Forgetting to renew his student deferment sent Gerald Griffin to the top of the U.S. Army.

“Life is good!” bellows retired U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Gerald Griffin when asked how he’s doing. Ask about his military service, and he gets right to it: “Forty-one and a half years. About 20 years of active duty, almost 22 on the reserve side.”


He was drafted in 1963, he says, because he forgot to renew his U.C. Berkeley student deferment. That oversight weaved together two lifelong courses: medicine and the military.


“I started life as a grunt,” he says affectionately. More specifically, as a grunt medic. Alternating between active and reserve service, he finished his studies at Berkeley, worked on an Indian reservation and taught in Albuquerque. He had three kids and a wife and was broke, so he re-enlisted, finished medical school and completed his residency while in the Army in 1978.


He was a reserve again in Salinas, working in an ER and in private practice, when he was mobilized in 1991 for Operation Desert Shield.


“I was sent to Northern Iraq during Operation Provide Comfort. I ran all the medical teams [caring] for the Kurds under the umbrella of the Special Forces.”


The Army retired him at age 62.


“Three months later they drew me back in. [I did] a year and a half in Kosovo. Tough go. We were constantly being booby trapped and mined on the roads.”


He served half a year in Mosul, Iraq, as an ER doctor and triage officer, under daily mortar attacks. The Marez Base mess hall was hit by a suicide bomber on Dec. 21, killing 22 and injuring 72. 


“That was truly a life-changing episode. At that point I was done. Done! I came home and fixed myself because I had a lot of PTSD and I was injured.”


That’s when he embarked on his current mission. He engaged, he says, in adoptive immunotherapy; in the molecular biology of PTSD and traumatic brain injury; in “translational medicine,” translating laboratory and clinical research for doctors to enhance patient care; and in writing peer-reviewed papers.


Locally, he’s deeply committed to the Monterey County Visiting Nurses Association – “great, great people, wonderful organization” – but he doesn’t have time for much else. Asked what drives him and he says, plainly: “I’m not done yet.”