In this picture above I hid 2nd Lieutenant rank on my ACU as a symbol and a reminder of my goal, how I should carry myself and guide my thinking.  Yes, I know it is entirely out of Army regulation, but just read and I think it will be made clear as to why I secretly wear this passion.

Two days ago while on duty I had a bit of down time, so I decided to recall all of the questions that were asked of me in the first Officer Direct Commission board that I attended.  (If you recall, I wrote a post explaining in great detail how that board played out here.)  After jotting down the questions I looked over them carefully and made mental notes of the ones that required the most crucial answer.  The questions were as follows:

• Tell us what you do or tell us about yourself.
• Who is your mentor or guide at your unit?
• How do you plan to make up for the training you've missed in OCS and ROTC?
• What other leadership roles have you had besides teaching?
• What do you see yourself doing in the Army in the next 3 to 7 years?
• Why didn't you do ROTC in college?
• Why are you trying to become an officer now?

These questions were critical and very probing.  I stumbled to put it very bluntly.  However, I  basically concluded in my blog post about my first ODC board attempt that my trouble stemmed from not having a clear answer to the most important question that wasn't asked in the first interview:  

Why do you want to be an Army Officer?

So, after jotting down these questions and thinking over them, I then resorted to answering this critical question above.

I have natural passion for leading and teaching people.

I desire to be greater than I am by expanding my abilities through knowledge, trial and error, while continuing to press forward.

I believe my purpose lies within the realm of military leadership and decision-making to help serve and protect people of the United States and it's Constitution.

I know that my civilian education, teaching experience and skills will uniquely aid me in developing the additional technical and tactical proficiences and qualities needed to be an Army officer, once coupled with officer training.

Overall I believe that by serving as an Army Reserve commissioned officer, I will be a better leader than I am, allow me to further myself in higher education, and ultimately open doors for a civilian occupation with a major US governmental agency.

I wrote my answer to this question in a creed-like fashion because it makes my thoughts and intentions very clear to anyone that reads it.  I know what I am after and I will not give up!  I stumbled on the first try, but this second time I believe I will do exceedingly better to earn the boards recommendation for direct commission.

My mission is to become a U.S. Army Reserve Commissioned Officer.

Warrior Ethos:  I will always place the mission first. I will never accept defeat.  I will never quit.

On 14 January I received an email from my Unit Administrator (UA) pertaining to my army career.  I would like to just post a quote of the email, and while it is an unclassified document, I don't feel it to be appropriate so I'll summarize.  Basically I submitted an application for pre-qualification for a direct commission as an officer in the US Army Reserve--which I did qualify and I'm currently awaiting further direction from higher up the chain of command.  However, my unit is preparing to mobilize for deployment to Afghanistan and a lot of training is forthcoming throughout this year.  In fact, I already have a week of training coming up in February.  Also prior to deploying we have about thee months of training in another state.  The process of commissioning can be very lengthy and frankly the chances of getting commissioned and trained in time for deployment in January 2012 is slim-to-none at the rate the process is going.  Ideally, it would be great to commission and finish officer school prior to deploying, but as I've already stated...  Suffice it to say if I continue with the direct commission I would be placed on an order of merit, which would make me "non-deployable".  

When I read all this I couldn't help but think something along the lines of  "It can never be a singular and simple path, but forks in the road every so often."

So after much discussion, careful and prayerful thought on the matter, this was my emailed reply to my UA:

We shall see what happens in the coming months following this.

Hooah!