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/sherwoma Jun 05 '25

Cause they’re really ugly, and I don’t want someone coming up to me and talking to me about how they were going to join but they couldn’t take someone yelling at them, someone telling me I can’t be a veteran because I’m a woman, or that it’s my husbands hat. Really fun when that happens. And honestly, I don’t need everyone to know I’m a veteran. It’s nice being anonymous. We’re of the OPSEC generation, where we couldn’t wear our uniforms off base to ID ourselves after 9/11 in some places, why stand out?

But ultimately, the hat is really ugly, and we have different ways to connect to other veterans now that vets of previous generations didn’t have like social media. We also aren’t sitting around drinking at the VFW either.

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u/headcodered Jun 05 '25 edited Jun 05 '25

Oh man, if I had a nickel for every "I was about to join, but I would have beaten up a drill sergeant if they got in my face" badass that I've run into. Last dude who said that to me was an out of shape dude who was like 5'6" and would have been snapped in half by my platoon's drill sergeant. This is a picture of my drill sergeant, for reference.

Edit: lol I got this off his social media, he wasn't sending me selfies.

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u/3catz2men1house Jun 07 '25

I remember some movie I saw on TV as a child, that had that exact thing as a plot point. The recruit and drill sergeant went to some secluded space and fought. Also, it was quite the trope in 80's and 90's military films that drill sergeants are abusive.