From war to college

After finishing a year in Iraq I'm finally going to start college at the University of Missouri - Columbia. I've been accepted to start college in January. I so enjoyed doing my blog from Baghdad that I really wanted to do a new one for college. I hope you enjoy it...I think it's going to be an interesting four years!

Friday, February 23, 2007

Scare tactics in the Army

As many of you know I just came back in October from a year in Iraq after being called up out of the IRR. Well I'm trying to live out the last 9 months of my IRR contract quietly and concentrate on school. This week was going pretty well...my boyfriend, Rick (we met in Baghdad), came to visit on the way to his first duty station. I took a couple exams and did pretty well. All in all I was feeling pretty good about life in general. Then I got a call from my IRR Career Counselor who asked me to come in to talk to him since the IRR is making some big changes. As it turns out the IRR realized they had a very ill-prepared Inactive "Ready" Reserves force and they are changing the whole system. Now it will be called Individual Warriors and we'll have to muster 1x a year, get PT tests, and be ready for more stateside call ups. No problem, great idea...at least I'm done in like 9 months. Now I was told that I'm nondeployable for 1 year after returning from a deployment and I asked him if this changes that. He said yes! He said that since technically the component is changing I will once again be deployable, less than 6 months since returning. I think he's lying to me to try to get me to join a Reserve unit till my time is up (he says he can guarantee 2 yrs of nondeployability) and I think it's very messed up! Tell me what you think...