Missonary-turned-Marine reconnects with faith during grueling training

Shouldering 85 pounds of gear, the 5-foot-3, 115-pound Sgt. Tara-Lyn Baker skied up the snowy slopes of California’s Mount Shasta and jumped into a hole cut into the ice of a frigid lake.

“It was part of the training,” said the 25-year-old Benton graduate. “It was 15 degrees with a 40-mile-per-hour wind, and we had to ski with our packs on into the lake and show that we could rescue ourselves and our gear.”

Baker endured the icy experience and numerous other physical and mental challenges en route to being the first female Marine to graduate the summer and winter Mountain Leader training courses.

Beyond the certification and accolades since that milestone, however, Tara-Lyn can’t ignore a spiritual rekindling she experienced during the course.

“I decided to do the Marines thing without really factoring in His plans for me. During a really tough hike in the summer course when I felt miserable and was questioning myself and my life choices at that moment, I really felt God say: ‘I have been with you through all of this, and you haven’t even leaned on Me once. You’ve done all this so far on your own. Imagine how much more we could accomplish if you learned to lean on Me.’”

Missionary becomes a Marine

Long before tackling hypothermia labs — where Tara-Lyn had to sit in the bottom of a frigid pond for up to 15 minutes until she got hypothermia and then needed to revive herself as part of the winter training — she could be found playing in the forests of Columbia County.

“I was always out in the woods, playing in the creeks and hunting with my pap,” she said. “I was holding a weapon by the age of three. Some of my favorite times were being out there with my dad.”

Those moments were memorable for her father, Wes, as well.

“I taught all my kids rappelling. We’d spend a lot of time on the rocks in the mountains,” he said. “Tara is very tough and very beautiful — a father’s worse nightmare!”

Wes served in the Army — he was stationed in Germany when Tara-Lyn was born. She has seven younger siblings, including a brother who is currently in the military. A cousin and one of her grandfathers also have been involved.

“I was always proud of the military members of my family, however I never thought I’d go into the military myself,” she said. “My passion was missionary work. Pretty much right after high school, I went into ministry with Youth With a Mission (YWAM) based in Montana and went all over the world, traveling and doing missionary work.”

During that time, she felt a desire to really challenge herself, and was drawn to the military.

“I decided to enlist with the Marine Corps because it is the hardest,” she said, joining early in 2014 and leaving for boot camp by October of that year.

New experiences

“I hated boot camp — it was such a stark contrast to the calm, loving environment in YWAM. I really felt out of my element,” she said. “Surprisingly, when I got to combat training, I fell in love with it.”

She felt that was because in boot camp — you need to focus completely on yourself to survive each phase. In combat training, it is about taking care of others, something Tara-Lyn attributes to her faith-based passions via missionary work.

“I became a squad leader without ever really trying to be one, and it was a big responsibility I enjoyed. I also loved the competition and learning the technical issues of what combat is,” she said. “I grew up playing paintball, and through combat training, I got to ‘play’ war.”

Tara-Lyn was then sent to specialty school to be a heavy equipment mechanic, servicing John Deere, Caterpillar and other pieces of heavy equipment affiliated with the Marines. Three months later, she was transported to Okinawa, Japan, for one of the Marine’s most grueling experiences — jungle warfare training.

“It was pretty wild. I was rappelling down into the jungle and sleeping on the jungle floor where even the smallest of lizards can be very poisonous. It was an experience I’ll never forget. My favorite part is that there is this algae there that glows at night — it’s like looking at the stars on the ground,” she said. “It was very challenging and took a lot out of me, but it also helped get a feel for intense trainings. When I heard about the mountain leaders training and that no female Marine had passed both, I decided I needed to do it.”

Mountain leaders experience

Tara-Lyn was accepted pretty quickly — partially because so few want to commit to a program so remote in the California back country.

“Some call it the base where careers die because it is so far out there in the middle of nowhere surrounded by mountains and woods,” she said. “But it didn’t phase me. Thanks to growing up like I did in central Pennsylvania, I learned to really appreciate being out in the country like that.”

The summer mountain leader course was something Tara-Lyn said she loved — it was full of climbing, hiking, rappelling and crevasse rescues. Nearly every part of that session is testable, including blindfolded knot-tying sessions — “they’d tell us to tie a butterfly knot blindfolded in 30 seconds and then we’d move onto the next” — and performing different cliff-side rescues off Mount Shasta, including rappelling down a cliff with “just two ropes” and minimal gear.

“I loved climbing in the summer. I found I was really good at it being so tiny and flexible. Some of the guys had long arms that helped them with climbing, but I was able to come up with some creative ways to get up the mountain,” she said. “We’d do night climbs, too, going up cliffs in the dark. I loved sleeping out some nights under the stars with no tents.”

Despite having so many memorable moments from the session, there were countless reminders of the intensity of the training and how the elements could change things quickly, she added.

“One night, it got so cold, a lot of the guys got dropped from the training due to getting hypothermia. A group of us were huddled together and we could hear them calling in people to evacuate them,” she said. “We talked, tried to keep warm and were careful with how we dressed in layers. At one point, a little frog hopped up and was trying to get into our sleeping bags because it was so cold.”

The winter mountain leader training course was different for Tara-Lyn.

“While everything is testable in the summer course, the winter session is one you have to survive through,” she said. “I wanted to do the summer course for myself, but the winter course I did because as I got to know the other Marines, our base is really tapped out. The men instructors would go out on a course of 15-20 days in the mountains away from their families. I wanted to help out so they weren’t so strapped and needing to sacrifice so much of their family time.”

Resetting priorities

Tara-Lyn has felt herself become more grounded since her summer leader hiking encounter with God.

“Living in this culture it can be a struggle. I came here in an attempt to do my own will. I jumped out of what God has planned, but He is going to use it,” she said. “In the military — and even in day-to-day life — we can find ourselves with intense tunnel vision on what’s next to accomplish and what needs to be done to get there.

“As a Christian, though, the mindset is different. It is about having a heart for those around you and sacrificing what we want for what God wants in our lives. It is very humbling.”

Tara-Lyn calls her outdoors revelation her “Ecclesiastes moment.”

“We spend so much time trying to do things on our own, with our own vision, and we forget that God has a vision that is much bigger,” she said. “It is hard to ask for help — to realize that He can give us strength beyond anything we can do on our own.”

Tara-Lyn’s time with the Marines runs until August of 2020, at which time she plans to return to the YWAM missions program, using what she’s learned from these courses to help get supplies and God’s word to those in the most remote areas of the world.