ARNOLD AIR FORCE BASE, Tenn. -- One of the military's most effective recruiters is often a person's older brother.
Senior Airman Eric Ball is the first to acknowledge that joining the Air Force was not on his mind, until his brother enlisted in the Air Force's security forces and told him about the work and the educational benefits.
When the Atlanta, Mich., native did decide to join the Air Force, he had his sights set on "a flying job," but learned he was partially colorblind during his medical exam.
As a result, Ball's choice of Air Force job choices "went from a lot to a little."
Determined to make a go of it regardless, Ball, AEDC's financial services technician, said, "I've always had an interest in business and finance, and so I picked this one out of five or six [other choices]."
Ball, who just returned from a six-month deployment to Afghanistan, has always aimed high.
"Academically I'm finishing my bachelors [in business management]," he said. "I'll be done in September. I'm just a few classes away and then I'll start my master's program at the beginning of the year."
He is considering pursuing his masters in business administration.
Regarding a future with the Air Force, he hasn't decided yet which path he will pursue.
"I don't know if I want to apply to go to officer training school (OTS) or get out and go in the Reserves, or get out completely and become a civilian," he said.
Ball, who has actively sought out mentors while at AEDC to help him chart a course going forward, has impressed the officers he met while at Arnold.
"Eric does a great job of interacting with [people of] all ranks and roles at AEDC, and his genuine concern for others makes him a great officer candidate," said Capt. Alex Henning, a project manager with AEDC Test Technology Branch. "To pursue school while working full-time isn't an easy thing to do. His commitment to higher education is a great example for others."
Ball said deploying to Afghanistan was also an educational experience but a very sobering one.
"It was my first deployment," Ball said. "It was like going from one end of the spectrum to the other. I went from basically no military here at AEDC to working with military from all over the world, working for NATO.
"You could walk down a corridor and you'd hear a conversation over here in French, a conversation over here in Romanian, and another language somewhere else down the hall - it was eye-opening at first."
Ball worked at Kandahar Airfield in the contracting and finance office for NATO.
"If there was any contract on base that was NATO‟s money, then it came through our office, like anything that needed to be built or if you needed anything on base to support the mission it came through our office," he said, adding that projects they funded including the building of roads and seasonal challenges.
"We did a flood mitigation project just off base," he said. "It was pretty good because I was there during flood season, and the base flooded four or five times while I was there. Any morale events that we had on base, we funded all of those."
Ball personally was one of the coalition troops who helped teach the children of the local Afghans on base.
"We had a school on base [with] about 75 kids there and we taught them reading, writing and English," he said. "They would come on base while their parents were selling things at the bazaar and we'd help tutor them, and that was where I felt like I was making an impact, even if it was small. I still felt pretty good about it."
One person who Ball worked with and befriended at Kandahar was Maj. Liviu Iusan, who was the Chief of the Office of the Financial Comptroller with the Romanian Army for the Ministry of Defense.
"Professionally, it was a pleasure to work with Airman Ball, a very competent and dedicated fellow, capable to pursue the organization's goals and his personal goals," Iusan said. "I have appreciated a lot his capacity to overcome the austere situation on the ground and his wish to move forward and to study for the next step of his career, sometimes late in the night.
"Personally working with him was very useful for me. He managed somehow to convince me to join him and go to [the] gym, not without a long struggle, as I was almost all day busy with working. After few weeks I became addicted, and I still go to gym almost daily, which is more than useful for my physical condition and morale."
Ball said regardless of where he was during the deployment, there were reminders of why coalition forces were present.
"They would fire rockets at us, probably four-five times a week, sometimes less, sometimes more depending on the month," he said. "When you would hear the explosions it was weird to think that somebody out there [is] trying to take your life, except it's kind of [in] an indirect way because they're not shooting directly at you with a gun. But their goal is to take your life."
A more somber reminder came when Ball and others would take a bathroom break.
"I worked right on the flight-line, my building was actually the last building that the U.S. took over when we invaded Kandahar in 2001," he said. "It was the Taliban's last stand building and the U.S dropped a bomb in the middle of it and that flushed out the rest of the Taliban.
"Now we use it for offices and stuff like that. Our building didn't have any plumbing, so I would walk out to go to the port-a-john outside and there would be a ceremony going on where they were taking some of the fallen Americans [being transported] back to [the states]. You're going out there to go to the bathroom and all the sudden you see flag-draped caskets being loaded onto a plane. That was a pretty harsh reminder of where you were and what was going on."
One of the most enduring experiences was the friendships he forged with other coalition forces, but this was something that happened after considerable initial trepidation.
"When I got there, I said how could I ever get used to this place, this is awful," he recalled. "I was around more people from other countries than I probably was Americans. The best thing is that now I have friends from all over the world. Once it got close to me leaving I wondered to myself, 'How am going to adjust back to life in the U.S., this is my life now.'"
Regarding his time at AEDC, Ball said the highlight has been the people he has met here.
"[I'd have to say it has] probably the mentorship from all of the junior officers because they're more like my peer group," he said.
Ball said about three years ago they gave him a hard time about not going to college.
"That's why I started going to school," he said. "Just bouncing things off them and the mentorship from the officers has been something that probably not many other junior ranking airmen will [experience] in their careers. It's been a big benefit. They took me under their wing and it's been good."