Staff Photo by Dan Henry Sgt. Shawn Denney, owner of Preppy Pet Suites, speaks about how he is trying to sell his business that he and his wife opened in August of 2007, since he will be on active duty with the National Guard beginning this Monday and is expected to be deployed to Afghanistan some time in April. Sgt. Denney is with the Georgia National Guard 1/108th Calvary based out of Dalton, Ga.

Shawn Denney has managed to live a double life for a few decades now, but he has finally reached his breaking point.

As he approaches his third Middle East deployment since 1990, Mr. Denney is realizing that the career he has built as a Chattanooga businessman is no longer compatible with the military career he’s built alongside it.

One of them is going to have to win out, he says — and it’s going to have to be service to country.

“It’s just what I do,” said the Ringgold, Ga., who served as an active-duty soldier for several years before becoming a reservist in 1989.

So Sgt. Denney is leaving this week to train for a yearlong tour in Afghanistan with the 1/108th Cavalry Regiment of the Georgia National Guard. He has hired an office manager to handle day-to-day business at his Preppy Pet Suites franchise on Lee Highway. He knows he can’t run it adequately from overseas and is looking for a buyer to take over as soon as possible.

That will be the fatal blow to the dream life he and his wife had been cultivating since opening the business in August 2007. Beth Denney had planned to leave her job teaching middle school in Dalton, Ga., to join her husband as soon as she could.

“This was what we wanted to do,” she lamented. “I would have stopped teaching and been with him full time.”

Unfortunately, the Denneys aren’t alone in their struggle, said Joe Thomas, chairman of the Tennessee Committee for Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve. Both independent business owners and employees of larger companies struggle with the impact deployment can have on the civilian jobs of National Guard and Reserve forces members, Mr. Thomas said.

The Department of Defense has formally recognized the issue since chartering the National Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve in 1972. The organization has a hotline that answers questions about federal laws governing deployment leave and even provides referrals to state ombudsmen for impartial mediation, Mr. Thomas said.

Under the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act of 1994, an employer must retain an equal or better position for the employee for up to five years of cumulative military service time. The law requires that those employees continue to accumulate seniority while deployed and stipulates that they cannot be discriminated against in any way.

“The greater majority of employers stand behind members of the Guard and Reserve because, in a way, that’s their contribution to our nation’s security, making arrangements and sacrificing for those deployments,” Mr. Thomas said.

But compliance with the law is sometimes spotty, he acknowledged, because some employers are “simply not aware that they are obligated by that law.”

It’s usually not intentional, he said, and once they are educated, about “90 percent of the time they’re willing to comply.”

The Chattanooga Police Department has gone above and beyond to accommodate military service, according to Officer Grover Wilson, who has deployed twice with the Tennessee National Guard since 2004. Department officials send applications for promotion to service members deployed overseas and have even promoted some of them while they were gone, Officer Wilson said.

Tennessee National Guard Sgt. Daniel Heaps said his employer, Alstom Power in Chattanooga, also has been more than generous. The company paid the difference between his military salary and his normal pay as a welding inspector and continued contributing to his 401(k) during his deployment last year with the 1/181st Field Artillery Battalion, he said.

Still, Sgt. Heaps can’t help but wonder if he was passed over for a promotion recently because of some type of prejudice about his military service. He plans to leave the military after his contract runs out in the next few years because, unlike Sgt. Denney, he wants to focus more on his civilian career than his National Guard trajectory.

“I can’t take another chance of being deployed again,” Sgt. Heaps said. “I love my job more than anything. I live for my job.”

Rob Sentell, director of human resources for Alstom’s Boiler Retrofits Division, said he was unaware of any prejudicial treatment of Sgt. Heaps or any other employee affiliated with the military.

He said the company was happy to have the sergeant back because it can be difficult filling the gaps that deployments leave in the workload.

“We have to reassign or do things a different way,” he said. “We try to do everything we can to make deployment less painful for the employees and their families. ... Hopefully it will get better soon, with all these multiple deployments.”

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