Thank You For My Service

A pragmatist's intro to enlisting in the US Air Force for the young, smart, and aimless

This article is the first in a planned six-part series exploring life in the Air Force from the perspective of an enlisted airborne language analyst.

I like to tell people I joined the military because it was the most socialist organization in America.

The thought of joining never crossed my mind, growing up. Sure, it was a respectable enough course, but—for other people, y'know? I'm not from a military family. I've never really been anyone's idea of an eager patriot. The only war story that ever resonated with me was Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, a somber reflection on the Vietnam War from a man who counted himself a coward for not draft dodging. In my mind, the prototypical military recruit was a testosterone junkie with more muscles than sense and no real prospects, lured in with promises of glory before being sent to wander like Moses in the desert for 40 years.

But my decision to join ranks as one of the best I’ve made yet, and I find myself these six years later deeply grateful for the experience. It gave me space to stabilize and lay a firm foundation for my future, to leave my bubble and come into my own properly, to muddle forward figuring out who to become without diving into debt or wasting idle years with nothing to show. I walk away now from the Air Force as a staff sergeant, having just married the man of my dreams, with six figures of savings to cushion my exit and with the prospect of free grad school next should I choose to pursue it.

After all that, strange to remember that it was a postcard that caught me.

You know those mass mailers they send out sometimes? Serve Your Country, Be A Hero, Sign Up Today, and you always see them and wonder what sort of lunatic would make such a consequential life decision based on a piece of junk mail?

Yeah, that was me. I'm the reason they send those out.

My life had always been planned out in a nice, comfortable script: go to high school, serve a two-year Mormon mission, get a scholarship to flagship church university BYU, walk away with a degree and a Mormon wife, and settle into a solid white-collar job while focusing on church and family. Simple.

But, well, somewhere in the middle of that script something went wrong. My first year in college went well enough, but I came home from my Mormon mission with more questions than answers and a burning sensation that I needed to get away, an itch of unease with the whole of it that I couldn't quite articulate. When I returned, I applied for a transfer to Boston College—got accepted, even—but that sank in as a pipe dream when I saw just how much debt the school thought I ought to embrace. So I stayed, and sank deeper into the doldrums: withdrawing socially, tuning out of classes until the school cut my scholarship in half, mired in a religious faith crisis at a school that would show me the door should I decide I could no longer make myself believe.

The postcard came shortly after my return home from a hitchhiking trip, the day I test-drove the van I was planning to live in for my next semester. Jokingly at first, my family asked if I’d thought about joining the Air Force. Then my mum got serious—but what if you did join the Air Force?

There was only one position I’d consider, I knew. I wanted to be a Chinese language analyst—colloquially, a linguist. I had only the faintest idea what they did, but at least I’d get a language for my troubles. But it caught in my mind and I sent my info in, and then when they didn’t get back fast enough drove down to the recruiter’s office and dodged around the Marine pitching me on machismo to take a look in person, and within a few weeks found myself naked up against a wall in the Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS) being inspected for defects.

I knew very little about the on-the-ground reality of military service before enlisting, and joined with a motive somewhere between whim and instinct. It’s far from a universally correct path, but, well, I'll be frank: I thought I was too good for it, and suspect there are many young people who, like me, find themselves adrift while seeing military enlistment as a mistake for others to make. As such, I feel myself compelled to present a picture of service candid and thorough enough to help those people determine whether they should pursue that path. The personal and objective both play a role, so expect dispassionate analysis mingled with my own story. This is not a guide in the traditional sense, but I hope it proves useful to those weighing the decision to enlist.

If you are hoping to join the military and come out the other end a fundamentally different person, you will be disappointed. Part of me hoped for transformation, for rigid discipline to shape me into the conscientious, diligent individual I could never quite be. Alas, I remain myself: the aspect of forced responsibility is real and valuable, but changing external state only goes so far. But the military sales pitch is stronger than many credit, ensuring that while you will not escape yourself you will skip past many of the material concerns that plague young adulthood.

The Military Sales Pitch for the Young, Left-Leaning Cynic

Join the military, the most socialist organization in America! Doesn't matter whether you've already started college, are in the middle, or graduated and are staring down student loan debts and the world of civilian work: you'll be provided with full job training in a career field well suited to your tested aptitude and interest. Choose to stay four years, six, or twenty: the whole time, you're guaranteed free health care, a stable living environment with housing and food reliably covered, heavily subsidized college classes and certifications, travel around the country and world, a month of paid leave each year not including all the holidays you have off, and a startling array of smaller benefits down to discounts at half the businesses in the country.

After you leave, no need to worry about student loan debt—your college will be completely paid for and a living stipend provided. You'll even get a bit of a diversity boost, since most institutions want to be seen supporting veterans. Of course, you could just stay in for twenty years, then retire at 40% pay plus whatever you invested in your own retirement. Enlist at 18, manage your finances responsibly, and you can retire by 38, financially independent and with half your life to do whatever you want.

So you don't want to tote a gun, aren't interested in "bro" culture, and have no particular quarrel with the middle east? No worries. Probably stay away from the Marines, but the other branches will all give you plenty of options. Want good living conditions? Join the Air Force, and after a few weeks of basic training and your tech school, you'll be incredibly comfortable. Even enlisting, there are all sorts of intel career fields or similar ones full of people embedded in internet or "nerd" culture. If you're passionate about social justice, you can find a position or volunteer in one of the diversity, volunteering, or sexual assault prevention initiatives within the military. Remember, culture varies heavily between career field, and the military attracts a broad enough swath of people that you're almost certain to find a niche somewhere. If not, you can always retrain at the government's expense, or just leave.

And the pay? Well, sure, base pay isn't great unless you're an officer, but what about housing allowance, food allowance, hazard pay, flight pay, temporary duty per diem, language pay, and the guarantee that as long as you meet requirements, you will have your job and get paid, regardless of whether you're in training or even just waiting around for an assignment to start or for one of the other thousand reasons you wait around in the military. Want to buy a house by age 25? Go ahead—in the military, that shouldn't be a problem. Want to save 90% of your income? Totally possible, since everything you need to survive is given to you, and then some.

This is all perfectly true and with no exaggeration. There is, though, the small matter of turning your person into government property. Forget civilian rights: you're bound by much stricter military laws, and they will use you however they see fit. Hope you weren't too attached to your hairstyle or your bong. Best to calm the biggest of your disagreements with US foreign policy. And while your preferences are taken into account and usually accommodated quite well, if they tell you to sit in the middle of North Dakota as a gate guard for three years, you pick up a scanner and start greeting drivers.

You'll also notice a striking lack of detail when I get around to describing my job: the government still owns many of those corners of my mind and my experience, and will until the day I die. Every word of the sections outlining my own experience will have to make it past my, ah, sensitivity readers. In a literal sense, my mind is no longer wholly my own.

Some would call it a Faustian bargain. Me? I could only ever see it as a bargain, with the US taxpayer giving me far more than I could offer in return. But make no mistake: I made a trade. Six years of my life and a sliver of my mind on one end of the scale, lasting material stability and a buffet of experiences on the other.

So What Is This Series, Anyway?

I am leaving the Air Force today, after six years of service as an airborne cryptologic language analyst. They've been good years: not extraordinary, not deeply and fundamentally meaningful, but good. The sales pitch above has been true to my own experience, but I want to give people a sense of the world behind the sales pitch—the day-to-day of life in at least one corner of the military. It will be a positive series, overall. I always knew I would leave after six years, and I have plenty of gripes about my time in service—as is the sworn duty of every enlisted military member—but it would be rank ingratitude for me to act as if the Air Force did not fulfill every bit of the bargain I had in mind when I signed my contract.

This series will cover every step of my life in the Air Force, to whatever level of detail is appropriate and allowed by my good Sensitivity Readers, with an eye towards usefulness towards young people thinking about joining and entertainment for the rest of us. Most of it remains unwritten and unreviewed, so I may take a long time between segments and change things as I go, but my current plan is to tell five stories, spanning the whole of my time in service between them and weaving in reflections on the rest of military life as appropriate:

1. Basic Training: Weeding out the weird

2. DLI: The Ivy League of Misfit Toys

3. The Coffee Maker

4. Thirty Minutes of Warning

5. [To be revealed]

If you're interested in this series and want to be notified when the rest of it has made it through Customs, I encourage you to subscribe:

For a moment, though, I want to talk about just what it means to separate from the military. I was an active Mormon when I entered, which among other things meant growing up knowing I had an immediate social circle anywhere I chose to travel, united by experiences and a sense of purpose above and beyond my school or work. In the Air Force, I spent six years knowing exactly where my paycheck was coming from and exactly what my near-term future would look like. Just as importantly, I spent those six years surrounded by friends and fellow airmen with the same sense of being in it together, united by peculiar experience and a sense of shared purpose, forming close bonds even as we knew that we would inevitably scatter to the winds.

Now, I am scattering to the winds. Tomorrow morning, I will wake up without any legitimate cause to wear the uniform I relied on for six years, without the rules and the social group and the structure that have at once restricted and defined my life. A friend of mine likes to say that a cage is also a frame, and I have leaned on and built within the Air Force frame for the bulk of my adulthood. I am free now, by choice, but it is a freedom that comes tinged with loss. For the first time in my life, I will be without an in-person community to rely naturally on as "my people", and without the rigid structures I at once chafe against and rely on.

But, to lean on wisdom of friends once more, the times of greatest change are also the times of greatest opportunity. I'm nervous but excited to face the future, with almost a year of unclaimed time before I move to a new city and get on with the next fixed step. The military is stable, predictable, and a safe path as these things go. It is also comfortably limited, and the sudden removal of those limits is as exhilarating as it is nerve-wracking.

Time to go exploring.

---

This year is my first time in adulthood without long-term fixed responsibilities, with my next long-term obligation coming about a year from now. I've always been keen on creating openings for serendipity and avoiding the soulless tedium of typical résumé-flinging job hunts, so please excuse a moment of pitching myself:

I have written online for some time now, focusing on everything from whether the education system adequately serves advanced students (it doesn't) to the tragedy of an online community that outgrew itself to the story of the man who built Singapore, while enjoying a side gig as the assistant producer for the podcast Blocked & Reported. My writing has been cited by outlets including The Independent and Reuters, and much more importantly, by Freddie deBoer. I believe my online work presents a clear picture of my ability and interest. In addition, I have taken on tutoring responsibilities within my various positions over the past eight years, and with an LSAT score above 175 and a passion for understanding the mechanics of expertise, am eager to pick up a few students to tutor on the LSAT. Long-term, I'm keen to work towards opportunities in law and education policy. Right now, I have no non-military credentials to speak of but am a capable learner, eager to be useful. If you know of remote gigs that could perhaps use someone like me for any length of time within the next year or so, or to inquire about tutoring, please contact me at tracingwoodgrains@gmail.com.

You can also follow me on Twitter @tracewoodgrains.