He doesn't talk about his encounter with a jury-rigged bomb -- or any war stories for that matter -- with his classmates. Most of them were worrying about prom dates and acne while Josh trudged through open sewers, took sniper fire, and saw his fellow soldiers mangled and killed. He definitely doesn't mention the time four roadside bombs detonated next to his Stryker assault vehicle in rapid succession, where each explosion felt closer to the one that would tear open the steel underbelly like a sardine can and vaporize the men inside.

Universities have long been a place where young people develop a purpose in life. But for older students with wartime experience, those lessons have already been learned.

But it's not just the discussion of war he omits from other students. He has quarantined himself almost entirely. He shows up for class, takes notes, and leaves, most of the time without communicating with students or professors. In the first three months of his first semester at UW-GB, he never said more than a few words to anyone. "I'm almost 10 years older than everyone. I'm not a college kid partying on the weekends. Who would want to be my friend?" he told me over the phone as his own kids played in the living room.

His reclusive behavior on campus betrays the man who was once my roommate in a dilapidated Korean War-era barracks at Ft. Lewis, since renamed Joint Base Lewis-McCord, a verdant mega base that sprawls along Interstate 5 near Tacoma, Washington. His backstory seemed to be assembled from cliché high school movie plots: the big man on campus, the Type-A jock all the girls gravitated towards. Since then, the King of Preble High has transformed into an introvert, and his story is remarkably similar to those of other war veterans I spoke to for this story.

The challenge of societal reintegration after war has mystified soldiers throughout recorded history. The saying "War changes people" is a profound understatement of the issue. It also displaces the sense of belonging to any number of groups, from peers to the countrymen who stayed behind. When Odysseus returned home after 20 tumultuous years of battle and incredible journeys, a sense of unfamiliarity overtook him: "But now brilliant Odysseus awoke from sleep in his own fatherland, and he did not know it, having been long away."

The foreign shore of Homer's tale has become the college campus. Tens of thousands of troops rotate out of the service every year, and many head straight to school, thanks to federal education benefits for veterans. More than 700,000 veterans and family members have used the Post-9/11 GI Bill since its inception in 2009, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The benefit pays in-state tuition and fees, a living stipend, and cash for textbooks.

An unknown but likely majority of these students today have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. But for veterans who may have been out of school for years -- or are fresh out of the military -- universities are the cleavage between two groups: their own peers, who went to college or found jobs after high school, and their new classmates, who are often many years younger and increasingly isolated from military culture.