Veteran's Day is an ideal time to hear from one of those rare folks who combine corporate and military careers. Dan Cross, a software engineer at Google (GOOG) and a 1st Lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps, took a leave to serve active duty in Afghanistan, came home a year ago, and brought back lessons that he couldn't have learned in business. While he had never seen himself as the military type until a personal tragedy made him reroute his career, he's a better man for it. Cross, 34, is now an active member of the Google Veterans Network (VetNet), a community of some 400 veterans and other Googlers who support these remarkable people. Here's Cross on what he learned in the war:
I was a student at Columbia University, with a couple of jobs under my belt, when the world changed. I happened to be downtown on the morning of September 11th and saw the Towers fall.
While I didn't lose any loved ones that day, like many others, I felt personally affected by the tragedy--especially because my brother David was a Marine helicopter pilot at the time. I was a long-haired, skateboarding 14-year-old when David, my only sibling, joined the Marines. Over the years, my brother described life in the service, and while I loved his stories, being a Marine didn't seem like the path for me.
On January 22, 2003, David was flying an anti-drug mission along the U.S./Mexican border in South Texas when his Cobra attack helicopter went down in a mid-air collision. Everybody--four Marines in two helicopters--died.
I never considered a military career until my brother's death. But I was really moved by the way the Marine Corps conducted his funeral. Members of David's squadron came from all over, and it was impossible to ignore the bond they had. I wanted to know more about what linked these Marines--what compelled them to come from all corners of the country to commemorate one of their own. I also thought back to September 11. I wanted to find a way to make a difference and protect the ones I love. So I enlisted in the Reserves. I was 26.
My life as a recruit was regimented. Boot camp was the most painful 13 weeks of my life, but I suffered it out, graduated and earned the title "Marine." I went on to Marine Combat Training in North Carolina and then to the Marine Corps Communications Electronics School in California's Mojave desert. Fifteen months after stepping off the bus on Parris Island, I returned to New York, to Columbia and to student life. I served with the Marines one weekend a month and during two-week sprints in the summer.
I decided to become an officer, and just as I was wrapping up at Columbia and preparing for Officer Candidate School, my civilian life changed. Google called me, out of the blue. A recruiter had spotted my resume on my personal website and brought me in for an interview. They offered me a job as a Site Reliability Engineer at Google New York. For a software engineer, a job offer from Google was equivalent to an invitation to Disneyland. "Can you be flexible?" I asked the Google recruiter, thinking of my military commitments. "Yeah, sure," she told me.
