What is with Generation Y-ner's in the military?

I recently listened to snippets of an interview with the family of the shooter in Dallas that ambushed several police officers during a Black Lives Matter rally and heard a familiar theme come to the surface. The shooter had served in the Army Reserves and according to his family, he was a changed person after he came home. Not because he was some ground pounding, door kicking grunt that had seen the evils of war. No, his military occupational specialty was that of carpentry/masonry. The reason for his change in personality that led him down the road to extremism and violence according to his family was subtler and harder to explain than the stereotypical PTSD that is sometimes thrown around. He was reportedly upset with his military service and had left feeling frustrated from his experience.

Listening to his mother and step-mother talk about his frustrations brought me back to listening to the most recent Serial podcast regarding Bowe Bergdahl, who also had served in the military and had an experience with the Armed Forces that did not meet his expectations, thus resulting in him doing something extreme. You remember Bowe, right? The dude that disregarded his military orders and abandoned his post in the middle of Afghanistan? If you take the time to listen to his interviews you hear some convoluted thought processes for why he did what he did. No one but Bowe can know the true motive for why he walked off, but anyone that has signed on the dotted line can agree that we all go into our service with some preconceived notions for what the experience will be like…..and then that is shattered over the course of our enlistment or commission.

I suppose I should disclose that I fall under the Gen Y category as I was born in 1980, however when I see what some of my compatriots are doing, and even read the general sociological descriptions for my generation, I tend to distance myself from being associated with this screwed up class, wistfully daydreaming that I could have been with Major Winters and Chesty Puller and the rest of “the Greatest Generation” that came before us. But, I digress.

So, back to the point. I’m part of Gen Y, and I too served in the military. So, in some very small ways I can identify with the Dallas shooter and Bowe. I was around 14 years old when I saw a “20/20 special” on hazing in the Marine Corps and it sold me on wanting to be a jarhead. At that point, I mentally checked out in high school and made no effort to pursue academic excellence as it was a waste of time in my mind. I was going to be a Marine and had no use of intellect, or a GPA for that matter.

My first warning sign that things would not be all glorious and spiffy in the military came when I went to undergo my physical exam to enlist. I failed the hearing test (would find out later that particular hearing station was faulty) and was sent to have my ears cleaned out. The doctor subsequently punctured my right eardrum which immediately disqualified me for service. Thankfully, I had cornered myself into a position that the Marine Corps was really my only viable option, and my mom found a surgeon that could repair the injury. Within a year I was disregarding this speedbump and enlisting.

I left for basic training in August of 1999 and my life changed as I knew it. I had watched “Full Metal Jacket” on repeat that summer as I mentally prepared for what was to come. I wish there had been a scene in the first half of that movie in which Private Joker had three of his wisdom teeth extracted while the Novocain wore off, with one of the teeth breaking in half at the root. Seeing Joker screaming out in pain and being told to shut up out of concern that he would scare the other recruits waiting their turn might have prepared me for my own experience. Furthermore, seeing Private Joker reduced to bedrest for a couple of days as he dealt with dry rot and infection would have helped as I fought to stay with my platoon and not get cycled back. But, I did what the Marine Corps was teaching me to do, adapt and overcome, and I graduated on time with my original platoon.

After basic training, I came home on leave to show off my leaner frame and new uniforms. After a couple of weeks of trying to impress everyone around me, I was heading back to the West Coast for Marine Combat Training, in hopes that I would get picked up with a training cycle in time to return home for Christmas. I showed up a couple days early and instead of starting training, was assigned to guard the base and armory’s while all the other Marine’s went home for the holidays. Once again, that preconceived notion of what my military experience would be like was being chipped away.

Fast forward six months and I had left the dry-rot of Texas and my firefighting training to be sent to the armpit of America. When I first landed in Yuma, Arizona and the plane door opened, the dry dessert air not only sucked out every molecule of moisture in the tiny pond-jumping cabin of my plane, but also the last remnants in my mind of what my expectations were for my military experience.

A few months after arriving in Yuma, on September 4, 2000 at 0800, I was involved in an event that was part horseplay, part negligence that resulted in a fellow Marine dying. The coming months led to two of my fellow Marines being court-martialed, and as part of the investigation I was placed on legal hold. This meant I couldn’t go home on leave to see my family, I couldn’t be promoted, and I couldn’t go to the mountain warfare training center for winter survival training that I had volunteered and been selected for. This was a horrible time for me and for my unit, but I didn’t distance myself from my fellow Marines, or ideologically from my country as I struggled with it. I did what any 19-year-old with a developing brain would do and adopted as many maladaptive behaviors as I could, by drinking vast quantities of alcohol and trying to find women. My world had been turned upside down, but rather than be consumed by hate or fear and allow the unforeseen circumstances to change me into a completely different person, I simply used those circumstances as excuses to sow my wild oats, and the harvest was a plenty.

A year later, there was another cloud over our unit as we prepared one September morning to go on duty and realized that our country was under attack. We rushed to the airfield and quickly relieved the other duty section. My crew was selected to go out into the middle of the airfield and post my junior Marine on the roof of the truck with a pair of binoculars to look for any aircraft that hadn’t followed the FAA’s instructions to be grounded. I drove our truck out to the middle of the runway and we sat for a short while as we tried to make sense of what was going on. We were called back to the fire station once they realized all planes were grounded, and we spent the rest of the day huddled in our TV room staring at the horrific scenes play over and over, talking about the impending war.

In the coming months, many of us Marines attached to a Marine Wing Support Squadron thought we were gearing up to head to Afghanistan. There was a lot of rumor and speculation, and we prepared but never went. At some point, I was made aware of the opportunity to volunteer for a highly competitive meritorious promotion board. Earlier, I had obtained the title of “Fire Fighter of the Quarter” through a knowledge based competition which put me on the radar for this promotion. It comprised of a two-day competition among various Lance Corporal’s from different units that were competing for a highly valued and extremely rare meritorious promotion to Non-Commissioned Officer. For the first time since that little plane door had opened and I stepped foot in Yuma, I was feeling the hope and potential that had sparked inside of me when I first decided that I wanted to be a Marine.

The competition was comprised of a physical fitness test, a unit drill, a uniform inspection, giving a period of instruction, and a presentation before the board whereupon you are drilled on Marine Corps knowledge and judged on your military bearing. I spent quite a bit of money on a whole new “Alpha” uniform for the inspection and knocked that out of the park. I gave a thorough period of instruction following the Marine Corps structuring on rescue procedures for the AV-8B Harrier, and had even gone to Walmart and created a model and painted the hazard areas to match up with the NAVAIR rescue manual. I killed it on the unit drill as I had spent all my evenings at the fire station practicing handling the sword and calling out drill commands to my fellow marines on the tarmac. The physical fitness test was my weakest category, although scoring a 1st class, I could never get the max 20 pullups that the perfect Marine could for that coveted perfect 300 score. As for the presentation before the board, I had the answer for every question they asked, including current events, and ensured I did the whole “left hand left knee, right hand right knee” thing to a T. Later that day, I was told by my Sergeant that I did not win one of the coveted slots. It wasn’t that I failed, but that the Command said I should have never been allowed to be selected due to my involvement in the death of a Marine.

Between the death of a Marine and subsequent court-martial’s, feeling kicked in the teeth repeatedly by my command for my involvement in the incident, and feeling stuck in the tiny corner of Southwest Arizona, myself and a couple buddies got tired of our surroundings and requested transfers to Japan.

I spent my last year of active duty on mainland Japan, where I initiated my cross-cultural agriculture program by trying to introduce my wild oats to that tiny, homogenous society. As a large, loud, heavily inebriated Marine, I fit right in with their mild mannered culture. I guess you could say that the bottle became my manifesto for expressing my frustrations of how my military service had played out, but while on duty, I continued to strive for excellence. My motto was “work hard, and play harder”.

I began a relationship with a Japanese woman that was very strange and tumultuous. I don’t care to go into the details, but my last several months in Japan involved taking some leave and ordering a “DIY Maury paternity test”. As America was about to invade Iraq, I was facing the prospect of fatherhood in a foreign land, and heading to South Korea for a training exercise. I spent mid-February to mid-March of 2003 sleeping in a tent, which gave me a newfound respect for our Korean War vets, and left me in the dark about what was going on with our impending war with Iraq. With a brother and close friend that I had recruited to join the Marines both sitting in Kuwait waiting to invade Iraq, I was rather anxious for information. I luckily befriended a couple of South Korean Airforce guys that spoke English that gave me some updates.

I had returned to my base in Japan in time to watch some Armed Forces Network coverage of American forces crossing the berm into Iraq. The frustrations now had turned into those of being on the sidelines and feeling left out. Multiple training exercises in the desserts of Arizona and California doing Forward Arming and Refueling Points had been exactly the kind of thing that would be needed to support the Marines on the ground and here I was sitting in my barracks in Japan, drinking beer and wondering if I was the father of a child to a woman that I barely knew. This was not how 14-year-old me envisioned the Marine Corps.

I know that some will likely read this and think, pot...meet kettle. I begin this post with a statement positing that Generation Y members of the military are whiners and then wax poetic about how my experience went south. I went into that detail for a couple of reasons. 1. In the off chance that there are any pimply faced 14 year olds out there reading this that might get a small dose of reality, that if you want to join the military, you’ll have to leave your expectations on the barber’s floor with your hair. 2. To share that in spite of all the crap that didn’t work out, I turned out exactly how I envisioned I would when I joined. I joined to serve my country and to be a part of something greater than myself and by doing so, I grew into the man I hoped I would. I just don’t understand Y some from my generation can’t sign on the dotted line and face whatever comes their way without leaving the reservation.