I want to take a moment to expand on this because I really think it exposes this immense vein of cognitive dissonance in the general American population

There's this perception that the military "straightens people out", that it makes a productive adult out of difficult youth https://twitter.com/Nymphomachy/status/1297666014017138689

I am baldly stealing @arthur_affect's words here but Jeffrey Dahmer was the picture of exactly one of those weird kids from a troubled background who is clearly deeply fucked up

When he decided to go into the Army, people thought that pretty much tied a happy bow on his story

Because that's what happens, right, that's how it looks to the suburban normies who both have their shit together enough not to have to enlist in the military and never have to see you again when you do

Hell even Kurt Vonnegut described it as "making good" in SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE

If you follow me you know I was kind of a hellraiser in high school

Well, the year I enlisted my little sister brought a headshot of me in my USAF blues from boot—a photo where I look emaciated, broken, and empty—to the counselors' offices

The receptionist tacked it to the wall

She was so happy and delighted I was "making something of myself". And that is, of course, the end of the story for her, because I certainly never saw her again.

Penelope went and had a happy ending, out of sight where none of us ever have to actually watch

I mean if Dahmer hadn't gotten caught, that's how everybody from his hometown would have thought of him

The guy turned it around in the end, wow, damn, good for him

Because the military is an ENDING. It's the conclusion to a narrative of trauma and alienation

Meanwhile, all of us in the military, we wind up brushing shoulders with all the other people who were too much of a disaster to shake it in their hometowns.

None of us come IN well-adjusted, and most of us don't get any more well-adjusted from the exposure.

You don't see that.

There's a lot to say about the military but one of the less articulated things is that it is chiefly a way of putting people out of sight, out of mind, and kicking the can down the road.

Something that surprises people is that my mom's knee-jerk reaction to my announcement that I was going to go on hormones and be myself was to be completely supportive. I hung up the phone with a warm feeling.

Then, later, she realized this meant I'd be leaving the military

Because, see, having a 'son' in the Air Force, doing secret squirrel shit, became her badge of honor. It provided her the social cachet of having at least one child who had "figured it out", while the other two were smoking pot all day, and watching My Little Pony, respectively

Me not only getting out of the military, but getting out of the military to be a drag queen (because that was what she was picturing)? I was basically nuking her precious validation as a parent from orbit.

She called me back a few days later; begged me not to go through with it

Her argument was, basically, I shouldn't leave the military because I'll never have anything as good, both in terms of the benefits and the social cachet of my position.

She wasn't even wrong! Occupationally I've gone from working with radar to waxing lips and mopping up piss

But, really, it wasn't about that. It was about me jeopardizing her neat little narrative about having at least one child who was "complete", who was "away" and "fully grown".

Because as long as she can't see me, that's what she gets to imagine about me, in her mind.

And, you know, the narrative doesn't stick after you betray it by continuing to be a living, breathing human after your military "ending" ends.

I came home after not having been there in six years. _Immediately_ demoted from competent golden child to infantilized problem child

That's kind of getting off on an unnecessary tangent but it's all to say that the civilians of the American center have a really twisted, fantasyland, unhealthy perception of the military, and what it does to people

They think it launders our reputations, sands away our flaws

And meanwhile, Jeffrey Dahmer doesn't actually stop being Jeffrey Dahmer. It's just that you don't have to deal with him; it's the damaged people there who do

And when he gets out... You fucking guessed it, still Jeffrey Dahmer

It's a shitty way to think, a shitty way to live.

I have to live in the shadow of this prevalent liberal notion that every moment of my life from now until the day I die is just the tragic epilogue to the six years of my life I was supposedly Doing Important Things.

The truth is, most of us aren't functional when we go in and most of us sure as fuck won't be functional when we get out.

If we were, we wouldn't be there in the first place.

And the perception it must be otherwise is how you let foxes into the henhouse.