Matt's Tour

As I posted on Matt's blog, he has been assigned to Korea on a one year, unaccompanied tour. (Side note here, my list of 'lies' told by the recruiter is getting longer and longer). Matt was chosen for this post because he was available and they needed someone to fill it. I get the impression that they did not look at his wish list at all before placing him somewhere and I wonder what role that wishlist really plays in things. We looked into trying to get orders changed so it could be an accompanied tour but he has to put in an application regarding it and the guy who told him about it said there is no chance in he.. that he'll actually have his application accepted because he is too low on the totem pole. We looked into me just moving there but the costs are really high and maybe just out of our range. We'd loose a lot of money trying to sell our condo, pay thousands for airfare and either have to send our stuff overseas (I don't even want to start guessing how much that costs) or pack all our stuff into storage and buy all new stuff when I get there. Again, that costs a lot of money. The last option we were thinking about was getting him assigned to Japan after this (he has to choose his next base within a week and then I have the choice of staying put or moving to the new base). If I chose to move to Japan I'd be across the water from him and could potentially see him more often. But... a boat ride costs almost 200$ per person to go from Japan to Korea round trip (plane rides are almost twice as much) plus the driving costs to get to the boats/bases as well as extra food and hotel costs. It again becomes nearly unreasonable to expect to be able to visit any more frequently than if we were living here. The verdict: we don't know. If I stayed here Matt would probably be able to come home after the baby is born but more than likely wouldn't be home for the birth. He would be allowed a 2 week RnR after 6 months as well. It takes 2 days to fly each way so his 14 day RnR would actually be 4 days of travel and 10 days at home. Matt said that he is pretty much not allowed to recieve phone calls for safety reasons but will be able to make phone calls occasionally. He will be allowed to use the Web cam on a regular basis though. Unfortunately, Korea is something like 12 hours ahead of us (or more?) and fitting our schedules together so we can actually talk when Matt isn't working or we aren't sleeping is going to be interesting. All in all, this sucks. Big time. It think it would have been okay had I known going into this whole thing that it was a possibility but the recruiter never even hinted at this sort of assignment. And, he also said that if we ever recieved an assignment we didn't want we could always trade with someone else. No go. Matt is forbidden to change and forbidden to turn it down. So basically its desert or leave his family for a year. I don't sound happy. I'm sorry. I don't necessarily think the military is bad, just at the moment I'm not appreciating it. In a year I'll probably start liking it again.