I often feel stranded in between starkly opposed cultures with no way to resolve the tension. It is a matter of my identity and how I relate to those around me. I should warn you here that if, you are looking for nice and tidy answers with a pretty little bow then, you are in the wrong place. When I was eighteen years old and fresh out of high school I decided to enlist in the United States Air Force to the tune of a six year active duty commitment. The reasons I did this are complex and meant for another post. Suffice it to say that I was young and it seemed like a good idea at the time. It did not take long however for me to quickly figure out that I in no way really fit in this military culture for a number of important reasons.
I found myself surrounded with people who were proudly anti-intellectual despite the fact that I worked in the intelligence field. They seemed perfectly content in the face of the profoundly troubling nature of what we were doing, to only ask questions of how to do it better and more efficiently. While I meanwhile, found my mind plagued with a radically different and potentially dangerous set of questions that revolved around why. Shamefully at times I wished I could be like them. They seemed so blissfully ignorant and happy. Many of them really seemed to believe in the patriotic american narrative of divine rescue. While I could only see the hands of american empire at work. I felt stuck and suppressed. I had no choice but to keep my thoughts and questions to myself. I found ways of venting of course but I always felt as though I was hiding something. I had to put on an act for not only my superiors and subordinates but for my peers as well. Every morning when I put on that uniform I went through a transformation of sorts. It was, in many ways, a ritual where by the time I tied my boots, stood up, put on my cover, and walked out the door I had become a character in a play that I had no choice but to play convincingly and leave my humanity at home.
As time went on the problem intensified to the point where I felt completely at odds with the person I became every morning as I put on that uniform. I had reached the point where I simply could not resolve my personal ethical convictions with the actions I was being ordered to carry out while in uniform. Living in that ethical tension felt like an inescapable prison. To complicate matters, the sensitive nature of my job meant that I legally could not tell anyone outside of my office what it was exactly that I did and still can’t to this day. Inevitably, I increasingly became an outsider at work as time went on. In fact after my assignment in Okinawa I was given my last assignment in San Antonio and there I resolved to keep my personal and professional life entirely separate. I never spent time with people I worked with outside of the office. Almost all of my friends were civilians in San Antonio.
Finally in August of 2009 my freedom was given back to me and I literally did a dance out of that office building as I left for the last time. For the first time in a long time I felt like I could breathe fresh oxygen again. I moved to Austin Texas to go back to school and I felt like the whole world was open to me once again. The transition to civilian life however proved to be far more difficult than I would have ever predicted. To begin with my lines of compartmentalization had not merely blurred but had completely vanished. These structures had so regulated my behavior for so long that their removal in many ways left me me confused and questioning my own identity.
However, the most troubling thing of all has been the discovery that in many ways my identity had already been deeply formed by my time in the military. The way in which I viewed the world was defined in terms of contrast to the military. The military had become my point of reference. It’s not so surprising I guess that six years years in a system like that will undoubtedly leave its marks. Being around civilians and trying to live a completely civilian life has thrown a sharp contrasting light on my own set of formative experiences that still regulate how I function and operate. But this has created problems for me in how I relate and form meaningful relationships with the people around me. Their point of reference is entirely different than mine. Their respective experiences come out of an entirely different culture and have thus deeply formed them in a profoundly different way. My hope is that as time goes on this will become less of an obstacle. I am firmly committed to continuing to purposefully engaging with those around me. But confessionally it is really tiring at times and once again I feel like an outsider.
