OMAHA, Neb. – Civilian employees who work for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers do not have deployment requirements as active-duty service members do. However, many of them voluntarily choose to, such as Ryan Williams, a longtime Omaha District employee.
Williams started his career at the district in 2007 as a power plant electrician at the Fort Peck Dam in Montana. After spending years traveling out of town for a power company, Williams said landing the job with USACE was an incredible opportunity for him to work closer to home.
Over the next decade, Williams enjoyed being home with his twin children watching them grow, but once they graduated high school and went off to college, he said he knew it was time to support some of the greater opportunities that USACE has to offer.
There are two major categories for civilian deployments with USACE: short-term domestic deployments and long-term international deployments. Most domestic deployments support disaster recovery, from rebuilding levees and removing debris after hurricanes like Katrina to clearing large structural pieces like the Baltimore Bridge out of the Patapsco River. International deployments occur anywhere you can find the U.S. military, from bases in allied countries to active warzones.
Williams has done both.
International deployment: Afghanistan
Williams was chosen to support Operation Freedom Sentinel in Afghanistan as a contracting officer technical representative in 2019 due to his extensive and well-rounded electrical and contracting background.
“I had traveled all over the U.S. working with a contractor building powerlines early in my career, but I had never had the opportunity to travel outside of the U.S. before,” Williams said.
Preparing for an international deployment is an involved process. Williams had to obtain a basic proficiency in Dari, the native language in Afghanistan. He also had to complete the interview and background check process for a security clearance and get a round of vaccines to be prepared for his deployment.
He spent a week in Virginia for Prime Power School to teach him the finer points of what to expect and how to properly perform his role in Afghanistan and then another week going through the combat readiness center at Fort Bliss, Texas.
“This was one last final check to ensure that I was physically and mentally prepared for deployment,” he said.
Williams said everyone had to pass the physical fitness requirements, or they wouldn’t be able to survive the deployment. He quickly found out why as he was responsible for carrying five bags, as well as more than 50 pounds of body armor, whenever his group traveled throughout the country.
Getting there was also not easy. The flight there took nearly 24 hours, stopping in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, then Germany, before landing in Kuwait.
“We had to fly into Kuwait in the middle of the night, because in July, even at night, it was 125 degrees Fahrenheit on the tarmac,” he said. “Could you imagine what it would be like in the middle of the day….upwards of 140 degrees?”
Williams was boots on the ground at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan on Aug. 4, 2019, where he would live and work under dangerous conditions.
“At the time of arrival, Bagram was nicknamed Rocket City because 6 out of 7 days of the week, the Taliban Forces would launch improvised rockets into base,” Williams said. “During my two years in Afghanistan, I had two separate somewhat scary and relatively close experiences with mortar attacks.”
Williams quickly learned his role and was able to travel throughout the country to do his job. USACE had centralized powerplants on four different bases he would travel between.
His first year was spent building up the electrical infrastructure, and during the second, he worked on the retrograde process after the peace treaty was signed and efforts to transition out of the country had begun.
The COVID-19 pandemic also impacted his deployment as several important staff members were sent back to the United States for medical concerns. Williams stepped up to take over the lead contracting officer technical representative role and assumed many additional duties during his remaining 14 months of deployment. This required traveling to at least 12 additional U.S. and allied military bases to consult or facilitate needed electrical support.
Williams was also one of only three USACE civilians left in the country prior to the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces, staying behind to facilitate the critical process of keeping the lights on for the last two bases left in Afghanistan to include Camp Dwyer, a critical base in the Helmond province.
Only 200 U.S. Soldiers and Williams remained at Camp Dwyer until the final withdrawal.
“The last day was so eerie and quiet,” he recalled. “I can remember it like it was yesterday - I was somewhat worn out from monitoring the powerplant and base electrical grid every couple of hours around the clock for the last four days and wondering to myself how all this was going to play out.”
There was pressure, Williams said, to ensure nothing happened on the power side of things to jeopardize the final withdrawal plan. He would have to solve any problems that might occur in those final four days following the departure of his contractor staff.
On the evening of the last day, towards the end of June, 2021, Williams said he decided to leave the generators running. Before they left, the electrical crew helped Williams automate some of the bulk fuel to continue to keep the generator’s daily fuel tanks topped off. He estimated the powerplant could potentially have kept the lights on continuously for about five days after they had left.
“I got into my pickup and left the powerplant gates wide open and drove to the flightline where everyone would be gathering for final withdrawal from [forward operating base] Dwyer,” Williams said.
Williams was on the last plane, along with 50 U.S. Army Soldiers, to depart the second to last air base in Afghanistan.
“As I looked out the window, all the lights were still lighting up the military base, so our neighbors were not any wiser,” Williams said.
Williams spent the next week in Kuwait helping coordinate with the remaining USACE contracting officer technical representatives still in Bagram, the last active base in Afghanistan, before he finally made his way home.
Domestic deployment: Georgia
Williams had been home from Afghanistan for three years when he decided to consider another deployment opportunity.
“I wanted to support USACE again, but on a smaller scale and closer to home,” Williams said.
In January of 2025, Williams signed up to spend 65 days in Georgia supporting the hurricane response mission following Hurricane Milton.
“I was pretty excited to go to Georgia and see firsthand what a hurricane was capable of doing,” Williams said. “It was an eye opener for sure.”
The most common job for USACE staff on domestic deployments is to work as a quality assurance inspector. When he arrived, Williams was one of more than 100 QA inspectors assigned around Georgia.
The damage from Hurricane Milton was widespread throughout the state, so the USACE mission divided the 10 counties into four work zones. Williams was assigned to Zone 4, covering Lowndes and Brooks counties along the Florida-Georgia border.
Williams said he had the opportunity to rotate through all the non-supervisory QA roles in Georgia. His first role was in a debris tower at one of the temporary debris management sites. QAs assigned to a debris tower check every truck entering and exiting the site and record the observed volume of debris or mulch entering or exiting the site.
He held this role at multiple temporary debris management sites as well as a mulch site and at the final debris storage site.
Williams worked in tandem with the inspectors in the tower and spent several days uploading the debris load tickets into survey software as official record of how much work had been done by the contractors.
Later in his deployment, Williams spent time working with the crews clearing right-of-way debris throughout Zone 4. This entailed working with the contractor to close out completed locations, to identify additional work in need of completion, and to plot it on maps to track the percentage of completion.
“I would observe and make sure the trucks were picking up the trees from the correct designated locations, that they were operating safely and using proper Department of Transportation flaggers and signs if traffic got busy,” Williams said.
This role also tasked him with performing spot inspections on as many truck loads as possible and uploading the information to the surveying program.
Williams said his first domestic deployment was made special by the people he was deployed alongside.
“When I first arrived, I was very fortunate to have a really knowledgeable and seasoned QA supervisor and zone manager who saw the benefit in having me rotate into every debris job in the field in an effort to make me very versatile,” he said.
During his last few weeks in Georgia, Williams was knowledgeable enough in every role to be put in charge of training new employees in the various QA roles.
Williams said a short-term domestic deployment like this one can’t compare to his time in Afghanistan, but it was great in its own way.
“I met and worked with a bunch of incredible people from all over the U.S. and have made some friends for life,” he said. “I will definitely continue supporting this great program during any opportunity that I can.”