Cetto now studies business at Framingham State College near Worcester, Massachusetts. “I don’t know if I’m just thankful, but I’m really focused on the next phase of my life,” he says. Unlike many of his classmates, he says, he doesn’t take safety and stability for granted. “These are kids who think it’s great that they can stay on their mom’s insurance,” he says. “The lens I see things through, it’s absolutely different from theirs.”

Alex Horton, an Army rifleman, shares Cetto’s mindset, and his sense of alienation from his peers. Horton always thought he might join the military. When the U.S. pushed Iraq out of Kuwait in 1990, he was 6 years old, playing Nintendo and watching the war unfold on CNN. But it was a vague inkling, and in his junior year, 9/11 clarified his future.

“These conflicts happen once in a generation,” he said. “And this was our generation. This was our once.” He enlisted as soon as he was able, working at a baseball stadium for $6.50 an hour while he waited for his paperwork to crawl through the system.

Horton served with the Army’s Third Stryker Brigade in three of Iraq’s most violent cities: Mosul, Baghdad, and Baqubah. His deployment was extended to augment the troop surge of 2007, and he spent 15 months in combat. One he returned home, hypervigilance left him with a weird high. Colors and smells were more vivid. He could drink in street noises like a sommelier, picking out individual sounds, tasting for threats.

Horton cashed in his G.I. Bill at Georgetown University. He was a native of Texas, and he barely escaped high school with his diploma, but there he was, reading Moby Dick in a bastion of East Coast privilege and ambition.

“They grew up loving lacrosse and hanging out at Martha’s Vineyard—that’s what they did,” he says. “That wasn’t my experience.”

That difference in background made Horton see all his classes in a whole other light. His friends read Moby Dick and saw the story of a whale hunt. Horton saw a man who lost his leg and set out for vengeance. He knew Ahabs. And he knew what it felt like to cling to the timbers with his shipmates, hurtling forward on a mission that threatened, at any moment, to kill them all.

***

Millennial veterans tend to get trapped between two stereotypes. Either they’re aimless, privileged youth, or they’re psychologically scarred warriors struggling to reintegrate into society. “You’re a hipster, or a PTSD vet ready to explode,” Cetto says. “People are really nice about it, but they’re nice in a way that they’re nervous, instead of being normal people.”

Sure, some Millennial vets are adrift, and some grapple with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but perhaps not as many as people tend to think. According to a study conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, Americans falsely believe a majority of veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from PTSD (according to the Department of Veterans Affairs, the figure is between 10 to 20 percent).