This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2007, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Just months out of law school, Stewart Peay thought he finally had it made.
As a new attorney at Snell & Wilmer - a powerful commercial law firm in downtown Salt Lake City - he had a finger in some of the firm's most important litigation. On the posh, cherry-wood-paneled 11th floor of Gateway Tower, in an office overlooking a range of snow-capped mountains, the future seemed wide open.
Then the Army called.
With less than 24 hours' notice, the National Guard officer was called away to war. Peay put on his uniform, packed his duty bag, kissed his wife and toddler daughter goodbye, and left his home in Highland.
And then, without time to even explain his situation to his clients, he disappeared for 18 months.
He has been home now for more than two years. But the effects of the deployment linger on.
Some of the cases may have changed, but Peay's office is little different than it was before he left. Folders and legal pads are strewn across his desk. Attorneys and clerks pop in to ask questions and deliver answers. The phone rings and rings.
He bills his time in six-minute increments. And clients who pay the kind of money his firm charges expect those minutes to be well spent.
But Peay said he still gets set back at times, caught up by things that he should have learned years ago - things his peers did learn years ago.
"I look around at these other guys, these attorneys who were hired at the exact same time as I was, and I can see this gaping hole," Peay says. "I'd started my job fresh out of law school, so my mind was focused on the law. But when I got back, I hadn't thought about the law for 18 months. I hadn't written anything legal for a year and a half.
"I was completely lost."
And far behind. While Peay was away, those in his class of junior attorneys were writing briefs, taking depositions and arguing before judges - one even took a case before the Utah Supreme Court.
Peay had expected to catch up in short time. It didn't take him long to realize that wasn't going to be as simple as he had imagined.
--
Hadley Peay was not yet 2 years old when her father left for war. Because she is deaf, she couldn't communicate with her dad when he would call home from Iraq.
"When he came home, she didn't have any memory of him," says Peay's wife, Misha.
Yet as tough as it was on her husband to have to reintroduce himself as a father, Misha Peay thinks the difficulties at work were tougher.
"You work so hard to get to a certain place in life, and we felt like we were finally there," she says. "When he got called up, everything came to a halt. And when he came home, I think he lost just a lot of his confidence. He felt like he wasn't being productive enough."
Misha Peay says her husband is good at shielding his emotions.
"But every once in awhile, he'll say something like, 'You know, if I hadn't gone . . .' ''
--
For Stewart Peay, one of the first clues that the deployment had taken a severe toll on his career came when he delivered a legal brief he had written to one of the firm's partners, Mark Morris.
"Stewart's written product was - well - it wasn't what it used to be," Morris now says politely.
Peay remembers the conversation about the brief in another way. "It was clear that he was very, very disappointed," he says. "He was very let down. And it was clear, at that moment, how far behind I really was."
It was a humbling blow. The firm had been good to him while he was away - voluntarily making up the rather substantial difference between his military and civilian salaries.
Peay feared he was disappointing them. Over lunch one day, he confided in a friend, fellow attorney Troy Booher.
"The practice of law is humbling enough," said Booher, one of the attorneys who was handed a piece of Peay's workload when the Army officer left for Iraq.
"For Stewart to have to step back into this - to have to ask for help with things that, in his mind, he already should know how to do - it was hard for him."
--
By the time Peay returned home from Iraq, weapons of mass destruction were no longer the subject of apocalyptic war rhetoric but rather the butt of late-night talk show jokes. Even President Bush was getting into the act - recording a skit for a gathering of White House reporters where he mockingly searched for weapons under his Oval Office desk, among other unlikely hiding spots.
For Peay, explaining what he'd been doing for the past year was a bit awkward.
"I'd never had what I would call sustained failure before," said Peay, who spent the majority of his time in Iraq as part of David Kay's weapons-hunting Iraq Survey Group. "I've always felt that everything you're a part of is a reflection upon you. And when I'd tell people that I spent the last year looking for weapons of mass destruction, they would just laugh instantly."
Peay had spent more than a year away from his family and his career "going from dry hole to dry hole."
"It was embarrassing and frustrating," he says.
--
Peay doesn't bemoan his service. The son of a retired brigadier general, he understood from an early age that even top-ranking soldiers don't get to write their own marching orders.
When he went to Iraq, he says, he went proudly.
But with every passing day, the possibility of being recalled to war increases. So like many reservists, Peay is having trouble reconciling his commitment to serve with his desire to move on.
His dreams of one day making partner already seem so far delayed.
"The first time, as a first-year associate, it was kind of like I just started over," he says. "Now, I think a year away would be hard to overcome. It would take so much more to get back to where I am right now . . .
"It would be really crushing."
Peay will be eligible to resign his commission next year. And yet he is uncertain he will do that.
--
His nation is at war.
It is not a war of his choosing, or even of his liking. But were his unit to be called forward, Peay is not sure he could step back.
"If I did get out, I'm certain that I would feel some kind of regret about getting out during a war," he says. "It just seems that is not the right time to leave the military.
"But that said, the prospect of leaving my wife and children again - and to lose another year of my career - that's a very difficult proposition."
Now, at home, there is another child - a boy "who thinks his dad is the greatest thing that walks on the face of the Earth," Misha Peay says.
The decision may end up being made for him. In January, the Army lifted rules that had limited the frequency at which reservists may be called to war.
"I know it's a possibility that I could be called again before I have the chance to decide for myself," Peay said. "It's something I live with. The reality is there is nothing I can do about it."
Now, on the 11th floor of Gateway Tower, in an office overlooking a range of snow-capped mountains, the future is so uncertain.
* More than 1.4 million service members, including about 10,000 Utahns, have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. In a continuing series of personal profiles, The Salt Lake Tribune features those whose lives have been forever changed by their wartime experiences.