COLUMN ONE : Battling Life After the Service : The U.S. military provides a social and economic safety net like no other. Personnel cut along with the defense budget find themselves ill-prepared to be civilians.

NUREMBERG, Germany — During more than a decade of military service, Sgt. Mark Piotrowski has been stationed at Army bases in Missouri, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas and Germany, where he is completing his final tour of duty. By conventional accounting, it’s been three years since he has lived in the United States.

But in a very real sense, Piotrowski has never in his adult life lived in America.

Like thousands of his compatriots in the U.S. armed forces, Piotrowski has been enveloped since he was 18 in the warm embrace of the American military--an employer that has provided him and his family with a social and economic safety net with no equal in civilian society. In return, Piotrowski--a veteran of the Persian Gulf War--has given up many of the basic rights that civilians take for granted, including the right to duck danger in the line of duty.

Piotrowski, who makes $27,400 a year, has never had to pay medical bills or worry about health insurance for himself, his wife, Pam, or their two children. He has never had to buy a life insurance policy or wonder whether his paycheck would keep a roof overhead and food on the table for a growing family. He has never had to interview for another job he really needed, and until now, he has never worried about the security of the one he has.

For Piotrowski and thousands of others, that life is about to end as the American military winnows its ranks in response to the Cold War’s passing. The young sergeant is one of more than 40,000 service members who already have been persuaded to accept a buyout to leave the services. A total of 80,000 are expected to be squeezed out under such circumstances over the next two years, and military officials say even larger layoffs are possible.

Suddenly, Piotrowski is coming home to America.

As Piotrowski and others like him peer beyond the confines of their protected existence, they are discovering that compared to the security of the peacetime military, civilian America resembles a social and economic combat zone. And to their dismay, they are finding that the all-encompassing, paternalistic culture that the armed forces worked so hard to create may have left them ill-prepared for the struggle.

As a result, experts say that many are likely to experience profound anxiety, self-doubt and depression, marital discord, career difficulties--and a lingering sense of betrayal.

“It’s fearful, fearful because of the unknown and the uncertainty. Going out on our own could blow up in our face,” said Piotrowski, whose comments were echoed in recent interviews with dozens of departing military members. “It’s frightening, not because my life is in danger this time, but because the security of my family is in danger. My children have grown up in the military, and there was security there. There was always some agency there to help pick us up. Out there in the real world . . . I just don’t know.”

“Sometimes,” added his wife, “we get so depressed we want to cry.”

Between 1987 and 1995, planned cutbacks in the U.S. military will have driven at least 180,000 service members, most of them men, out of the military under conditions not of their choice. Roughly 96,000 of them have families that have come to rely on an extensive network of support services unlike anything they will find in their new lives.

Their world--the world of America’s armed forces--is a society apart. Their community is separated from civilian society not only by their nomadic lives and their physical remoteness from surrounding communities. It also has its own traditions and courts of justice, its own systems of health care and higher education, its own labor laws, its own newspapers and television stations, even its own chains of subsidized department stores and filling stations. It offers an array of services ranging from marriage and parenthood counseling to day-care providers whose cost and quality are strictly regulated.

It is a world practically free of crime and illegal drug use. Overt racist behavior is, quite simply, forbidden. Homelessness is something that happens off the protected perimeters of the nation’s 625 military installations, with their extensive base housing facilities and military housing stipends.

In the military, one is virtually never alone. Service members socialize almost exclusively with each other, meeting at their own on-base clubs and playing together on golf courses and in recreation facilities reserved for members and their families. In peacetime, military personnel say that a common bond--”the mission”--holds them inextricably together as a team. In wartime, they readily acknowledge they would die for each other. And they do.

The military is one of America’s most progressive employers, offering genuine equal opportunity, extensive workplace benefits and one of the most generous retirement programs around. Short of joining a Japanese corporation, service members could not find in the civilian economy an employer that takes greater interest in--or exerts more influence over--their health, social and family relations, work and play habits, even their dress.

Service members must stay within weight limits; failure to do so can be grounds for dismissal. Marriage is rewarded with extra pay, and the arrival of children brings higher housing allowances--practices that, according to the Brookings Institution’s Martin Binkin, follow the socialist principle of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

Divorce is frowned upon. Until recently, a failed marriage, or a peculiar or uninvolved wife, were considered relevant factors in an officer’s promotion proceedings. Under something called the Personnel Reliability Program, the emotional state, drinking habits and home life of military personnel with access to nuclear weapons are subject to regular scrutiny, and fellow service members are expected to report signs of eccentricity to superiors.

“What other employer in the world pays attention to whether its employees engage in adultery?” asked Eugene Fidell, an attorney who specializes in military law. “What other jurisdiction is able to use a urinalysis test as the basis not just for denying you your job, but for prosecuting you?”

The rigors of a military career result in a homogeneity not found in the broader population of Americans. “At a personal level, military personnel come in all sizes, shapes and persuasions,” said Christopher Jehn, the Pentagon’s manpower czar. But, he adds, “the extremes are missing.”

Charles Moskos, one of the nation’s premier military sociologists, says that while there are no broad attitude surveys comparing military and civilian populations, his own studies make clear that service members are “much more conservative than the average American, much more patriotic, much more concerned with getting things done.”

The military, Moskos adds, “doesn’t get the bottom or the top” of the spectrum of personality traits or social attitudes. “It’s sort of the broad middle.”

Experts say religious conviction also runs higher among military careerists than in the population as a whole. Here, too, military hierarchy intrudes into service members’ most private decisions, because commanding officers regularly lead their troops in prayer.

Among those who accept the restrictions--and the rewards--of a military career, there is an unshakable sense of entitlement to its unwritten promises, including the opportunity to stay in for at least the 20 years it takes to earn the military’s generous retirement pension.

Military careerists say they feel betrayed and enraged that the nation’s decision to pare the armed forces will disrupt the predictable course of their lives. The military’s top brass regularly exhorts Congress not to make them “break the contract” with service members. That contract, some lawmakers gently respond, was always contingent on the nation’s needs and not the military’s sense of self-preservation.

Piotrowski concedes that before he agreed to the buyout, the last major decision he had to make was the one that brought him into the military from his mother’s home after he graduated from high school. A year later, he concluded that the service would be a secure place to raise a family, and then he married Pam, the daughter of a retired Air Force chief master sergeant who says she “turned in one military dependent card to get another.”

“Everything has been chosen for me--my duty station, my job, where I’m going to live,” said Piotrowski, an outgoing 29-year-old who installs and repairs communications systems for the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Germany. “You get kind of used to it. You adapt to it because that’s where your job, your security is. And because you’re not alone.”

But after years of depending on the support of community, camaraderie and teamwork, Piotrowski and his family are making the voyage back to what he calls “the real world” alone.

One 1988 study published in the Journal of Employment Counseling likened departing military service members to adolescents. “Much like the teen-ager who finds himself or herself suspended in a state between that of the mature adult with a crystallized vocational self and the dependent child whose needs are, for the most part, met by reliance on a nurturing institution (i.e., parents), the retiring military officer finds that he or she is surprisingly ill-equipped to cope,” it said.

For some who have faced fear and desolation under fire, the prospect of a transition to civilian life has brought a depth of distress somehow more difficult to deal with than combat itself.

Experts like Stanley and Genia Hyman, who have counseled more than 18,000 service members on their transitions to civilian life, say frustration and anxiety sometimes drive the most stoic warriors to drink and to verbal and physical abuse at home.

“You are going to be frustrated, scared and angry,” Hyman told a group of retiring officers in Washington recently. “You’re going to transfer your frustration and anger to the people closest to you--your spouse and family. You’re going to be bitchy, obnoxious and erratic--for a little while, your spouse is going to have an extra teen-ager on her hands.”

Dr. George Joseph, a Washington psychiatrist who has treated service members having difficulty with the transition, says that leaving the military often brings stress-related physical problems such as stomach troubles, disruption of sleep cycles and, in some cases, depression and thoughts of suicide.

Not surprisingly, many of these people will return to their original custodians, moving home with parents as they launch their job searches. For some, that will be a painful reminder that they are, in Piotrowski’s words, “starting from scratch” as adults with spouses and families in tow.

One of those struggling to begin again is Gary Howe, a retired Air Force master sergeant who left the service after a final tour of duty at an air base in Japan last December.

Howe, who lived with his wife in base housing for most his 24-year military career, moved in with his mother in central Florida until he could get himself established. At 41, he is preparing to buy his first home and to return to a vocational school to turn his military experience as a high-voltage electrician into something he can use in the civilian world.

“It’s strange. It’s different,” he said of his house purchase, his first major encounter with the civilian economy. “They keep explaining things I don’t understand. In past years, the base legal office could have offered some help.”

Howe cites one of the most frequently heard laments among those navigating the unknown waters of the civilian world.

“There’s too much choice, and it’s frustrating,” Howe said. “My wife says I’m afraid of making a decision. But my whole senses are just being flooded--you don’t know where you’re going, what you’re doing. We used to live in base housing. Everything was arranged--a house, jobs. So for me, it’s a real mental strain. I’ve always been a quiet person, and it’s real frustrating.

“I’ve been through some fits of temper,” he added. The civilian world’s array of choices is particularly trying on the job market. Service members who have moved through the ranks usually change jobs every two years, and they have gamely done a lot of things. But deciding what they really love to do--and pursuing that goal in the midst of an economic recession--is not one of them, say many transition counselors.

For many “line” officers, whose specialty has been management and leadership in the field, the problem of transferring their skills to the civilian sector is difficult. “We have a lot of qualities, but not many real skills,” conceded one officer.

Drawing from detailed personality tests of career service members, Hyman maintains that the qualities most often found in successful soldiers would do a Boy Scout proud. Overwhelmingly, he says, they are trustworthy, loyal, obedient, brave, clean and reverent. Four in five military officers, he adds, are also highly conformist, risk-averse and group-dependent.

While those qualities may serve the nation well, and will get an individual promoted in the military, “it turns off completely” some prospective employers in corporate America, Hyman tells his classes of military retirees.

Most of those employers have never set foot on a military base and do not understand the military ethic, employment counselors warn service personnel. Hyman notes that military professionals tend to operate within designated channels, pledge allegiance to a single company and appear to build empires by surrounding themselves with ever-larger staffs. Corporate officials tout their commitment to employees and to the principles of loyalty and integrity, says Hyman, but many are suspicious of ex-military employees for actually taking such standards to heart.

“America lives by greed and the corporate lie!” Hyman roars at his audiences, which have swelled in recent months. “Americans are motivated by greed, and we are short-term in our mentality,” he says, as if introducing these officers to a foreign culture. “There’s no trust, no loyalty, no nothing.”

This message is, Hyman admits, shock therapy for the hard-to-reach. It visibly rocks his audiences--men and women who have built their careers on a cornerstone of teamwork and loyalty. By the first break in Hyman’s seminars, the shock has turned to denial, anger and a dose of sanctimony.

“If you look at the crisis issues in business, ethics is right up there,” said Lt. Col. John Norton, an infantryman who grew up in an Army family. “In the military, there’s a camaraderie of trust you hold for each other. You know that the guy next to you is someone you can depend on--not that he’ll stab you in the back,” added Norton, whose current job as a military intelligence officer has marked him for probable early retirement.

The disgust that many military careerists feel for prevailing corporate attitudes causes many of them to be just as nomadic in civilian life as they were in the military--but far more unhappy and far less secure. Experts say a typical military careerist will behave much like a new high school or college graduate after leaving the services, changing jobs three to four times in the first dozen years after returning to the civilian world.

Nicholas Vamvakias has learned firsthand the harsh demands and arbitrary whims of the private sector. Since retiring from the Army in August, 1990, as a colonel, he has had three different jobs, and now is selling life insurance in the Washington, D.C., area.

American business lives up to Hyman’s stark portrayal, he says. Even so, the military life builds an “inner strength” that allows people like him to “live to fight another day.”

Part of that strength appears to be the conviction among military people that America is changing, and that it will embrace them and their values as it searches for new solutions to its domestic travails. The military’s sense of community, camaraderie and can-do won the Cold War, they reason. Maybe it can win the battle to recapture the lost American spirit too.

“I’m hoping--maybe I’m naive --that it will all change,” Vamvakias said. “We were taught we all stay alive by working together. I think the Japanese way of working--the team effort--is something we taught them. We all need to go back and relearn that.”