When All the Markers Disappear: Employment and Veteran Identity

I was a Hospital Corpsman in the Navy. From my first days in the fleet, I came to believe—through countless stories told by senior Corpsmen about their experiences working with Army medics, or them having heard stories about other Corpsmen who worked with Army medics, and so on—that we were superior all around: in the quality of training, our capabilities in the field, and our physical and mental fortitude. This was an objective, indisputable truth.

Then I became a field Corpsman, aka FMF or green-side Corpsman, whose identity is defined by distinction from blue-side Corpsman. We were hard core; they weren't. They played politics; we didn't. Above all, Marines called us doc.

This dynamic exists everywhere in the military. Whether the claims are true doesn't matter; the myths told and retold become as accepted as the sky being blue and the grass being green. What matters is that everyone among us understands the reference points. The distinctions are legible.

Through this process of myth reproduction, a boot became a green-side Corpsman, who has gained a clear understanding of where he stands in the complex matrix of a total institution in which we found ourselves.

How Military Culture Creates Identity

Service members first come to understand the differences between military groups that may seem trivial or nonsensical at first. Shortly thereafter, they accept these differences. Then soon enough, the arbitrariness is no longer perceived. The fact that these distinctions are constructed, that they could be otherwise—that becomes air. Service members constantly joke about these differences, competing based on shared understanding of each group's quirks. They wear their ranks, patches, and occupational codes with pride while ribbing others. The distinctions are everywhere, performed daily. What disappears is the question of whether the differences have to exist at all. This mutual recognition creates much of the within-group camaraderie and sense of membership. It's completely and deeply ingrained.

There's military culture in its broadest sense, then branch-specific cultures, then occupational subcultures. Rank structures cross-cut everything: officers versus enlisted, and in the Navy, the Chief's Mess versus the rest of the enlisted ranks. Distinctions and commonalities are internalized, and identity emerges. Some groups have stronger identities, with their own rituals and traditions. But once we step forward into the exit door and look back from the other side, nothing can be taken for granted. Once on the other side, everything that was made invisible suddenly come back to fore, in the world that is filled with symbols, rituals, and norms that civilians around us neither see nor feel. With a DD-214 in our hand, we become foreigners in a foreign world.

But as I've alluded to, each service member can undergo multiple identity shifts throughout their career. That is, from boot to junior Sailor to Petty Officer to technical specialist to chief, and perhaps to commissioned officer. These shifts require real adaptation: unlearning the boot mindset to take on leadership responsibilities.

The Paradox of Military Identity Shifts

Here lie the questions: If we can adapt and perform across these different military identities, why is the shift to civilian life fundamentally different? Why, when we've proven ourselves capable of repeated identity transformation within the service, does post-military transition feel so disorienting?

The difference lies in what makes identity readable and meaningful to others. Within the military, an elaborate system of symbolic markers makes every service member's identity immediately comprehensible to other service members. If not by occupation or branch of service, then by rank. Visual cues—uniforms, ribbons, patches, insignias—and behavioral codes instantly communicate position, identity, and relative standing. These markers are mutually understood, second nature. Each position carries norms and expectations, and deviations are quickly noticed. There's order and predictability. Circumstances might be chaotic, such as in war, but Sailors, their positions, and expected conduct remain within bounds, governed by rules and regulations.

Legibility and the Power to Shape Culture

But legibility isn't just about being understood, it's about having the standing to participate in culture-making. In the military, our identity doesn't just conform to culture; we actively shape it. A junior service member can reproduce or challenge naval traditions. The Navy today is notably different from the Navy of two decades ago, as younger Sailors have pushed the culture in new directions. A green-side Corpsman can influence how Marines view Sailors. Identity and culture exist in a bilateral relationship: culture shapes identity, but identity also lets us contribute to the rituals, jokes, and shared meanings that define a group. This reciprocal shaping—being shaped by the group while also shaping it—is what gives existence purpose and belonging.

When the System of Legibility Collapses

None of this translates to civilian life. At separation, the entire system of legibility collapses. All the markers that once made me immediately comprehensible to others, my rank, my rate, my ribbons, my unit and my deployment history, all the accomplishments and sacrifices I have made, big and small, mean absolutely nothing outside the service. The symbolic language I spoke fluently for years becomes unintelligible overnight. My tightly bound group membership, so easily recognizable and taken for granted, has vanished into thin air. My cultural and human capital, gone.

A veteran might come to define who they are as an individual but also understand themselves in terms of veteran as a social category, an identity, a legal status, or as group membership. This takes place as veterans understand themselves in terms of civilian society whose knowledge of the military or veterans is thin, one-dimensional, and often stigmatic. Civilians see us as "a veteran"—an amorphous, often meaningless category that flattens all the complexity of our service into a single label. Or they see us as "military," which is equally reductive.

We no longer understand what we are ourselves. What the hell does it mean to be a veteran, anyway? But we don't get to figure this out in private. Transition is framed publicly as assimilation or reintegration. It’s a veteran's job to become legible to civilian society so they are absorbed into what is normal, what is functional. This forces veterans to start over in a fundamental way. Here, we face an impossible choice: do we jettison everything that made us who we are? Do we reject our identity to make space for whatever comports with the civilian world? But how do we do that when this identity was forged during our most formative adult years? Each veteran eventually defines what these terms mean for themselves, but it doesn't happen overnight.

Illegibility and Survival

Whether one is aware of it or not, transition is a matter of survival. Survival here isn't metaphorical, but rather, housing, employment, healthcare access, and the social bonds that prevent veterans from becoming statistics in suicide or homelessness data. We are pressed to make ourselves understood by civilians. If we are feared, avoided, or misunderstood because they lack the symbolic framework to read us correctly, isolation becomes likely, whether imposed or self-selected. We become illegible, and illegibility breeds disconnection.

Employment: More Than Finding a Job

This is how employment becomes such a fraught issue in veteran transition. Employment is one of the key aspects of veteran transition as it's tied to so many other life outcome measures, but it's more complex than simply finding work. The challenge isn't just translating your NEC or MOS (military occupation codes) into a civilian job title. It isn’t simply learning to write a resume without military jargon. The deeper challenge is rebuilding a legible professional identity in a system that doesn't share our symbolic language.

Just as military service is both a job and a way of life, many civilian careers share this quality to varying degrees. Work shapes identity in ways that extend far beyond earning a living. Taking on a job or changing careers isn't as simple as putting on different clothes and clocking in. Each role carries values, mental states, social access, even language, and prerequisites that reshape who you are. Being a paramedic isn't just about responding to emergency calls. It is dark humor as a coping mechanism, hypervigilance that doesn't turn off at home, the weight of decisions made in seconds, and a bond forged through shared trauma that others can't fully understand. Being a college student isn't just about sitting in a lecture hall. It's complete ownership of daily schedule, wearing casual clothes, collaborating on group projects, and making statements with clear reasoning in group discussions in the absence of hierarchy and where good questions or even a challenge are valued.

To a veteran, this becomes a challenge on multiple levels: not only the shift from military to career identity, but also the deeper work of becoming civilian again. In this light, it’s easier to see why some professions feel less alien than others. Why certain roles, cultures, or environments echo just enough of the familiar structure, mission, or camaraderie to make the transition feel navigable.

Performing Legibility in Civilian Work

When we apply for a civilian job, we can't rely on the markers that once made our competence, experience, and character instantly readable. Our service record means nothing to an HR manager who has no frame of reference for what "green-side Corpsman" or "E-6" or "OEF deployment" signifies. We must learn and embody an entirely new symbolic system, one that values different markers, different credentials, different ways of signaling competence and trustworthiness. So veterans learn to perform legibility: translating "0311 Infantry Marine" into "operations management," learning to signal competence through credentials that civilians recognize. All the while, we wonder if we are overdressed or underdressed. This translation always feels incomplete, like speaking a second language we learned too late in life. Until then, we are either a blackbox, a misfit, or whatever they think we are based on whatever sources of reference they are informed by.

Loss of Cultural Participation

Worse still, when we're illegible, we lose not just our sense of self but our ability to shape the cultures we enter. We become a cultural imposter rather than a cultural participant, always trying to decode civilian workplace norms rather than helping to create them. We seek belonging and purpose. We want to become an active participant of something that recognizes us and the good we can bring to the table. Yet, we can't contribute to workplace culture when no one understands what we bring to it. Perhaps this explains feelings of isolation, irrelevance, or anger that veterans often report. We feel stuck looking back to the good old days of camaraderie, because today we feel unseen. Or seen, but unwanted.

Wrap Up

Each of us undergoes such phase while simultaneously trying to preserve some continuity of self. We’re not just looking for a job. We’re desperately looking for a way that allows us to remain recognizably ourselves while operating in this new system of meaning. That's the real challenge veterans face in employment: not just finding work, but finding ourselves in work when all the markers that once made us legible have disappeared, and when we’ve lost the standing to participate in making the workplace culture that might, eventually, make space for who each of us actually is.