The Foreign Service Journal, October 2013

24 OCTOBER 2013 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL remained at post. After all, what we were doing in Yemen wasn’t something we could walk away from just because it was dangerous. If anything, the fact that it was dangerous rendered our presence even more vital. “A Self-Professed Adrenaline Junkie” Looking back over the progression of my career since join- ing the Service in 1992 at the tender age of 23, I still remember how excited I was to discover that postwar Kuwait was on the list of vacancies for my A-100 class. With a background focused on Arab politics and Islamic extremism, I hoped to spend most (if not all) of my career in the Arab world, so Kuwait was a dream posting for me. I devoted a great deal of energy to persuading the entry- level division of the Office of Career Development and Assignments to choose me for the job. When my efforts paid off on Flag Day, I discovered that many of my colleagues were delighted I had wanted to go there—so they wouldn’t have to. A self-professed adrenaline junkie, I followed Kuwait with assignments to Damascus and Algiers. Algeria was my first danger-pay posting, my first one-year assignment and my first experience living on an embassy compound. But because our movements were so severely restricted, it was difficult to form deep bonds with Algerians who did not work at the embassy. It was there that I first began pondering whether the For- eign Service was taking the right approach with regard to staffing danger-pay posts. To be sure, the money was excellent—perhaps too excellent. Not an insignificant number of colleagues were quite open about the fact that they had chosen to serve there because (and only because) of the money. Several of them appeared to be fleeing unpleasant personal situations (such as messy and costly divorces) back home— situations that often left them in a fragile emotional state and poorly equipped to handle the stresses of living under a con- stant security threat. I witnessed the same phenomenon years later in Sanaa, where some colleagues admitted to me that they were not coping well with the pressure. Yet they stayed, simply because they could not afford to give up the financial benefits of serving in an extreme hardship, high danger-pay post. It was also in Algiers that I first experienced the sometimes- desperate attempts to staff such challenging posts. Almost immediately after I arrived, I began to get questions about whether I planned to extend, formu- lated in a way that made it clear the department wanted me to say yes. I had no idea yet whether I was going to like it there, and—more impor- tantly—the department didn’t know whether I was a good fit for the job or that kind of environment. I found it troubling that State would push me so hard to extend, and had similar concerns when it unveiled the linked assignments program as an incentive to serve in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. Why should someone be rewarded with a highly competitive three-year posting for merely serving in a priority posting in an AIP country? Shouldn’t the department and the receiving post wait to find out whether the employee actually did a good job in the position? While the vast majority of my colleagues in such places were top-notch, there was a handful who were subpar. You can guess which ones: Those who had taken the assignment because their time in class was about to expire, and hoped that a posting in a high-visibility country would buy them some time to revive their flagging career. Time for a Change? After Algiers, I did a brief tour in Washington, then headed to Lahore and Islamabad, where I was posted as the Afghan watcher at the time of the 9/11 attacks. After extended tempo- rary duty stints in Kabul and Peshawar, I spent the remainder of my tour running our refugee assistance program in Islam- abad. We experienced two terrorist attacks against the embassy and its personnel while I was in Pakistan, and for the first time in my career, I began thinking seriously about doing some- thing different. Not forever, just for a tour. For the first time, I bid exclusively on non-hardship, non-danger postings. Perhaps I had been naïve, but I was surprised to discover that there was no reverse version of fair-share bidding. My career development officer was quite open in telling me that there was no guarantee, even after nine years of nothing but hardship/danger postings overseas, that I would end up somewhere different. On the contrary, with Iraq opening up (I left Pakistan in 2003), the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs would It was in Algiers that I began pondering whether the Foreign Service was taking the right approach to staffing danger-pay posts.