Sometime.
Yes, you all knew it would happen. Eventually they have to let us come home. And now for the million dollar question: WHEN?
Turns out no one really knows. While Josh was on his latest and last jaunt to India, we received our RFO sending us back stateside for graduate school. As exciting as it was to receive that little piece of paper (okay, fine, e-mail), now we start the next waiting game for orders. A "normal" Army company contains anywhere from 40-200 Soldiers depending on the location and mission. When a "normal" Soldier gets an RFO, it gets sent to the Personnel Services Battalion on post that processes it and turns it in to orders once the Soldier takes care of getting their company commander to sign and approve their leave form. This process naturally becomes a bit more complicated when you're assigned to a detachment that is in charge of every student in the Army who is assigned anywhere in the world. So the Student Detachment, as it's called, oversees somewhere over 2,000 Soldiers at any given time. And all of those Soldiers are somewhere in the process of arriving at a new duty station (which requires large amounts of paperwork for inprocessing), hanging out to attend school, and leaving (which also requires some paperwork). This detachment does not work the same days we do (standard M-F work week), nor are they even remotely in the same time zone. So anything we send out on the last day of our work week (Thursday) has no chance of even being seen until Monday night our time. Then, if we need any sort of action taken, assuming the stars are alligned, everyone is at work, doing their job that day, we might get an e-mail indicating they are processing the action. That, unfortunately rarely happens. Is it frustrating? Sure. But who doesn't expect a long wait when they call customer service of a big corporation - this is busy season for Army moving after all.
In the case of our orders, we actually heard back the day after we sent in the required paperwork that they had received the packet. It was the cause of a small party in our house. Receiving the packet is only half the battle though as there are any number of formatting issues that could cause them to kick back the packet and we would start all over. To date, that has not happened. And so we are still scheduled to have our move-out survey next week and have all of our Dhaka possessions picked up 4 days later. Of course, if the orders don't come, we can't do that.
We're not buying plane tickets yet, so I guess that tells you how we're feeling right about now ;)
