What the Marine Corps Taught Me to Unlearn

I came out of the Marine Corps with a lot of trauma I couldn't name. Not flashes of anything specific. Just a low hum I didn't have language for yet, and a body that had learned to treat almost everything like a threat worth flattening.

For about a year after I got out I wouldn't shoot a gun. Wouldn't go hiking either, even though I love both now and do them regularly. At the time it felt less like a choice and more like a reflex, a middle finger to six years of being told when to do things I actually loved. I shaved my head once after getting out too, and hated it enough that I never did it again. Now people look at the dreads and ask if I was ever in the military, and there's something funny in that, though it took a while to get there.

The real unlearning wasn't about guns or hair. It was about grace. I struggled with empathy before I ever put on a uniform, and the Marine Corps didn't build it into me, it built it out. By the time I got out, understanding what someone else needed from me wasn't part of my vocabulary at all. I could read a threat in a room in half a second. I couldn't read a person who was hurting and just needed me to slow down.

Nobody in the Corps was going to fix that for me. It came through the mirror of my own relationships, mostly the hard way, mostly by being told directly and not hearing it the first several times. Somebody would tell me what they needed, plainly, and I'd file it under weakness instead of information. That took years to unlearn, and I'm not going to pretend I'm all the way through it.

What I know now is that it matters, more than almost anything else I carried out of the service. You can run a tight operation and still miss the person standing in front of you. I did that for longer than I'd like to admit, and the cost wasn't visible on any readiness report. It showed up in relationships that got harder than they needed to be, one at a time, until I finally started paying attention.