“I feel like I can do things that I could not do before I arrived here,” he explained, likening his skill acquisition to a scene in The Matrix in which the protagonist Neo instantly learns kung fu. “I express myself way more clearly than I could before, I can write at a level that I couldn’t before, I can speak Chinese.”

Vassar’s broad curricular offerings also offered new ways for student-veterans to understand their military experiences. Among the courses de la Torre sampled, a cognitive-science course and a class on the philosophies of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud helped him make sense of the PTSD symptoms he experiences. The Vassar history professor Maria Höhn, whose scholarship focuses on the U.S. military, notes the difficult but transformative experiences she witnessed among the Vassar veterans who took her American-studies course. “What they do in my class is really look at the structure of the U.S. military, its history, and what it means,” she says. “It forces them to think about their military service [in a way] that’s very different than they ever thought about.” Braga, who who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom II and took two courses with Höhn, credits her classes with helping him develop a nuanced perspective on the sometimes beneficial exercise of American military power after initially holding anti-war views after his deployment.

But course subjects aren’t the only place where student-veterans have the opportunity to confront military narratives—in Vassar’s trademark discussion-based roundtable seminars, for example, students are known to hold uncompromisingly progressive views. That campus ethos presented a point of contention when the school announced the Posse Veterans initiative. “To be honest, the reaction of students was like, ‘They’re all right-wing conservatives and we don't want them here,’” Hill said in recalling some of the students’ responses.

Heather Kettlewell, a Vassar junior majoring in international-studies, appreciates the student-veterans contributions in her political-science classes. “Sometimes classroom discussions can get really homogenous, and the vets are able to add a completely different perspective that I think Vassar students don’t hear,” she said. “There can be a lot of army hating and anti-war that gets projected onto the soldiers themselves.” Citing a recent classroom conversation in which a student-veteran discussed her role in helping to build community infrastructure during a deployment, Kettlewell she learned about “a whole side of the military that doesn’t get discussed. It’s good that it humanizes these people who can be demonized.”

To Garrett, the Vassar chemistry professor, student-veterans’ identities offer hope for bridging divides. “As vets, going out in this world, their ability to translate this experience to a group, a different part of our world and our country, is really critical,” she said. De la Torre’s next endeavor, establishing a community bank for disabled veterans, is a manifestation of that translation. The project will rely on both the economics skills he developed as a Vassar student, and the military know-how he’s arrived at through personal experience. It’ll also offer him the chance to apply the operational modes he’s acquired. “My military experience is grounded on doing—you’ve got to get results immediately,” he explained. “And then my liberal-arts education is about the theoretical and how to apply it from the different perspectives and looking at the big picture. So the balance between the two has, at least in my opinion, has positioned me to apply that to pretty much anything I’m trying to do.”