“You don’t just shut the machine down dude. It’s all I’ve ever known. It was my life.” I said in a recent conversation I had with a non-veteran friend. It’s extremely hard to articulate the feelings that come after the dust settles and you find yourself a newly transitioned veteran back on the block again. I’ve come to see that military life could be accurately described as “Organized Chaos”. Who In the hell would want to drag a family around countless cross country moves, new houses in new neighborhoods, new friends, a partial do over on life every few years. That’s not taking into consideration the job though. The GWOT era veterans repeatedly deployed in and out of combat, endured accelerated training cycles so when you’re home you’re not really home and had to answer the call in countless near impossible ways all with the expectation of flawless execution and perfect morality and discipline in a way that no other generation of veteran had ever been held to. You sit around and listen to your civilian friends talk about their concept of what hard is and it’s extremely difficult sometimes to take them seriously.
Him: man J I’m I can’t believe I have to actually show up to the office 3 days a week!
Me: (thinking in my head) That’s not a real problem bud. Why would you say that to me like it’s some catastrophic issue? I woke up at like 4 am almost daily to be there by 530 am to immediately work out and start a 15 hour day 5 or more days a week for over two decades.
You have to stop yourself and remember that you are the odd man out here not them.
The actual transition out is unceremonious. You keep waiting for this feeling of relief that never comes. One day the military just all goes away. It’s like a distant dream. Sometimes I feel like it never even happened, and I just woke up after high school. You notice that what you just went through is in no way relatable to the average American you meet. The “Normies” live boring ass lives to be honest. As folks get to know me they ask me about my time in the Army. I’ve begun to really look at what questions they ask and their reactions to my answers. It’s telling of their maturity and life experience. Your average person can in no way relate to what a veteran has to tell them about the lifestyle, serving, and especially war and combat.
My expectation after I retired is that I would transition into this next chapter of life seamlessly. Most things happened according to plan but what I didn’t anticipate dealing with was how the change of lifestyle would impact me. The single hardest thing I deal with is the lack of unity and not having my close veteran friends near me. Often times you’ll call and they are busy. It’s not like it used to be when we all had the same mission. We all have different missions now. Different goals and dreams and different ways of living our lives. It’s a lonely place a lot of veterans find themselves in. You begin to feel like you aren’t normal. Well, the truth is that there is nothing normal about military life and it is in fact organized chaos. The fact that your nonveteran counterparts can’t relate to what you’re going through is normal though. It’s not for them to understand.
I kept waiting for “Something” to happen. Something to react or adjust to. Something major that would change everything. It rarely comes and when it does, it’s not the flavor you’re used to.
This is all part of the transition. Time allows you to process things differently. Your life becomes normal but, your experiences will always be there. A couple of key things I try to take away are:
-What Do I keep from my experiences?/What’s useful?
-What do I discard? Why am I holding onto this?
One thing I’ve come to realize is while military life is not “the real world” neither is corporate America. There are an infinite amount of ways to do life. You’ve got to pick the way you’re going to do this.