How I got to Baghdad

First things first. YDS apologizes profusely for his extended absence. Ending my former job and moving to a new one proved to be more stressful than I anticipated and stress has an unfortunate side effect of sapping my motivation to write. I also discovered Facebook, so a lot of my one-liners have ended up there, rather than here. I still plan to blog about Japan, so if you were hoping for that report, you’ll have to continue being patient, but it will come eventually.

But I digress. On to the topic at hand.

Perhaps you remember two summers ago, when the Foreign Service came under a great deal of criticism for its supposed failure to adequately provide enough volunteers for our missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The press somehow gained access to an internal “town hall” which, like many of the town halls on medical reform, got somewhat ugly. The media coverage that followed gave my profession a pretty bad black eye. There are conspiracy theories about whether the entire happening was stage managed, but I have no intelligent opinion on that. I’m not generally a conspiracy theory type of blogger.

The missions were quickly full staffed after that and I like to think that our profession regained some respect by responding to the criticism (fair or not).

Anyway, it’s against that backdrop that I found myself in the center of the effort to make sure that the awkward moments of the Summer of 2007 were not repeated for the Foreign Service. Secretary Rice informed me (well, she had the Director General send me a letter) that she thought I would look cute in Iraq and that I had “special skills” that would be of good service.

I took a deep breath, that’s for sure. Even as things were improving in Summer of 2007 in Iraq, the previous months had been rocky, to say the least. Nonetheless, I accepted my Career Development Officer’s (CDO, perhaps better known as Career Destruction Officer) offer of a cup of coffee to discuss what it really meant to get the letter.

As it turns out, it did not really mean that I had to go to Iraq. At least not necessarily this time around. But as he put it, “The Embassy in Iraq is a big place and takes lots of people serving there. The Foreign Services is not all that many people.” If you take out the people who are medically unable to serve in undeveloped countries, the numbers shrink further. In other words, many if not most Foreign Service Officers are going to have to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan at one time or another. So it became a question of not so much if, but when? And if I was going to go, would it be when I decided or when the Department decided?

In other words, I could kick the can down the road, but it was going to stay in the road.

Other factors were at work as well. To be close to Skippy Jr., I had served two tours in Washington DC. The Foreign Service requires that Officers go abroad after five years in the States. So if I was going to take another two year tour in DC, I would have had to seek a waiver based on my family circumstances. It was probably mostly an administrative exercise, but there that was. A tour in Iraq would allow that clock to be reset after only one year abroad and away from Skippy Jr, as opposed to the ordinary three year tour.

The next and perhaps more important factor was the current compensation package. With Congress still throwing money at Iraq and Afghanistan, the Department had (and still has) significant ability to put together very attractive compensation packages for Officers willing to serve in Iraq. The details are somewhat dry, but suffice it to say that not only will I be making very close to twice of my salary in DC with virtually no expenses. On top of that, the Department will pay for three trips home during the one year tour--a benefit enjoyed only by Officers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The kicker, and the benefit most likely to go away soon, was the ability to link my assignment in Iraq to virtually whatever assignment I chose. With an eye toward being close to Skippy Jr. again as quickly as possible, I chose a job in the training division of the Department, teaching new consular officers how to be consular officers. It is a job that I thought from my first weeks with the Foreign Service, “Man, I’d like to do that.”

With all of that, the negatives were still there. Iraq is dangerous. There’s no getting around that. But the Department has more security here than anywhere else in the world, and their only concern is keeping all of us safe. They’re smart and good at their jobs, and I trust them.
The other main negative was being away from Skippy, Jr. That was (and is) a big deal for me.

But it isn’t the Dark Ages. The telephone in my apartment has a US commerical number. There’s email. I’ve set up a blog just for him to read. I’ve Skype’d with him twice. (Is that a word yet? It will be soon.) We should be on Skype again here this afternoon. And the three trips home, with the extra income, will be big fun trips. There’s a family gathering for Thanksgiving in Sandbridge. There’s the Disney cruise at the end of February. And for the third trip home, we’ll visit family and friends on the Cape and in the Hamptons (huh-ha! Fancy!)

It’s a good decision. It’s the right decision. But it was still a hard decision.

YDS