After graduation, life changed in an instant. Celebratory meals and hugs completed, my family boarded a plane home. I hopped in my car and whispered to myself, “Congratulations, you did it.” Then a little panic set in: What do I do now? For months, every hour, meal and action had been directed and monitored. Time and decisions were never my own. And now they were. What would I do with them?
On the day two decades later when I became a veteran, that little panic returned. Though I’d reached ranks where making decisions about other people’s time was part of the job, military life had been familiar and structured. It was a life where the metals and colors on a uniform’s collar, chest and sleeves told a person’s professional story in a glimmering glance. It was a planner’s life where the clock and the calendar and the rules controlled everything else. It had customs all its own. A language, too. And then, midnight strikes after the last day of active duty, and whether you’ve served for four years, 10 or 25, the world you know is no longer yours. It’s the past.
That’s not all bad. If you’re fortunate, you wake up the next morning having accomplished your latest mission, whether a move or a new job or school or family. You’ve reached your objective. There’s a freedom in being able to chart your own path again, to reclaim your time. On my first morning as a veteran, my beard was more than stubble for the first time in my life. I didn’t have to spend 10 minutes looking for a lost star from a ribbon or back fastener for rank or insignia. And there was no one standing around with a clipboard and stopwatch clocking my mile or telling me a push-up didn’t count.
But many veterans begin the day effectively unemployed — as, in fact, I was. Sometimes plans fail. Sometimes risks don’t pay off right away. Yes, the military does yeoman’s work in preparing service members to transition out. There are mock interviews and clothing workshops and résumé drills and career fairs. They try to scrub that military dialect out of your mouth. Suddenly, your 2003 deployment to Iraq becomes — as comedian Dewayne White, a retired Army veteran, said during a recent stand-up — that time “the company I was working for” tapped you to help open up a new market (“Baghdad”) — after some initial “success in the area.” But when the calls and networking and interview advice — or admissions or money or relationships — aren’t panning out, the first day as a veteran can be really difficult. You might even be asking yourself, “What do I do now?” just to avoid having to answer the infinitely harder questions: What have I done? Did I make the right call?
Humor helps. Dewayne was one of a dozen veterans in a recent comedy show I helped put together, and their jokes about life in the military and dealing with the life that follows rang true with the audience, whether they’d been through boot camp or not.
Whatever that first day looks like, it marks a change. We emerge from the uniform different from who we were when it was first issued. Taking it off for the final time, even for those who couldn’t get it off quick enough, is profound. It signals that part of life is over. Along with losing the rigors of service, that realization can be difficult for some veterans to come to terms with. For others, it’s exciting. A world of possibility awaits.
If there’s one thing a veteran knows how to do, it’s wait. A full two-thirds of military service is the waiting. Refreshing your email every seven seconds, hoping an interview or job offer comes through, is the kind of rote task expertise the military cultivates. For me, it took a month of refreshes before I began commuting to work in blue button-downs and khaki pants, a uniform of a different sort. And it took a couple of more years before I landed in the work I actually left the military to do. The transition was just another exercise, another training evolution that structures life in uniform. But the new mission cannot begin in earnest until you get outta those barracks by 1400.
Sometimes changes long in the making happen in an instant. And you have to trust that you are ready for whatever comes next.
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