According to a recent Pew research study, millennials are the most educated generation in American history. They’re also on track to carry the most debt. The Marine Corps understands this. Pitching the Marines as the smart alternative to college debt is one facet of the corps’s annual $80 million marketing budget. Another casts the Marines as simply the smart path to college itself. ‘‘Every Marine is a student,’’ reads one pamphlet, citing the many educational benefits available to those who serve. Though other branches of the military use similar enticements in recruiting, for the Marines, this approach is relatively new: For decades, the corps focused more on the prestige of being accepted into its ‘‘elite’’ ranks. But the post-Sept. 11 generation doesn’t see military service as particularly prestigious, the corps’s longtime advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson, concluded after conducting a study in 2012 on how to sell the Marines to millennials. Continuing to sell the corps as gung-ho warriors wouldn’t entice recruits beyond the Marines’ traditional base of white, evangelical, Southern conservatives, they found. Presenting the Marines instead as global do-gooders attracted kids across the political, racial and socioeconomic spectrum. Thompson described its new marketing strategy as the merging of ‘‘Rambo and Bono.’’

On June 16, 2015, Raheel posted on Facebook for the first time in a while. ‘‘I’m thinking about joining the military. Maybe the Marines.’’ Just three weeks later, on July 8, he signed his enlistment papers and entered the Marines’ Delayed Entry Program, which, lasting anywhere between a month and a year, is designed to stagger the number of recruits the corps can train at any one time. It’s also intended to indoctrinate ‘‘poolees,’’ as they are called, into the culture of the Marines. ‘‘The D.E.P. is all about selling the Kool-Aid,’’ says a lance corporal who also enlisted in the Marines in 2015, after his freshman year. (‘‘I decided I didn’t like college enough to justify all that debt,’’ he told me.) ‘‘You meet every Saturday, and they’ll tell you stories, do little workouts,’’ he says, ‘‘tell you some lies.’’ Like ‘‘ ‘Yeah, I’m always in my room playing Xbox,’ ‘There’s all this time to party’ ’’ — anything that will appeal to college kids.

Raheel spent close to eight months in the D.E.P. under the tutelage of his recruiter, who the Siddiquis said told them that Raheel was his most motivated poolee. Ghazala marveled at the changes in her son, who now woke each day at 4 a.m. to spend hours at the gym. Any doubts his mother had about his education were assuaged by Raheel’s own assurances: He said he had been told that he could continue his education while serving, and that, having chosen a technical specialty, working on Marine aircraft, he might not even have to fight unless he wanted to. (In fact, Marines I spoke to said it was nearly impossible to pursue an education during their first enlistment; once deployed, every Marine has to be prepared to fight if suddenly under attack.) At Raheel’s urging, Ghazala visited the recruiting office in Taylor, where she says that recruiters assured her that Raheel’s safety wouldn’t be an issue.

‘‘I feel like they’re really good at lying,’’ says the lance corporal, who was sold on the corps by recruiting videos that presented the Marines as ‘‘badasses’’ on humanitarian missions to save refugees or deliver food and water. Raheel told his parents that enlisting in the Marines would put him on the fast track to join the F.B.I., which, to their total surprise, had become his life’s dream. A few weeks before he left for boot camp, Raheel stopped by Truman to tell some of his old teachers about his plans. Abraham pressed him on his decision, but Raheel’s mind was made up.

‘‘Be careful,’’ Raheel’s friend Hussein Chehab, who worked with him at Home Depot, says he told him before he left. ‘‘Just . . . watch yourself. You don’t know what kinds of people are down there. You don’t know how other people think.’’