Greetings everyone!
So I popped in once about 2 years ago, said hey, and promptly disappeared. Such was life, courtesy of the U.S. Air Force...let's see if I can do better this time!
A quick recap of the last...oh...seven or so years (I think I popped smoke around the summer of '08? Time flies.):
Graduated law school in May '08 and took the bar that July. In that time period, I was conditionally accepted in the U.S. Air Force JAG Corps (pending bar results and a medical exam). After taking the bar is about when I disappeared and moved back to Illinois to wait out the inprocessing. Bar results came out in Oct '08 (I passed, yay) and the Air Force was able to schedule my physical exam in...Feburary '09. Took the physical, then went back to the waiting game. Started doing construction work in March '09 to keep from going insane, and in June finally recieved word that my Officer Training date would be in August.
Attended Commissioned Officer Training in August...in central Alabama
(it was...sad...really, mostly a "here's how you wear your uniform and salute and not look like a clown" for lawyers and docs). First assignment was to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio. Got to Ohio in September, then went back to Alabama for lawyer-specific training until December. I spent the next two years living near Dayton, Ohio. Most of the legal work I did involved addressing government ethics, client services and legal assistance (e.g. wills and powers of attorney for military members along with legal advice regarding areas like divorce or consumer affairs), and military personnel law (stuff like discharges for bad behavior). Also got to try a few criminal cases (a coke user, a pot brownie eater, and some white-collar fraud). During this time I also pretty much stopped with the video games and picked up board games instead; let's face it, board games look more awesome on a shelf!
Around June of '11, my supervisor gave me the "good" news that she had two really great opportunies, and I could choose one. I could either spend a year in Afghanistan doing government contract work, or I could spend a year in Afghanistan doing general legal practice work (and if I choose neither, I was still hot to deploy and would go to Afghanistan anyways and without any input into the office I'd end up in). I chose the government contract option (turned out to be the perfect choice, I'd later find out!). I spent the next 6 months training up, capped by a two week expeditionary course at Fort Dix-MacGuire, New Jersey...in early January
I started my deployment to United States Force-Afghanistan in late January '12. Since mine was a year-long billet (most were 6 months), my duties evolved from contracts and fiscal law to...just about everything, since I had the continuity. All said, I got to spend time in Doha, Qatar; Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan; and Kabul, Afghanistan (twice!). Oh, and a two week paid vacation to Australia courtesy of the Army (awesome!) for spending a year in the suck. In about December '12, I found out I wouldn't be returning to Ohio; rather, I was being assigned to Ramstein Air Base, Germany as a "reward" for deploying.
Finished up my time in the Middle East, returned to the states for two weeks to outprocess, then flew to Germany in Feb '13. Ramstein is anything but a reward. Living in Europe was fantastic, but the workload is crushing (take 18 year olds away from home for the first time, who are legally allowed to drink copious amounts of cheap wine and beer, and you have a recipe for disaster). Legal work there started with doing discharges, and later working as the General Law division chief when our GS-14 senior civilian attorney quit. At least I had the chance to visit parts of Germany, France, Austria, Hungary, Poland, and the U.K.!
Ended up deciding to separate from the Air Force in the later summer of '14. I had been holding out for a chance at being selected to go back to school for an LLM in International Law, but they decided to instead give that school slot to someone who never deployed, had never been overseas, and had never worked with another government agency (let alone a foreign agency). That was all the incentive I had to get out. Finished out my service in October. For one last hurrah, I stayed in Europe and went to Athens, Greece in November and ran the 'original' Athens Marathon (from Marathon to Athens).
From December '14 until about May '15 was spent doing the job search (grad school courtesy the G.I. Bill was also on the table, if the job search had failed). Initially, I had good prospects for a GS-14 attorney position with the Federal Transit Authority in Chicago, IL, but that didn't pan out when they indicated they wanted the attorney to also have environmental litigation experience (would have been nice to have known that before they called me in for the second-round interview!). In May, I went to our family vacation home in Door County, WI to work as the night manager for a local hotel. Finally, in June the U.S. Army called about a position at White Sands Missile Range, NM I had applied to in February and interviewed for in May. The position I applied to was for client services, but they also had an unexpected opening for a contracts attorney position they needed to fill and I had the requisite contracts experience for it (yay for that time doing contracts in Afghanistan!). I accepted that job offer and was given a start date of 13 July 2015.
So, in July I moved to Las Cruces (back to my old stomping grounds of NM!) and started a GS-13 (roughly equivalent to a senior associate attorney or junior partner position at a law firm) contracts attorney position. Did some house hunting and just closed on a nice home that was intended to be a vacation home, but was never actually used. Perfect. So here I am today.
That should about catch me up on 7 years of absenteeism!
