Vachon Imagined

In the Army, there are—or there used to be; perhaps I am dating myself—uniform inspections. We would put on our military uniforms, and a leader would examine our badges, our appearance, our posture, and our adherence to regulation.

For females, this meant scrutiny over things like makeup—too much or too little—hair placement, earrings, and every detail that had to align with the standard. The same expectations existed for men: every part of the uniform, every aspect of appearance, every detail was measured.

And perhaps this is the good news about the military, at least in theory: it is designed to strip away what you have learned and rebuild something new. A new machine. Preferably, a fighter. Someone capable of enduring war and emerging on the other side as a champion.

It sounds beautiful in theory, doesn’t it?

It is the story Hollywood sells because we want to believe it. We want to believe that adversity creates strength, that battles create heroes, that people can walk through fire and emerge untouched.

Maybe sometimes they do.

Maybe someone goes to war and returns without visible scars. But trust that they have invisible ones. The kind people do not always want to discuss because, in the Army, we say, “loose lips sink ships.” But it goes deeper than that.

Some memories are not easily brought back into the light. Some experiences are buried because survival sometimes requires silence.

But leaving a battlefield does not mean the battlefield leaves you.

Leaving an environment does not mean that environment no longer exists within you.

The body is the energy of life. It absorbs. It remembers. It reveals. But the one thing this life does not do is die. People may leave a place behind and grieve the person they were there, but when grief and healing are not balanced with empathy, listening, and the courage to reveal what happened, we forget who we were.

And in that forgetting, pride can take root.

The military, in all its forms, exists to serve something larger than yourself. Again, this is beautiful in theory—and often true in practice. But when ideas become fixed, when beliefs become immovable, that is where prejudice begins to grow.

That is where gender becomes solidified into something absolute.

Ideas about gender become attached to the body, and the body becomes something to control rather than something to understand. Often, it is easier to follow the current than to step outside the accepted path. Easier to conform than to question.

But there is another way.

To walk the path of the body and of life itself.

Without a predetermined story.

Without a fixed compass.

Without the need to become anything other than what we are.