Every two or three years for twenty years I ranked a list of places and waited to find out where I was going to live. In the Foreign Service we call it bidding. Early in my career, when you thought the world was your oyster, I used to refer to it as the travel brochure. Where in the world did I want to live.
Your first two tours are directed, which means somebody from Washington decided where an entry level officer was most needed. Mine were always going to be in the Middle East because I came in to the service with Arabic. My official Flag Day ceremony found me heading off to Muscat, Oman - a country and experience that I truly loved. One, because it’s your first tour so you’re not jaded by the bureaucracy of the Service, and two because at that age you really do want to try everything and see everything.
For the second tour my spouse and I put together a dream list for my career development officer, the person who is supposed to be steering you, and got fobbed off to Sarajevo. I wouldn’t have planned it myself but we loved it.
After those two you are on your own. Every bidding season you interviewed and you begged. You would have good interviews. Your ambassador would call someone he might have come through A-100 with but it seemed there was still always somebody who knew the Vice President. I’m joking, but that’s how it felt. Always a bridesmaid. The one job you wanted slipped away, you went somewhere else, and you made that the plan instead.
What nobody tells you at the start, and what I try to be frank with younger officers, is that the list is really two lists and you only get to bid one of them at a time.
You bid for your family, or you bid for the work that keeps you up at night. Those two do not come in the same posting. The places that are good for a marriage, for a kid’s school, for a parent you want to be able to fly home to in a hurry, are not the places where the exciting policy is happening. The places where the policy is happening will have you unaccompanied somewhere far from your family and working 60 hours a week.
I bid Baghdad twice in a row because that policy work is addictive. I knew what it cost at home and I put it on the list anyway.
The people who thought they could have both went for the pretty capitals. Paris was at the top of that list. They bid the city, dreaming of croissants and strolling the Seine and expected the serious work to be sitting there waiting for them when they landed. What no one likes to admit is that that mismatch of expectations leads to one of the highest curtailment rates in the Foreign Service - that’s what we call leaving a post before your tour is up. Curtailment.
Nobody in Washington was going to put down an urgent Baghdad (or Kabul or Kyiv) question to pick up an urgent Paris one. The oxygen, the attention, the money, the focus was somewhere else, and everybody who got there figured that out by about month four.
My tours went as follows - Muscat, directed. Sarajevo, directed. A Washington bureau tour I was miserable in. Baghdad, twice, because of the above. Washington again as a chief of staff. New York at our mission to the UN, which was one of the two best tours I ever had. Germany as a political advisor to the four star Commander. Geneva as deputy permanent representative at the Conference on Disarmament, which is the body where arms control gets negotiated, and which I had a love hate relationship with for the entire tour. Then Baghdad again for two years that were the best and the worst at the same time, and a last stretch working remotely on Afghan resettlement.
Every one of those was the same choice, and I can tell you which way I went almost every time.
There is no bidding season now. Nobody is holding the list and nobody is going to fob me off anywhere. I picked Hawaii this week because two years on an island might be the thing for me. Germany next month, because maybe that is the thing. Thailand in January, because I will probably need a vacation.
The arithmetic has not changed. I am still choosing between the work that keeps me up at night and the people I want to be near, and the only real difference is that there is nobody else to blame for the answer. That was doing more work for me than I ever gave it credit for.
Honestly, I would probably bid the same way again. I loved all my tours for very different reasons.
I wrote down the honest version of the first year out of government for the people coming behind me. It is free.
If you ever took the posting that cost you the most at home, where was it, and would you bid it again?