The Foreign Service Journal, March 2017

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH 2017 51 A s DS adapts to the need for more temporary duty assignments (TDYs) to tough places, morale among family members has taken a hit. More agents are report- ing that they like their jobs, but their families are strug- gling. Go on any DS message board, and you’ll see spouses who are worried about how to tell their children that yet another unaccompanied tour is coming their way. You’ll hear from spouses who are trying to manage households in far-flung locations while their employee spouse has disappeared on yet another TDY with no clear end date. And, of course, you’ll hear about the special hell that is DS bidding. For tandem couples, the challenges of trying to keep a family together can be even worse. “DS has tried to make it work for us,” says one agent and mother of two. “But some- body has to raise the kids. Somebody has to be there.” “It’s going to work early on,” she continues, but “it’s dif- ficult down the road.” For the first eight years of her career, she says, “things were easy.” But as the couple advanced in their careers, it became harder to find posts where they could serve together. And because they have small children, they are facing multiple years apart as they separately complete the requirement to serve at unaccompanied posts. It used to be that agents were required to do an unaccompanied tour once per career, but now it's once a decade, and the math works against tandems: “That’s four years apart during our career,” she says. “My genera- tion of agents didn’t sign up for that level of hard-core, high-threat work. What’s the plan for families left behind?” “If you’re a tandem,” she says, “expect to sacrifice. The question for us now is, how deep is that sacrifice going to be?” The long-term separations take a toll on marriages, so she’s not “shocked and horrified” when people split up. “What does this separation do to the quality of relation- ships?” she asks. “Separating made us stronger,” she adds. “But it can be a death sentence.” She wouldn’t have been able to move up the DS ladder without the support of her agent husband, whom she calls her “biggest cheer- leader,” but she thinks she’s an outlier: “If we can make it work, we’ll be the exception, not the rule.” Together since high school, Jim and Shannon Eisen- hut have been part of DS for more than a decade. They are currently posted in Miami, but they plan to move to Baghdad—for the second time this decade—in 2017. Jim thinks the key to success as a tandem is flexibility. “Your career path isn’t as simple,” he says, because of the multiple approval processes you have to go through to try to get assigned together. “We don’t have kids, but it’s still challenging,” says Shannon. “We just want to be together, and because of that our options are extremely limited.” That’s why the couple decided to go back to Iraq for a second tour. Recent changes to the nepo- tism regulations have restricted tandems like Shannon and Jim even more, and they say many tandems are encouraged to take leave without pay so they can stay together without quitting. “I know a handful of agents who have decided to leave DS,” says Shannon. “Some have already left.”They were “rising stars,” she says, but they couldn’t find a way to make the career work for their marriages. The Eisenhuts think DS could fix this problem and retain more of their qualified tandems if the bureau cre- ated a roster of telecommuting jobs. Imagine one spouse is assigned to a post in South America or Europe. Put the other spouse in the same post, and that person could be a “regional desk officer” with a quicker response time than somebody else posted back at headquarters. There are ways to make this work, they say, but “it comes down to funding, policy and changing mindsets.” —D.S.G. “We don’t have kids, but it’s still challenging,” says Shannon. “We just want to be together, and because of that our options are extremely limited.” Twice the Hardship: Tandem Couples