Redeployment(85)

“Oo-rah, sir.”

I thought about making some sort of joke, like, “Stay off the opium,” but I didn’t want to force anything. So I continued on my run, and three weeks later I was out of the Corps.





? ? ?


There’s a month after my discharge I can’t really account for. I traveled. I moved to New York, and then I think I spent a lot of time in my underwear, watching TV. My mom says I was “decompressing.”

At the time, most of my college friends were in corporate law or investment banking or were reevaluating life after dropping out of Teach for America.

Strangely, I started feeling more like a Marine out of the Corps than I’d felt while in it. You don’t run into a lot of Marines in New York. All of my friends thought of me as “the Marine,” and to everyone I met, I was “the Marine.” If they didn’t know, I’d make sure to slip it into conversations first chance I got. I kept my hair short and worked out just as hard as before. And when I started at NYU and I met all those kids right out of undergrad, I thought, Hell, yeah, I’m a f*cking Marine.

Some of them, highly educated kids at a top five law school, didn’t even know what the Marine Corps did. (“It’s like a stronger Army, right?”) Few of them followed the wars at all, and most subscribed to a “It’s a terrible mess, so let’s not think about it too much” way of thinking. Then there were the political kids, who had definite opinions and were my least favorite to talk to. A lot of these overlapped with the insufferable public interest crowd, who hated the war, couldn’t see why anybody’d ever do corporate law, didn’t understand why anyone would ever join the military, didn’t understand why anyone would ever want to own a gun, let alone fire one, but who still paid lip service to the idea that I deserved some sort of respect and that I was, in an imprecise way that was clearly related to action movies and recruiting commercials, far more “hard-core” than your average civilian. So sure, I was a Marine. At the very least, I wasn’t them.





? ? ?


NYU prides itself on sending a high number of law students into public interest, “high” meaning 10 to 15 percent. If an NYU student gets a public interest job that pays under a certain amount, they get partial or full debt forgiveness, saving them more money than the average American makes in three years. Like everybody else without a Root Scholarship or wealthy parents or a fiancée at a hedge fund, I’d sat through NYU’s presentation on the program and thought, Oh, they want me to work my ass off and live in Bed-Stuy for six years. With incentives like that, four out of five NYU students take a good look at public interest jobs, hem and haw, consider the trajectories of all the fire starters they admire, and then go to the same huge law firms as everybody else.

Joe-the-corporate-lawyer told me, “Do Legal Aid. Do the Public Defender’s Office.”

We were having drinks at a rooftop bar with a stunning view of the Chrysler Building. The drink Joe had bought me was made with a cardamom-infused liquor. I’d never had anything quite like it.

“I’m not really an idealist anymore,” I said.

“You don’t have to be,” he said. “You just have to be a guy who doesn’t want their life crushed doing shit that isn’t even mentally challenging. Sometimes I hate my clients and want them to lose, but that’s actually a rare improvement over most cases, which involve huge corporations where I can’t even bring myself to care. Aside from bonuses, which get smaller every year, I’m on a set salary. But I bill by the hour, which means the equity partners make more money the more I work. And nobody works their ass off for ten years to become partner because they’ve got a burning ambition to improve the lifestyles of first-year associates. They do it for money. And so do I.”

“You’re paying off law school and college debt,” I said.

“Which you won’t be,” he said, “thanks to the G.I. Bill and the Yellow Ribbon Program and your savings from the Corps. If you go my route, you’ll be stuck doing doc review every day and every night and every goddamn weekend and you’ll want to blow your brains out.”

Joe was right about the debt, but I already had some experience as a true believer, and if the Marine Corps was any indication, idealism-based jobs didn’t save you from wanting to shoot yourself in the head.





? ? ?


Paul-the-Teach-for-America-dropout told me, “If you go public interest, be careful where you go.”