving in the Guard, Smith focuses on the soldiers who have served in combat and what they have given.

&8220;We can&8217;t really even imagine what sacrifices they have made,&8221; she said. &8220;We don&8217;t see the most severely injured. We can&8217;t imagine all the limbs lost and all the severely burned.&8221;

Her goal is clear. She and her colleagues want to put soldiers back to work. &8220;Our goal is to get as many as possible to return to their individual units.&8221;