It’s funny how one silly sheet of paper can control so much about one’s future.  For many, it’s the paper containing their medical test results, for others it’s the sheet from a college or graduate school informing them of their acceptance or denial.  I’ve had plenty of sheets of paper like that, but at this point in time, the piece of paper controlling my fate is my orders onto active duty, which finally came earlier this week.  Ultimately, my world wasn’t rocked with change when they popped up in my email inbox, but getting them definitely meant more than I thought it would.

     If you’ve read any of my past entries, you’ll understand that I’ve known my trajectory (including my final duty station) for a couple months now.  However, the orders are the final piece to the puzzle.  This is the document that tells you exactly who and when you report to, and is the official green light to service.  After a seemingly endless delay, which I’ve talked about on here a bit, my classmates finally started receiving their orders one by one, starting last Friday.  Knowing the Army, I didn’t hold my breath over getting mine in the first batch, and convinced myself that physically getting a copy would mean little to me. 

    Unlike direct commissionees who have no other access to bases, I had a military ID and thus didn’t need the orders to make my way onto post for things like the purchase of uniforms (or simply to be able to get onto Ft. Lee in the first place).  Similarly, I knew I was headed to Ft. Stewart, and knew enough about JAG at the post to wager a guess at what office I’d be in (easy enough – the main one for the post, which dwarfs all others).  Despite all of those certainties, I had a little tinge of anxiety as each person posted about getting orders.  The group of us without them was small, and continued to shrink as Monday and Tuesday passed, and I found myself compulsively refreshing my email to see if they’d arrived.

     By Wednesday, even the problem children of the class (not literally, but just those who had one complication or another with the processing of their orders) had received theirs.  At that point, I decided it was time to step in and see what was going on.  Everyone mentioned getting their orders via their personal email accounts, but I had been checking both that and my AKO, just in case (to no avail).  I sent an email to our POC at JARO, and was surprised to get a near immediate email and phone call.  Our POC, a Captain, said that she’d sent the orders the day before to me by email, and sent them again in case their was a problem.  She mentioned the larger than normal number of issues my class has had in the last month, and I suggested that we be known as “Benny Hill,” (after the old TV show with the crazy theme song that’s normally put to sped up videos of bloopers), since we’d already started calling ourselves versions of that.

    After that phone call, I got what I’d been waiting on: the document with the solid wall of caps lock text, which meant a lot more to me than I expected.  Those eye-blistering lines contained the specific office I was heading to, as well as the answers to a couple other nagging questions I’d had, but they held something more.  Beyond the alphanumeric gibberish and regulations littering the page lay something that couldn’t be expressed by any DoD acronym, publication, or code: that sheet of paper was my golden ticket. 

     That sheet of paper was the invitation (ok, well, the contractually-backed demand) to my dream job that I’ve worked towards for the last 8 years.  It was a ticket to serve and work for one of the oldest, largest, and most prestigious law firms in the world-not to mention one that none other than George Washington himself helped to set up.  I couldn’t help but to feel like Charlie from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when he unwraps the candy bar to find the last golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s factory.

(Sadly, the orders did not come on golden paper wrapped around a candy bar)

Hopefully I won’t fall into a river of chocolate or turn into a blueberry at Fort Lee next week, but I can safely say that I’ll feel just like Charlie did as I flash my ticket at the gates, and take the first step into a new world.