While I arrived in Germany in April of 1995, it took the rest of the summer to get my family there. Due to medical issues with members of my family, they were enrolled in the Exceptional Family Member Program (EFMP). EFMP was created to ensure that if a family accompanied a solder to a duty station (Overseas or in the US) that needed medical care was available for these family members. Between the administrative requirements of this and some ongoing medical care that required a doctor's consent to travel, my family was not able to join me in Germany until August.
Once travel was approved, travel arrangements were made and the family arrived in Frankfort. I remember my first impression of exiting the jetway and seeing two Polizi standing watch holding Uzis. Made quite an impression and this was before US travel changed after 9/11/2001. I wasn't used to machine guns in airports. We made it through customs without issue and managed to get to our van where I'd parked it on the US Air Force section of the Frankfurt airport. The drive back to Wurzburg on the autobahn yielded the first of many interesting questions from my children. Why are there so many signs for Ausfahrt? It must be a huge city. Then I explained that Ausfahrt meant Exit and those were exit markers on the Autobahn.
Getting a family established in a foreign country was not easy. The Army was supposed to give me thirty-days stabilization. The was to ensure that for the first thirty days my family was in country was there to help them adapt. That lasted about ten days before I was sent by our unit operations on temporary duty (TDY) to Heidelberg to spend three days in the flight simulator. The flight simulators had cost a lot of money and they were expensive to maintain (Still much cheaper than flying the actual aircraft though). This caused pressure on operations to keep all training slots filled. Since a large amount of our pilots were preparing for a field exercise in Grafenwoehr, I was selected with another pilot for the simulator. I complained, but I still ended up riding in CW2 Millares' beat-up BMW to the simulator.
Ignoring my stabilization seemed the norm instead of an exception as I found out a few days after returning from the simulator, I too was going to Grafenwoehr. Grafenwoehr was the field training area for Germany. There weren't any attached training areas like Fort Campbell or for Hood had, just this one main one for all of US Army Europe to use. This resulted in my living in a tent in Germany less than three weeks after my family arrived in Germany. But this couldn't get worse could it? Did I mention the low clouds and rain that kept us on the ground the entire exercise? It was cold wet and dreary. But we were army and used to cold and wet and dreary. Then I got a call to report to the commander.
Shit! I thought there was a problem with a member of my family or some other tragedy. In a way I was right, but the tragedy wasn't with my family, it was with my career. He called for me to let me know, in the field, that I'd hadn't been selected for promotion to Chief Warrant Officer Three (CW3) I'd been passed over by the Department of the Army selection board. I had known this was a possibility, but I had gained false hope after my assignment to Degree Completion that DA actually had plans to keep me around. My commander apologized and asked if I knew what I wanted to do? I told him I had to think about it.
Here is some clarity on the situation. I needed promotion to CW3 to accrue enough time to retire at twenty years. This had been my plan since starting active duty. Originally, I'd needed to be a Staff Sergeant (Promotable) to retire. When I had made Sergeant, that had meant making one more grade and just being eligible for the next which was pretty easy. I could have made that threshold with ease. When I went to flight school, I got credit for my active duty time, but I then became subject to the Warrant Officer promotion schedule. Two years as a WO1; Six as CW2; then make CW3 and retire. While in Korea I'd learned I could make CW2 six months early due to my National Guard service credit. That 180 days screwed my career.
At the time, getting promoted early looked like an all win situation. Make rank sooner, more pay, more respect as I wasn't the warrant officer equivalent of a "butter bar" anymore. All my career, getting promoted early had been a good thing. Desert Storm changed things. The army had spent a lot of money and they were now looking to save money. Reduction in Force (RIF) has always been the army way to save money and I was now looking at it personally. RIF changed the way the army was looking at overseas assignments to Germany and Korea and other places, especially in regard to Chinooks.
When I was in the CH-47D transition at Rucker, there were three companies of Chinooks in Germany, Two in Korea and one in Alaska and Hawaii. By the time I left Degree Completion five years later, there was one in Germany, one in Korea and the Alaska unit was only half the size it had been, Hawaii was gone. What did this mean? More pilots than Chinooks. The Gulf War had caused a dramatic increase in departures of seasoned Chinook pilots. I'd arrived at Campbell as a low-time pilot (300 hours) when the unit average was over 1500 hours. When I left for degree completion, I was a high-time pilot with 800 hours and the unit average was 300.
The early promotion to CW2 meant that I was also going before the CW3 board a year earlier than I would have done normally. An ever shrinking pool of assignments and my straw that broke the camel's back was my physical profile. My promotion board consisted of fifteen field-grade officers. Thirteen of them were combat arms (Infantry, Armor, Artillery, etc.) and combat arms types didn't like soldiers with permanent physical profiles. The P3 profile I'd had to try and save my back from further injury, along with force reduction, had killed my career. "What should I do?" was the question.
I had a second chance. If you were non-select the first time, there was a second look a year later. Second look selections were rare, but they did happen. One of my instructor pilots in Korea made CW3 on the second look, so there was a chance. My family had invested a lot of money in the move to Germany, going home after six months was not attractive as we had no money reserves and I had no after army career plans. After some heart wrenching discussions and hope for something to work out, we opted for me to wait it out another year.
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