By Tabitha Evans Moore
Editor & Publisher
There is a particular kind of courage that doesn’t announce itself. It builds quietly, across generations, passed down through example and expectation and the particular weight of watching the people you love do hard, dangerous, necessary things.
Moore County’s Sarah Nelms grew up surrounded by that kind of courage. The daughter of Bill and Jackie Nelms, granddaughter of Annie Lou and the late Jack Tomlin, she graduated from Moore County High School in 2006 — a cheerleader, a basketball player, a small-town girl with a one-red-light frame of reference and a family tree full of soldiers.
Her grandfather William Hall Nelms served in the U.S. Army in World War II. Her grandfather Jack Tomlin served a career in the Army and fought in Vietnam. Her father served in the Army and the Tennessee Army National Guard. Her brother Will currently serves in the Tennessee Army National Guard. Two uncles have served as well.
In April 2011, Sarah Nelms signed her first contract with the U.S. Army and became the first woman in her family’s long line of military service. She describes it plainly, without fanfare, the way people who have actually broken glass ceilings tend to — as simply the first of several she intends to break.
“Being the first female in this long line of military men to serve is just the first glass ceiling I aim to break through,” she says.
{Editor’s Note: As with any interview with a currently serving U.S. service member, we must added the disclaimer that the views expressed in this piece are Sarah Nelms, and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army or the Department of War.}
The Decision
The path to enlistment wasn’t a straight line. Sarah went back and forth for years, wrestling with the decision during one of the most turbulent chapters in recent American military history. Then came February 24, 2009 — the day 1st Lieutenant William Eric Emmert, someone close to her family, was killed in Mosul, Iraq.
“I knew from the day he was laid to rest that I was called to do more with my own life,” she says. “Spiritually, I knew God was guiding me to the path I was meant for all along.”
She had intentions to sign up then, but her father deployed to Afghanistan shortly after Emmert’s funeral. She waited until he returned. The delay, she says now, was a blessing. Joining in her early twenties gave her time and perspective she didn’t know she’d need.
One Red Light to the World
Nearly 15 years of service later, Sarah Nelms has lived in Washington D.C., Virginia, and Alaska. She has deployed to Afghanistan twice, to Guantanamo Bay, and to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. She has participated in Global Health Engagements in Samoa and training missions in American Samoa. She has traveled solo across regions most people only read about.
She still has shock and awe moments, she says — after all of it.
The hardest transitions weren’t always the most obvious ones. It wasn’t the geography or the danger that caught her off guard — it was the absence of something she’d taken for granted growing up in Moore County.
“The transitions that were the hardest were encountering places that didn’t have the same Southern hospitality I was raised with, or places that weren’t used to women being solely independent — or more so, in the military,” she says.
In those moments, she found herself returning to the foundation her parents built. They had always told her she could be whatever her heart desired. They pushed her to step outside social norms and her personal comfort zone. That permission, given early and often, turns out to be the most durable gear she packed.
The assignment she returns to most often when asked about favorites isn’t one of the deployments. It’s Samoa — both the independent nation and American Samoa — where she participated in Global Health Engagements and an Innovative Readiness Training mission. She describes the islands’ culture of community and welcome with a warmth that sounds, unmistakably, like homesickness for a place she’d never been before she arrived.
“We’d have cook-outs and fish frys or go to Granny’s after church on Sunday for a big spread, in Samoa they do what is called an ‘umu’ — an above-ground oven using rocks and leaves to encase the food,” she says. “I got to watch cousins, uncles, and brothers come together and create dishes for Sunday’s meal after church. I fell in love there.”
The Afghanistan Crucible
Of her two Afghanistan deployments, it is the second — 2018 to 2019 — that she identifies as the hinge point of her career. She was often the only woman in the room. She was performing at the level of a Sergeant First Class while holding the rank of Sergeant. The gap between expectation and rank was, by any measure, a test.
“The expectation set for me during this period was my ‘make or break’ moment in my career,” she says.
She made it. When she returned, she enrolled in her master’s degree program and began pursuing her goals with what she describes as stronger, more intentional focus. That deployment also gave her something unexpected: the freedom, during authorized leave, to travel solo in the region. Her first personal travel out of uniform. Her first taste of the world entirely on her own terms.
The Afghanistan chapter also carries a deeper resonance. Her father — retired Major Bill Nelms — deployed to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia during Desert Shield/Desert Storm in 1990 and 1991. Sarah deployed to Saudi Arabia in 2022 and 2023. Both share the War on Terror campaign ribbon for their respective Afghanistan service. Father and daughter, the same ground, different decades.
“I am sure others probably think it’s ludicrous that we find that to be such a special thing to share,” she says. “But it’s one of my most proud accomplishments thus far. I keep aiming to step foot on the same ground as my father did along his career.”
What She’s Carrying Home
Sarah is currently a Sergeant First Class stationed at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska, serving as interim First Sergeant — a position a full grade above her current rank. She is working simultaneously toward her PhD and toward an instructor role within the military. In 10 years, she says, she’ll be heading toward retirement and preparing to volunteer with nonprofits, teaching in remote parts of the world.
She carries Moore County with her everywhere she goes — not as nostalgia, but as a standard. The approachability. The outreach. The county mayor who bales hay one day and wears a suit the next and stops to speak in both settings. She uses that image regularly, she says, to explain small-town life to people who grew up somewhere else entirely.
And she has a message she wishes she could deliver to every seventeen-year-old in Moore County standing on the edge of something new and frightening.
“It is more than okay to both stay or go,” she says. “I wish I could go back in time to my 17-year-old self getting ready to graduate at MCHS and tell her that it is okay to leave and try something new. The best part of a small, close-knit community like ours is — no matter how long you’re gone, you’re always welcome back.” •
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