Bitter ... Bitter Bitter Bitter

It's been seven years and I'm still bitter about this.

I still have the e-mail from the NSA indicating they were not able to transfer service obligations because the Army felt it best that everyone become a platoon leader (the cookie cutter officer approach). Unfortunately the links are no longer valid (being seven years old) but I had several URLs pointing to articles where the DoD went out and hired an old retired guy (who was bored), a soccer mom (looking for excitement) and some college kid (that had just switched to IT because it was profitable). These hires were then going to be given two years of information warfare training on the taxpayer's dime and subsequently become part of your IT national defense. There were never any follow-up articles to these, but I seriously doubt the venture worked. Meanwhile, my skills were put to the spectacular use of being a 31L platoon leader - the very un-technical job of unspooling really long wire.

Fortunately that didn't last very long and I was able to work my way into more technical roles - but not once in five years was I ever assigned to a slot that really utilized my ability. HRC never failed to amaze me with the blind "well - we have this assignment that sucks or this assignment that sucks ... but really we'll put you where we're short people" mentality. Even directly contacting individuals within these specialized units (with LoRs from people that had contacts there!) resulted in zero leads. Yet over the past seven years I would see news story after news story about the DoD looking at criminals and unqualified individuals (for training) that they would spend tens of thousands of dollars on when there were plenty of people just like me already within the system, on their payroll, with that skills required.

What I found very ironic was that after leaving the Army, there were more opportunities to do exactly the jobs I wanted through the Reserves. The Reserve HRC now sends out e-mail after e-mail advertising these sorts of slots and their need to fill them. Where was that concern before? Why is it easier for a non-involved person to join that unit than somebody who is active and potentially a careerist?

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