As soon as I stepped off the sweat and body odor soaked Boeing 747 I started to question whether or not this was the best decision I could have made. With my trusty, well-traveled rucksack hoisted over my shoulders, and my sunglasses covering my blinking eyes, I strode out onto the familiar, sun-blasted tarmac of Al Udeid Air Base.
I can’t believe I forgot how hot it is here, I growled internally to myself as the long line of Military and Coalition partners made its way to the same old in-processing building, where we sat in the same chairs as I had just over a year prior. Except that this time I received a different, and thankfully much shorter welcome briefing than I had received the previous February.
Instead of returning to Al Udeid as a member of the Expeditionary forces, I was returning as a member of Air Force Central Command (AFCENT)’s Detachment 6, a small unit of “permanent party” who were responsible for auditing and overseeing the massive War Reserve Materiel contract that stretched across several different countries in the Middle Eastern Area of Responsibility (AOR). The Detachment was filled with Subject Matter Experts who acted as Contracting Officer Representatives (COR) on each of the different functionalities that the contractor provided to the USAF, and was led by a Logistics Officer, with another Logistics Officer serving as the Operations Officer. I was back at Al Udeid to serve as the Quality Assurance Flight Commander and as one of two Administering Contracting Officer (ACO)’s that were assigned to the Detachment.
In short, I was here to advise non-Contracting personnel on how to remain inside contractual boundaries of a massive contract while inspecting the contractor.
Six months prior to my return to Al Udeid I had been trying to figure out any way to effectively not follow the more-or-less predetermined Career Path that Contracting Officers were expected to follow. Moving from an Operational Squadron, working with Airmen to go to a System Program Office (SPO), working on one of the Air Force’s many large scale acquisition programs sounded incredibly boring to me. So I tried everything I could think of to delay or avoid getting stuck in what I was starting to consider the contracting equivalent of the doldrums.
My first attempt was to attempt to volunteer for any of the three deployments to Afghanistan that were advertised one November afternoon. When I went to go request that my commander approve my volunteerism efforts, fully loaded with bargaining propositions of promising to go to a SPO as soon as I came back, Major Travieso flatly refused as soon as I opened my mouth, as he had also seen the email solicitation for volunteers.
“Ell-Tee, you just got back,” Major Travieso sounded a bit exasperated with the request, “your Momma would come down here and kill me if I let you get sent away again.”
That was a hard statement to deny, and Major Travieso sent me away before I was able to pull out my meager bargaining chips. “Your boots are sandy enough,” he said, “you’ll get another chance.”
Faced with rejection, but not willing to give up just yet, I returned to my desk and continued to scheme. I was scheduled for a Permanent Change of Station in the summer of 2017, and the listing of available jobs was broadcast and sent out the December prior. In that list held my second chance.
It took some bargaining, mostly promising to apply for an Advanced Academic Degree program or to go to a SPO after it was over, but Major Travieso begrudgingly agreed to sign off on my list of job preferences with the year-long Al Udeid tour at the top.
Wading through the heat in Qatar I was now starting to think about all the places my friends had been assigned to instead. Los Angeles, Japan, the Mountains of Utah, and Boston, to name just a few. Here I was, sweating my nuts off as I loaded my bags into the back of Detachment 6’s Suburban. I had not started to regret my decision, but I was questioning it.
The Supply COR and Operations Officer had come to pick me up from the terminal, and after exchanging pleasantries, they handed me my new work phone, and drove me to drop my bags off in the dorm room that would serve as my home for the next twelve months.
Very little had changed in the ten months I had been gone from Al Udeid. A few buildings were conspicuously absent, but everything was the same three shades of brown that I remembered. After I dropped my bags off in my room, we drove to Detachment 6’s office building, where I met the rest of the CORs and settled into my office. Finishing that, I went to boot up my computer and check my email.
I had not been gone long enough for the local Communications Squadron to purge my email address from the system, so they did not even have to make a new one for me. I had to clean out hundreds of emails that had accumulated over the past ten months. As everything was deleting, I popped a disk into the disk drive and pulled my Advanced Academic Degree application off.
Following the instructions written on the application, I loaded everything onto a single email and sent it to the prescribed email address. With that completed, I emailed Major Travieso and let him know that I had arrived safely at Al Udeid and had sent off my application as promised.
Now what? I was alone in the office for the next two weeks as the other ACO was on leave. After over seventy two hours of travelling due to a scheduling mix-up leading to an extra twenty four hours in Baltimore, and a misadventure to Georgetown, I was exhausted. I tried to get more acquainted with the contract files, but I was too exhausted to retain anything that I was reading. Quitting time finally rolled around, and I dragged myself out to drive back to my dorm room.
It took a bit to get my sleep cycle on track, and as I learned a bit more about the assignment I had volunteered for, I was getting more pleased with it. It may not have been the greatest choice, career-wise, but I was going to get to interact with people who had many different specialties, and I was going to get to travel a lot.
To top all that off, for much of my stay at Al Udeid many of my friends from USAFA or Goodfellow, or even my previous rotation at Al Udeid were going to be rotating in and out.
As someone who knew how to get around Doha, I was happy to learn that I could leave base even easier than I had been able to the previous year. Within just a few days, I was driving people downtown to show them my favorite places. Including the shawarma and juice shops behind a gas station. I was going downtown almost daily, bringing friends and coworkers to various corners of Doha.
It might not have been the best career choice to take this assignment, but if that was the case, I was determined to have fun.