Your guide to ‘fitting in’ with civvies after leaving the Forces


Here’s a handy guide from the Forces Network to help you ‘fit in’ with civilians when you leave the armed forces and transition as smoothly as possible back into ‘civvy street’.

See tips from speech to spending habits, bodily functions to fashion and much more…

1. Speech:
•Time should never begin with a zero or end in a hundred, it is not ‘Zero 530’ or ‘14 hundred’ it is 5:30 in the morning and 2 pm.
•Words like ‘Gen’, ‘Ally’, ‘Threaders’ and ‘PT’ will get you weird looks; It’s ‘Really?’, ‘That’s nice’, ‘Not happy’ and ‘workout’, get used to it.
•‘F***’ cannot be used to replace whatever word you can’t think of right now, try ‘um’.
•Shouting words of command is not talking.
•It’s a phone, not a two-way radio, conversations on a phone do not end in ‘out’
•Do not abbreviate, people will not know what you are talking about if you tell them you are running slightly late and will send a SITREP in 5 mikes or that you will RV soon.

2. Personal accomplishments:
•In the real world, being able to do pushups will not make you good at your job.
•Most people will be slightly disturbed by you if you tell them about people you have killed or seen die.
•How much pain you can take is not a personal accomplishment.
•The time you ‘got really drunk and passed the breathalyser test anyway’ is also not a personal accomplishment.