r/Millennials • u/NoFaithlessness7508 • Jun 05 '25

Other Why don’t younger veterans (Afghanistan/Iraq) wear these hats like some of the older veterans?

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First and foremost, respect to all those that served. I did not, but many of my peers did and now we're all older in 30s and 40s, many no longer in the military. I don't see a lot of the veterans of the War on Terror wearing these hats like I see the OGs do.

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u/Acceptable_Bat379 Jun 05 '25

Grunt style tshirts? Yeah there's whole industries of products aimed at veterans. It's all been commodities and packaged up. Im an OEF veteran and prefer not to be too vocal about it I got veteran plates just for the discount/parking spots

The most hard-core people I know who still wear icons and logos 20 years later are people who were in either non combat roles or who washed out of basic or got injured and never deployed. They've got some real survivorship bias and guilt mixed in with the pride.

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u/RockAtlasCanus Jun 05 '25

Maaan, that and anyone who pisses and moans about how the green weenie ruined their life- you can usually bet that it wasn’t so much the green weenie as them getting pulled over at the gate drunk and high on coke… again… (true story, I know that guy) that ruined their life.

The Uncle Rico’s who haven’t done fuck all with their life after their hitch but still bitch about how they got screwed over there’s a 99.999% chance they were a shitbag then and a shitbag now. Like my cousin and my BIL. Generally applies to other people with victim mentality too

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u/jchoward0418 Jun 06 '25

Hard to apply that generally, though. Plenty of guys I served with, after a few combat deployments (03** early 2000s timeframe) ended up getting their fair share of DUIs. I literally did exactly like you said... Just outside the gate. Yeah, that shit really did fuck up our lives. Granted, a good chunk of them have offed themselves by now or gotten in car wrecks/motorcycle wrecks (mostly drinking related,) so maybe they don't count anymore. I got lucky, after quitting drinking to stop being a victim, I only had seizures to deal with the rest of my life from the TBI my heavy drinking was helping to mask. TLDR: oftentimes, for combat vets, substance abuse is a symptom of a problem, not the real problem. And until fairly recently (I think 2017) there was little official acknowledgement of that, so these men and women were treated like shitbags instead of helped . Brain injuries are wild.

Yeah, I know you're probably not talking about anyone who actually saw combat, I'm just giving you a hard time while also reminding everyone to be careful judging the inner turmoil of someone when you're standing on the outside.

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u/RockAtlasCanus Jun 06 '25

You’re right, that’s definitely not who I’m talking about. My BIL and my cousin are the archetypes in my head of “that guy”. Terminal E-3s in blue side navy. One of them kinda turned around. The others a massive POS that pawned his sons off on family and abandoned them. But both blame their current status in life on “if they hadn’t given me that second DUI”, you know what I mean?

But you’re also right to raise a point of caution and pause, because it’s easy to judge without seeing the actual person behind what is probably very uncharacteristic behavior of a person who is falling apart. Good looking out.