After his last class on Friday, Rio Americano High School social science teacher Brian Brickey will trade his usual polo shirts with the Raider logo for military fatigues with golden oak leaves, as he departs for an almost year-long deployment as a major in the Army Reserves.

Brickey will be deployed in Bell for the rest of January and then to Fort Bliss, Tex., for three weeks of training. After that, he will be gone for nine months as a public affairs officer in the Middle East. His unit will work with nations in that region to resettle refugees from over a decade of conflict.

Despite leaving his job and his wife and four children for his deployment to Jordan and Lebanon, he sounded a positive note for Rio students.

“You either choose to succeed or you choose to fail,” Brickey said. “Best of luck in the coming year. I’ll see you all in 2025.”

Brickey has been teaching at Rio for two years, starting not long after he left active duty. He teaches World History, U.S. History and Geography. A nationally ranked powerlifter, he also teaches advanced weights and is the strength coach and line coach for the school’s football team.

Brickey has gone a long way in teaching, and one main goal that he follows is inspiring students to “learn to learn and love to learn.”

“You’re gonna forget 95% of what we teach you in here,” Brickey said. “The whole point of teaching is to develop your thought processes.”

Brickey was an excellent student himself, graduating as salutatorian from his high school in Santa Maria. He played football at Occidental College before getting his bachelors in world affairs from the University of La Verne and his master’s from USC.

After college he joined the Army officer corps.

“Growing up, I did not come from a military family at all, but very quickly I found the idea of serving in some capacity to be a necessary call for your country,” Brickey said. “Regardless of the situation that the United States may be in politically… the freedoms that you have, you have to give back and defend those same freedoms.”

During his eight years in the active U.S. Army, Brickey did everything from platoon leader of a 12-man anti-tank guided missile platoon to an executive officer.

While serving as second in command for a 140-man reconnaissance troop out of Fort Lewis, Wash. he was selected as the I Corps liaison to the U.S. Embassy in Malaysia during Pacific Pathways 2016.

At the end of his active-duty career from 2018-2020, he was a maneuvers operations analyst at Fort Bliss, Tex., an assignment in which he advised military leaders on future weapons, techniques and tactics.

Brickey said that he left the Army to end deployments away from his growing family and because the Army was going to assign him to a desk job.

“They told me I couldn’t kick down doors anymore, that I had to start pushing papers,” Brickey said, “so I chose the reserves so that I could still affect the Army in some way, shape or form, and continue that service to the country.”

Brickey and his wife of 12 years, Allison, have four kids, three boys and one girl. His wife is a nurse in plastic surgery.

One strain of his deployment is that he is not sure how he’ll be able to keep in touch with his family.

“As of right now, there’s no guarantees on the communication and when I’m gonna be able to communicate,” Brickey said. “Number one, there’s going to be a difficulty because I will be 11 hours ahead. And then number two is there are oftentimes where I’m working with the special operations community, so I will be running missions with them to run their public affairs. And there’s no guarantee that in the situations we’re in, whether we’re in Jordan, Iraq, Syria or Lebanon, that we’re gonna have the ability to communicate back until after the mission’s complete.”

Although conflict in the region has increased since the start of the Israel-Hamas War in October, Brickey is not worried about his safety.

“There’s no concern,” Brickey said. “I understand that there’s hostility in the area, but it’s what we signed up to do, and I trust all the service members that I’m with.”

A popular teacher noted for his rigor, Brickey plans to return to Rio in February 2025, following a one-month “reintegration period” after his deployment.

“He’s a great teacher,” junior Regina Del Real said. “He treats his (U.S. History) class as an AP class and it’s fun and he teaches well.”

This story was originally published on The Mirada on January 19, 2024.