United by uniform, bound by oaths of attestation, moulded by shared experiences, the military is the very definition of a tribe. A warrior tribe of men and women connected by common values and ethos. A patchwork populace of smaller groups united by the same procedures and processes that provide commonality. We call them Unit or Regimental traditions because ‘rituals’ sounds too primitive and pagan. We call them deployments because ‘rites of passage’ is more akin to young African males entering manhood, having proved their worth. We award medals to mark the warrior’s achievement because celebrating this accomplishment with scar tissue on the face would not please the RSM.
We speak our own language; largely English but littered with acronyms and slang incomprehensible to anyone outside our circle. This bonds us further, separating us from those who don’t talk our talk. And we like this, take a perverse pride in our collective identity. If you ever witness a reunion of old military colleagues it is almost instant that drinks become ‘wets’ or ‘brews’, the kitchen becomes the ‘galley’ or the ‘cookhouse’ and the rate of profanity multiplies at an eye-watering rate. They are back with their tribe, back among the only people they feel truly understand them.
This relationship is cemented completely by the bond of experiencing war. When young, and perhaps not-so young people experience and survive war, they become even closer to one another, becoming a tribe within a tribe. They relate more to each other than anyone else in the belief that only they can fully understand what they have gone through. Trying to share this with someone outside of their circle is futile and often seems to belittle the intensity of the experience.
This situation becomes worse when the conflict is an unpopular one. The well-documented situation of returning soldiers from Vietnam to the USA is a good example of this. Tours of duty over, the returning veterans were targeted by those protesting the war and the government’s foreign policy. Stunned by the staggering level of antipathy they experienced, most veterans retreated within themselves, unwilling and unable to discuss their experiences with anyone else but another vet. It took many years for the general public to differentiate between a government’s misguided foreign intervention and the poor conscripts that were sent to fight it. Hence the glut of books and movies relating to Vietnam only being released a long time after the conflict. Vietnam veterans in the USA probably retain a stronger bond with each other than most post-conflict veterans due to their poor treatment, forcing them to fall back on the bonds formed in the jungles and paddy fields of South East Asia to fill the void they found on their return.
The military, by necessity, takes individuals and moulds them into tribes, relinquishing the self and thinking only of the group. Because that is the only way you can take people to war and expect them to fight and survive. Contrary to public perception, very few soldiers would cite Queen and Country as their motivation for facing down bursts of AK 47 fire in dusty foreign compounds. They fight to protect the man or woman either side of them, to take the position without losing one of their own. In this the military is uniquely successful in its ability to achieve this mix of duty, honour, and commitment from an individual pulling in sometimes less than the minimum wage.
But what happens when service personnel leave all this behind and enter an entirely new world where there is no real chain of command? No orders, merely company directives? Where swearing in the staff room can lead to a dignity at work infringement? When their request for a coffee ‘Julie Andrews’ is met with a blank look? Some won’t experience this, assimilating almost immediately to their new circumstances. Some will adapt, in time, learning through guided discovery. Others however, can’t or won’t adapt.
I’ve lost count of the amount of ex-servicemen and women I have met who refer to their work colleagues as ‘civvies’, despite having been ‘civvies’ themselves for many years. When they discuss their jobs there is the inevitable lambasting of the evil triumvirate of Health and Safety, HR, and Political Correctness and that these institutions weaken rather than strengthen the workplace environment. Nostalgia for their time back in the mob when things seemed simpler and easier to understand is all too common. A time when an infringement was addressed immediately by a SNCO having a quiet word or a blatantly open threat of public disembowelment from the RSM. No paperwork or escalation process, no HR hand-wringing or procedural quagmires. A different time.
So why do some of us find it harder than others to integrate back into regular society after a long spell in the military? It’s simple; we have left our tribe, our brothers and sisters, a way of life alien to many but the only one many of us have known. It’s particularly hard for those who joined the Forces at the age of 16 and have literally known nothing other than the military for their entire adult life. A friend of mine is a prime example of this. He joined the Royal Marines as a ‘boy soldier’ or junior, worked hard, got promoted, became a sniper and enjoyed a good career. What was apparent to me however was that during social occasions we could only ever really talk about military subjects as he had no real experiences outside of this. When wives and girlfriends would discuss their work or relay an anecdote or two, his eyes would glaze over and he would have nothing to say until he turned the conversation back to the merits of Crusader Bergans over PLCE…
Another friend of mine summed it up with his own experience. He left the Marines after completing around 6 years of service. When he was attending job interviews he would conduct a discreet assessment of those around him and, by his own admission, sit back smugly secure in the knowledge that he was more than a cut above most of the scruffy applicants, dressed as he was in smart suit and gleaming, polished shoes. After many rejections however, it dawned on him that if he wasn’t getting these jobs then they must have been given to the scarecrows he had been so quick to deride. He told me that the penny eventually dropped that nobody really gave a shit that he’d been in the Corps for a few years or that he could iron a shirt and polish his shoes.
He was treated exactly the same as the scruffs he had looked down his nose at. And it was this aspect that confused him the most. He was accustomed, as most of us were, that when people asked you what you did and you replied ‘I’m in the Forces.’, they would proffer their respect and admiration. When he left, he anticipated this same admiration to stand him in good stead but found it cut little ice with employers looking for someone with recent experience. Dejected and alienated, he missed his tribe more than ever and became quite embittered as a result of his experiences.
Because in the private sector, there really isn’t a tribe, at least not in the way that we have become accustomed. Alpha bankers and stock traders may beat their chests and dispute this, but a collection of hyper-masculine individuals do not constitute a tribe. At most they are a subculture.
So when we walk out of the camp or barracks for the last time we are also walking away from our tribe. And when we lose our tribe we become lost, cast adrift in an entirely new world that we struggle to make sense of. At least for a while. And that time frame is different for everyone.
Company employees are not conditioned or programmed to put the group before self, do not endure physical suffering that creates bonds or recognise a sacrosanct chain of command. Because they don’t need to; they will never encounter a situation where the life of the man or woman next to them depends on their actions. They will never be asked to remain awake, hungry, thirsty, physically and mentally exhausted, for days at a time. Never have to say goodbye to their wives and children in the hope that they return alive or at least in one piece.
Because that’s what members of the Armed Forces are paid for. To fulfil these duties on behalf of the public and negate the requirement for conscription or compulsory National Service.
When former service personnel join their new job in the private sector, depending on the individual, the transition period can be quite a significant one. And the main reason for this is, for the most part, lack of commonality. The adjustment of leaving a structured tribe and moving into something altogether more amorphous.
In some cases however, the attributes and values we bring from our tribe stand us in good stead in our second careers. Again, it is not uncommon for an ex-Forces individual to shine in a job through their confidence, communication, and willingness to push themselves. One of my former colleagues found himself doing very well at his new civilian job and was gaining rapid promotion. He found that one of the things that he brought from his military background was that of keeping going until the task was complete. Many of his co-workers were happy to down tools the minute the working day was done, regardless of what stage of development the project was at. My friend reverted to old habits and worked until happy that he had completed the elements of the task to either deadlines or time-frames rather than clock-watching. This attitude was picked up by senior management who rewarded his endeavours with quick promotion and additional benefits, to the chagrin of some of his colleagues who felt their time in position should have qualified them for the promotion. As my friend stated quite succinctly, ‘Longevity of position is not a benchmark of quality.’ Quite right; anyone can spend 8 hours a day sitting in an office. It’s what you do with those 8 hours that makes the difference.
I see regular posts on various forums from former service personnel unhappy with their lives after the Forces and in particular, how they feel let down by the military after they have left. One such post I see now and again on social media says ‘I was prepared to fight for my country, I was prepared to die for my country, I was NOT prepared to be abandoned’. I was curious about this post for several reasons, the main one being that it was liked and shared by a lot of people. Now, I could understand the odd individual who has had a raw deal based upon personal circumstances, but whole groups?
So I contacted a few of these people, asked about their experiences and was quite surprised by their reasoning. Taking the few individuals with very personal circumstances out of the equation, the remainder seemed to feel that the military had failed them all in dereliction of after-care. Their military experience ranged from 2 years to 10, some had deployed, some had not, some were front-line soldiers, some were not. But all felt that their struggle to assimilate was the direct fault of the military in not preparing them for life after the mob. As some of them had left the Forces as far back as the seventies I thought it possible that perhaps the blame lay in the inadequate resettlement processes of that era. However, many of the individuals I contacted had left far more recently and had the opportunity to engage with the resettlement packages available so this couldn’t be the ‘one size fits all’ answer.
Truth is…I didn’t find an answer. I found bitterness, blame and utter belief that the military ‘should have done something’. But what? What could the military have done to assist these individuals in integrating into civilian life? As I said, I can understand this back when once your time was done you walked out the door on a rainy Friday afternoon after handing your leaving routine in and that was it. Military to Mr or Mrs at the dropping of the barrier behind you.
But regarding the individual who had only completed 2 years of service, never deployed and (I suspect from our conversations) left under a bit of a cloud; were they entitled to some long-term commitment from the Army to ensure their well-being? My feeling was that this individual couldn’t give me a definitive answer to what the Army should have done for him…realistically. His suggestions seemed to indicate that he wanted some kind of extended, formal links with his old life. He felt that the Royal British Legion, Regimental Associations etc just didn’t cut it for him. To be honest, I was at a bit of a loss with what to suggest and struggled to identify with his cause. But I believe that on leaving the Army, he’d struggled to fit in with his new circumstances despite his relatively short service period. His language remains littered with military jargon and slang, linking him back to the tribe he left many years before.
It is incredible the strength of the bonds that unite military personnel, even, as in the case of the individual above, when they have completed a relatively small amount of service. Once forged, never forgotten as the expression goes. I doubt there’s a former member of the Armed Forces, regardless of how long they have been civilians, who can’t rattle off the service number they last used decades before.
I’ve always thought that if a company or business could replicate the military’s success in gaining and retaining the loyalty and esprit de corps of its tribes, they would be sitting on a gold mine. Unfortunately, corporate culture and working compliances do not open themselves to the same practices that the military exploit to build the tribal framework. The closest I think I have witnessed was the early years of Virgin, when Richard Branson’s personality-driven work culture accrued very real loyalty from his workforce. Branson, through his well-documented focus on looking after his staff, came closest to building what I believe defines a tribe. Branson’s employees loved working for the brand, were proud to wear the Virgin uniform and represent their CEO to the general public. As I said, this was the early days and Virgin today is another multi-national, corporate giant with a typical workforce representative of such.
And I think this is because the bigger an organisation becomes, the more difficult it is to maintain the links that created the tribal culture in the first place. Yes, the military is a large organisation, but it is essentially a nation of smaller tribes bonded and linked by common purpose and sense of duty.
Our tribes define who we are and how we conduct ourselves, and the longer we remain with a tribe the stronger the bonds. The intense experiences we endure throughout our military service further cements those bonds, extending them long after the day we walk away from our tribe to face a future of assimilating into an altogether different animal. An animal that has none of the intensity of experience or common platforms from which to relate.
We once were warriors, a tribe in the truest sense of the word where, for however long we served, the self was put aside for the good of the many. A concept that became hard to find once we’d returned our ID cards and walked out of the main gate of camp to whatever fate awaited us.
