Army veteran finds new life as teacher
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WARREN -- After 20 years and nine days serving in the Army, Tom Ericksen had to grapple with where his next steps would lead him.
He tried being a cars salesman, he interviewed for the Red Cross and he spent a year working in food service, but seeing the academic struggles his autistic son faced helped him see a path for himself in special education.
Ericksen, now 45, was deployed three times and spent a total of 38 months in Iraq, including the first deployment when he was just leaving high school at 17. He was trying to choose between going to college and entering the military and eventually chose the latter.
"I think part of it was that I had a hard time with the idea of college. I didn't think I'd make the best choices there," Ericksen said.
Joining the military was a temporary move Ericksen said he did to get the discipline he needed for college, coupled with the financial support the Army would provide for him to pay for school.
However, getting permission from his parents to join the Army proved tough as his mother was not a fan of her oldest son joining the service. She previously had seen the pains of seeing a loved one go overseas when her brother was in the military.
So Ericksen, as a kid eager to carve out his future, decided to trick his parents into signing a contract that allowed him entry into the Army.
"She wanted me to go to college so I told her to sign it so I can go to school, and then I came home and said, 'Hey I leave for basic training in September. She wasn't too pleased about it," Ericksen said.
In September 1995, he was shipped to Fort Stewart in Liberty, Ga. He did a One Station Unit training -- a training program that combines Basic Combat Training (BCT) with Advanced Individual Training (AIT) -- which Erickson finished in January 1996.
"It was a wake up call being there, at the time Desert Storm was still considered an active engagement, so my class got the National Defense Ribbon," Ericksen said.
After training, Ericksen was stationed at Fort Stewart until 1998 when a duty station change landed him at Camp Casey in Dongducheon, South Korea, from 1998 to 1999.
His time over there was how he eventually met his wife back in the States online via a chatroom where they bonded over a love of music.
"We just clicked and when I came home from Korea on my leave before reporting back to Fort Knox, I stopped there for about a week to see her before my own family," Ericksen said.
At the time, his wife, Nikki, lived in Indiana about four hours away from where he re-enlisted at Fort Knox, Ky., from 1999 to 2001.
On Thanksgiving, 1999 he proposed, the following year they married in 2000.
After leaving Fort Knox for Fort Carson in Colorado in 2001, tragedy struck the United States later that year when two planes flew into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and one flew into the Pentagon.
"We knew something was going to go down after that happened," Ericksen said.
Two years after 9/11, Eriksen was deployed to Iraq in March 2003 on his wife's birthday. The deployment came at a time when he and his wife were focused on the family they were building with her being pregnant with their first child, Brandon, at the time.
"You make some really drastic choices when faced with that kind of news," he said. "I wrote a letter that was supposed to be given to her in case something happened letting her know how I feel.
"The first day of our deployment we were still immortal, we were untouchable, we were bulletproof, we thought nothing was going to happen to us," Ericksen said.
That viewpoint changed when they witnessed their first casualty after losing a staff sergeant to an improvised explosive device (IED).
"It's things you don't typically see -- nothing prepares you for the first body, the explosions, the smells -- it's something you carry with you for the rest of your life," he said.
That's when Ericksen said he got laser focused on doing what he needed to return to his wife and future child.
In June 2003, his first child was born while Ericksen was still overseas. Using a phone supplied by a U.S. Embassy member who crossed the border into Iraq from Jordan, Ericksen recalled nervously dialing up his wife while she was in labor.
"I told my sergeant that knowing my luck, I was going to call and she'd be in labor cursing me for not being there," he said.
He only was able to see his son a few weeks before shipping off again. After his deployment, he went back to Fort Carson from 2003 to 2005, from where he was deployed two more times to Iraq.
He spent 2006 in Fort Hood before his final stationing in South Korea from 2007 to 2009, after which he and his family settled in Youngstown. He joined the ROTC from 2009 to 2015, They welcomed their second child, Ethan, in March 2016.
"I did my 20 years and I was done, We're starting to get that family time back now," Ericksen said.
In August 2016, Ericksen started at Youngstown State University to become an intervention specialist and in May 2019, he graduated and began working at Warren G. Harding High School where he still works as a teacher.
He chose working at the high school level in hopes his story resonated with students.
"I did the military, I worked a job as a civilian with no education, I've had experience at all levels of adulthood from being a father to working on a degree now," Ericksen said.
The next step for Ericksen is working toward completing a master's program at YSU for his principal and administrator license.