I did a lot of things in the military, or a lot of things that happened in the military ran through me. My time in service feels like a collage of disjointed coming-of-age memories. Call it a late Bildungsroman. I was still a teen, left on my 19th birthday, wearing the same clothes as everybody else, hair slicked tight into a bun or shaven. “Are you Amish?” a friend asked me, just by looking at my eyes and how I talked. “Yes,” I answered half joking. I grew up out of the public school system, belonging to a Jewish-Christian family that preferred a different telling of history. “This formation better wrap up soon. I’ve got butter to churn back at the dorms.”
The uniform and common values hammered into our heads did not dilute the friendships I made. Rather, their essence felt compelling, their stories about home or where they came from.
Collage 1 | Basic Training: Another trainee and I were doing our night shift of E.C. duty, like a night guard. The two hours were long, so we whispered about home and the food we liked. “You ever had empanadas?” she asked. “We’re more of a matzo ball soup and apple pie kind of family,” I answered. Our mouths salivated thinking about home-cooked meals. “My mom makes the best empanadas.” Later in El Paso, her mom was shot at the mall, a hate crime victim.
Collage 2 | Technical Training: We learn to do our assigned jobs on the West Coast, at an army post guarded by a concrete eagle at the entrance. We joked about the legend that the eagle guarding the gate entrance would fly off if someone graduated training and left as a virgin. It would stretch its stone wings and disappear across the Pacific. It has yet to disappear, so the legend could still be true. I had a lot of firsts, the first time saying “FUCK YOU!” First fuck. Not bad for an ex-pretend Amish Airman.
First time filing by the hundreds into a funeral for a young military student whose name I do not remember. His poster-sized photo of his Basic Training Graduation photo propped next to his casket in the center of a room. The chaplain read his life to the room. “He studied Russian. He was kind, sensitive… He loved snowboarding…” From the outside, we whispered that he was struggling in class, punishment in the form of paperwork for bad grades got to him, and the social pressure of failing was too much. Over the weekend he took a trip to San Francisco, got a hotel…The reading ended. Silence was a filler between the service and the moving on. Rafters over our heads creaked loudly in the silence. Then a wail swelled through the space. My throat clenched, all of ours must have. Our military blues, blouse tightened tensed like the ribbons pierced through our skin. The mother was slowly led out of the room, pressing into the crook of someone’s arm. Sobs choked the room and remained for a moment after she left, in the rafters, the corners. Collage 3 | Vassar College: Time goes fast. Leaving the military after serving six years meant entering a new way of life. Waking up at 10:30 a.m. because the class does not start until 12. Pursuing opportunity according to the relaxed rhythm of 75-minute classes, walking by Y2K-reminiscent fashion (loving the baggy pants by the way), bright posters stuck on 19th-century buildings. As at home as I have begun to feel, I am constantly reminded that time goes fast. What we do becomes condensed into collages of images and memories. We are the breath passing in and out of Main and the Library—two years inhale, two years exhale. And then that is it. Like the military, time is what I can make of it. We will see what happens.