ARMY NATIONAL GUARD, 12 YEARS — Civilian career, two deployments, one identity crisis

Guard for twelve years. One deployment to Iraq in 2007, one to Afghanistan in 2011. The rest of the time I was a software engineer in Atlanta. The hard part was never the deployments. The hard part was coming back to my civilian job after a year away and realizing my career had been parked in place while my peers had advanced two levels. The hardest moment was at a code review in 2012 when an engineer junior to me — who'd joined the company while I was in Helmand — corrected my pull request in front of the team. He wasn't wrong about the code. He was right. I had to learn a different kind of patience for that civilian track. Guard service is a multi-year tax on your career and nobody on the civilian side really sees that bill. Some of the best advice I got was from an IAVA case manager who told me to stop comparing my track to my peers' and start comparing it to my own. I am behind where I would have been without service. I am ahead of where I would have been without it. Both are true. The trick is holding both.