“How” to Retire from the Military

Once the considerable calculus that goes into when to retire is complete, it’s probably time to decide “how” to retire. By this I mean, what, if any, ceremony do you want to have. This again is personal preference. I’ve seen everything from small ceremonies in a conference room with just close family and a few guests to major productions in an auditorium complete with the career video montage and “American Soldier” playing in the background. Many installations also offer a post retirement ceremony where several retirees are honored at a time, complete with marching band and formations of troops!

I went somewhere in the middle. I decided to use a popular off post venue for my ceremony. I was able to get the venue for free but bought about a 100 meals / drinks from the on-site food vendor. As a bit of a tangent, the DoD organization I retired from had a world class protocol staff that assisted me with much of the planning and execution of the event. You certainly don’t see protocol folks in line units but if you find yourself retiring out of an organization that has them, definitely take advantage of their knowledge!

As to be expected, retirement day came and went in an emotional blur. I’ve got dozens of pictures to remind me of the day and am very thankful I conducted a ceremony… definitely a personal “sustain” from my military retirement experience.

In my humble opinion there is only one wrong answer about “how” to retire from the military and that is to not have a retirement ceremony.  Some of my closest friends have chosen to just slip away, rather than participate in a ceremony. I couldn’t disagree more and tried to talk them out of it. I’d offer three reasons for conducting a retirement ceremony.

First and foremost, the ceremony provides closure and I believe is an important first step in returning back to civilian life. For lack of a better comparison, retirement ceremonies are almost like funerals in this regard. The ceremony signifies the end of one way of life and the beginning of a new way of life (and the start of a healing process). I believe if I had not conducted a retirement ceremony, my adjustment back to civilian life would be harder than it already is.

Second, it is a perfect time to heap some public praise and adulation on our Families. Most retirement ceremonies include some nice swag for family members. More importantly, the retiree gets to publicly thank their family for putting up with a bunch of B.S. over the years. Hard to put a price tag on recognizing those long-suffering parents, siblings, spouses and kids!

Lastly, while I am a firm believer humility is an important leader quality and I get the whole slip away thing, a retirement ceremony is a well-deserved celebration of a career of service to our nation. Soak it in and enjoy it! It’s great to see the look of pride in our family and friends while all kinds of praise is being heaped upon you about an exceptional career. They know we couldn’t have done it without them! Celebrating a long, successful career with some of the friends and family who enabled it is a great way to say, “thank you”. That was the general tone I wanted to set for my particular ceremony, and I believe I was fairly successful.

Leaving the military is something we all have to do. Why not do it in style? We all had some sort of ceremony when we entered, shouldn’t the same be said for when we exit? Again, it’s purely personal preference, but deciding to have a retirement ceremony was one of the better decisions I made during my transition back to civilian life!

From the mental gymnastics when making the decision to retire to finding a J-O-B, I am capturing the lessons learned from my own military retirement journey for a FREE e-book coming out this fall!

Check out my new book on investing in rental properties Collect Rent, Don’t Pay it, on sale now at Amazon!

The views, opinions and biases expressed in this blog are the authors and do not reflect those of the U.S. Army or Department of Defense.

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