Combat Comptrollers

A memoir of an Air Force finance troop

Troops in Kuwait waiting to board a plane into Iraq in 2008. Photo by author.

 

What’s it like to be in the military? I mean like on a normal day. We’ve all seen the war movies, the crawling through the mud under heavy enemy fire, or taking cover when there is incoming artillery. Maybe the basic training comedies like Stripes or Biloxi Blues. New troops learning to march and getting yelled at by their crusty old drill instructor. 

But in real life we’re usually not actively at war, and even then, most members of the military aren’t out on the front line. Similarly, at any given time, only a fraction of active-duty troops are in boot camp. What the heck are all those people doing all day on those military bases scattered around the country?

That’s what I was asking myself back in the late summer of 1992. It had been five years since I graduated high school and my initial attempts at “adulting” didn’t seem to be going all that well. I had the idea that I would go to college, get my history degree and start teaching high school social studies. I liked history and teaching was a job I could understand. Seemed reasonable enough.

Yet after five years I had managed to complete about two years of college, and even at that leisurely pace I felt burned out by the effort and failed to enroll in classes for the fall of 1992. Simply put, I was 23, a career as a teacher seemed to be going nowhere fast, and I was stuck making pizzas at Pizza Hut. That’s when the light bulb lit over my marijuana hazed head, the military.

The armed forces had been in the news a lot the last couple of years with the First Gulf War. I definitely wasn’t interested in fighting terrorists on the front lines, but the war was winding down. Also, being from Wichita, Ks, home of McConnell Air Force Base (AFB), the nice safe Air Force seemed like the natural choice.

The Recruiter

So, in the fall of 1992 I headed into a recruiting office, and this real nice guy with stripes on his sleeves explained all the wonders the Air Force had for me. The fact I had some college meant I could come in at a little higher rank. I made the mistake of admitting to smoking pot. Turns out the military was totally squaresville when it came to potheads.

But the nice man was able to get a waiver to let me enlist anyways. And just like that, after some poking and prodding at the military enlistment center in Kansas City, I was on a plane to Lackland AFB in San Antonio, TX for basic training.

Basic Training

There was a group of five of us from Kansas and Missouri that traveled together. We formed a group that stayed together during our training. David Reeves was also from Wichita and bunked next to me, so we became natural buddies. Having someone to help keep you out of trouble in basic training is invaluable. For most people joining the military it’s their first time away from home and meeting new kinds of people.

There were guys just off the farm, and others from inner cities like New York and Los Angeles. There were guys who were in high school a couple months earlier and others who in their mid-twenties who had some experience in the world. Some were gung-ho for the military who showed up already knowing how to march and salute. Others like me didn’t really know anything about the military and just thought it would be an interesting thing to do for a couple of years. It really was an interesting and diverse group of young men.

Everything about basic training is a little surreal. It’s basically just like what you’ve seen in movies. They want you to eat a certain way, to fold your clothes a certain way. They have a special way they want you to shower, sleep, and walk.

For someone just off the street it’s pretty intense for a while. The main thing the movies get wrong is drill instructors tend to be pretty young, usually in their twenties, not some old sergeant. After the first couple of weeks of trying to take things in stride and get with their program I started to think joining the Air Force had been a spectacular blunder.

The funny thing though, soon after that, things started to come more easily. Before I knew it, I had the system down pat. Going through boot camp is one of those intense experiences that you never forget even though it was a relatively brief experience.

Thirty years later I can still vividly recall every detail of our barracks, running the obstacle course, the firing range, the drill pad and many of my fellow Airmen, especially the core group of us from Kansas that flew there together. After six weeks of physical and emotional ups and downs, I was a newly minted Airman.

Picture of my Basic Training graduation taken by my Dad

From basic training they ship you off to one of their technical schools where you learn a job skill. Knowing how to march and properly wear the uniform is all good and well, but that doesn’t get planes in the air. I had signed up with a guaranteed general job classification in administration, so I knew I was going to have some sort of office job, but I learned towards the end of basic training I was going to be a comptroller.

This brings up the next logical question, what the heck is a comptroller? I soon found out it’s the Air Force’s version of accounting and finance, and I would be heading to Sheppard AFB in Wichita Falls, TX to learn how to do it.

Tech School

Tech School in the Air Force is basically Basic Training Lite. You’re still wearing the uniform all day, eating all your meals in the chow hall and marching everywhere, but there’s less yelling and you get to live in a dorm room with only one other person instead of open bays with your 50 newest best friends.

I learned that I would be a technician making sure people’s pay checks were correct and that they were properly reimbursed for official travel expenses. As boring as this might seem, I found it interesting. There are a lot of factors that can affect someone’s pay.

Obviously rank, but also factors like if they live on base or off, and if they get free meals in the chow hall or not. Some career fields get extra pay, or a re-enlistment bonus, usually because they have a job that is sought after in the civilian world. The rules for travel reimbursement are probably even more detailed and often arbitrary than the rules concerning pay.

My time at Sheppard AFB lasted a couple of months and on the whole wasn’t too bad. After awhile they let the new Airman have more privileges like wearing civilian clothes on weekends and leaving the base after duty hours. I even bought a used bicycle and explored the wonders Wichita Falls had to offer on weekends. 

The big question on everyone’s mind while at tech school is, where would their first Permanent Duty Station be? In my case, since every base has a finance office, I could potentially go to any base in the world. Finally, I got the big news, my first base was going to be McConnell AFB, KS. Wait, what? I joined the military to see the world and my first base was in my hometown. Well God damn!

First Permanent Duty Station

In reality I wasn’t that disappointed with the assignment. After four months of consistently dealing with new and strange situations, the prospects of something familiar was actually kind of nice. In fact, after seeing the sad state of the dormitories at McConnell I decided to live with my parents, right back in my old room I’d grown up in. Did I have to take some ribbing from my co-workers about living with my parents, most assuredly. But while they were living in a small dorm room with a roommate and eating in the chow hall, I had my mom doing my laundry and making home cooked meals, so the joking was a small price to pay.

An Airman’s first permanent base is an important time that can set the trajectory for the rest of their time in the Air Force. Key in this time is their first supervisor, usually a junior Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) who’s probably been in the military for six or seven years. This is a new Airman’s first experience with the real Air Force. 

On the whole I was pretty lucky. Staff Sergeant Cox was smart and a little too aware of that fact, which meant he could be a real asshole. But he also took the time to make sure I really understood how the Comptroller Squadron worked. He’d regularly take me out to lunch and regale me with his adventures at his previous bases in Europe, including intriguing stories of Amsterdam brothels.

Most of my time at McConnell was pretty routine working from 8 to 5 Monday through Friday, but there are memories worth exploring. I remember on my first day they showed me to my desk. My desk. I had always worked in fast food, now I had a desk. That blew my mind for some reason. I’d spend half the day working the counter helping people who had some issue with their paycheck and the other half working on files at my desk.

However, it was still the military, so nothing stayed routine for too long. We’d periodically have war exercises where they would load us on a bus with all our gear and take us to some back area on the base. Once at the simulated forward deployed location we’d go through the process of setting up a mobile finance office.

Depending on how thorough they were being, they’d often run us through some wartime finance scenarios. For example, the Chaplin might come in and say they need to purchase 50 bibles and they needed to know how to pay for them. Or, we would be told we’ve taken some prisoners and need to hire a local company to build a detainment facility, what category of funds can be used to pay for that. 

The idea of a combat comptroller is a bit of a joke even to us. However, without finance troops located alongside fighting forces in forward deployed sites, it doesn’t take long for huge amounts of money to be illegally spent or go unaccounted for.

There were also real-world deployments of aircraft and their crew stationed at McConnell, usually to the Middle East. When that happened, we’d have to work shifts at the deployment processing center to hand out advance payments to troops before they got on the plane, usually in the middle of the night. We also had to stay up to date on our chemical warfare training and maintain our weapons qualification on both the M-16 and M9. 

The M9 is the military variant of the 9mm Beretta pistol. Typically, enlisted people don’t carry pistols in a wartime environment. However, because comptroller troops might need to carry large sums of money, they wanted to make sure we could carry the cash with one hand while firing with the other. You can’t fire an M-16 with one hand. When your normal job entails processing travel vouchers and paycheck corrections, the opportunity to spend the day at the firing range was always a welcome event.

France

Far and away the coolest thing that happened while I was at McConnell started when I was called into the superintendent’s office one day. The US military was helping NATO enforce a no-fly zone over Bosnia after the breakup of Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s. We needed to keep fighter jets in the air over the war zone, which required air to air refueling. 

The French government agreed to let an American squadron of KC135 refueling planes operate out of a French Air Force base in the south of the country, and they needed a finance Airman to go with them. Master Sergeant Voyce had called me into his office to tell me I was going to France.

Non-stop flight from Kansas to France on a KC135 air refueler.

Not only was I going to France, but we’d be staying off base in a hotel and receiving full per diem of $60 per day to cover the cost of our meals. Turns out the actual work was also a piece of cake, they sent me with $250,000 to payout advances to the other Airman to cover the cost of their meals. This was before debit cards were widely used. I just had to keep track of how much everyone got and come back with the right amount of cash. This assignment was a complete fluke, I really wasn’t qualified for it, and several other people were ahead of me for it, but for various reasons none of them could go.

I was also fortunate that I was working in the same space as our Security Forces. They had their own rental car, so we got to explore much of the country on weekends. We drove over to Italy one day and just happened to run into a city that was having a festival with jugglers, people walking around on stilts and other entertainment.

Another day we went to Monte Carlo and lost some money in the casinos. I discovered they don’t actually let the public into their famous casinos for the high-rollers, but they had a little side casino with slot machines for the common rabble. I even got a tattoo in the medieval walled city of Avignon.

We also saw the castle where the popes lived when they moved the papacy to Avignon in the 1300s. The papacy moved back to Rome during the Great Schism in which there were two popes, one in Avignon and one in Rome. The result of this was Catholics fought it out over which one was the real pope.

Too soon my time in France came to an end, at least I still have the tattoo. About a year later my time at McConnell AFB also came to an end. Several important events took place after getting back from France. First, I met this girl named Sonja Littell, and after a brief romance we decided to get married in 1996.

I also made the decision to re-enlist since I hadn’t made much progress on the bachelor’s degree, so the plan to teach high school was effectively dead. Finally, I received an email announcing the Comptroller tech school, that I had graduated from four years earlier, was looking for instructors.

I figured if I couldn’t teach as a civilian, maybe I could teach in the military. I honestly didn’t really expect to get the teaching position, but low and behold, the assignment came through. I was heading back to Wichita Falls, TX, but this time as an instructor.

Back to the School House

Teaching the ins and outs of Air Force finance to new Airmen ended up being one of the highlights of my career. Unlike teaching in public schools, I’d have the same class all day for a month or two. As a classroom teacher, I was often one of the first real Air Force people they met who wasn’t yelling at them for doing something wrong. I also had real world experience doing the job that they were about to do at their first permanent duty station. That put me in a position to help form their initial impression of what to expect in the Air Force. 

After a couple of years, I was put in charge of course development for part of the course. That essentially meant I kept the course instructional materials updated to reflect changes in regulations and the priorities of the career field’s leadership. By the time I left the school I had written a good portion of the course’s textbooks, workbooks and tests. 

Ordinarily teaching is a special duty that you perform for four years before transferring back to a normal Comptroller Squadron somewhere. However, as I approached my four year point, the Air Force announced they had decided to move our school from Texas to Keesler AFB in Biloxi, MS. They wanted to have continuity as the school switched bases so they offered all the instructors the opportunity to transfer to the new base for a period of two years. Because I loved teaching so much I jumped at the opportunity. Because of that I ended up being one of the longest serving active-duty instructors the school ever had.

All good things come to an end, I was happy to get two additional years at the school, but it was time to get back to the real Air Force. At this point I’d been in the Air Force for twelve years and I knew I was hot for a remote assignment. Just like you might guess, a remote assignment is an overseas base that’s in a remote location.

Typically, these are 12 to 18 month assignments in which you’re not allowed to take your family. I was hoping to get a relatively cushy remote assignment like Guam, The Azores or even Greenland where not too much happens. But nope, the powers that be decided I needed to go to Kunsan Air Base in South Korea.

Korea

I was told repeatedly that the people at that base are crazy gung-ho for the military. With the menace of North Korea to the north, war was always a possibility there. The bases close to the North Korean boarder would likely be overrun before they could mount a defense. Kunsan, located in the center of the country, was the line of hard resistance to an invasion.

Going to Kunsan meant you were going to be playing soldier for real rather than the relatively soft assignments I’d had up to that point. But when the Air Force gives you an assignment, it’s not a conversation, it’s an order. So off I went to Korea.

The horror stories I’d been told were both right and wrong. They did take the possibility of invasion seriously. We typically had week long war exercises every other month. Unlike a stateside base where you might play war for a couple of days during duty hours, then go home to your normal life in the evening, at Kunsan you were playing war games 24 hours a day for that week. You had to be armed and in your chemical warfare gear anytime you were outside your dorm room.

Also, unlike a normal base, if war broke out, instead of sending troops to the war, we were already there. Our job was to make sure we were ready to accept tens of thousands of new troops rushing into the country. I routinely put in 24-hour days during these exercises and would need to pour out the pool of sweat that had accumulated in my rubber chem warfare boots before falling into bed.

Taking cover during a simulated attack.

Despite this, Kunsan ended up being a really fun assignment. I got to see a lot of the country, and take tours of historic locations. I shipped my bike there and often spent my weekends exploring the back roads around the base and the nearby industrial city of Gunsan.

With everyone at the base being away from their families, it’s not surprising that the weekends frequently turned into a debauched drunken mess. Poker games, nights at informal on-base clubs or off-base Korean clubs, there were a lot of interesting Friday and Saturday nights during my time in Korea.

About halfway through my time in Korea, David Reeves, my old buddy from basic training transferred in. He’d started off in a different career field, but had retrained into finance at some point. To quote Forrest Gump, “we was like peas and carrots,” exploring South Korea in our free time.

My job there was also pretty interesting. Our commander assigned me as the installation Disbursing Officer. It was my responsibility to make sure all the cash and blank U.S. Treasury checks were properly accounted for and that all the payments and collections balanced out each day.

It wasn’t a difficult job, but was high profile because of the potential consequences of losing a large amount of money. Because of the “work hard, play hard,” mentality of a remote assignment I made a lot of close friends at that base, many of whom I’m still Facebook friends with seventeen years later.

Patrick AFB, FL

Before even going to Korea, I already knew my next base would be Patrick AFB, FL, near the city of Melbourne. So, coming back from Korea I flew to Kansas where Sonja was, and we made our way to Florida.

While at Patrick AFB I made the rank of Master Sergeant which became my final promotion. Initially I worked in the Military Pay Special Actions section. That included overseeing the pay related issues for people who were separating or retiring from the Air Force, who were being court martialed, and new Airman who were being brought on to active duty but not going to basic training first. This was usually new lieutenants who received their commission under the Reserve Officers’ Training Corp. Eventually I became the Chief of the Travel pay office overseeing a staff of about ten people.

Halfway through my time at Patrick I switched jobs and became a budget analyst for the Air Force’s Space & Missile Center. Rather than working with individual service members who needed to do something, I was now working on the accounting part of the Comptroller Squadron.

Through the government’s budget process, each individual unit in the military gets their own little sliver of that big pie. It was my job to track the spending of my assigned units to make sure they didn’t go over budget. The money in this budget comes with strings attached that limits how they can spend it. In addition to making sure they didn’t spend too much, I also had to make sure they used the money for its intended purpose.

Camp Victory, Iraq

More interesting than my jobs at Patrick AFB, the Air Force deployed me twice while I was there. In 2008 it was finally my turn to experience a combat zone with a six-month assignment to Iraq. Just to refresh your memory, President George W. Bush (R-Texas) announced he was sending an additional 30,000 troops to Iraq in 2007, frequently referred to as “The Surge.”

This renewed effort in Iraq led to intensified battles. This was the situation I encountered as I made my way to the country. I entered Baghdad on a C-17 cargo plane that performed a steep combat landing to minimize their exposure to enemy fire. Upon landing someone dropped the ball and didn’t pick me up, so I spent my first twelve hours in Iraq trying to figure out where I was supposed to be.

Eventually I sorted out the initial confusion and I began to acquaint myself with my new duties. Another quick history refresher, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal was a couple of years old at this point. That was an incident where it became publicly known the U.S. soldiers were torturing Iraqi prisoners. Following that incident, the military overhauled its system of detaining enemy combatants. As part of that effort, they realized the Army had done a horrendous job of accounting for the money they were spending on imprisoning suspected Al Qaeda detainees.

The Army mentality is everyone is a soldier first, and if they have another job like working in accounting, that’s secondary. The results were predictable, millions of unaccounted for dollars in their prison operations. To get their finances in order they decided accounting was something the Air Force did well, so they tasked us with fixing the mess. The office was me and another sergeant and a major who was our commander.

We had to completely reinvent the wheel since there was no established means of effectively controlling spending requests. This was before I had any experience in accounting and we were working with Army regulations that used completely different terminology, I had no idea what I was doing. But over the months we developed new systems to track the spending and trained the various units we worked with on what they had to do if they needed to buy something.

The Finance office for Detainee Operations in Iraq.

Nate Gurwell was the other sergeant in the office. He’d only been there a short time when I arrived, but he seemed to somehow know all the ins and outs of what we were supposed to be doing. Our styles complimented each other. Where I was more analytical, wanting to study a situation before deciding how to proceed, he’d see the problem right away and take action.

One day a group of us were walking back from lunch and encountered someone a little ways off who seemed to be acting unduly harsh towards a dog. While the rest of us just looked on, Nate sprang into action chewing the guy out for mistreating the animal. We didn’t know who this guy was or why he was doing what he was doing, but Nate saw something that wasn’t right and took action. That’s Nate in a nutshell. I’m proud of my work in Iraq, but Nate was the heart of our office.

Life in Iraq

It really was a pretty extreme situation that could be both exciting and maddening. I quickly got into a routine that basically involved getting up, going to the chow hall, going to work, going to lunch, back to work, off to dinner, back to work, before finally falling into bed around midnight. Wedged in there were trips to the gym to get a workout and going to pick up and drop off laundry.

I was at Camp Victory which was part of a massive complex of several connected bases that included the Baghdad airport. We often looked for excuses to get away from the office during our 14+ hour days. There were times we’d need to go somewhere to either drop something off or pick something up at various places. Eventually I got to know all the back roads and weird little tucked away places around the complex.

One of the frequent destinations was one of Saddam Hussein’s old homes, the Al-Faw Palace. Despite being in the desert it was surrounded by a moat, which became a frequent fishing location for soldiers who had a little time on their hand.

The palace served as the headquarters for American forces in Iraq, it’s where General Petraeus worked. Al Faw was quite beautiful while also being surreal. Cubicles filled the palace with American military officers diligently managing the war effort. There’s just something weird about these soaring spaces with intricate tile mosaics filled with beige cubicles of people working on spreadsheets.

The highlight of most days was the chow hall. There were five different dining facilities, each with their own charms. At lunchtime we’d discuss which one to go to like someone stateside might discuss which restaurant to go to.

Camp Victory had two within walking distance. The big one had a better variety, but we usually preferred the closer little one because the food was better, and it just felt more homey. It had a chicken wing stand that the guy would call out “99 flavors of chicken wings, come and get’em.” In reality he had about eight flavors, but they were good. 

When we wanted to mix it up, we’d borrow the truck and go over to one of the Camp Freedom dining facilities. They weren’t better, but sometimes different is enough. On special occasions we’d go all the way over to the airport where the Air Force had their own chow hall. It was nice, but perhaps more important was the comforting sight of Air Force uniforms. The food in Iraq was great. I didn’t lose any weight on that deployment.

Despite being in a war zone, on the whole we weren’t in great danger. Still, you had to keep your guard up. You could get in trouble for not carrying your weapon, and several times a week the “incoming” alarm would go off. When that happened you either dived into a bunker if one was nearby, or otherwise hit the ground. 

More often than not it was either a false alarm or a dud. Sometimes however, the sound of a distant explosion followed close behind the alarm. The only times it got real was after a rocket hit close enough to the chow hall we were in to feel the explosion. On another occasion there was a sustained attack lasting a couple minutes with multiple rockets hit, none were close though.

One of the most interesting things about being in Iraq was the diversity and cosmopolitan nature of the base’s inhabitants. Up to that point in my career I had pretty much worked exclusively with other Air Force people. Although the Air Force was managing the finances, we shared an office with the logistical support which was all Navy. The next office over were the engineers who were Marines, the legal office was mostly Army, we even had a few Coast Guard troops scattered around.

But beyond the military branches, Camp Victory had detachments of Australians, British, French, Dutch and even the Tongan Marines. The military contracted out the laundry and much of the other support functions to people from India and there was Nigerian security contractors at all the chow halls. You just never knew where the people eating at the next table over in the dining facility would be from. Interestingly, the people you were probably least likely to run into were Iraqis, although I think they had a presence in other parts of the base.

After being informed the military was extending my tour in Iraq, I was finally allowed to head back home only two weeks after my initial return date. By the time I left, the Surge in Iraq was winding down and over the course of the next couple of years our military presence in Iraq began to shrink.

But there was still Afghanistan. The thing about being a career Air Force Comptroller is, the higher in rank you get, the more likely you are to get deployed. They don’t want some new Airman working in an office managing millions of dollars, they want people who hopefully have some experience and know what they’re doing. Having survived Iraq, I didn’t have any desire to tempt fate in Afghanistan.

Islamabad, Pakistan

The next year when my deployment window came up again, I was hopeful that having just gotten back from Iraq, I’d be low enough on the list that I wouldn’t get popped again.

So, I was a little surprised when my deployment manager called me at home to let me know I they were shipping me out again. But when I expected to hear the word Afghanistan, he instead said Pakistan. I even made him say it again because it didn’t quiet register the first time. I mean, did we even have troops in Pakistan? 

However, I had heard him correctly, they were sending me to the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. This couldn’t be more different from my Iraqi deployment. In Iraq I was on a massive American compound were we were running the show. In Pakistan we officially had no military presence. I would be wearing civilian clothes and living in a civilian Pakistani neighborhood.

Because Afghanistan is a land locked country, surrounded by other countries that tend to be hostile to America, the logistics of conducting military operations there were complicated. Crucial in this was our relationship with Pakistan. Through a flurry of diplomatic efforts, we had secured Pakistan’s assistance in the months following the 9–11 attacks, but the relationship was always tenuous.

My deployment came at one of the low points in that relationship as the Pakistani government suspected all these military people going to the embassy were really spies. Because I was going commercially to a location subject to Pakistani law, I needed Pakistan to issue me a visa to enter the country, but they had put all visas on hold for months.

There was a real question if I was even going to be able to get there. After a delay for over a month, they finally decided to have me and several other finance troops travel to Ft. Belvoir near Alexandria, Virginia to work remotely. So, for several weeks we stayed at a La Quinta and drove into the Army base each day and tried to figure out what they wanted us to do. It ended up being a complete waste of time as we mostly filled our time with busy work.

Finally at the end of December 2009, the Pakistanis agreed to let our little group of three Air Force Comptrollers enter the country. About a week later I flew out from Reagan International Airport for Pakistan with a connection in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). I only mention the connecting flight because I nearly missed the plane. Most big international airports have a certain familiar layout, but this airport seemed confusing to me. By the time I figured out what direction I needed to go I had to make a mad dash through the airport to make the flight.

I managed to get there right before they closed the door, but after getting settled in my seat they announced there was a problem with the airplane and we were delayed until the next day. Well jeezy creezy, I could have taken my time getting to the gate. Still, if you have to get stuck in an airport, you can do worse than Abu Dhabi. After about 15 hours, they announced the flight was ready to go and I was finally on my way to Islamabad.

Getting to Pakistan was an ordeal that had taken months to work out, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise that my arrival in Islamabad was chaotic as well. After the plane touched down, I looked out the window to see armed soldiers standing about every ten yards along the runway. Well, that’s something different I thought. 

I’m not sure what I expected but this wasn’t a first world airport. It was packed shoulder to shoulder with people as I attempted to retrieve my luggage. Rather than a normal luggage terminal they basically just had an area right were you entered the building where they laid out the luggage. Fortunately, I got my bags without much trouble, but I still needed to get to the embassy.

The Embassy

My instructions were clear, do not get in a taxi. A white guy in Pakistan is an obvious target for a kidnapping. The embassy would have a guy there with a sign with my name on it and they’d take me there. However, once I got to the exterior of the airport it was still just a sea of people packed together. I walked down to one end of the area and back to the other end frantically looking for a guy holding a sign with my name. The whole time I’m being continually bombarded with offers for rides by taxi drivers. 

Eventually a Pakistani man came up to me with a little piece of paper with my name on it asking if I was him. That’s not a damn sign I thought. Reassured that he seemed to be the guy, he took me to his SUV that had an American from the embassy in it, and off we went.

Despite the rocky start to this deployment, things started looking up from there. After getting checked in at the embassy they assigned me a room in one of the local houses they had contracted. Previously the embassy housed military personnel at the Islamabad Marriott. However, a year before Islamic terrorists bombed the hotel killing 54, including several Americans. In the aftermath, the embassy’s security team decided it was safer to spread the Americans out rather than concentrating them all in one spot.

That’s how I came to spend those months living in what I would have to call a mansion. The house had 6 bedrooms, each with a full bath, a formal dining room, two living rooms, twelve-foot ceilings and marble floors.

We also had a full-time housekeeper who did our laundry and cooked our meals. Technically the housekeeper wasn’t provided, we had to pay her salary out of our pocket. Still, my share of her salary was only $120 a month, if I recall correctly. Considering we were getting $70 a day for food, the cost was nominal. Frankly considering how much work she did, I felt guilty for not paying her more, but I guess that was consider pretty good wages for Pakistan.

Of course, security was still a concern. Surrounding the house was a concrete wall topped by several layers of razor wire. Out front was a watch tower, manned 24 hours a day with armed security. To drive in the country, the embassy required that you attend a special defensive driving course where they teach you to drive like Grand Theft Auto. I wasn’t able to take that course, but they had a transportation service that could pick you up whenever you needed.

The security concerns did limit our freedom of movement during our off hours. No exploring all the back roads on my bicycle in Pakistan. Still, I did get a chance to see some of the sites. We made some trips to a local grocery store and did some other shopping. I also got to eat out a couple of times, fortunately a friend warned me not to get ice in my soda. Pakistan is a bottled water only country for Americans accustomed to parasite free water. The embassy is located in the secure international zone along with the embassies of most of the other countries.

Our little group of Comptrollers attended a swank party at the French embassy one night and experienced the world of French sauces. On another occasion we attended an event with the American ambassador and the visiting Secretary of Defense in attendance at the U.S. Embassy.

Entrance to the International Zone. Photo by author.

Coalition Support Funds

Despite the fancy housing and occasional hobnobbing with diplomats, for the most part this was an all-business deployment. Our commander assigned me to a program called Coalition Support Funds (CSF). The purpose of this fund is to reimburse other countries for actions taken on America’s behalf. At this time Pakistan was by far the largest recipient of this money with over a billion dollars annually.

However, since Pakistan began denying any new visas for American personnel, we started withholding the CSF payments in retaliation. The only reason Pakistan relented and issued our visas was because we told Pakistan’s government the Comptroller troops were needed to process the back CSF payments.

Pakistan was heavily involved in fighting Al Qaeda in the loosely governed tribal regions of Pakistan. We were reimbursing them for this effort because it was helping our war effort in Afghanistan. The truth was Pakistan was fighting Al Qaeda because they were a destabilizing influence to their own government, but the CSF funds allowed them to be much more effective in that effort. So, at the end of the day, this American funding was mutually beneficial, they just had to work out their diplomatic disagreements.

The way this program worked is they would give us a request detailing all the expenses they wanted reimbursed for each month. It was highly detailed down to how many bullets they shot. Apparently, Pakistan’s government is highly bureaucratic and slow to adopt new ways as a holdover from their days as a British colony. As a result, Pakistan rarely used computers for anything. These monthly requests were all handwritten ledgers that were hundreds of pages long.

Everything in them had to be meticulously checked and verified before payment could be made. They often had mathematical errors, requested reimbursement for the same thing multiple times or requested outrageous amounts for the supplies they had used.

The previous Marine who had processed these claims took an entire month to process the monthly claim. We now had 9 months of back requests to process as fast as possible with just two of us working these claims. It occurred to me that I could make a spreadsheet to enter all this data in and greatly streamline the verification process. Because of the complexity of these claims, it took some time to get the spreadsheet set up. However, once it was ready to go, we started working our way through these claims at a rate of about one a week and had the back log cleared out after just two months.

My work on the CSF program is probably the biggest impact I’d ever had in my career. We’d processed nearly a billion dollars in claims that went directly to fighting Al Qaeda in just two months. Unfortunately, the Army colonel we worked for didn’t think anyone doing desk work for four months deserved anything more than the basic Achievement Medal. My deployment to Pakistan was a unique experience, but I was ready to get back home.

Kirtland AFB, NM

Before leaving Pakistan I received some important news. By this time, I had been at Patrick AFB for about four years, even though I had spent a year of that deployed to Iraq and Pakistan. So, it wasn’t too unexpected when I got an email telling me I had an assignment to Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque NM. The military is weird, you’re going about your normal day to day life, then all of a sudden one day they tell you, you’re moving to Albuquerque.

I was hoping for somewhere in Europe, but they could have sent me to North Dakota, so on the whole I was pretty happy about the assignment. It did leave me in a weird position after I got back to Patrick AFB from Pakistan. They had reassigned my duties while I was gone, and they couldn’t give me a real job with me leaving in a month. I ended up spending a month kind of killing time doing various odd ball jobs until it was time to hit the road.

At my new permanent duty station, rather than reporting to the base’s Comptroller Squadron, my assignment was to the Air Force Operational Test & Evaluation Center (AFOTEC.) The Air Force spends a fortune on planes, satellites, computer systems, etc., most of it custom designed for the military. Before they hand over billions of dollars, they have to make sure the stuff works and does what they need it to do. AFOTEC has a lot of PhD scientists all over the country coming up with ways to test these systems the military wants to buy. All this takes money which we managed from the headquarters at Kirtland AFB.

AFOTEC is a pretty interesting organization that I didn’t even know existed before my assignment to it. However, my job there was essentially the same as it was at Patrick AFB. Reviewing and tracking purchase requests to make sure they weren’t spending more money than they had available and that their purchases were legal.

Over my first couple years there I had a few week long temporary assignments to AFOTEC sub-units in Colorado and California, and to a conference in Las Vegas. By 2013 however, my rotation on the deployment schedule was about to come up again and it was very likely that the Air Force was going to send me to Afghanistan. Now with two young children at home I really didn’t want to be gone for another six to nine months, so I decided to hang up the spreadsheet and put in my retirement paperwork.

Conclusion

It was such a weird thing that I enlisted to begin with. I didn’t really have family connections to the military and had never previously considered enlisting. Even once I enlisted, it was my full intention to do four years and get out.

I never would have imagined in 1992 that over the next 21 years I would step foot in England, France, Canada, Korea, Japan, Italy, Crete, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Germany and Pakistan. Among other things I had played a role in funding anti-terrorism in Pakistan, building prisons in Iraq and managing the Air Force’s space program.

Like most people, I never thought of Accounting and Finance when considering what a career in the military might look like. For all the rightful attention that people directly involved in combat receive, without all the Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, and Airmen working in jobs like supply, personnel, transportation, and finance, we’d never even get to the battlefield.

P.S. One other side note about my time at Kirtland AFB. One day while selecting potatoes at the base commissary I heard someone walk up behind me. A little startled I turned around and it was David Reeves, my old buddy from Basic Training and Korea.

Turns out he was assigned to a different squadron at Kirtland. At this point in our lives, we were both married with small children so we didn’t get to hang out the way we once did, but it was good to see him again. We saw each other periodically over the next year and at my retirement ceremony he was there, just like he was on my first day in the Air Force exactly 21 years earlier.

David Reeves and I at my retirement ceremony.