An Army of None
Following directions isn’t really my thing and I’m not about to share my bedroom with fifty other idiots, so, barring an uprising by the Federation for the Advancement of Gays and Gayelles (F.A.G.G.), enlisting in the military is about as likely as that time five minutes ago when Sean Penn friended me on Facebook. Regardless, I accompanied my roommate Small Fry to the recruiting office in Durham recently. It was an exercise in cheek-biting for me: it’s hard not to laugh at military recruiters when you are so fundamentally opposed to what they stand for (e.g. obedience, nationalism, khaki) and what they do (e.g. kill, depose, Skype) and know you are wasting the time they could spend coercing other young people to sign over their autonomy. They likely had just as little hope of signing us based on appearance alone. It’s not that we’re obviously dykes, which we are (despite national policy, gayism is probably recognized as a benefit in the armed forces. Would you rather be defended by Bull Dyke Barbie or Malibu Barbie?), we just don’t look like the kind of people who would join the army. We look like the kind of people who put nutritional yeast on popcorn or the kind of people who talk shit about people who put nutritional yeast on popcorn but still kind of like it. But there we were.
The recruiters’ office itself isn’t what I expected. When you walk in, there’s no one to welcome you with stars and stripes and patriotic songs, ready to salute you in the right direction. Left for Marines, right for Army, around back for Blackwater. Instead, you just wander around until you find the branch you’re looking for. There were two recruiters in the Air Force office. They didn’t try to sell us. They didn’t talk about the army of one or the benefits or the camaraderie or the honor in fighting for your country after that big September thing. They just handed us forms to fill out and left us alone. Although I might have given them my sister’s social security number and an ex’s phone number, I was mostly honest on the paperwork. Have I been arrested? Yes, but it was just a misunderstanding. I wasn’t really trying to pass myself off as a forty-two-year-old Canadian woman with a taste for Bartles & James and the charges were dismissed after I gave the judge a mani/pedi. You’re also supposed to list all the drugs you’ve done and the number of times you’ve done them. If I actually wanted to earn my pilot’s wings, I would have lied, but because I was more interested on getting out before happy hour than being fitted for a uniform, I wrote the truth. It’s not like I’ve ever traded my body for a crack pebble or anything, but I went to college. I wore Birkenstocks and rolled one-handed joints on the way to school. And, besides being the inevitable gateway to excessive napping, weed was never really a problem for me. When I stopped smoking, I didn’t even really think about it. I just stopped. And that’s what I told the military recruiter. Look, brother, there’s nothing wrong with smoking a few trees. It’s Of The Earth, my friend. A gift from our planet to our minds. He looked at me like I’m John Waters trying to get into the police academy and said he didn’t think the Air Force was an appropriate fit.
When Small Fry first told me that she was thinking about joining the military, I changed the subject (Look! Boobs!) and waited for her to put this terrible idea to bed. But she didn’t put it to bed. She talked about detonating bombs and wearing a tailored uniform and never cooking again. She made her hands into guns and shot everyone who walked by the window. This is what I need to gain discipline, she said. This will make me grow up. Her thinking is stupid, like waiting for your power to get cut off because then you’ll be forced to start paying your bills on time, and yet, I kind of get it. There is no discipline in our home. The two of us live in a tree house world. We try to take the recycling out but only manage to get the cans out of the pantry and into the living room. We create imaginary futures for ourselves. We’re going to move to San Francisco and live in bunk beds and have a bunny that hops behind us everywhere we go or maybe a fairy who hovers by our shoulders. Or maybe someone will recognize the appeal of two nearing-thirty girls who sit around wearing eye patches and gypsy masks, getting up every once in a while to practice chest-bumping before resuming our Facebook sentry. Yes, that’s what we need: someone to find us and and love us and give us a reality TV show.
I left Small Fry with the recruiters and wandered around, thinking about what do to now that this option that was never really an option isn’t ever going to be an option. Med school? Americorps? Teaching English in Korea until the economy recovers and we can get back to the lives we think we deserve: comfortable lives, exciting lives, full lives, mornings that don’t start with trying to think of a reason to get out of bed, not finding one, and closing the blinds and dreaming for a few more hours. Being in that office, walking past rooms where people were signing the papers because they want to or because they have to, some excited, some scared, all making real decisions, big decisions, decisions that will influence the course of their lives now and forever—people who are, really, just like us—made me think there might be no fairy and no benefactor and no one else to make us grow up. Are we past the age when it’s acceptable to walk around town barefoot with our pants rolled up because we feel like playing Tom and Huck? This is the point—out of school, underemployed, desperate enough to consider the military—where you realize that you’re on your own. That’s where the military comes in. Sign here and stop thinking. Do their push-ups, make their beds, polish their door-knobs, call them sir and write your girl back home. Your inability to make decisions won’t matter anymore. It will, in fact, make you a better solider. There is some solace in being a robot. I understand this, and part of me wishes I could get over my ethical reservations and my unwillingness to take orders and my past life as a stoner and my unshakable belief that things will work out, maybe not for everyone, but for me. Because what if it doesn’t? What if this is all there is, looking for ways to adulthood, wishing you were one of the thousands of people who sign up, who put their fate in the hands of others, who follow orders. Maybe we all want to to sacrifice our autonomy, not to an organization run on obedience, but to a fate we think we deserve. We are no different than anyone else in that building. We just think we are.
