By all accounts, the talent pool for many jobs is shrinking, and the situation is expected to keep worsening. But the pool won’t be empty. Nearly 250,000 men and women leave the U.S. armed services every year after gaining experiences and discipline that will benefit employers for years to come. The talent pool will include people like Captain Cal Cunningham, who has just been recalled to active duty as legal counsel to the 3-Star General who leads Multinational Corps – Iraq. He won’t be in the available talent pool in the when his tour ends because he will return to the greatest private law firm in the world. But there are many, many others who are or will be available.

If you’re interested in sharing a little of Captain Cunningham’s experience, he has set up a blog, entitled “The Focal Points,” where he will post some pictures and notes about what he’s doing (to the extent security permits). He describes his last three weeks in today’s post:

We would have more training to do before we would fly into Baghdad, but in only sixteen days since being told to immediately deploy, I had transitioned cases to others my office in Winston-Salem, reached into the depths of the Army to extract our orders, rushed through reserve mobilization, torn through combat refreshers, said very short - and consequently unsatisfactory - good-byes and landed in Kuwait. When we swiped our military ID cards at Ali Al Salem, we were officially in a combat zone.