Hundreds of Miles Away, Guardsman Still Calls N.H. Home
EMERSON
The New Hampshire Union Leader
Jenny Paul
Boston University Washington News Service
11/24/08
WASHINGTON—Traces of homesickness flit across Andy Emerson’s face as he ticks off a list of the things he misses most about his home state of New Hampshire.
“My family’s there. My friends are there,” Emerson says, his voice growing louder with excitement and his words pouring out faster as the list grows longer. “It’s such a friendlier place. It’s a place where you can be at home and not even really be there all the time.”
A drive for practical knowledge and experience has marked the past eight years of Emerson’s life, and it has taken the 26-year-old hundreds of miles away from his hometown of Henniker. Still, Emerson manages to keep firm ties to the state as a second lieutenant in the New Hampshire National Guard, even as he works full time for a lobbying firm in Washington and takes night classes at the George Washington University law school.
He’s committed, he says, to returning to New Hampshire as a permanent resident in the not-too-distant future.
In the meantime, Emerson, who maintains a permanent residence, car and spare wardrobe in New Hampshire, flies from Washington to the Granite State one weekend every month to fulfill his National Guard duties and sometimes returns for lengthier officer training sessions.
He enlisted in 2005, while he was working as a legislative assistant in former New Hampshire Rep. Charlie Bass’s Washington office, where he often focused on defense and foreign policy issues. Emerson’s decision surprised Bass and other staff in the office, Bass said.
“Andy’s kind of a mild-mannered guy,” Bass said. “He was quiet, and he didn’t appear to me to be the National Guard or military type, but Andy came to me and said, ‘I want to join because I want to do my part. We have this war on terror…and I’m the kind of guy that might be able to make a difference.’”
Emerson took a leave of absence from Bass’s office during the latter half of 2005 to attend basic training in Oklahoma but returned to work after training ended. His military experience gave him better perspective on the congressional policy issues he dealt with and provided him with direct connections to active-duty members of the military, he said.
While staff assistants in most offices relied on congressional military liaison officers, “I could talk to anyone,” said Emerson, who was commissioned as an officer in August and will be in the service for at least six more years.
His personal values, not his work, were the central factors in his decision to enlist, Emerson said. He was an intern in Bass’s office when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. He supported the war in Iraq then, and still does. He concedes that the administration’s policy on the war was badly implemented, but emphasizes that he agrees with its reasons for the invasion.
“I think there was a lot more of a personal sense of not wanting to be hypocritical,” said Emerson, who hasn’t been deployed to Iraq but expects to deploy overseas some time in 2010. “If you supported that decision [to invade Iraq], you should probably be willing to volunteer to be a part of it. There are a lot of ways you can do that. At 23 years old, I thought that [enlisting] was the right way to do it.”
Since he was a little boy, Emerson has always wanted to pull his weight in family, school and work activities, his mother, Nancy Emerson, said.
“When he was in elementary school … and his dad and I were home with him, he shared a night — each of us cooked one night, and he always took his part,” said Emerson, who lives in East Andover. “Just little things like that.”
Nancy Emerson said her son displayed a similar sense of responsibility when he decided to postpone college for a year after high school. He used that year to work , in New Hampshire for AmeriCorps, a government community service program, because he wasn’t sure, he explained, what he wanted to do in college and didn’t want to waste time and money without having a direction in school.
“I think [AmeriCorps] was a really good experience for him,” his mother said. “I think it made him politically aware about different people’s feelings about politics and about poverty and diversity.”
After his AmeriCorps stint, Emerson enrolled in Goucher College outside Baltimore and interned in Bass’s office during his sophomore year. Bass was so impressed with his work, the former lawmaker said recently, that he hired Emerson as a part-time staff member during his junior year. Emerson commuted to the congressional office and took extra courses that year so he could graduate early and begin working full time.
“Andy is bright, and he learned the ropes very quickly,” Bass said. “We had a lot of interns, and a lot of them were pretty good, but Andy was especially good because of his innate abilities. It just basically worked with him.”
After Rep. Paul Hodes (D-N.H.) defeated Bass in November 2006, Emerson found himself looking for work but was hesitant about taking positions offered by defense lobbying firms in Washington.
Then Bass’ former chief of staff, Darwin Cusack, asked him to join Eastpoint Strategies, a Manchester-based lobbying firm. Knowing the position would allow him to split his time between Washington and New Hampshire, Emerson jumped at the offer. At the firm, Emerson helps clients, many of them New Hampshire companies, to apply for federal grants and represents them “to make sure their legislators in D.C. are supporting them.” Company policy prohibits him from discussing specific work he performs for clients.
At night, Emerson attends law school, although he said he wants to remain at Eastpoint Strategies even after he becomes an attorney. The courses he takes as a law student will make him better equipped to find and distill information and consider different sides of arguments and policies, he said.
“I think it’s important to have a broader perspective of what you’re doing,” Emerson said. “It probably has something to do with why I joined the Army, too. I don’t like to talk about things without knowing what I’m talking about.”
Emerson doesn’t expect to graduate from law school until 2013 because he will have to take time off to undergo further officer training in the National Guard. Balancing his military obligations with work and school hasn’t always been easy, and Emerson said he sometimes wonders if he should have enrolled in law school at an earlier date or chosen a more compact National Guard officer training schedule.
“But I tend to think you take life as it comes, and if something’s important, you just make it work,” he said.
Emerson, however, is adamant about one thing: he’ll become a full-time resident of New Hampshire after graduation. The state’s friendly atmosphere, its wealth of outdoor activities like hiking and skiing –not to mention the close proximity of his family and friends – are too much for him too pass up.
“It’s a cross between the suburban, modern life and quasi-rural that allows you to have a great standard of living without dealing with city life,” Emerson said. “I can’t imagine living here [in Washington] and raising a family, and I’d like to do that someday. So I’m going home.”
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