The first thing Coco Nolen noticed at the border wall during her deployment was the smell.
“There’s people who try to cross and they just don’t make it,” her guide told her. “A lot of dead bodies get brushed up along the shore.”
Nolen’s heart dropped to her stomach. What am I looking at?
Before her, the U.S.-Mexico border wall rose up. That’s your land, she thought. And this is mine. But what do you do when you get to the ocean?
Nolen teared up realizing the extreme measures people were willing to take in their circumstances. It was 2022, she was in California and her first military deployment was forcing her to confront the reality of the border—of people trying to swim across and not making it, their bodies washing up on shore.
“I had no clue,” Nolen said. “No matter what side of the border I was standing on… it’s like standing on people’s graves without even knowing who they are.”
Nolen first joined the United States Army at 17. She spent high school heavily involved in athletics, and during an Army recruitment event at her school, she challenged her best friend to see who could do the most pull-ups. They tied with 20, then found themselves sitting across from the recruiter in a Chick-fil-A, who asked if they were genuinely interested in joining the army. Turns out, Nolen was.
By 18, Nolen was riding a bus to basic training, where she shared a room with 64 women. Her life became two-minute showers, eight-mile ruck marches and 4 a.m. wake-up calls. Knowing the people around her were also struggling gave her the strength to stay positive.
“A lot of people had that mentality,” Nolen said. “Like, do I just want to go home? They’d write to their parents about how depressed they were… God really worked through me in this moment, because I was a light in some people’s life in this way.”
After basic training, Nolen decided to attend Bethel University and major in psychology. But she stayed involved in the military by working in human resources, ensuring soldiers were doing their jobs and getting paid for it.
Then, one day in Oct. 2022, she got the news that she would be deployed to the U.S.-Mexico border and would be leaving the next month.
“We were only given a rucksack and three bags to pack up for a year and a half,” Nolen said. “So I was like, ‘Alright, what you got for me?’”
After arriving at the border and seeing the wall, Nolen and her squad received their assignments. While some were assigned to work along the border with patrol agents, Nolen was placed at the home station in California, watching different areas of the border on camera overnight.
The eight-hour shifts were taxing, but Nolen found ways to handle the stress through athletics.
“Every Saturday we would go meet up at the beach and literally just whoop each other in volleyball just for fun,” Nolen said. “And then we would go play soccer games on the Navy base and just hype it up. So those days made me actually feel like what I was doing in uniform was still fruitful.”
Despite the fun distractions, Nolen still faced difficult challenges with the leadership she was working under.
“There are good and bad leaders everywhere in life,” Nolen said. “But the leadership specifically that was assigned to me wasn’t the greatest. So that made my desire and want to do what I wanted to do… extremely hard.”
Due to the poor leadership, a close friend of Nolen’s was hospitalized after a mental breakdown and was placed in an inpatient facility for a month. It was eye-opening for Nolen, who realized something had to change.
“I got close with other people that actually felt the same way,” Nolen said. “In a sense it was like, I’m not the only person feeling this way. So maybe we should speak up about what’s going on here. And there were a lot of good things that came out of that.”
Regardless, the experiences Nolen had while working on the border led her to foster a new love for people. Through conversations with immigrants and children taken in from the cartel about their lives, she saw the world differently.
“I grew such a sense of love for America, for myself, for others… just in general, a sense of love,” Nolen said. “I’m so grateful because I wouldn’t have said that prior to me leaving.”
During her deployment, Nolen grew close with her sergeant Makenna Stoner. Nolen drew Stoner’s name for a Secret Santa gift exchange in 2022 and gifted her a workout set. The two started talking about workouts and became fast friends.
“Being away from home, you start to feel home in people,” Stoner said. “I felt at home with Coco. There wasn’t a day where one was without the other. We talked about everything and laughed about anything together. I noticed Coco would talk about religion and God with other soldiers and one time I was in the room when a conversation sparked.”
After this conversation, Stoner talked with Nolen more about faith. Thanks to Nolen, Stoner found a personal relationship with God herself and felt changed. She attributes it all to the faith-centered friendship she found in Nolen.
“Deployments don’t last forever, but our love for God and our friendship certainly does,” Stoner said.
Once her deployment ended, Nolen returned to Bethel to pursue her degree in psychology. Amid school and the National Guard, she plans to continue her career in the Army, hoping to work in human resources. But Nolen also has hopes of giving back. After struggling with transitioning from place to place while in the Army, she wants to help those in the same position. Her end goal is to combine her military and psychology experience by opening a private practice dedicated to helping veterans psychologically.
“Just all these different transitions that a soldier undergoes,” Nolen said. “You just get spat back into society and that’s that.”
She was promoted to sergeant in December and will be in charge of leading soldiers in their missions.
Despite the 2-minute showers, long nights watching camera footage and exhausting ruck marches, Nolen thoroughly enjoys the work she does.
“My boyfriend asked me, ‘What would you do if you got sent back? Or how would you feel if you got sent back?’” Nolen said. “My response to that would be… I would still go in a heartbeat.”
