Mixed Feelings

I always have such mixed feelings when someone I know/like tells me they're going into the service. It changes people. Always. They do not come back the same person they went in. If you like who you are, and don't really want to change it, think really hard about choices like these, because they will change you, and change you fast.

Sometimes I think they change people for the better. More often, I don't like the person who comes back as much as I liked the person who left. I have a hard time dealing with military personnel. They're very critical of shortcomings. They're used to being yelled at, have survived weeks and months if not years of punishing perfectionism, and usually think that if only everyone could be made to go through the same thing, we'd be a better society. They call us "civvies." I am not making this up. Yes, it is a slur. No, they don't care that it's a hurtful word. Hurtful words are common in the military. You get used to them and learn not to let them hurt you. This is, they think, something everyone should be made to learn.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about this mentality. I see no tangible difference between what happens to people in the military and Stockholm syndrome. But I also recognize that it can be helpful for people who feel they need direction, structure and discipline, who are hamstrung by indecision about their futures.

I'm one of those disorganized, easily distracted rainbow chasers that tend to give military types frustrated fits. I'm the sort of person they'd wipe off the face of the earth if they could. But I also think, because I don't think anyone deserves to be erased--regardless of their real, extant flaws--that it's important that I be proud I'm not like them. And it's just as important that I'm sad that someone I once admired no longer appears to exist.

This is what vets face when they come home: a population that is completely alien to them. Loved ones who no longer know them and aren't able to deal with the new demands they're suddenly faced with, or the curious lack of empathy from a soldier who was once warm and understanding. Add to that a society that collectively shrugs at the homebound soldier's joblessness and tells them to take a fucking number, it's no wonder so many people try to re-enlist, and such a problem with suicide among our young military who can't, for whatever reason, return to duty. They're completely and utterly alone, surrounded by people who seem lazy, petty and unmotivated, and asked to defer to them, to treat them as equals, after being built up to be better than they are, and further had it burned into their brains that to be a civilian is to be weak and useless.

Of course, this isn't always true. I worked with a guy who did a couple tours in the Navy, and he was both one of the best people I've ever met and one of the laziest! But even he said that he felt like he was an exception; instead of completely overwriting his personality with military training, he was able to set it aside, and return to it when he came home. He forgot the military more than he forgot who he was before going in. He said a lot of his friends weren't nearly so "lucky." He wasn't friends with most of them anymore. They thought he was a loser and a slob. He just shrugged and kept browsing Something Awful, but, he said, "it sucks." Because he wasn't either of those things. He just didn't wind up preferring the way military life made him feel and act, and he was able to come back from feeling and acting that way. Oh, he kept some of the skills. He folded his clothes with perfect precision, he just didn't care if it was done fast or not. He's a great shot with a rifle. But he hated the way the military treated its women. He hated being yelled at all the time, never really got used to it. He didn't understand why they felt it was necessary to encourage verbal abuse as a means of securing loyalty and performance. He acknowledged it worked, but thought there were probably less damaging ways that could be just as effective. He wished he was a scientist so he might find one of those ways.

Well, he wished, but he didn't really want to look into it.

Sometimes I think that I should become a scientist, just so I could find the answer, myself. I hate the fear I feel when someone I know goes into the military. I'm afraid I'll never see them again, and I don't mean because I think they'll get blown up, I mean I think they'll be brainwashed out of existence. And more often than not, that fear is born out.

I want to know what the Earth of Star Trek supposedly knew. I want a military based on science and some variant of humanist philosophy. Structure and discipline and self-motivation are wonderful things, but not when they come at the cost of individuality and creativity, when their procurement isolates people from the larger civilization, financially disempowers an entire section of the population, and dismisses the importance of meditation, imagination, curiosity and discovery for their own sakes.

I feel like I lost a friend today. I didn't really know her that well, but I'm still sad, because she came back someone I completely did not recognize. She's clearly happy, and I'm glad she is happy, but I fear for her future, and I'm hurt that she has no compunctions about dismissing me as a "civvie" and "lazy."

Oh, well. One more invisible funeral I get to hold for someone in my head.