Basically, the burden of proof is on the landlord that the tenant hasn't responded because they may be deployed.

I was living on Palm beach county for several years prior to being deployed to Italy and Japan.Ironically I was in Naples Italy another big Navy townI'm assigned to the Embassy and have been living in Tokyo for almost 4 years now.

You will also need to include a Department of Defense Manpower certificate from their web site to certify that the tenant is not deployed.

Once we sell our original primary residence, we will be looking to re-deploy our capital into a small multi (or settle for a SFH) in the DFW area.

That is since your desire was to deploy the least amount of capital into the asset to keep your cost basis low in an attempt to make a margin on the re-sale, there really can not be much if any of a value increase, since the relative cost to dispostion the asset is the same for all potential owners.

A few weeks ago I offered to pay a landlord upfront for quite a few months rent because I was looking for a shorter term lease (My roommate is getting deployed to Afghanistan.)

You will select the institution that holds the funds, and when capital is not invested in non-traditional assets such as real estate or notes, you will determine how to keep that capital deployed.  

In that case if its 50+ miles from your job then you may consider quitting and being a full time student while letting your co-signors help you qualify for the loan in tandem with the income already available on the property.The reason you wont want to use conventional or hard money or etc is the down payment will be 25%+ down unless if you have it and its sitting around readily available to be deployed.

Welcome; I have similar interest after 5 deployments myself.

Its dropbox which I have deployed for the same.