Heidi Squier Kraft received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the UC San Diego/SDSU Joint Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology in 1996. She joined the Navy during her internship at Duke University Medical Center, serving as both a flight and clinical psychologist. Her active duty assignments included the Naval Safety Center, the Naval Health Research Center, and Naval Hospital Jacksonville, FL.

While on flight status, she flew in nearly every aircraft in the Navy and Marine Corps inventory, including over 100 hours in the F/A-18 Hornet, primarily with Marine Corps squadrons. In February 2004, she deployed to western Iraq for seven months with a Marine Corps surgical company, when her boy and girl twins were fifteen months old. RULE NUMBER TWO is a memoir of that experience.

She left active duty in 2005 after nine years in the Navy, and now serves as a consultant for the US Navy and Marine Corps’ Combat Stress Control programs. She treats active duty patients who suffer from PTSD, and provides invited talks on combat stress, stigma and caring for the caregiver, for 45-50 audiences per year. She lives in San Diego with her husband Mike, a former Marine Corps Harrier pilot, and twins Brian and Megan, who have no memory of their mother's time in Iraq.