Betty-Lou (calls herself Liz or Elizabeth) Lee comes from the mountains of the Ozarks. She was born in the Missouri backwoods to a couple who scraped a living off a hardscrabble small-holding and jobs above and below ground in the lead mines. She grew up in a clannish atmosphere where people angered easily and there was only one path for a Lee girl: early marriage and a life of grind.

 Betty-Lou saw another path though, one that saw her leave home at fifteen and work tables in New York until she’d made enough money to attend community college. She studied nursing and after qualifying she worked in one of the big NY teaching hospitals. Here she met Henry, her husband when he was training to be a doctor.
 She pulled long hours to help him get through his training and then juggled their children and her work to get him through his qualifications to become a plastic surgeon. At that point Henry decided he needed a newer, more attractive wife and moved to LA with a mistress in tow.

 That left Betty-Lou unable to cope with three young kids and a job so she did the unthinkable. She moved back home and took a job as a nurse at the mine.
 A year or so later, the National Guard was offering good incentives to join if you were a medic and Betty-Lou signed on. She desperately wanted to join the 185th Combat Regiment and she worked hard to qualify as an on-board medic to be used if the Corps MEDEVAC unit was stretched. It took her a couple of years to qualify but made it just before the war in the East looked as if it would spill over into Europe.

 When the Missouri National Guard was activated into Federal Service, she served in several theatres before being sent to Northern Anatolia to support the American forces in Turkey that were helping to support the Turks with training and logistical expertise. One night her chopper was called out to pick up several wounded Special Forces troops that were stranded on an op short of Krasnador. The Blackhawk went down and Betty-Lou was captured along with the survivors of the crew and the Green Berets.

 Because of the importance of the Green Beret prisoners, the captives were sent to Sevastopol so that senior interrogators could interview them. Betty-Lou was deemed to be unimportant after initial interrogations and was shipped off to a POW Camp in the Ukraine.

 She’d expected brutal treatment from the Russians, but found a friendlier face in the Ukrainian guards. Soon she was running a clinic for the camp and the locals and when the Ukraine declared independence she kept working for the locals and a group of mercenaries she found along the way.