Life as a Paid Nomad: Preping through Assessment to Deployment

About two years ago (2010), I attended the annual conference put on by the California State Division of the International Association for Identification. The conference was held at a lovely resort in Palm Desert, CA where the temperatures made it more appealing to sit by the lazy river and sip a margarita than attend lectures and classes. I resisted this siren call though and an as a result attended a lecture that would eventually change my life.

The speaker was Hilary Moses and the topic was Expeditionary Forensics. Hilary talked about what it was like to work in the Forensics field in the middle of a war zone. This might not sound like the best idea to almost everyone, but to me and those that do this job, it sounded like the job of a lifetime. Someone out there was willing to pay me to travel abroad doing what I love and provide me with an adventure…how could I pass that up? That lecture created a seed that grew into a nagging that eventually led to me applying and receiving a job offer to be like Hilary and ply my trade in Afghanistan.

I was hired by BAE Systems as a rotation LPE. This means that I work in both the US and overseas (wherever the need for me to be is) as a latent print examiner. The job is perfect for a nomad like myself because you never quite know where you’re going to be stationed or for how long. They can send you out for a few weeks to a year or so at a stretch or the contract could expire and you could find yourself unemployed within a few months. It’s all a gamble, but one that I’m willing to take. The moneys good, the adventure present, and there are stories waiting to be discovered.

Before being deployed, I needed to complete 3+ months of paperwork, readings, and assessments. I was hired as a contractor, but the program that I’m working for is run by the Army and they feel the need to make sure you know what you’re doing before sending you on your merry little way.

This training started with four weeks in Dalgren, VA where I meet a bunch of helpful people, read pages and pages of documents that were half out of date or didn’t related to me, completed medical and dental appointments, was stick in the arms with a zillion shots (they call them vaccines, I call them painful), received some cool new dirt colored clothing and gear, and eventually was signed off to be shipped to my next location, DPC.

DPC is the Deployment Processing Center. I spent a lovely four days in the off-the-beaten-path town of Jacksonville, NC, the home of Camp LeJune Marine Base. Here I got to sit around a lot, have people make sure that the paperwork that I had done in Dalgren was acceptable and complete, and get stuck with more needles. In the evenings I got to wander the local Wal-Mart, as that and restaurants are about the only entertainment in the town. One the plus side, I received a set of dog tags and pissed off the guy making them cause apparently the four allergies that I needed printed on the tags keep causing the machine to break. Once I showed up and stood over the guy’s shoulder and told him to leave one of the allergies off (poison oak), the machine seemed to work fine and then I was free to drive the nine hours to my next destination, Atlanta, GA.

Atlanta and Fort Gillem have been my home for the last eight weeks. Here I endured the stress of assessment where one wrong move meant you were going home before you ever really got anywhere. It’s confusing, stressful, and can mean that you left your job only to become unemployed. There were about two weeks where I thought that: “This is it. I’m done. Finish. They’re going to send me home.” The assessment had multiple components to it, the hardest two being a comparison exam and a written exam.

Before I came here, I was freaked out about the written and felt that that would be the hardest thing. I studied for two months, made flash cards, practice sheets, talked to others that had taken the test, and read a few textbooks, so that by the time I got to the written test, the only thing I needed to worry about was hand cramping. The exam was 125 short answer questions that needed to be handwritten. Anyone that knows me (or is reading this blog) can attest to the fact that I have a different definition of “short” than most people. The final result was five and a half hours of writing and 27 pages of chicken scratch. Then it was a week and a half of wondering if I was going home until they came back and told me I’d passed. The guy grading my exam was like: “I would have had it graded sooner, but it was 27 pages.” What’d they expect with 125 short answer questions?

Turns out that the hardest part of the assessment were the comparisons. I figured that these would be fine. You have eight hour to correctly identify or exclude 12 of 15 latent prints to one or more “suspects”.  It’s one of those things that you either can do or can’t do. Besides just looking at prints, there is no real way to study for this. When I actually took the test, my first impression for half the prints was “you’ve got to kidding me! These aren’t even comparable.” At the end of eight hours, I had made nine correct identification and/or exclusions. I then spent three nerve-wracking days waiting to see whether I would be granted a second shot (there’s a random guy that oversees the entire Expeditionary Forensics Division that gets to decide if someone gets a life line or a plane ticket home) before my assessor told me as an off-hand remark on his way out the door at the end of the day that I’d be granted a retest. Apparently my nervousness and constant state of “freaked out” had no affect on him whatsoever.

Obviously since I’m writing this and set to deploy in two weeks, I passed my make up test (by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin, but passed nonetheless). The rest of the assessment period was a series of mock cases and mad scientist chemistry. This was the fun part. I got to make chemical concoctions and work with lots of nice expensive equipment that I’ve only ever seen in the Forensic catalogs, and realize that lasers are cool.

Currently, I am waiting for the last of my four mock cases to be reviewed and for my paperwork to be submitted for the final stamp of approval. Then it’s a hectic week at home buying gear, packing, driving, and visiting everyone before I ship out on the 19^th. If all goes to plan, I’ll arrive at my final destination, Maxar-i-Sharif, the night before Thanksgiving.  Until then…