Throughout his final year of high school, Rob Henderson thought a lot about his friends, he explains in Troubled, and where they were all going:
Cristian and John said they were going to turn it all around in community college — they both planned to get good grades and then transfer to a four-year college. When they told me this plan, I thought about how we were C-minus students at best, and now that we were nearly adults, we would soon have more freedom. The marginal adult oversight we currently had would soon be nonexistent. Which meant we would go from a little bit of friction to none at all when we felt the urge to ditch class and do something reckless. Gradually, I realized the path I was on had nothing but a tragic ending and came to believe that the military was my only lifeline. It was an environment that would present maximal friction if I felt the urge to do something stupid. And it didn’t hurt that enlisting would also provide a decent income. As I write this, I’m reminded of a quote from George Orwell: “The thought of not being poor made me very patriotic.”
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As a kid, I was weighed down by instability and hopelessness. The military helped to unlock my potential, because it provided a structured environment, a sharp contrast to the drama and disorder of my youth. I was surrounded by supportive people who wanted me to succeed. In this new environment, I gradually came to realize that my childhood was anomalous, and I didn’t have to let it define the rest of my life. I’d been liberated from the mistakes of my past. I believed that the external comportment I had cultivated would allow me to control my internal demons and productively channel my restless energy.
I would probably have committed at least one felony had I not been locked in the military throughout these years. For behaviors and habits to be stable and predictable, one’s environment needs to be stable and predictable. I didn’t have discipline, mentorship, healthy camaraderie, and so on back home, but I had them now.
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In a very real way, simply being confined to a schedule steered me away from misconduct. Military life consists of physical training (PT), room inspections, uniform inspections, and mandatory tasks outside of standard work hours. Every aspect of existence is tightly regulated, and this is especially true for new recruits. Your life isn’t really yours. No institution is more aware of the latent impulsivity and stupidity in young people, especially young men, than the military. It has evolved into an environment in which it is very hard to do something reckless, because the consequences of failing to meet standards are both clear and severe. Major infractions like not showing up for work or failing a random drug test result in literal jail time.
I learned that so much of success depends not on what people do, but what they don’t do. It’s about avoiding rash and reckless actions that will land us in trouble. The military presses the “fast forward” button on the worst, most aggressive, and impulsive years of a young man’s life—the time when a guy is most likely to do something catastrophically stupid. Studies have found that a man’s likelihood of committing a crime peaks at age nineteen, and then gradually declines throughout his twenties.2 This has led some psychologists to describe their larger appetite for violence, risk-taking, and competitiveness as “the young male syndrome.”
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For many young people, the gap between impulsive and unwise decisions and the consequences of those decisions is large. In the military, there is almost no gap at all.
Even if a young man learns absolutely nothing during a military enlistment, that’s still four to six years he spent simply staying out of trouble and letting his brain develop; the same guy at twenty-four is rarely as reckless and impulsive as he was at eighteen. The reason my life didn’t go off the rails is because I was just self-aware enough to decide to have my choices stripped from me.
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Before I joined, I’d heard that the military basically becomes your parent. I found this to be true. They teach you about finance and budgeting, and supervisors would lead new guys away from doing stupid things like blowing their savings on a brand-new sports car. Instead, they’d say to buy a sensible car. Some of the guys didn’t listen, though. New members made about thirteen hundred bucks a month. It wasn’t much, but it was more than I’d ever made before.
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Many people say that to do something difficult and worthwhile, they need to be “motivated.” Or that the reason they are not sticking to their goals is because they “lack motivation.” But the military taught me that people don’t need motivation; they need self-discipline. Motivation is just a feeling. Self-discipline is: “I’m going to do this regardless of how I feel.” Seldom do people relish doing something hard. Often, what divides successful from unsuccessful people is doing what you don’t feel motivated to do. Back in basic training, our instructor announced that there are only two reasons new recruits don’t fulfill their duties: “Either you don’t know what’s expected of you, or you don’t care to do it. That’s it.”
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The military asked that I put myself in the service of something higher than myself. I had a seriousness of purpose that I lacked before and experienced a new feeling about who I was and who I could be in life. But it didn’t fundamentally “transform” me. It just provided conditions that prevented me from acting out the way I had as a kid.