Rock n Roll Transition part 1. “Lately it occurs to me, what a long strange trip it’s been.” The Grateful Dead. – Truckin’ 1970

 Transition is my life. My job as the Virginia Transition Assistance Program Coordinator for Central Virginia is to help transitioning service members make that change to post military life. For those of us who have already done it, most will tell you it was not easy. We were unprepared for so many aspects of life after we took our uniforms off that it might cause us head and heartaches if we are not adequately prepared. I know that it did for me. With that in mind, I will offer a series of blogs with the goal of helping to ease or at least prepare those transitioning out of the military. I am going to focus these blogs around one of the things that I know and love most…music. So the idea is simple. I will take a lyric from a song I know from a wide range of music genres and apply that lyric to a different part of the transition process. The goal is to get you to look at your transition differently and maybe get you to listen to something different. So with that as the background, here we go.

 “Lately it occurs to me, what a long strange trip it’s been.” The Grateful Dead. – Truckin’ 1970

Whether we spent 2 years in the military or 32 years, our time and experiences are unique. Now when I say unique, I don’t mean to each other, I mean they are experiences that, depending on the data you follow, up to 99% of the population cannot relate to in any way other than what they see on the movie screen and on television shows. When we speak of deployments, MRE’s, hot racking, fox holes, liberty ports, battle buddies, check your six, etc. Most civilians cannot even begin to fathom what we are actually talking about. We have been through a career that is unlike any other and trust me, what you thought was normal in the military is about as strange as can be in the civilian world.  It is this experience that we need to be aware of and need to learn to harness because there are employers that are looking to utilize those skills. Understand that the Army goes to the latrine, The Navy and Marine Corp goes to the head, 99% of the population goes to the bathroom. We need to understand that our experiences are unlike what most people have ever even though of. You have been places most have never heard of. Experienced more cultures in one deployment than most will in a lifetime and were charged with more responsibility before you could vote than most people ever will. Do not underestimate how much this will affect you on the outside. Transitioning is one of the most stressful events that you will go through and if you do not prepare yourself for the loss of some of the structure provided by military life, it will catch you off guard and leave you feeling alienated and lost. Make sure that you keep some of your peers in your life, whether through a veteran’s service organization like VFW or American Legion or through maintaining contact with some of your closet friends. I look back at my time in with incredible fondness, often sharing my “sea stories” with my fellow veteran brothers and sisters who in turn share their own. Talk to other veterans that you know who have successfully navigated from uniform to business suit. Find out what pitfalls they went through so that you don’t have to. There is plenty of help out there, utilize it.