I seriously don't understand the point of this article.

"Hey dude, we're just like you, except oh yeah, our lives were more 'real' than yours, and your pussy trip studying abroad" (which by the way not all of us did, but the rampant generalization, that's okay, I'll let it pass, it's only one of many and probably not the most egregious) "is NOTHING compared to what we went through overseas, but I'm going to compare the two just so you feel like a pussy for thinking you're culturally enlighted, we're stronger than you, we've been through 'the hardest part of our lives already' and you haven't, so we might be in the same spot, but" (pats self on back) "I'm a veteran so I know I can make it through this while you stand there in your big glasses and your plaid and your skinny jeans smoking pot in the basement of your parents' house."

- These lines directly contradict each other, don't they? "We don't think we're better than you" but the "one key difference between us" is we [the veterans] "have already been through the hardest times" and know we can handle whatever's thrown at us (implying non-veternas haven't been through shit and don't think they can handle whatever's thrown at them)

*We don’t think we’re better than you* and don’t want your sympathy. We know we volunteered for the job and did it to the best of our ability. In essence, we know there is one key difference between us: we’ve already been through the hardest time in our lives , whatever else the world throws at us, we can handle it

- I also deeply resent the implication that because I went to college, my life wasn't hard. There's no need to hash out details here but I dealt with sexual predation, abusive/manipulative boyfriends, drug addiction, unwanted pregnancy, shitty-job-turned-into-no-job, not enough $ to pay for medical procedures I needed , estrangement from my family and almost all of my high school "friends," severe depression and anxiety, disordered eating, suicidal urges, hallucinations, paranoia, fuck all sorts of SHIT in college. I failed so many classes. I overdrew my bank account constantly , eventually the ATM just ate my debit card. Those don't feel like first-world problems to me, even though that's basically what this dude is trying to imply throughout this whole article. And you fucking know what? I still graduated on-fucking-time. I didn't have grenades thrown at me and I wasn't shot at and I wasn't overseas. But I think it's bullshit to try and quantify "hard."

- That's point #2. It's bullshit to say "my hard was worse than your hard." "I'm better than you because I went through more shit." I'm going to bring up a TED talk now and look. I know there are problems with TED talks. (I watched the TED talk about it, that makes me an expert, right?) But if you're on Facebook or hell half the internet at all, you heard about this one. It's the one where Ash Beckham, a clearly-gay woman, discusses coming out of the closet, a little girl who asked her if she was a boy or a girl, how we all have closets, no matter what they are, and how we need to stop comparing each other's "hard." That simply put we all have hard, it comes in different shapes and forms, and it's stupid and impossible to say "My hard is worse than your hard!" In fact in my opinion it's simply butthurt. This dude who wrote this article? He's saying his hard is worse than my hard. And FUCK. He doesn't even know what my hard is , he is making countless baseless generations about me and people who went to college like me instead of - by the way - choosing to enlist. We both made choices and we both thought we knew what we were getting into at the time. We didn't. So fuck him. He doesn't even know what my hard is, he's just trying to make himself feel better about his . Which brings me to point #3...

- This guy has a giant, massive chip on his shoulder. Maybe he thinks veterans don't get enough respect. Maybe he's tired of reading about Gen Y in the news, the Gen Y that stayed at home, the Gen Y he's alienated from. Maybe he feels we don't talk enough about veterans. But seriously this whole article is basically like "I went to Afghanistan. You went to some fancy ass liberal college" and underneath it all he is screaming "I RESENT YOU FOR YOUR EASY LIFE AND THE WAY YOU BITCH ABOUT IT." Fuck you, dude, you enlisted.

I seriously can't tell if this guy is aware of the underlying resentment leeching through this article. Maybe he thought he's written a mostly-nice article. Maybe he's trying to be ironic, or satirical. (But doesn't he know? It's the kids who stayed at home who 'own' irony these days, duh!) I mean, it's on Thoughtcatalog so it's supposed to be mindless, uplifting fluff, right?

But you know what it is? It's bullshit cloaked underneath a "we are just like you" that the author clearly doesn't even believe.

And my closing shot, which is insignificant and pointless: This guy is clearly nothing like me. No one taught him how to use apostrphes overseas

(P.P.S. Can we stop talking about how pointless Comm and English degrees are? If you are smart you can talk that degree into a job in ANY industry. What industry do you know of where you don't need to be able to demonstrate you can talk to people ?)