Marine veteran turned UNT Health Fort Worth professor finds new meaning in service

After leaving the military, Ryan Schalles kept asking himself a question.

What did my military service really accomplish?

He’d trained. He went to war in Afghanistan. He returned. 

Yet his service felt abstract, even after four years in the Marines, Schalles said.

But as he steps into his everyday role as an assistant professor at UNT Health Fort Worth, Schalles has begun measuring the value of his service differently. In his current role, he’s learning about what happens to veterans after they take off the uniform and informs health workers about how to better care for former service members.

“I can see the impact that I’m making in people’s lives,” Schalles said.

‘Manly enough or tough enough’

Schalles felt lost growing up in Lubbock.

He didn’t have a good relationship with his dad. He didn’t know what it meant to be a man. He didn’t have a role model.

Schalles patched together his own definition of a man: someone strong, someone who provides.

“I never felt like I was manly enough or tough enough,” Schalles said. “I wanted to prove to myself that I could do something hard.”

Schalles enlisted in the Marine Corps in 2011 and went off to boot camp.

Ryan Schalles

Years in service: Corporal in the United States Marine Corps from 2011 to 2015, and first lieutenant in the United States Army Reserves Nurses Corps from 2020 to 2024.

Current occupation: Founding faculty and assistant professor at UNT Health College of Nursing and clinical administrator at the Texas Center for Patient Safety.

Family: Married to Jenna Schalles and they have two children.

Education: 

• Working on a Ph.D. in nursing from the University of Texas at Tyler
• Master’s degree in nursing education and a bachelor’s in nursing from the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center

Definition of service: “Service is simply giving of oneself to another in any way that you can.”

Ian Goodrick, a Navy veteran who became close friends with Schalles in nursing school at Texas Tech University, said they enlisted for similar reasons.

“Love of country, patriotism and go see the world,” Goodrick said.

Torrey Tiedeman, who served with Schalles, said they were looking for similar things. Brotherhood. A test.

“We wanted to do something difficult, something we could be proud of,” Tiedeman said.

Following training, Schalles was sent to Afghanistan, where he was a point man in combat patrol, sweeping for improvised explosive devices with a metal detector. If he missed one, the Marines behind him could pay with their lives.

The weight of life and death fell upon Schalles’ shoulders — at 19. He prayed to God that if something happened, it would happen to him.

“It’s an immense amount of stress, but also I think it reflects the depth of love and humanity that we have for each other, that we would be willing to die,” Schalles said. “Not necessarily for an abstract concept like our nation, but for the people who we served with.”

During his deployment, Schalles befriended an Afghan interpreter known as Omar who was paired with his unit. Schalles joined him for a Ramadan dinner, and the interpreter gave him a headscarf that he still keeps in a box of military mementos, he said.

Looking for a career

Goodrick spotted the student sitting in the front row of a microbiology class at Texas Tech and had an inkling that he was also a veteran. 

“It’s pretty stereotypical veteran behavior — sit in the front row and try to do as good as possible in the class,” Goodrick said.

Goodrick sat down. Schalles, too, recognized his seatmate as a fellow veteran. But they wouldn’t become close friends until they found themselves sharing the front row in another class.

Goodrick remembers the conversations he and Schalles had about their futures. Goodrick wanted to become an anesthesia nurse. 

Schalles wasn’t as sure.

He wanted to be a physician, he said. However, when he shadowed a few of them during their workday, they gave him some advice: “This job sucks.” 

Schalles started thinking about being a nurse practitioner. He shadowed again. The nurse practitioners gave him similar advice: “It sucks, too.”

“I was already in nursing school, so I was like, ‘I guess I’m going to be a nurse,’” Schalles said.

He graduated in 2018 and started working as a nurse at a hospital in Lubbock. When the pandemic hit in 2020, Schalles was burned out by the pandemic work and considered leaving the profession, he said.

A conversation with one of his former professors suggested a different path: teaching.

Educator was a role that fit Schalles, Goodrick said. His friend really liked helping others learn and understand concepts.

Goodrick saw that in nursing school. They were studying for a pharmacology exam. They needed to remember the name of a drug, what it does, the affected body pathway and side effects. And then the patient’s medical history, whether the drug would be right for them.

Goodrick said he struggled to memorize the information needed for psychiatric medications. Schalles came up with a mnemonic device that Goodrick has long forgotten but that helped him at the time.

“He’d break it down Barney style,” Goodrick said, referring to the purple dinosaur’s simple way of explaining concepts to kids. 

Goodrick aced the test.

‘Who I am today’

Leaving the Marine Corps brought mixed emotions for Schalles, who was excited to return home but was devastated at losing a part of himself.

“I lost my friends. I lost my job, who I was. My identity,” he said. “I was really lost and struggled.”

Over time, Schalles rebuilt his identity and fused his military identity with his civilian life. 

Each new piece came with a sense of service, he said. 

As a nurse, he gained responsibility to his patients. 

As a teacher, he takes time to talk to students and see how they’re doing. 

As a husband and father, he supports his wife and cares for their two children.

Faith became the center of Schalles’ new identity.

Shortly after Easter last year, Schalles signed a message in a group text of old Marine buddies with “God bless.” When a friend gently teased him, Schalles explained that he was Catholic and had been attending Mass for three years, Tiedeman recalled.

Both men had been raised Protestant and drifted from church as teenagers. As Tiedeman considered attending Mass, Schalles encouraged him without pressure.

“He was instrumental in my conversion,” Tiedeman said.

Faith gave Schalles a framework for his life. Catholicism changed how he saw his family and the concept of service, he said. Now he strives for serving others at all times. 

“Service has definitely developed from this abstract idea when I was in the military to more concrete aspects,” Schalles said.

After three close military friends died by suicide, Schalles began studying what he calls reculturation stress, the culture shock a veteran experiences when returning to civilian life. He hopes to show that it’s distinct from post-traumatic stress disorder and to develop interventions to help veterans through the transition.

“If I can show that, then maybe we can develop interventions to help with this thing that everybody is kind of ignoring,” Schalles said.

‘Turned over every rock’

When Schalles tried to define the key accomplishment of his military service, the answer wasn’t immediately clear. 

Then Omar, his former interpreter, sent a message to Schalles over WhatsApp, Tiedeman said. When Kabul fell to the Taliban in 2021, Omar told Schalles he was trying to get his family out but wasn’t sure they could leave.

“He basically turned over every rock that he could, looking for someone on the ground or someone in the States who was in touch with someone in Afghanistan that could help get them out,” Tiedeman said.

Schalles eventually found a Marine from his old unit who was assigned as a guard at Kabul Airport. The guard let Omar and his family through and got them on a plane, Tiedeman said.

Meanwhile, Schalles tasked Tiedeman with helping file the family’s special immigrant visa application, Tiedeman said.

Omar and his family made it to the United States, Schalles said.

“I think that God put me there to meet him to help his family,” he said.

Now Schalles has a concrete answer as to how his service mattered.

Jacob Sanchez is education editor for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at [email protected] or @_jacob_sanchez.

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