On Autonomy
Serving in the Corps was, for me, a masterclass on isolation and its consequences.
The average person has their fair share of assumptions to make whenever they meet someone in service. There’s a degree of removal which allows a certain mythos to exist, helped by the glamorised (and often politically-charged) branding plastered throughout entertainment. Though my ego may beg to differ, I was not a jet-setting blood-thirsty playboy who personally fought every major terrorist at least once.
I was just a nineteen year old in a uniform that had a habit of swallowing me until everything about me just seemed so unbearably small.
When I joined up into the service, all I could think of was the very concept of freedom, albeit in an extraordinarily selfish context. I’d been working three jobs just to keep up with expenses – and even that wouldn’t be enough to afford a life off of my university campus. You too would’ve grabbed onto any buoy offered to you if your neck was that deep in the water and named it your saviour.
There wasn’t much mind that I paid for the piece of what having each need of mine provided for would cost me. Even if I had, I couldn’t have so much as thought that the answer to that could be as much as it was.
Before we continue, I want to state and overstate that I have no regrets about making the choice to enlist. It is the reason that I am the person I am today – both in the best and the worst of ways. Yet, regret isn’t the topic of this essay; it is agency – the second sacrifice mandated by any service, following only innocence.
One hallmark of recruit training is the memorisation of the Rifleman’s Creed in order to instill one vital remembrance within us: we are only another weapon. The only difference between our M16s and us is that we cost a hell of a lot more to maintain. You sign over your body and all of the rights that go with it.
There’s a technique called becoming the mask within the intelligence field, in reference to long-term covert operations. In simplest terms, you become what your mission requires you to become, so much that you’ll forget over time what you were before. You’ll start using third-person language with your first name in order to express that when you’re all alone, not because you want to, but because you want to allow yourself to exist in the only way that they can anymore. It permits emotional distancing; it has to in order to keep you and others safe.
For example: Arabella, the sunset is pink and it used to be just like that in the town where you grew up on most summer nights.
Then, there’s the aspect of depersonalisation – the art of viewing the person you are required to be from a distance, as though acknowledging it as a sort of role. You name it for what it is, then you filter all stimuli through it as a question. It isn’t how do I react to this anymore; it’s how should the Marine react to this. For example: LCpl Sarver should accept that what
happened was okay, because their command says it was. If someone asked me to name the mistake in which I hinged my service upon, then I would only gesture towards this explanation. I would say that LCpl Sarver’s downfall began because Arabella genuinely loved someone which would become a casualty of our own mission. And, once someone has begun to open themselves into the foolishness that is humanity, it becomes infinitely harder to permit yourself the privilege of blind compliance.
On both of my arms are tattoo sleeves which tell a story: my story. There are symbols denoting everything from my heritage to those whom I love. I received my first proper tattoo during my time in service…which later spiraled into over twenty. In retrospect, they are one of the few permitted venues for
self-assertion within the military world. Perhaps it was as if my subconscious was instilling within me that Arabella could never be forgotten; that just some needles and ink could preserve the argument that within me there still remained a person.
I have survived a great many atrocities during my time in service, with them engraved within me through each. There were some mornings in which I could not bring myself to notice them and still complete my mission, but there were far too many others
in which I let my eyes linger upon them as a comfort. Even in the moments in which my physical body has endured torture, they were never scraped from me.
As if to spite such traumas, I’d always find myself adding in a few more flourishes to myself upon my survival. As a medium, tattoo exists in order to remind us of the permanence that remains even after the needle has been long discarded. It can become a symbolic acknowledgment that we will suffer but we can also determine the ends in which we do so through.
If there is any hope, I will live long enough for most of my body to be covered in the proof of my own enduring soul. Some two and a half months ago, I received my DD-214 and was escorted from my base to begin my second life as a civilian, following three years of service. Around three this morning, I was splitting a Dubai chocolate waffle at IHOP after
blowing my voice out at two clubs. There was no particular obligation towards anything except the transient sense of self which I held in that moment. The former Arabella can no longer serve as an encompassment of the thing that I have become, nor could I maintain the falsehood that LCpl Sarver was much more than convenient for others to use.
I simply was.
About the Author
Arabella Sarver is a United States Marine Corps veteran and writer. They have published multiple works of fiction and non-fiction prose, as well as poetry.
