Amphibious Transition

Transition is a buzzword in the military and veteran community. When you leave the service and become a veteran, you trade one life for another, much like an amphibian. Some people bemoan not having an adequate transition plan; others easily seem to hit the ground running and move from one life to another. I was stuck somewhere in the middle. I think about what it took to earn the title “Veteran” and how my life has metamorphosized as a result.

Since I was in the Army National Guard, and my time on active duty only constituted under eighteen months for my deployment, it seemed not as jarring to re-enter the life I’d left before the war. I was back in school within three months of returning home from Iraq. I took my month of terminal leave and returned to work for the family business. Life went on. Only, it seemed I was running from an inevitable cultural crisis. I didn’t realize the transition from combat-effective to monotonous obsoletion would slowly take its toll.

I left discipline, structure, and, as cliché as it sounds, a brotherhood. At home, all I had was a dog and a failing relationship. The real transition happened after everything collapsed. I had to figure out who I was, and that took some time. Truthfully, I’m still figuring that one out.

I found myself disillusioned with the life I was leading. The university I was attending was skewing more liberal than I had remembered, or had I become less liberal while eating Iraqi dust? People were protesting the war on campus. Even though I agreed with their sentiment, seeing their protests enraged me because it challenged an entire year of my life. It called into question my value since everyone kept thanking me for that very service. Hello, dissonance, there you are.

Hindsight being what it is, I see they were mostly right, although misguided. At the time, it just further showed I didn’t belong anymore. I was neither a war hawk nor a hippie. I was just some new veteran dropped back into the real world and expected to go on as if I didn’t just spend a year trying to stay alive. I dropped out of that university after completing the spring semester, barely passing my classes.

I was three and a half years into a biology program, but I just didn’t fit anymore. The school felt stifling. That same spring, I broke off my seven-year engagement to my high school sweetheart. Life felt like it was spiraling. This was the hard beginning of my transition home from war. It took nearly six months for the homecoming honeymoon phase to completely wear off, and now I felt really lost.

I spiraled into an abyss of unknowing. I hiked and hiked some more. I wanted to find all the reptiles and amphibians in my state. I needed a mission. I went to Florida and chased pythons, gators, and other invasive wildlife. I filmed and photographed the things I saw. I scratched stories on the paper of spiral-bound notebooks and made clumsy videos. I needed to make up for lost time. I was very alone. I had lost all connection to community.

A few years went by, and I transitioned from agnosticism to faith. Tried school again. Dropped out again. Found a small bible college. Transitioned from biology to theology and got a piece of paper that said I knew a thing or two about the divine even though it’s all still a mystery to me. I got married and transitioned from single to a clueless newlywed. Then, a clueless old married guy. I chased dreams, then transitioned into chasing paychecks.

Now, all these years and journeys later, I’m trying to chase my dreams again. I’m older and hopefully wiser now. Still transitioning and living amphibious. I’ve always been of two worlds, it seems. It leaves me thinking about the entire process of metamorphosis from my tadpole days as a young private in the Army to my current form as a fully formed middle-aged government employee scribbling articles each week in hopes of filling some void left empty. Here’s to figuring it out, moving forward, and always being in transition from lesser to greater forms in perpetuity.

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Stan Lake is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker from Bethania, North Carolina. His work has been published in Reptiles Magazine, Dirtbag Magazine, Lethal Minds Journal, Backcountry Journal, Wildlife in North Carolina, SOFLETE, The Tarheel Guardsman, Wildsound Writing Festival, and others. His poetry collection “A Toad in a Glass Jar” is scheduled for publication in late fall 2024 by Dead Reckoning Collective. He has written three Children’s books and one Christian Devotional book. He filmed and directed a documentary about his deployment in Iraq with the Army called “Hammer Down.” He spends most of his free time wrangling toads.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.