Something new... and kind of old... for us.

Thak got hired today by a civilian contracting firm he has a lot of experience working with. It's the same firm that had the Utah job that got put on hold, but it's a different job, one that definitely won't be put on hold. He will be a field service representative, assigned to a unit of the Army or the Marine Corps, to work on the same kind of unmanned planes that he worked on for five years as a soldier. The key difference is that it is a higher level of mechanical work that he will be doing, so he has to go to school for three months at the company's HQ in Maryland before he can be assigned to a unit. He will be paid during that time, so it's really good even though he'll be away from us for a few months. (He'll probably come back to go to drill every month with his unit anyhow, so we'll see him at least a little bit. We'll be fine.)

Once he's done with training, they will either send him to Afghanistan to join a unit that's already there, or he'll go to a unit that's here in the US. Going directly to Afghanistan would be bad because, well, it's Afghanistan, but on the positive side, the kids and I would stay in El Paso with our friends until Thak came home, and since he would be joining a unit that was already there, it would be a shorter time for him to be gone than if he went to a unit and did a whole deployment with them from start to finish. So basically that has its up and down sides. Now, what we're actually hoping for is that he will be assigned to Ft. Stewart. The HR representative who did his hiring told him that the company is well aware of his good work history with various members of the Ft. Stewart crew, and that it is a consideration to send him there, although they cannot promise anything right now. Obviously it would be good to go back to Ft. Stewart. It's about the closest thing to home that we have as a family. Erin was raised there for most of the first five years of her life. It was me and Thak's first home after we got married. Orren was born there. It's home if ever there was such a thing for a couple old Army vets. He would deploy, but no time particularly soon, according to friends who do this exact job there.

Did we particularly want Thak to have a deploying job? Well, no, we didn't. He got out of the Army because the deployments were a major deal breaker. Even so, you've got to do what you've got to do, and fixing BMW's a million hours a week isn't getting the bills paid. This is better than the Army, though. The money's about what he'd be making as a Sergeant First Class, so no complaints there. Then when he deploys, it's a lot more than that, of course. The money's the least of the ways it's better, though. The biggest way it's better is that you're not locked in indefinitely like he would be in the Army by now. Say he does one deployment and we decide there's no way we could ever do that again. He can find a non-deploying position within the company, and transfer to it, or if there is none, he can choose to leave the company. That's hypothetical, of course. The plans are for him to do this job indefinitely, but the good part is that it's our choice, not Uncle Sam's choice like it would have been in the Army.

To be honest, this is probably a good gig for Thak. It suits him. Thak is a bit of a contradiction. He's a peace-loving Buddhist, who is extremely good at war. He never chose it, of course. It chose him. This is the role he's good at, though, saving the lives of combat troops, not being one. Working on UAV's is a good job for him, because UAV's save lives. The kind he works on do not carry any weapons, just cameras. (We always get asked that.) Thak is great at maintaining UAV's, of course, so for that reason, this job is definitely a good one for him. I don't like that the boys will have to learn what it's like to be without daddy for a long period of time. Erin already knows, and that's bad enough. We have to do what we have to do, though, and honestly, at this point, we're just happy that this contracting firm has given Thak a chance. He deserves that, and I know they will never regret their decision to hire him.

Now, the specifics... He leaves for Maryland in a month. He'll be there for three months in school. Then after that, we don't know. We could be seeing him off to Afghanistan, or we could be packing up our old gypsy wagon, and making our way back to Georgia, or we could be going somewhere else. Nobody knows at this point. What we do know, is that it beats what we've got going on now, and that everything will be fine one way or another.