How the Mexican Army changed me?
After a year in the Mexican army, I packed my clothes, returned my uniform, and went back home.
It was the longest and shortest 9-hour bus ride from Guadalajara to Mexico City that I had taken. The idea that my childhood dream wasn’t what I imagined was very hard to accept.
The first days back home were very hard, friends and family thought that I had left the military academy because I got scared, and to be honest I never took the time to express the real reasons. The first few weeks I could only think about what I was going to do with my life. I wanted to be an army pilot since I was a young boy living in San Jose California (yes I was what Americans now call a dreamer) how can you replace your childhood dream in such a short time? There’s no manual for that.
Fast forward a few years I was in college, getting my chemical engineering degree and being president of a student business club. I found it weird how many of my classmates said I had a strange personality, somewhat serious, and too disciplined and focused for a young guy in a very liberal public school (they didn’t know I had been in the military). Even my family told me that there was a gap between me before the army and after. I couldn’t understand what they meant by that, but I noticed I had trouble getting excited, feeling, relaxing, etc. I never actually related this to my military background, I just thought that was, well… me.
A few months ago I found a TEDx talk called “Trained not to cry” that changed the way I saw my issues and in some way changed my life. The talk couldn’t relate more to where I was at that moment. It talked about that the relationship in the soldiers that go to war and have psychological problems after the military isn’t related at all, but that the changes in a soldier come barely after finishing Bootcamp, where they “teach you how to be a soldier”.
This caught my attention because I always said that the military didn’t affect me because I was never in real combat, I was wrong. The change from a normal person to a soldier comes right after Bootcamp. These are the changes that happened:
1:Empathy
A soldier can’t have empathy in combat. You can’t shoot at someone thinking about their family or if it will hurt them. The problem is, you can’t switch empathy on and off, so after I left the military I had a hard time relating with my new civilian friends, family, and girls I dated. It was just like if I had an imaginary barrier between their feelings and mine. It was hard to understand why they were sad or stressed when the midterms were just a few days away, all I could think about is that their problems were nowhere near what I felt when one of my military friends got killed in a helicopter accident while destroying cartel’s marihuana field, or another committed suicide in Christmas eve. Still, when your girlfriend is sad, all she wants is for you to be there and say “everything will be ok, I understand what you are going through” words that I just couldn’t say, because I knew it was a lie.
2: Takes away the excitement for life
This is the most accurate thing on the list, I’ve never had suicide ideas during or after the military, but, indeed, I didn’t enjoy or get excited by the little things in life, or even the big things now that I think about it. The problem there is that I always compared my civilian experiences with military ones, like if someone recognized my hard work and discipline… well for me it was just what I was used to doing every day.
Somehow the military does this on purpose, remembering words like “Don’t get excited about your leave (being able to get out of the base) this weekend if there’s the trouble we are going to be here a few more weeks”. There are harder examples, but I think you get the point that it was best to always “Hope the best but be mentalized for the worst” as a famous quote says, still, you can get tired and overwhelmed by this.
3: Not good at asking for help
In the military asking makes you look weak. I remember this day where in formation, I started to get dizzy and about to faint, I told my sergeant and he said: “If I take you to the nursery you will get better, but I’ll take away your leave this weekend, so what do you prefer? Stay put a few more hours and be free or feeling better and not leaving the academy this week”. Once again, this was just a minor example of some other things that happen. In the Mexican military, if you ask for psychological help, this request ends up in your papers and affects promotion, leaves, and even the ability to fully operate. So soldiers simply don’t ask for help. And that translates to civilian life, if you are sad you keep quiet, if you miss someone you don’t say it, etc.
After I understood what was going on with me, I managed to do some changes. I talked to my friends and family about the issue, thanked them for their patience, and asked them to help me in the healing process. To be honest till this day (5 years after I left the military) I haven’t received any psychological help, this type of treatment is a bit expensive for developing country standards but as soon as I can have professional help I’ll gladly accept it. Still, just getting to know what my problems were helped understand these weird feelings as consequences and managed to work on them.
Today I feel much better, I don’t like saying I’m happy but I do like saying I’m in peace with the place I am today.
Thanks for reading!