Today we kick off Episode 6 of the 8-part Guest Post series: Military Life: Two Perspectives

In case you missed the introduction to the series:  Military Life: Two Perspectives with Leto and Avalune

The topic today is Life in the Military, from Leto’s perspective.  Next Saturday, we’ll hear Avalune’s perspective on military life and family.

*****

“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.” – Morpheus

I’ve thought a lot about this post, how I would convey to you what/how “Military Life” is like. It’s both simultaneously utterly thrilling and utterly banal. It’s intense flashes of manic, head-on-fire action followed by prolonged bouts of the utterly mundane. It’s not so different than any office worker trying to leave for the day, and then their boss dropping a fucking volcano potato on their desk with a due date of two weeks ago (because the original email was sent out four weeks ago and it sat in the exec’s inbox for three weeks and four days before they were reminded that this was due TWO WEEKS AGO).

Humans have tried to capture war through the ages in various forms. On walls, vases, books, paintings, music, and movies. Our current generational attempt focuses on special forces and everything they go through. Honestly I hate most of those films. Even the ones that try to show a human side to their people, not just ACTION! EXPLOSIONS! FANCY GEAR!, fall flat for me. The movie/series I’ll return to time and again is Band of Brothers. And it’s not for any of the war scenes, though those are very well executed. It’s the banal moments that hold the most significance for me. People being corrected for uniform infractions, reveling in taking a hot shower after not doing so for months on end, and imitating your boss while being stuck doing tedious shit. The reason I love those is because that’s military life.

The action parts, if you actually ever see any, are mere blips in your career. Get around vets and you’ll hear us say, “Oh you were at X; yeah, that sucked” and we’ll kind of leave it at that. But we’ll spend ages talking about the kid who got shoved into a wall locker at basic training and told, “I WANNA HEAR MICHAEL JACKSON! SING BEAT IT!” because he wouldn’t stop humming while the Training Instructor was trying to show everyone how to fold their shirts properly. Or we talk about the time the guys from Civil Engineering didn’t get a dig permit before digging out near the Radar Approach Control Facility, subsequently severing the 200 pair fiber cable controlling the main radar for the airfield because they thought it was a tree root, continued digging and then hit the main water line which shot water up 50ft and filled the hole with 10ft of water. I laughed then, I’m laughing now.

One of the main complaints I heard, and still hear, is that the recruiter lied to them/a family member/a friend. Yes, we have some shit recruiters. They’re salesmen. But there’s also no way that they can answer every question a person has about military life because it’s too vast. There’s no one single path that everyone travels down. It’s like life or time. It’s relative. We do share some common experiences: basic training, tech school, first assignment, last assignment, leaving the service… and that’s about it. I’ve thought about if I had a time machine and I could tell my younger self what to expect, how to better prepare for what’s coming up. Honestly? I don’t know if I could distill it into some sort of essential map to better follow. Also I don’t know if would want to.

The experiences that I had, all the good and all the bad, shaped me into who I am today. To go back and to fiddle with that would be to produce something wholly unrecognizable now. On top of that, at 21, I was still a knucklehead who didn’t want to listen to anyone about jack shit. I also want to point out that we do have some really good recruiters who try to prepare their folk for what’s coming. But they can only do so much. “Yes it’s going to suck. We all had to do it. You’re going to get yelled at like you’ve never been yelled at before. They’re going to expect you to move before they’ve said to move, but if you move before they say to move you’re going to get yelled at. Do what you’re told and you’ll be out of there before you know it.”

For most of though, Charles explained it the best:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair …, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way …”

Never in a million years would I try to sell someone on going in, especially now. But if they were to ask me for advice, I’d play it as straight as I could. It’s the same that I did for our son. One of the best things so far has been comparing stories with him. He’s a military brat, doesn’t know any other world, thought he knew a fair amount, but after going active duty he’s gained a whole new insight about some of the things I did, the reasons for them. An insight he’d never have if he’d stayed civilian, and not because I haven’t told him about things, which I have, but because he wouldn’t have had the proper frame of reference to appreciate it. At the same time I try to not pry too much, nor offer up too much advice (unless he asks for it) because this is his journey, not mine. I did my 22 and I’m happy where I am. This is his time, his experience, so I don’t want to rob him of that. He has enough NCOs breathing down his neck, he doesn’t need helicopter dad NCO doing the same.

With that, the floor’s open and I’m here for the next few hours. Have at it!

Military Life: Leto on Life in the MilitaryPost + Comments (118)

Today we kick off Episode 5 of the 7-part Guest Post series: Military Life: Two Perspectives

In case you missed the introduction to the series:  Military Life: Two Perspectives with Leto and Avalune

The topic today is Moving in the Military, from Avalune’s  perspective.  Next Saturday, we’ll hear Leto’s perspective on military life and family.

*****

Fearless together
You said “we’ll go through this together”
When you fly won’t you
Won’t you take me too?
~Birds, Coldplay

The Boy and I pile into a U-Haul with Leto’s dad. His mom is in the house pretending we do not exist. The cold shoulder is lost on The Boy because he’s too young to understand the nuances. The Boy and I weren’t supposed to move for months yet, according to the recruiter, but it turns out that once the newly minted military member has settled into technical training, they are allowed to move out of their dorms and into a house with their dependents. So, despite objections and a campaign to get military friends to talk me out of moving, his dad backs the truck out of the driveway and his mom declines to stand in the street to wave us off.

Our first home is a tiny house, in an area since destroyed by a hurricane. Leto spends much of the morning sleeping and all evening and late into the night at school, so The Boy and I are left to our own devices. The neighbors have a pair of Yorkies and talk about how much they loved Germany and want to get back. Mississippi is hot. Stand still long and you’re likely to be covered in fire ants. The coasts are lined with gnarled oak trees and shiny casinos. Lady Luck boasts an animatronic dragon over the water but the buffet is better at the Beau. Ghosts of the confederacy haunt the landscape.

📦  📦  📦

Leto’s parents are entertaining The Boy, while I stuff our things into commissary fruit boxes. Our only transportation is in the shop and then in the shop again because it wasn’t fixed correctly the first time. I refer to a list of things the military housing inspector will check before we can vacate and work through each item. Leto is finishing his training, so he’s not much use and the stress makes us both edgy. We’re moving to our first official duty station in South Carolina.

This house is a little bigger but the yard is smaller. The Boy attends school across the street from the military base. We hear rumors about drug and gun sales in the military housing outside the fence, but the only thing anyone tries to sell me are absurdly expensive Longaberger baskets, scrapbooking supplies and Pampered Chef. Our van is still acting up and our bicycles are stolen within the first week. The neighbors are vexing.

It is here I attend my first Hearts Apart meeting but like many things in this area, I find it lacking. Instead I turn to the other military wives met through our husband’s love of soccer and people I’ve met in the community. I frequent a quilt shop and spend much of my time sewing and working on my first degree. Leto’s parents are not talking to me again, presumably because we can’t agree on parenting practices, but I start to suspect it is easier to deal with Leto’s sand-filled holidays if they feel aggrieved.

It is here, I wake up to a frantic phone call from a military wife. “A” is supposed to be on a plane. I’m  confused because this is usually a good occasion – Leto is scheduled to be on a plane home soon too. I obey her directive to flip on the television and see the first of what will be on rotation for years to come – the fall of the twin towers. We do not know if A’s plane is in the air, is in danger. Our men make it home safely though delayed and the War on Terror begins. Leto takes a job as a technical school instructor and we prepare to move again.

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Mississippi is still hot. We live on the third floor of an apartment in a neighboring city to give ourselves some space from the base and vexing neighbor situations. The neighbors here are mostly ok, though we get a little too rambunctious for the downstairs tenants. I finish my degree and move on to the next one. Leto tells me stories about his coworkers, some of whom taught him when he came through here as an airman. He tells me one still has the snarky poem I helped him write about respecting his elders. He tells me about airman antics and instructor generated creative punishments. I graduate and prepare to enter the job market.

Hurricane Katrina hits just west of us. Strong winds and surge rattle the shore but the story is mostly center on Louisiana which is under water. I am in South Carolina, having evacuated with The Boy and Leto’s parents the day before. I watch the swath of destruction on TV. Boats are where boats are not supposed to be. Casinos are relocated. Miles of glorious old oak trees vanish. Leto shelters with his troops while I pace the living room. I flip the channels to take a break from the news and find my cousin telling Maury Povich about his wife’s affair with the bus driver.

Leto is ok but he is not permitted to leave the base and check on the apartment yet. People outside the fence see the military playing basketball to blow off steam. They interpret it as blithe and a suitable focus for their ire. Looters empty out what they can.

Our apartment is far enough up an embankment to be spared the worst damage. Whole floors of buildings just scooped out from underneath like Jenga tiles. Power restored to a nearby hospital saves our apartment from the excessive mold growth which damages whatever the hurricane left behind. I leave The Boy with his grandparents in South Carolina, where he started attending school during our long displacement, and return home.

It is hard to find work unrelated to construction or food service. I sign up with a temp service and test drive an assortment of jobs before landing on a job as a receptionist at a state run mental health facility. They let me adjust my hours to be home for the school bus, when Leto is shipped back to the desert.

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My back no longer wishes to function but we must be out of the apartment and in South Carolina before Leto returns. I drive back and forth between states, packing the one and trying to find a home in the other. A realtor finally shows me a house that ticks most of the boxes and doesn’t look like the set of a 60s sitcom, or like a group of 10 year-old boys built a fort on the side of the house and we’re calling that an addition. Leto scrambles to submit all the documentation while still out of country and we buy our first house before he’s even seen it.

The Boy is in middle school now and he has good friends. Do not give “Ant” Cheetos unless prepared for him to completely lose it in an orange dusted ADHD spasm. They somehow manage to not break multiple bones in their hands and fingers hacking at each other with wooden swords. He’s in a knight phase. He carries a sword and shield. He still likes the real helmet Leto leaves him and sometimes switches to more modern warfare. The younger dog likes to sneak up on the boys when they are distracted but they eventually get used to her trolling. I tell them I’m going to feed them to my pet spider if they misbehave and when they are skeptical I show them the rather large banana spider living outside the bathroom window, so they behave.

It is here that The Boy creates some of his most cherished memories. It is also here where he has some of his most difficult. We attend a funeral for a 14 year-old boy, The Boy’s Best Friend, after he loses his battle with Diamond Black Fan Anemia. It is here where I can’t stand to look at the avatar with “CW’s” orange hair and black t-shirt hanging motionless forever more in my friends list – but I also can’t remove him.

The Boy starts high school and I continue my search for work. Unemployment is high. I adjunct for a while before getting a job with a moving company. I’m sitting at my desk looking at a newly created file of grievances for which my employer has tasked his manager to fire me. The business is tanking and he needs to put people on the chopping block, I’m up first. His manager refuses to fire me with cause as instructed, so we are staring at each other wondering how to proceed when my phone rings. After a surreal phone call, I ask the manager to fire me, without cause. She does.

We avoid Leto’s parents in an attempt to avoid the “pre-move fight.” We are finishing up our last show, where we have starring roles in the local theater production. They fight with The Boy instead. The housing market tanks and we can’t sell the house, so we turn it over to a property manager to rent. The Boy and I are unable to get our visas quickly enough for the short notice orders, so I am sitting in a friend’s living room watching a houseful of dogs chase each other around the furniture. The Boy is self-medicating his stress with video games and pounds of the kind of sugary snacks we never buy. Leto is already on the plane to Italy.

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Italy.

We are going to live in Italy. I often dreamed of traveling Europe but never expected it would be financially viable. The military is offering to pay for us to live there.

I catch a good case of stomach flu just in time for the first leg of our 10+ hour flight. An airplane bathroom is not a great place to spend an entire international flight – in case you contemplating trying it. I’m excited, scared, stressed, uncertain, and full of virus. What I’m not full of are liquids because I cannot hold any down. By the time I reach the plane change in France, I am almost too weak to move.

I lean heavily on a giant suitcase and the pile of winter clothes I’ve shucked and watch a bunch of French ladies in powdery blue dresses and hats, that remind me of Jackie-O, put their heads together and murmur words I can’t understand. There is an unfortunate amount of scowling, so I assume it is not good.

They tell me we can’t transfer to the plane as planned because the luggage area isn’t pressurized and my dogs will explode – ok they didn’t saying it like that, but that was the general idea. They move me to another plane but tell me there is another problem – they say I haven’t paid for the dogs to go all the way to Italy. I show them my receipt but they insist. I send the boy to find some kind of liquid and tell them I’ll pay more, whatever you want, just get me on a not-dog-exploding plane. It seems they cannot take my money but they also cannot put me and the dogs on a plane. We’re at an impasse. After a long time and many more phone calls, words I can’t understand, and scowling faces, they send me to a far away gate.

I have to get the dogs but I cannot let them out of their kennels. The senior Lab frets and causes her kennel to tip over repeatedly while I struggle with a trolley too small to be useful. My fellow passengers hiss at me through clenched teeth. We manage to get through security and get into a boarding line only to be told again, about paying for the dogs.

I sink into a waiting area. I’ve already called Leto and asked him to turn around because I will not be landing in Venice but Milan. I don’t know where I’ll be landing now, or if I will land at all. I am imagining walking along a French dirt road, dragging luggage and dog kennels along behind me until I hit the border, when a woman tells me her colleague will be able to help me and to follow her. I sigh. I’ve heard this before, I tell her petulantly. I no longer want to have this adventure – I just want to go home.

Her colleague asks to see my receipt. He tells me I’ve paid for the dogs. Yes, I know, I keep telling the Jackie O ladies. He puts me on a plane just about to leave. I worry the dogs will not be on board but I’m herded on to the plane. I will hold a grudge against France forever.

We finally arrive in Italy. Here are the dogs but not the luggage. I am here and Leto is here and The Boy is here and the dogs are here.  The luggage is just a box of things and I am too exhausted to care. Our car still hasn’t arrived in country so one of Leto’s new co-workers loads two kennels of dogs, stinking in their own filth, and two sweaty and dehydrated travelers into his truck and buses us to a hotel. We bathe the dogs and ourselves, chug water and sleep.

The next morning is magical.

I completely (okay, obviously not completely, because I will rant about it with little prompting, every chance I get) forget about the endless obstacles getting here. Gelato is descendent from heaven. I am Dorothy, dropped out of the tornado into a strange technicolor wonderland.

I still cannot quite process the wonder that was my European adventure. I didn’t just visit for a few weeks, or a month like a tourist. I lived it every day. I cannot adequately express just how lucky I feel to have had such an experience or how much being so immersed in other cultures expanded my being.

We learned to appreciate the food and cooking. We were surrounded by art and passion and deep history. They tried our language, we tried theirs. We learned to speak with our bodies. We learned what did not translate. We learned they have strange ideas about American bread.

We grew. We tried things. We were brave. We were no longer stagnant – forced so far out of our boxes. We would live in Europe for seven years and continue traveling and learning about others and about ourselves. I would not trade one moment of it for anything (except, of course, when I was stuck in Charles de Gaulle).

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Not all of us adjust. Some are fish out of water, gulping air they cannot breathe. They hide on their little patches of America, rarely leaving the base, driving 90 minutes to buy American processed food, frozen and refrozen, and shipped in from Germany. They may or may not be able to find work depending on the specifics of the SOFA agreement, their credentials, or limited opportunities on base, so they just fester in their homes. Instead of opening up to experience, they close down and focus on the things they lack (the familiar mostly – Target, Wal-Mart, normal sized hamburger buns). Some of us cannot “bloom where planted,” as they often say in the military.

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Outsiders sometimes look upon us with pity – thinking of us as refugees forced to uproot and flee from one place to another. It isn’t easy, the moves. Logistics. Leaving newly made friends. Difficult and sometimes impossible job transitions. The interruption to the flow of education for our children. Missed family. Abandoned pets. The memorabilia lost or broken or sold to accommodate freight weight limits. The houses we can’t sell. The general lack of stability.

But do not pity me. I am not a refugee. I am a migratory bird. Even now I am restless. I feel it in my body. I have learned all I can here. It is time to fly.

Military Life: Avalune on MovingPost + Comments (94)

Today we kick off Episode 4 of the 7-part Guest Post series: Military Life: Two Perspectives

I hope you are all enjoying these posts as much as I am!

In case you missed the introduction to the series:  Military Life: Two Perspectives with Leto and Avalune

The topic today is Moving in the Military, from Leto’s perspective.  Next Saturday, we’ll hear Avalune’s perspective on moving.

Take it away, Leto!

This week Avalune and I will talk about moving around in the military. I know the direction of her post so I thought that I’d explain why the military moves us around so much from a Professional Development angle. It essentially boils down to two factors that intertwine: job and leadership experience.

I’ve spoken about this before but my job encompasses are large array equipment. Most Air Force careers (AFSC: Air Force Specialty Codes, otherwise known as MOS: Military Occupational Specialties in Army/Marine parlance, SWABBI in Navy talk) are similar, but none more so than Communications. Over the course of my 22 year career I’ve gone through three different career field mergers, as well as absorbing two to three different career fields into mine. What that means is that by the time you hit my rank/time in service, you need to understand how a lot of different systems interact to bring the whole mission together. While there are overlapping systems at each base, most bases have different subset functions as their specialties. Part of that is due to base closures consolidating many different skillsets/missions into an ever smaller number of bases, the military not wanting to put all of their eggs into one mega base/basket, as well as the political calculus of not wanting to lose jobs in their districts.

Regardless of those, we want well rounded/developed Airmen and the only way to do that is moving them. Staying at one base for 20 years at a stretch is essentially job knowledge suicide. This is something the Air Force recognized during our war years when we deployed many of our people. Many of them got down range and essentially said, “What’s that? I’ve never seen that. I’ve been at base X for the last 12 years and we don’t work on that.” So while technically that person was qualified to deploy, they’re a waste of space.

Which dovetails into the next item that we want to develop: leadership skills. I don’t know if it was intended, but I think it’s a positive byproduct of the officer system which is mandatory move every 2-3 years. Being around the same people, year after year, has both positive and negative effects. While you do get to know your people really well, that can lead to being too comfortable. It can also lead to cliques forming. Not to say that doesn’t already happen, but the long term effects of those can turn deadly. There’s a safety incident I would tell my students as an example of poor leadership that involved the misfire of the A-10s main weapon, the GAU-8 (BRRRRRRRTTTTTTTT). The incident involved the NCO not following proper technical order procedures during a weapons test which resulted in the gun firing indoors through 5 walls, almost killing 8 people. When they did a root cause analysis of the problem they found that it was poor leadership stemming from a shop that was “too familiar” with each other. Leadership didn’t provide proper oversite. They’d been around each other too long. They’d become too familiar.

Moving people around exposes them to new ideas, new ways of doing things. Maybe that great idea that Sgt Bob had will work well at his new base. Maybe Sgt Jane is the person we need to help course correct Airmen Dingbat. Not only are we moving them around to give them better skills to be able to handle different jobs, but we’re also giving them more times to develop their interpersonal skills so they’ll know how to lead/manage/interact with their people. That in turn produces some really good people… of course on the flip side, we still have some really bad people (for my vets: nope, that hasn’t changed. SSDD) Some are excellent technicians, but they have the interpersonal skills of a brick. Some were great managers (office types), but I wouldn’t trust them to screw in a light bulb. The military isn’t any different from the civilian sector in this regard: you want people who are both job and human competent. It’s something that we continue to invest a crazy amount of money to figure out how to do. I like to think that, on par, we’re getting better. Fingers crossed and all!

As always I hope this gives everyone a little better insight into why we do what we do. Again this is focused on the active duty enlisted force, but it holds relatively true for officers as well. I’ll be around for the next few hours to answer questions, so have it!

~Leto

*****

Reminder: Leto & Avalune are standing by for real-time conversation about this post on 3/25.  That’s this Wednesday around 8 pm.

Military Life: Leto on MovingPost + Comments (84)

Avalune is standing by for the Wednesday discussion of this week’s military life post.  (Leto, too.)

I could tell you my adventures – beginning from this morning, but it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then. – Alice in Wonderland

We’re making our way to the back of a nondescript beige/brownish rectangular building that could be picked up wholesale and dropped into any military base in any state without anyone batting an eye. The interior is just as vague as the exterior, with endless airplanes, pictures of smiling airmen in uniform forming a pyramid of chain of command, and flyers for base services. One such service is the reason we’re winding our way towards the light in the back of the building – a Hearts Apart Meeting.

Hearts Apart was formed to keep families connected while the military members are serving abroad. Services include things like video teleconference “morale calls” in a time before everyone carried a multitude of video chat services in their pockets. They also provide a four hour babysitting service called “Give Parents a Break,” a free oil change and safety check for your car, and a monthly support group.

Dinner and a chance for the children to play are the primary selling points and the reason I can feel the stink eye being directed at me by “The Boy.” Dinner is cow beef burgers and cheese pizzas, neither being things The Boy can eat due to dietary restrictions – restrictions explained to the group leader prior to the meeting which were met with the polite equivalent of “too bad, so sad.” [As dietary concerns have increased over the years, these groups do a much better job of addressing this now]. He doesn’t care about being able to eat but he very much cares that the children he’s expected to play with are significantly younger and he was perfectly happy playing video games at home before I dragged him here. I tell him sorry dude with my eyes and turn to the women gathering in a frazzled half-circle on the other side of the inedible food.

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Military Life: Avalune on DeploymentsPost + Comments (114)