Steve Harmon had been at his new job for only six months when he got word that his unit had been called up.
That’s barely time for a new chief financial officer to settle in. Harmon had been hired to help ease the transition as Flint Hills Technical College left the Emporia school district and became a higher learning institute in its own right. His Army National Guard service had come up at the interview, but nobody had expected him to be called up so soon.
But ready or not, Kosovo was waiting. That meant making arrangements not just with the school, but for his wife and three children as well. But the Harmons weren’t caught completely off guard.
“One thing we did is we talked to veterans,” Harmon said. “We talked to people who had deployed. We used the tools that were out there for veteran support. And when the Gulf War started in 2003, we just started planning because we knew it would be coming.”
Amy Harmon soon discovered the Iron Law of Deployments — namely, that everything breaks as soon as a military spouse goes overseas. Power lines went down. The washing machine stopped working. A neighbor’s tree fell into the driveway.
But overall, Harmon said, the experience was a positive one.
“We have a stronger relationship with our friends and neighbors than we ever had before,” he said.
Harmon was “platoon daddy,” as he puts it, for a unit that was part of a peacekeeping mission involving U.S. and NATO forces. The region had finished a civil war and the troops’ job was to make sure another one didn’t start.
For his first six months, Harmon was part of a quick response force, ready to root out bad guys on a couple of hours notice. Then his unit was rotated into patrol duty, serving as a sort of police force.
The weather could get cold, the roads could get rough. But for Harmon, the hardest part was being away from family. E-mail was available, and he traded messages with his wife and kids as much as possible.
“The kids always want to know ‘What are you doing, what does that mean?’” Harmon said. “You put it in basic terms. We’re there to keep kids and people safe and keep people from hurting each other.”
When Harmon was deactivated in February 2005, he came back to a new job as the college’s first director of customized training. That was great by itself. But the real high point was the chance to settle back into the family and get to know his wife again.
“You’ve had to live independently for so long that you’ve got that curve of ‘How do we blend responsibilities again?’” Harmon said. “It’s almost like getting married again.”