Drive-thru attendant: “Did you serve?”
Me: “Yeah, how’d you know?”
Drive-thru attendant: “I can just tell.”
I don’t sport a crew cut or wear military paraphernalia, but I’ve had a few conversations just like this one in the short three years since I left the Army. They are amusing reminders that though I’ve left the Army, it hasn’t left me. Sometimes my questioner is another veteran, or a teenager with military aspirations, or family members of other service members. They recognize something that identifies me with the military, and though I recognize it in others too, I can’t quite put my finger on it. Maybe it’s a manner of speech, a posture of carrying oneself, or some other subtlety that reveals the military’s stamp.
My trajectory toward the military began in sixth grade when I read Lone Survivor. I know it was an inflection point because it led me to adopt a religious physical training schedule. Outside of baseball and tennis seasons, I spent at least an hour every day after school doing calisthenics until I was old enough to join the local gym. Like many ambitious young boys, eleven-year-old Ben wanted to be a SEAL, a Green Beret, a Ranger, a MARSOC Raider, or an Air Force Combat Rescue Officer. Books and films reinforced that ambition. Military lore appealed to my appetite for adventure, competitiveness, risk-taking, excitement, sacrifice, heroism, and honor—all things a boy should seek out in healthy proportion. It offered challenges to test my mental and physical virtue. It promised unique experiences and a fraternal bond with warriors past and present. On the whole, it delivered.
Many folks will cite All Quiet on the Western Front to illustrate the dangers of propaganda and indoctrination and to warn of the disillusionment that will inevitably follow. But some distinctions are necessary. First, not all wars or soldiers share the circumstances of WWI Germany. Just War Theory is a thing. Soldiers are often as aware of the military-industrial complex as anyone—if not more so. Part of the drama of military leadership is the constant interplay of personal and societal values with mission objectives through which people have to make moral judgements. Veterans will be the first to tell you that Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran are messy situations with plenty of ambiguity. The American soldier, however, takes an oath to defend the Constitution, not to enrich private industry or serve a particular administration. Soldiers do have hearts and brains. No doubt some of my best friends and colleagues have had to wrestle with moral conundrums in combat, and I thank God that I’ve never been in that situation. But it is reductive to see soldiers as the hapless victims of propaganda and brainwashing.
Taking the oath as a freshman cadet at Montana State University in 2015.
For eight years I staked a large part of my identity on the Army. The military is great at initiation and the formation of identity through “type two fun.” I remember many times thinking, “Who else is doing this right now?” and taking pride in the knowledge that what we were doing was both challenging and unique. Surely I was also thinking, “This sucks.” There was ample opportunity to “offer up” discomforts. Those were my thoughts as a cadet, shivering in formation at 04:00 in cold driving rain with a rucksack on my back about to conduct a land navigation course in the mountains of Montana. Those were my thoughts when doing pushups for a drill sergeant in triple-digit heat at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and again later that month when attempting to recite the Soldier’s Creed in a room cloudy with tear gas. They were my thoughts watching motion-sick colleagues vomit into their shirts, weighed down by rucksacks and parachutes aboard a turbulent C-130 about to hit the drop zone for a follow-on objective fifteen klicks away. They were my thoughts when flapping my arms desperately trying to force warm blood to my fingers while snowshoeing to an objective at -40 degrees in the Alaskan bush.
A frigid night at Donnelly Training Area near Fort Greely, AK, ~ November 2021.
To be sure, there were also many exciting moments when I thought, “This is sick.” My first jump at airborne school when my canopy opened and I noticed a vulture flying below. Compressing the butterfly trigger on a .50cal machine gun or pulling the lanyard on an M777 howitzer. The first sip of Jetboil coffee on a crisp morning at an observation post overlooking the Delta River and the Alaska Range. Calling “fire for effect” on the radio and watching the detonation, in quick succession, of twenty-plus 155mm artillery rounds. Watching the northern lights from my bivy sack in the snow. Staring out the open ramp of a Chinook helicopter at the Chugach Mountains. The first time coordinating strafing runs and low flyovers from an Apache or fighter jet. Some soldiers probably associate these things with darker memories. I was about as fortunate as I could have been as an Army officer. Other than a painful lower back injury requiring surgery, I was able to leave the Army without serious trauma beyond a few aches and scars. I was lucky to be placed at my preferred duty station. I never deployed to combat, though most of my colleagues had, or would go on to “see the elephant.” Indeed, some of my friends have spent more time in combat zones than I spent total in uniform.
More influential and lasting than anything else in my Army experience were the people, both good and bad. I saw the difference between vice and virtue amplified by stressful situations. I saw what good and bad leadership looks like. I learned that the right attitude mattered more often than intellectual brilliance or physical aptitude. I learned that after the basics of discipline, technical competency, and physical fitness, to be a good soldier was to be a good person. And as C.S. Lewis said, “No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.”
From the moment I began ROTC to my last position as an officer, I was blessed in quantity and quality of lifelong friends and mentors. I would do it all again if just for those relationships. I can’t say if it was shared values, hobbies, commiseration, camaraderie, similar temperaments, or a combination thereof, but I sincerely doubt the ability of any other institution, save the church, to create such a network of close friends. I don’t see it replicated anywhere in the civilian world, and perhaps mine is a unique experience even in the military. But I don’t think so. Three years after separating from active duty, I still maintain regular contact with no less than fifteen people and occasional contact with thirty or forty more. We’ve been groomsmen at each other’s weddings. We are godparents to each other’s children. We’ve continued to celebrate and console each other through the ups and downs of life, even though many of them are still on active duty serving on different continents.
Necessary arguments about the justice and prudence of the missions on which the military is sometimes deployed can obscure the reality of these valuable friendships forged through working in harsh conditions for the good of others. In an age marked by loneliness and narcissism, such goods are increasingly precious.
After eight years of being associated with the Army, I realized just how much I had hitched my identity to the uniform. The months leading up to my discharge brought a sense of instability as I had to reckon with the transition to civilian life. I knew folks who lived and breathed the Army, and I thought for sure I wasn’t one of them. I hated talking about work outside of work. I had hobbies like reading and hunting and fishing and interests in theology and ecology. I was a Christian first, a soldier second. Yet, I had banked so much of my identity in being a soldier, an officer, a paratrooper. Maybe pride and my ego got the better of me, or maybe the transition from military to civilian life is just difficult because it’s so disparate— probably both. What’s more, my new civilian colleagues didn’t share the same sense of community, purpose, or experiences; they didn’t speak the same lingo.
It took a year or so, but I finally settled into my new life as a husband, a teacher, and a graduate student, first in theology and now in ecology. I came to appreciate my military experience for the friendships and lessons it gave me, as well as for the memories of outdoor recreation afforded by an Alaska duty station. While the military humbled me in many ways (nothing like being put in charge of a bunch of battle-hardened thirty-year-olds with over a decade on active duty when you’re a rosy-cheeked twenty-two-year-old fresh out of biology class), the transition to civilian life forced me to take a hard look at my sense of identity and make adjustments toward the Cross and away from my ego. The last thing I want is to be the guy who’s always going on about his time in the military. I will, however, talk your ear off if you’re interested— about the military, about ecology, about history, and especially about faith. When someone asks, “Did you serve?” I think about all these things and smile with gratitude as I nod.
Image Credit: Ben Sisson
