America’s Generation Y can be divided into two distinct groups: Those who served in Iraq and/or Afghanistan, such as myself, and those who didn’t. Taking an educated guess, I assume a lion’s share of the readership of Thought Catalog are liberal arts degree bearing, student-loan debt ridden types who think those who joined the military were too stupid to go to college and were unaware cogs in the political war machine run by evil multi-national corporations with the goal of maximizing profit and exploiting the lower class. In turn, we think you’re a bunch of overly sensitive, pretentious, hyper-liberal pussies, so its even. Now, let’s begin to gain an understanding of each other’s perspective.

Our memories of our formative years are quite different. You headed out into early adulthood going to community college or university, be it full-time or part-time. You may have gotten a student loan, a scholarship, paid for it yourself, or used your parents. You may have gone to college parties, lived in the dorms, lost your virginity, and lived in an environment where you were constantly meeting new people while smoking weed. You studied with your classmates in the library and bitched about eating Ramen. The opportunities to meet members of the opposite sex were bountiful if you chose to take advantage of them. Your major causes of stress were your grades and classes. You had no idea what you wanted to do after graduation, but you’d figure it out when you had your diploma.

We headed out into early adulthood by arriving at some soul-crushing military base in the asshole region of some mid-west or southern state. We got yelled at, gave up every single bit of freedom we had, got our balls smoked off, and were taught to do things the way the military wanted us to do. After basic combat training and our job-specific school, we were assigned to our unit where we had to deal with more military bull shit on a daily basis. For men in all male units, meeting women was rare and our best shot was just walking around the local mall or using myspace because we were too young to go to bars. Our major causes of stress was the fear of pissing off our team leader or squad leader and thus getting our world destroyed. We had no idea what we wanted do to after the military, but we’d figure it out once we got out.