Welcome to your new duty station, where the coffee is burnt, the traffic is confusing, and the base housing Facebook group will both save and destroy you.
You’ve PCS’d, unpacked 60% of your boxes, cried in at least one parking lot, and now you’re wondering: how does anyone make friends, find the good wine, or get their kid into the not-terrible preschool?
Pour a beverage and settle in. Here’s your insider guide to playing it smart (and maybe a little smug) at your new stomping grounds.
Rule #1: Befriend the girl with the spreadsheets
You know the one. She’s only been here a year, but she already talks like a local, keeps a color-coded Google Drive, and can tell you which Starbucks has the slowest base WiFi (and which one will write your name as “Dependent”). She’s your golden ticket.
This is the spouse who has already figured out who bakes the birthday cakes everyone pretends are homemade. She has a shared Notes file on seasonal consignment sales. She knows which yoga studio is actually military-friendly (not just 10% off on Tuesdays) and which school registration officer will waive the birth certificate if you bring cupcakes.
But be warned. Don’t try to recreate her lists. That will only lead to quiet despair and a half-finished Excel file titled “stuff??” because you don’t know where the pumpkin patch is or why everyone’s obsessed with the base bowling league. She already did the hours, took the hits, deciphered the acronyms.
Instead, offer her coffee or your Trader Joe’s frozen croissants and do everything you can to be her friend. Not in a weird social-climber way. In a “please save me from Googling ‘good dentist near me military’” kind of way. She’s the key to surviving this duty station with some grace: to finding the salon that won’t leave you with fried hair, to locating the back gate shortcut that saves you ten minutes at pickup, to ordering the exact right thing at the restaurant that looks like a health code violation but makes transcendent birria tacos on Wednesdays only.
Rule #2: You Need One Civvie Friend
Even if you’ve made friends with the Queen of Spreadsheets, you still need a civvie lifeline. The kind of friend whose partner doesn’t get sent to the field for 14 days with 20 minutes’ notice. The kind who won’t try to decipher your acronyms—she’ll just wait for you to translate and then carry on like it’s normal.
And yes, she’s the hardest one to find when you first arrive at a new duty station. Even more challenging will be realizing that most of your life is built around people who also move every 2-3 years. It can make reaching out to someone who isn’t going anywhere feel… daunting. Like you’re asking to rent a room in someone else’s stability.
But here’s why you need her.
She’s not operating on the same chaotic timeline. She knows what this place is really like because she’s not just passing through it. She’s rooted. She’ll be the one to tell you which Target has the good seasonal section, which grocery store doesn’t unironically blast 80s rock at 8am, and where to get a good haircut without booking six months out. The best part is, she doesn’t care about your spouse’s rank, or what battalion your kid’s friend’s dad is in, or whether your porch flags are regulation.
She is your stable axis in the chaos. The person you can text midweek when the base is on another boil advisory and you’ve lost the will to make dinner. Find her at yoga, at school pickup, or behind the counter at the local wine bar. You’ll know her when you see her: she has strong opinions about local politics, makes an annual spreadsheet for Halloween candy, and her eyebrows are perfect even in humidity.
She will not understand your world, but she will keep showing up in it. And that’s the whole point.
Rule #3: Lean on your partner, even when it feels like you shouldn’t (or can’t)
It’s tempting to slip into the rhythm of doing everything yourself. After all, that’s how you’ve been surviving for this long, right? While your spouse is busy in-processing and adjusting to their new unit, you’re doing … everything else, just like usual. They’ve got their lane, and you’ve got yours.
But if you’re not careful, this becomes the story of every new duty station: they get the structure, you get the scramble. They get a sponsor; you get the base housing waitlist and an identity crisis.
So here’s the rule: lean on your partner. Not because they’re fully available or magically off-duty (they won’t be). But because this life works best when it’s not quietly lopsided.
Let them do the grocery run. Or be the one to awkwardly introduce you at the hail and farewell. They can definitely figure out how to get the dog booked for their annual check-up, even if it takes three wrong office visits and a passive-aggressive post in the Facebook group. Tell them when you’re lonely, not just when you’ve reached full-blown “why did we even do this” energy.
This duty station is theirs and yours. If you carry the emotional weight of it alone, you’ll start resenting both the place and the person. Ask for help. Let it be clumsy. Let it be enough.
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