Exchange of Realities

And now, for something a little different.

0800 hours on MCRD San Diego. I’m sitting in the food court with my mother, looking out the window at the roiling mass of families here for graduation. By now, the crowds are something I’m used to. They’ve turned on music in here, loud enough that I’m not sure I’d hear a bugle if it was being played right outside the window.

But that doesn’t keep me from noticing when, outside the window, Colors begins. If you’ve never been on a military base, it might not mean much to you, but Colors—the raising or lowering of the flag every day—is a big deal, big enough that if you’re outdoors and that bugle’s playing, you aren’t allowed to do anything but pay respects in the general direction of the flagpole until it stops. It was one of the first things they taught me when I hired on with the library.

The recruits knew. There was no way they wouldn’t. So in and among the crowd outside that window, anyone wearing a uniform was stock-still, standing at attention, all facing in the same direction. And yet there were all these people—their friends, their families, still talking or moving around or carrying on, not even holding still in deference to the fact that there was clearly something that these people had to do.

Now, I’ve never considered myself to be one of the uniformed crowd. When they showed me the video on why “civilian Marine” isn’t an oxymoron, I still had my doubts, since there’s a big difference between fixing weaponry and my shelving books. I still can’t keep my ranks straight beyond being able to tell low-range from middle range from officer, and all that takes is simple collar reading. And I operate under no illusion that I’d last a minute in training, let alone out in the field. Heck, even in dress most of the visitors seemed more associated with their recruit relatives than I—you had the small children in their “Mini-Marine” T-shirts and the proud parents and grandparents and what have you with theirs, and the main thing marking me as having anything to do with the services was just the government-issued ID on the lanyard about my neck. As far as I’m concerned, if there’s an ‘us’ and a ‘them’, my ‘us’ is definitely the civilian population.

Except that something in me speaking to sheer instinct seemed to disagree that morning. I looked out over the mass of families talking and carrying on, over at my mother on the other side of the table, rolled my eyes at this sign of what seemed to me to be mass obliviousness (didn’t anyone tell these people how seriously the Marines take Colors?) and muttered “Civilians.”

I’m sure there’s something in there to be learned. About the gray area in dichotomies, perhaps, or about how self-identification works. About things that seem obvious to people who already know them and can justify them easily (we’re used to standing still for the flag at sports events or graduation, aren’t we?), and how they might look to outsiders. About how much rituals and understanding them can create a feeling of in-group and out-group even when the usual in-group/out-group lines are drawn somewhere else.

But right now I think I just need to think about what this means for me.