American soldiers operating out of Joint Security Station Babil in Baghdad's Karadah neighborhood this summer lived a pretty good life for living at an outpost. The port-a-johns were a 30 second walk away, telephones and Internet accessible computers, and a steady stream of electricity flowing from generators on the outpost grounds.  

Inside the sleeping quarters of second platoon you'd find surge protectors, video game consoles, and laptop computers to occupy their downtime when not on patrol in the relatively calm neighborhood.  The room was crammed with bunk beds – bunk beds with actual mattresses no less.  Refrigerators stocked with energy drinks, snacks, and popsicles, hummed along with the various air conditioning units poking out of the walls.

As a reporter embedded with the unit, I had the luxury of charging my Blackberry, digital camera, and computer.  I wrote about the soldiers seated at a large rectangular table with an industrial fan blowing on me, and a fluorescent tube light illuminating my keyboard.

Just over five years earlier I was also in Iraq, as a Marine reservist entering the country on the tail end of the initial invasion force.  I was living in a hole in the ground.

Of course, the dangers were different then too.  There were no roadside bombs.  The enemy was not a well-organized network of insurgents, but remnants of the Baath party and Saddam Hussein's paramilitary force, the Fedayeen.  We carried suits to protect against a chemical attack.  We rode around in open-topped humveees, and our body armor lacked side plates.

Talking to the soldiers last summer about my own experiences in the war, I felt like an old man boring a younger generation with stories of "way back when."  Some of these soldiers were still in high school when the war started.  A 24-year-old lieutenant, whose platoon had recently lost two vehicles to roadside bombs, told me of watching the war start in his grandparent's living room as a college sophomore.  In the end, I left Iraq in August not feeling as though I'd revisited a war I'd been there for the beginning of, but one that was in essence an entirely different conflict.

Those soldiers of JSS Babil I met this summer not only face a different war than I did five years ago but they will come home to a different country.  And this is important to remember as we observe Veterans Day today.  It is important to remember that while the country celebrates its veterans, Americans should also recognize how much the dialogue has increased over what it means to be a veteran – a dialogue that had remained largely silent in the absence of sustained wars over the past few decades.  

When the first Iraq veterans began coming home in the late summer of 2003, both the media and the American public had a new demographic to start getting used too.  It had been a while since a mass of young veterans reintegrated into American society, along with issues such as PTSD, employment hardships, and medical care that came with their return.

Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, a veteran to me was always one of those old men at Memorial Day parades wearing VFW hats and marching proudly with medals and ribbons pinned to their aged uniforms.  Members of my generation hadn’t grown up with war as part of their daily lives, and in the relative security of that time it seemed impossible this would ever change.

Of course it did, but by the time I came home from Iraq in August 2003 it seemed as though the country still wasn’t quite sure how to approach the fact that a new generation of young veterans were gradually re-entering society.  The war was covered around the clock in those opening months, and while it still dominated news headlines, the first waves of veterans were quietly coming home and the challenges they would face – and which are now well documented – were just beginning.

I remember the various exchanges I had with people back then, when there was often a look of disbelief and intense curiosity after they learned I was a veteran.  These sometime awkward conversations were part of the reason I decided to keep my mouth shout about my recent past.

When I started graduate school almost five years later, there was another Iraq veteran in my class and countless other students whose friends or family were also veterans.  For an average American to know a veteran, it seemed, was increasingly becoming the norm.  And as the years have passed, and countless news stories have addressed veterans issues, it’s clear America has gotten a substantive education on this once again emerging demographic.

As I learned from those Army soldiers this summer, they face a war far different from soldiers who slogged their way through the intense fighting of 2005 and 2006 when the country had descended into near chaos.  For soldiers in Iraq today, the fighting has been replaced with more emphasis on what the military often refers to as “non-kinetic” operations.  They will bring home memories of the war that may focus more on the Iraqis they worked with, rather than the Iraqis they fought.

The way these varied experiences translate into life upon homecoming is as much the story of Veterans Day, as is this image of WWI veterans honoring the end of that war today.  It used to be that I would only equate the term ‘veteran’ with such men.  And it can be overwhelming to think a 19-year-old Army private sitting in a guard shack in Baghdad, shares today’s headlines with these aged veterans and may someday take their place: the few remaining soldiers of a long forgotten war.