Day 2: Training turns into ‘hurry up and wait’

Let’s just say reality has finally sunk in and I am no longer waking up each morning and thinking, “Wow! That was weird, I just had the oddest dream, I had a dream that I had to go back in the Army ...”
— Excerpt from an e-mail message Tom Deierlein sent on March 7, 2006, while training to go to Iraq

Laura T. Coffey Contributing editor • E-mail

As Tom Deierlein answered the call to active duty, the Army told him again that he didn’t have to respond.

At a morning briefing at Fort Jackson, S.C., in November 2005, Army officials told Deierlein  and most of the other officers present that they were free to go back home.

Some already knew they didn’t have to be there. Deierlein, a 38-year-old executive from Manhattan who had been shocked to receive call-up orders in the mail, got a phone call three days before he left for Fort Jackson. An Army official told him he had fulfilled his eight-year military service obligation years ago. He decided to report anyway.

Others were bowled over by the news. Many had packed up their belongings, taken leaves from their jobs, broken leases, attended going-away parties and said difficult goodbyes to spouses, parents and children — for nothing.  Most had been out of uniform for eight to 10 years — not quite as long as Deierlein’s 12 years, but still a considerable time without any military training. A few had been out for 14 years or more.

When they had questioned their call-ups a month earlier, they had been threatened with jail time. But now that they had upended their lives and relocated, they were free to go? How could this be?

A shift in policy
Here’s what happened: In July 2005, the U.S. Department of Defense changed a longstanding policy governing how and when officers in the Individual Ready Reserve can be called up.

Prior to the change, whether they realized it or not, officers remained officers for life unless they formally resigned their commissions. Many officers in the Individual Ready Reserve have insisted they were unaware of that requirement; they thought their military obligations ended after eight years. Army officials contend that the resignation requirement was well known among officers.

The Defense Department unveiled its new policy on July 16, 2005, after aggrieved officers who were ordered to Iraq sued the Army on the grounds that their military commitments had ended years earlier.

Tom’s Journal Getting ready “The biggest risks I will face are what you hear about on the news, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), roadside bombs, suicide bombers and snipers taking pot shots. I try not to worry about those things...”

The policy shift was significant. It meant that instead of having to take the initiative to resign, officers had to take action to stay in the military past the eight-year mark.  This put officers in the same position as the rank and file.

Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, an Army spokesman, said the Defense Department changed the policy in response to complaints.

“The DOD said, ‘OK, we understand that all the enlisted people have taken positive steps to remain in,’” Hilferty explained. “‘In order to stop the complaints and be fair … let’s make sure everyone has to take those same positive steps to remain in.’”

But if the policy changed in July 2005, why were officers still receiving call-up orders in the mail and being warned about warrants for their arrest as late as October of that year?

Hilferty said the change didn’t take effect until Nov. 4, 2005 — nearly four months after the Defense Department released the new policy and one day before Deierlein’s accelerated wedding. That’s when Brig. Gen. Sean Byrne, the Army’s director of military personnel management, signed a memo outlining how the policy change would be implemented.

“Honestly, that’s not that long of a time period,” Hilferty said.

A daunting decision
Capt. Bill Billeter, a graduate student who had just abandoned his classes at West Virginia University with one semester to go, staggered out of the briefing in shock. He didn’t know what to do.

In the past month he had blown his family’s budget moving his pregnant wife, their  4-year-old son and all their belongings to Florida so she could be near her family when she had the baby.  Unlike Deierlein, he hadn’t been reachable by phone in the final days before training because he’d been piloting a U-Haul truck almost 1,000 miles south to St. Petersburg, then driving more than 500 miles north to this Army post in South Carolina.

If he stayed in the military as a captain, he’d make about $80,000 a year tax-free — money that could help support his growing family. He’d also miss the birth of his second child.

If he bailed on his Army service, he knew he’d feel guilty. He’d been feeling guilty anyway, sitting on the sidelines, watching the Iraq war unfold on TV.

Billeter found a phone and called his wife.

“What do you think?” he asked her.

“Honey, I’ll support you no matter what.”

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